Original subtitles

in eighteen eighty eight britain's first serial killer

jack the ripper

went on a killing spree in london

he was never caught

but i know who the ripper is

his real name is h h holmes

he was america's first serial killer

and he's my great great grandfather

previously on american ripper

proving this has become an obsession

if we're gonna have a chance of proving your theory

i need to go right the way back to the beginning

this is the place

that evil man built that factory for murder

you had one location where you could murder someone

and then get rid of the body

without ever having to leave the building

if it is true that holmes

is responsible for the death of his cousins

then that means his killing style

evolves over time

i think he kind of liked the thrill of having gotten away

with something

there's no document in the chicago record between

july of eighteen eighty eight and early eighteen eighty nine

that's the exact period

that jack the ripper was committing his murders in london

i'd like to get to work figuring out

where holmes was during the scout

former cia operative

amaryllis fox and jeff mudgett

a descendant of america's first serial killer

are working to

decode one of history's greatest unsolved mysteries

they've partnered

to investigate a dark theory about jeff's bloodline

that his ancestor h h holmes

is also the infamous murderer known to the world

as jack the ripper

okay so we have this gap we know

that it corresponds pretty

eerily with the period of the jack the ripper murders

h h holmes was a swindler and a con man

who left a trail of legal paperwork

all over chicago from his various criminal schemes

then the paper trail just stops

in july of eighteen eighty eight right before

jack the ripper started committing his murders in london

this doesn't mean holmes is the ripper

but it's a very compelling coincidence

h h

holmes is an alias of the man born

herman webster mudgett in eighteen sixty one

a trained doctor with a talent for dissection

a schemer who lives off the profits of insurance fraud

and the engineer of a gruesome

building on chicago's south side

known as the murder castle

that features

a labyrinth of secret chambers and underground vaults

designed to kill

the big question for me is whether we can actually place

homes in london

during this time

we've got a number of significant statements that holmes

made regarding being in london

including this letter that he had written in eighteen ninety

five in which he talks about the difficulty he had

finding his favorite paper

the new york herald is to be found

in only a few places regularly in london

now this letter doesn't prove he was in london in eighteen

eighty eight but it proves he traveled across the pond

yeah i think you're

right and i think we have a complete enough

record of him up until

the summer of eighteen eighty eight that we can be

confident that he hadn't gone to london

yet in his life at this point

it had to have been after july of eighteen eighty eight

the gap that is unaccounted for here is so eerily

connected to the jack the river murders it's

beginning to seem like slightly more than a coincidence

and for me it's enough to suggest

that we need to look for evidence on the ground in london

we have to go to london

how many people

have the opportunity to rewrite history in their lives

my objective while i'm here is just basically to channel

that original

jack the ripper investigative team and compare it with

the work that we've been doing around homes

and see whether there's any chance

that these two people could be one in the same

i've been studying this case for decades and in the

hundred and thirty years since jack the ripper

crucial evidence has been scattered or lost to time

there's still some surviving police files

press accounts and coroner

reports that historians have gathered on the ripper killings

but they're not all housed in one place

which only makes this cold case tougher to crack

we have so many newspaper articles or opinions from

over a century ago

which you and i have to take apart and see which ones

can possibly be true

and which ones were just plagiarized over and over again

the man believed to be the world's first serial killer

jack the ripper

stalks his victims in the dead of night savagely

butchering at least five women

between august and november of eighteen eighty eight

police question as many as eighty suspects

but they are all cleared

never identified

the killer disappears without a trace

i've dreamed of being in this neighborhood before and

it seems it's finally come true

the ripper investigation begins in white chapel east london

where jeff and

amaryllis meet with an internationally renowned ripper

historian and lecturer

i would love to get a sense of what

life was like

for the average person

living in white chapel at the time and at

this street sort of begins to paint a picture

i mean the honest truth is the average life

for the average person was horrific

it was very much the skid row of the victorian metropolis

london in eighteen eighty eight

is the center of a global empire

with nearly five million residents

it's the largest and wealthiest city in europe

fueled by an industrial boom

but not everyone is sharing in the spoils

if you fell through the net

this is the area you tend to end up in

and you might have an entire family living in one room

if that family

fell upon hard times

they were taken a lodger

so you'd actually have them maybe twelve

fifteen people

living in one room

strangers could come strangers could go

and it was those common lodging houses that were key

to the transience

of the neighborhood

and possibly the transience of the killer as well

if one of those strangers was a foreigner

would that seem unusual or

could they just melt

into the crowd here

in the area you had sort of a massive immigrant population

it was an area for migration you had sailors

coming into the nearby ports

and you had a densely populated area

so somebody coming in from abroad

wouldn't really stand that from the crowd

nineteenth century white chapel attracted

the same type of migrant

working class people as the chicago that holmes knew

women in particular

who made up the most vulnerable members of society

if you wanted to prey on young women

they seem like excellent hunting grounds oh very much so

will you walk me through the facts that we know for sure

about the first two ripper murders

on almost the thirty first

you have what we now know as the first jack the

ripper murder and that's this lady here mary nichols

so mary

nichols was lodging in a lodging house in thorpe street

now the way these lodging houses

worked was she paid for your bed

she was obviously going to resort to

prostitution as a means of raising the money for her bed

and so off she goes

she probably headed down to whitechapel road

before mary nicholson even knows what's happening

she's stunned

and takes her down to the ground and then cuts the throat

meanwhile the beat officer pc neil came along buck's row

and saw the same sight and shone his lantern onto the body

beneath the bloodstained

clothing a deep gash ran all the way along her abdomen

and she'd been disemboweled

were any of mary nichols organs removed

mary nichols didn't have any organs removed

of course then a week later you get the second murder

danny chapman the second murder took place in hanbury street

and not only does he target it he goes off with a part

of the body

she didn't have the money to pay for a lodging house bed

and so she was thrown out of the hostel

she has been dismembered but he's taken a trophy this time

he's gone off with the wound wow

now there are press reports she was seen

drinking in this pub that we're sitting in now

the ten bells this one

this one here at five thirty in the morning

no kidding yes we do know

six o'clock in the morning

a resident by the name of john davis

looked down and saw the mutilated body of annie chapman

the theory is that in london the

anatomy schools for dissection purposes look for

specific parts of a body

including a uterus most notably the uterus wow

the fact that they could profit from it financially

this might have inspired somebody to go

murdering people

so that they could sell them to the anatomy schools

so there was trade in organs and bodies yes

and crucially

when coroner winn baxter

holds the inquest he says the reason for her murder

had been so the killer could acquire this particular part

of her anatomy

huh for homes in chicago that was

one of his favorite

scams and his favorite ways to make money

we know that holmes enjoyed dissecting cadavers

in medical school so much so

that one of his classmates

said that he took a baby's corpse home with him

if the coroner's theory is true

that the ripper was profiting off of the sale of organs

then the ripper and holmes share one single motive money

did the police or the coroner

make a statement

as to the type of investigation used at the time csi

was very much in its infancy so as far as the investigation

you need to go to

ex city london police officer don rumbelow

to understand how jack the ripper

managed to escape detection while butchering his victims

jeff and amaryllis

connect with one of the world's foremost experts on

nineteenth century law enforcement

i was a policeman back in the sixties and seventies

we still wore the old duty armband

that armband showed that you were on duty

donald rumbelow

is a police historian and weapons specialist

with expertise in the investigation techniques of the era

what was policing like during

eighteen eighty eight well police were rigidly controlled

they were timed over their beats

so an inspector

would look at this what she says it's ten past seven

pc smith should be standing outside number five miter square

so if the policeman wasn't there

that was a disciplinary offense punishable by a fine

was that something that was known

to the public or were those routes changed and kept secret

the public tended to know where the policeman could be found

and when and generally when

and jack probably would have known that as well

the timing's almost almost certainly

the jack the ripper of the history books

is presented as a disorganized

opportunistic killer

who stalks and slashes his victims to death

almost at random

but this detail

raises questions about the traditional ripper narrative

if he was timing his movements to avoid the police

then that means he was actually premeditating these murders

is there any indication

in the scotland yard records that a murder

weapon was recovered for the tractor repair murders

no murder weapon was ever ever recovered we know from

post mortem the knife is pointed

because he nicks the vertebrae when he goes down

these are the sort of knives that

would be regarded as tools of trade

so they could be legitimately carried even

something like this which you would have found in a butcher

and does this seem like a probable weapon

that jack might have used i don't think it is

i would guess this is probably sort of a whaler knife

it's far too big it's not a handy weapon

and he couldn't do the fine cutting

that jack actually needs

which knife would you believe

jack the ripper would have used the blade

i actually believe is

jack the ripper's knife was was this one

the length of blade is right six to eight inches long

he's got a very sharp point

it's straight backed

it would be actually perfect

for evisceration for removal of organs

it is capable

of brutal but also very fine work

it's a surgical knife it's a doctor's knife

holmes was a doctor and this came

from a doctor's kit of the era yeah

would the same kit be available

in america well almost certainly it's a standard medical kit

holmes was the doctor he practiced dissection

in white chapel london

the revelation that the killer known as jack the ripper

likely used a surgeon's knife to dissect his victims

is the first promising link to h h holmes

he would have had a

kit like that with an assortment of knives jeff

mudgett and amateurist fox are investigating jeff's theory

that jack the ripper

is just one of the many identities of h h homes

an alias of dr herman mudgett the con

man killer and architect of chicago's murder castle

you could find tradesmen's knives in commonplace shops but

a surgeon set like that was

not inexpensive and not easy to come by

we know that holmes was very fond of dissecting cadavers

we know that he was trained in human anatomy using cadavers

and then at medical school he sold skeletons

yeah he mean he was pretty handy with a surgeon's knife

let's face it a layman

on the street

wouldn't have even thought of a surgeon's kit

i think the thing that's

interesting for us to investigate a little further is

if you had that surgeon's knife

in addition to that do you need anatomical knowledge

the more that we establish that the removal of organs

requires skill

the more we narrow down the possible suspect

and that could very well put the spotlight on holmes

he had a motive

he was out looking for organs to sell

the thing that bugs

me about that theory

is that he took the uterus and only the uterus

there are other

very valuable organs that are right there in that cavity

so was he harvesting organs for profit or was this

some kind of clue as to his state of mind or his motivation

the question of motive

is so important in linking these two cases

and one way to get to the bottom of it is to find out more

about how these women died

if money is ripper's motive

then we can assume he wanted to avoid a struggle

and just cut the organs out as quickly as possible

but if he's motivated by the joy of killing

then he would want to watch his victim suffer

and for that he needs them alive while he butchers them

jack's first two victims we have

the shift from no missing organs to a missing uterus

as we move into

killings three and four

i'm interested to see how that escalates all right

right back at the beginning of the century of the idea

of somebody who you didn't know you could

want to hurt you and and actually kill you was fright

three weeks passed between ripper's second victim

and his third attack

jeff and amaryllis meet with paul beg

an expert on the final three ripper victims

the thirtieth of september

is when the double event took place

murders three

and four were the murders of

elizabeth strike and catherine edwards

and they have committed on the same night

how much time separated the two murders

it was about forty five minutes

which was more than enough time

to have travelled the distance between the two crimes

the first of the murder was elizabeth stride

there was a man called israel schwartz who had walked behind

and there seems to have been an altercation of some sort

the ripper threw it to the ground

and he killed it

the ripper then realized there was another man

and that he was disturbed and then fled as fast as he could

she was murdered but not mutilated so she was different

from the other victims

if the third victim

was not mutilated why do

most experts think that she was a ripper victim

the medical opinion at the time

was the cut on the throat was the same as in other cases

i can imagine

that if he had wanted to kill

striden and had failed because he was disturbed

that you might have had somebody with a mixture of extreme

frustration anger fear

it depends on what kind of person

he was and how in control of himself he could have been

we've learned home

sometimes experience fits of rage in his early life

we collected reports that he physically abused

a college roommate and my great great grandmother clara

it's not impossible

for me to imagine that at this stage

in his career as a killer

he may have been less polished and practiced than he became

later in life

the second event was

considerably more savage attack

a catherine edwards was found murdered

in a place called miter square

and she was very badly mutilated that she had been

eviscerated part of her ear was sliced off

then a lot of first slashing marks on the face

the wounds that were done to the the face

take away what she looked like

that looks like it could be an x or a cross

we haven't seen that before

could you just clarify for me which organs were taken

the kidney was taken

from the uterus oh seems like he knew

at least how to find the uterus i mean there

because this was a repeated

organ that was removed

from annie chapman and catherine edwards

my view would be that there's at least anatomical knowledge

yes absolutely

the extraction of the kidney from catherine edwards

would suggest surgical skill

the more we hear about the violent but deliberate way

the ripper

is killing victim after victim with a surgeon's knife

removing specific organs with enough

precision to sell them for a profit

the more i'm becoming convinced that he might be a doctor

and like holmes must have some surgical skill so it sounds

like this is a killer who's escalating

in his violence and savagery as he goes through

the system yes yes the fifth victim he butchered

we can only be grateful for the fact that the photograph

isn't in color

so it sounds like this is a killer who's escalating

in his violence and savagery yes

jeff mudgett and amirilis

fox are uncovering

the grisly details of jack the ripper's methods

and their hunt for evidence to link

his barbaric eighteen eighty

murder spree to the work of america's first serial killer

h h holmes

the fifth victim mary jane kelly

she was young she was about twenty five years old

and she was murdered indoors

inside yes okay

and so therefore the ripper had more time

to indulge

his wishes

and he basically butchered mary kelly to the point that

she could in theory have been an animal carcass

it is i mean unthinkable butchery

mary kelly's body closely resembles the kind of dissection

that holmes

would have to inflict

on bodies in order to peel the skin away

and sell the articulated skeleton

this is certainly far different than the previous murders

the ripper's final victim is flayed like a piece of meat

it makes me wonder how holmes was conducting

dissections in the basement of the murder castle

in the years following the ripper killings

are you aware of any physical evidence which exists today

which is relevant to any of the five murders

there are various bits and pieces that uh that exist

perhaps the most interesting of which is is a shoe

that is supposed to have belonged to catherine edwards

which has blood and staining on this material

wow

that evidence has been called into question

but it's there and it's interesting

and it does have this big question mark hanging over the dna

it sounds to me like that is a really

really important item to get our hands on

absolutely i think it's worth a shot

alright so we have an escalation of violence

victim number one mary nichols

we're no organs were missing

victim number two where the uterus was missing

victim number three elizabeth stride

no organs were removed because the killer was interrupted

and then victim number four had incredibly extensive wounds

where both the uterus and a kidney were missing

victim number five mary kelly

obviously this is the pinnacle

of jack's journey and his escalation

through violence

this was obviously somewhere where jack felt safe

he felt uninterrupted

he was able to spend time

with this body in a way that he could have before

and that must have felt very gratifying to him

in victims four and five the killers

slicing the bodies open and removing organs

but he leaves some valuable organs at the scene

that does make me question

the profit motive because if you're killing for money

you wouldn't leave anything valuable behind

i'm starting to wonder whether the increasing savagery

of the attacks is a sign the motive is more personal

the killing and suffering excite him

what bothers me about

our depiction here is we have an escalation and it stops

this is certainly a killer who has learned

in his last crime that the way that he's able to achieve

the ends that he wants to achieve best

is in the privacy of a closed room

now he either been arrested or he's been killed or stopped

in some other way or continues

killing in a closed room somewhere outside of white chapel

in my experience tracking dangerous criminals

killers with this degree of escalation

don't just stop killing

they learn from their previous crimes

in order to become more dangerous and harder to capture

so there must have been some reason the killing stopped

as an ex trial lawyer i'm fascinated with the shaw

direct evidence

is what we live for and this is some of the only

ever that may still exist

i think it's really important for us to track down

see whether there is any potential for dna processing

if we find dna and that dna matches your profile i mean

bam case closed

jeff mudgett and

amoralist fox are investigating a theory

that could finally

reveal the identity of history's infamous

jack the ripper they're scouring

the surviving records for

clues to the ripper's motive to link him to american con

man and killer h h holmes

the case of jack the ripper was never caught

it remains the world's greatest

unsolved mystery

it evokes everything

there is to do with the east end of london

the fog the hansom cab the top hat

the cloak the victorian melodrama

on the hunt for new leads

they've arranged a meeting with a prominent member

of the white chapel society

a local group devoted to uncovering the truth behind

jack the ripper

i've got research notes here

on newspaper cuttings autopsy reports really yeah

the autopsies yeah just about

uh everything that i've researched on the janet ripper case

really appreciate your help

i'm excited to dig into the autopsy records

because the timeline would put

these eighteen eighty eight ripper murders before

the chicago killings in the murder castle which are

more removed and organized and meticulous

holmes and

jack the ripper of the history books are night and day

and so whether or not a serial killer

can or will change

their method of killing

over the course of their career is really relevant for us

the more intelligent

a suspect the more likely they would have known

that he needed to constantly change

if he didn't want to get caught

and you do you have an opinion on that

the history books are littered with people that do change

their mode of operation

some of the most notorious serial killers in history

varied their killing methods throughout their careers

in the nineteen sixties

the zodiac killer terrorized california first by shooting

then stabbing at least seven people

ted

bundy allegedly murdered dozens of women in the seventies

sometimes by bludgeoning and later by strangulation

changing their methods

helped these killers

to stay one step ahead of the law for years

before being caught

once you get into the case it's not who was jack the ripper

it's why was jack the ripper

and tying that in with h h home

i think it's really really interesting

while jeff tracks down the owners of the shawl

that reportedly belonged to ripper's fourth victim amaryllis

digs deeper into the autopsy reports they've acquired

with a coroner

who's trained to decode

the clues that a killer leaves behind

what care would have been taken

in those days around documentation of each of the wounds

they would do a very very detailed

description of each of the wounds

photography was expensive

so the description that they're going

to write down

is probably going to be the main piece of evidence

the descriptions are quite extensive yeah

but if nicholas's case we have here laceration of the tongue

and then the beginning of

the almost complete decapitation the cuts

must have been caused by a long bladed knife and used with

great violence yeah yeah

we still don't know

for sure what the ripper's motivation was

but the savagery of the crime

suggests that he enjoyed his victim's suffering

i'm hoping the coroner's report sheds light

on how these victims died

and whether it lines up with this theory

so for any chapman we have these bruises

the size of a man's thumb on the face or around the neck

so you can actually see a bruise on the face that's before

death so she has to be alive when the bruise happens

the point of a bruise is that you get

blood breaking out of small vessels

in order to do that you have to have a circulation so

he was straining her at the time

and it would produce those kind of marks exactly that the

completely horrific

disembowelment of catherine o's the throat

was cut across to the extent of about six or seven inches

so the throat was

truly cut ear to ear yeah i mean that sounds like it

more likely to have been done from behind

with the hands coming up from just below

going downwards that way like that

there's a deep cut over the bridge of the nose yeah

uh which went into the bone

and divided all of the structures of the cheek

so that was quite a nasty slice across the face basically

these killings

escalated from victim to victim and that

that they culminated with the killing of mary kelly

these images are so savage that

when i look at them i'm really not even sure

what i'm looking at

we have what appears to be a lot of

injury around the

face and neck area

this area looks really just a blooded area

which um could well fit without having a breast taken off

and revealing the muscle underneath and the and the ribs

certainly here further down there seems to have been

almost disemboweled in that area there where

where everything's left open more or less

how would you go about figuring out

what actually caused

death given the extent of the disfigurement but

if they were dead before he

mutilated them and otherwise there was no circulation

of blood then you wouldn't see the spurting

so you wouldn't see the typical

arterial pattern of blood on walls

but what you would see of course is pooling of blood

while the body is being mutilated

so you get pooling under the head

under the uh rest of the body as well

each of the reports

sites limited to no blood spurting in the surrounding area

and pools of blood under the body

that's fascinating do you think

all of the victims were

asphyxiated or rendered unconscious

before the mutilations took place

absolutely wow

the mythology of the ripper is that he

stalked his victims and slashed them to death in a wild

frenzy but the evidence is telling us the opposite

if the victims were dead before they were disemboweled

then everything

we believe about the ripper's kills may be wrong

that means we can rule out the victim suffering as a motive

so that leaves profit or pleasure in the dissection or both

and either motive sounds a lot like holmes

the point is he was obviously

the cold blooded psychopath who wanted to demonstrate

what he could do

hh holmes' great great grandson jeff mudgett

is on the trail of a new lead

it was only ever taken out when i wanted to show someone

he's tracked down the owners

of what could be a critical piece of evidence patches of a

shawl

believed to have been worn by the ripper's fourth victim

catherine edwards

reportedly found at the scene

how did you come

about having possession of the shawl

well about twenty years ago we met

david melville hayes actually owned the complete shore

and it been in his family

for many many years since the murders

his great great uncle

was a policeman on duty at the time

in mita square

he picked the shawl up at the scene

and he had it in the family ever since

may i see it sure

david actually cut the two small pieces out and framed them

and they eventually found their way to an antiques

shop in norfolk and we purchased them from him

there's an inscription on the back

two silk samples taken from catherine edwards

victim of jack the ripper

there is very little direct evidence regarding

any of the five jack the ripper murders

and yours is one of the only pieces left

there's no way to verify for certain that this

shawl belongs to catherine o's

we don't even know if the killer left his dna on it

and since it was collected in the time before forensics

you can bet it was handled by a lot of people

but even if there's only a one in a million chance

we have to give it a shot my intention is

if you'll allow me is to have the shawl tested for dna

and see if that dna matches

a sample they'll also take from me

and i'd like your consent to do so

would it do any damage to the material it won't

they'll handle it with the utmost care

well it is very precious to us

and we don't normally let it out of our

sight we keep it very close to us

but we can understand

how important

it is to you and i think if it is going to help

we could i'm just gonna help jeff agree to you

taking it and having it tested

i hope you do find something

and i hope it helps your investigation

thank you mom

to test the shawl for traces of dna

jeff and amaryllis

take the evidence to one of the world's

preeminent research universities

king's college london

we have some evidence that we like you to consider

these are reportedly sections of catherine edwards' shawl

well this is very interesting

and my understanding is that

there is potentially a link

between the person who murdered catherine edwards

and a distant relative of yours my great great grandfather

so we will need to take a reference sample from you

to compare with any material we find on here

could you tell us a little bit about the likelihood that

there

could after a hundred plus years be dna

evidence that would be useful here

well it's it's possible and it's also

difficult to say

i mean just looking at this

i can't see any obvious blood stains

but today our techniques are so sensitive

that a simple touch can leave enough dna

it really depends on what was the extent of that contact

was it prolonged was it pressured if it was somebody

who might have squeezed the cloth or had a lot of friction

i gotta tell you i'm very excited because

my research has largely been hearing opinions

and reports from newspaper journalists this

is the first scientific step into a real crime investigation

absolutely

at king's college london jeff mudgett

a descendant of notorious nineteenth century serial killer

h h holmes

is closer than ever to proof of his theory

that his murderous ancestor

and jack the ripper are the same man

he's come to test

what may be the only surviving

piece of physical evidence in the ripper case

we got it open wide i'm just going to wipe inside here

i'm going to take

these two swabs off into the lab

we analyze them independently

that was relatively painless good

we'll also take the framed

bit of shaw and analyze that in a separate laboratory

and see what we come up with

the fact that in the nineteenth century

police did not have the same kind of technology

available to them

could have been jack the ripper's greatest accomplice

but if they find dna on the shawl and it's a match to jeff's

it proves h h holmes was jack the ripper

i've read a lot of books i've studied talks been a member

of debates regarding jack the ripper but i never thought

i would actually be

evidence in the case will see you in about a week

so what's the next step

i have to fill you in on what i learned from the corner

all of the victims were suffocated before the killings

really that's a killer who

is depriving himself of the

gratification of seeing your victim struggle

and the image that immediately comes to mind

for me is the dissection of a cadaver

which is something that

holmes was really familiar with and was quite

enamored with

assume we prove

that these were the victims of holmes

assume we prove that he had four or five minutes time

to conduct these atrocities

assume

his irritation for not being able to do his job properly

what would he have done going back home what

would have been

the first thing that would have popped into his mind

where can i conduct these kinds of killings without being

interrupted absolutely the murder

castle look we know that holmes has a brilliant mind

and that he's an adaptive

criminal that when he makes a mistake

he corrects it the next time around

right and every killer has to kill for the first time

sometime and if these represent

holmes still in his adolescence as a killer

and he gets interrupted

that's a mistake that he's gonna

correct in the future

so it's certainly interesting to look at these

as perhaps his training ground for something that became

a lot more

thorough and polished

and meticulous once he took his act back across the ocean

at this stage in the investigation we've made some key

discoveries about the ripper

one he's probably a doctor just like holmes

two he may have timed his attacks to avoid the police

which leads us to believe he may be more

premeditated than we had thought

and three he suffocates his victims to death

before performing increasingly brutal dissections

all clues that could point to holmes as a prime suspect

i think we've done a good job of establishing the facts

around the first five victims yeah

and now that we understand

the wounds they sustained and the way they were killed

i want to see if we can place

homes in london during the time of the ripper attacks

amateurist enlist the help of andrew lambert

an expert in british maritime history

there are a lot of ships crossing the north atlantic

most of them are carrying cargo

some of them carrying passengers

she's asked him to access passenger manifests

and ship records

to look for evidence that

h h holmes may have traveled to london

around the time of the ripper attacks

trade between britain and america is big

and the people who are running this trade

the merchants the industrialists the financiers

they're moving around

so some of them are doing business

some of them are doing pleasure something doing both

it's a very simple come and go service

i have you here records that you're looking for

there's a group of people who are making this transit

frequently there's enough traffic to justify not

a line but many lines of steamers

and there is no id document required

what they tell the captain is what the captain tells

the board authority

so an alias could be used

if you wanted to create a new identity in a new world

you could get on the boat and offer your name as whatever

you might come up with

that's absolutely straightforward

did you have a chance to see whether there's the name

holmes in any of these ledgers

yeah there are names in the ledgers

which may be him

here we have h homes oh

h homes thirty six american wow

he's coming back from liverpool to new york

what month and year is this

this one is in may eighteen eighty nine

whoa

that's after the final ripper murder

this could be the reason the ripper killing stopped

next time on american river

so this is the sort of famous dear boss letter oh boy

next job i do

i shall cut the lady's ears off

so when you look at these letters

what do you find

the language it doesn't identify as a british writer

they took witness statements

we know from a report that an american was taken in

i managed to track down a forensic artist who can use

all of the details from the eyewitness accounts a full face

broad shouldered with fair skin hair light brown

holy

that's really creepy