Academic historians tend to be fairly unconcerned with who the murderer really was. This is partly because we'll never know for sure, and partly because the myth of the Ripper is far more interesting than any reality. As a cultural historian of late-Victorian Britain, I'm fascinated by the response to the murders and what it reveals about British culture and society at the time. The failure of the police to apprehend the murderer created a void; a blank space into which people poured their fears and fantasies. It's a great way to explore ideas about gender, race, crime, the city, and the press. This is much more interesting (to me at least) than desperately speculating about the identity of the killer. Historians tend to leave this stuff to the Ripperologists...

I found patricia Cornwell's case for Walter Sickert pretty compelling Link to book if you want to check it out. Things like details in his paintings that a person uninvolved shouldn't have known as well as paper matching to the letters from jack the ripper to police are interesting ideas as well as her creating a physiological profile that fit him and the ripper.

But there are a few holes in her case as she is piecing together a 100+ year old crime. Nothing can every be conclusively proved or disproved so any real accusation is basically a highly educated guess.

At this point in history the only concrete thing to say is that nobody will know conclusively who Jack the Ripper was.

A sort of followup question: I'm reading about H.H. Holmes right now and came across a mention that some people believe he was Jack the Ripper. Something about him being in London at the time. Can anybody offer a more scholarly analysis of this theory? It didn't seem particularly sound to me, but he did do some pretty nasty stuff in Chicago at the Colombian Exposition so maybe....

Is this a theory that has ever been taken seriously by anybody? What is the likelihood of it being true?