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Whitechapel, c1870–c1900: Crime, Policing and the Inner City

Investigative policing in Whitechapel

  • 3 things to know
  • Paper 1

Overview

Why physical clues gave little, house-to-house enquiries, witness interviews, sketches and photography, police surgeons and Thomas Bond's report, bloodhounds, the Metropolitan and City of London Police and Scotland Yard, the five victims of 1888, the Ripper name, newspaper coverage, and George Lusk's Whitechapel Vigilance Committee.

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Answer each one before you reveal it.

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Numbers

Which police forces investigated the Whitechapel murders, why was more than one involved, and where was the Metropolitan Police investigation run from?

Key term

Why could detectives of the 1880s get so little from physical clues left at a murder scene?

Evaluation

What were house-to-house enquiries, and how far were they taken in the murder hunt?

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

  1. 1

    Why could detectives of the 1880s get so little from physical clues left at a murder scene?

    Model answer

    Fingerprints were not yet used for identification and there was no way to tell one person's blood from another's, so stains and marks proved nothing.

  2. 2

    What were house-to-house enquiries, and how far were they taken in the murder hunt?

    Model answer

    Officers called at every dwelling in whole streets, questioning thousands of residents and lodging-house keepers and following up hundreds of them.

  3. 3

    Why were witness interviews an unreliable basis for the investigation?

    Model answer

    Many witnesses had been drinking, saw only a shadowy figure in poor light, and gave descriptions that flatly contradicted one another.

  4. 4

    How were sketches used in the hunt for the killer?

    Model answer

    Artists drew suspects from witnesses' descriptions and newspapers printed them, in the hope that a reader would recognise the face.

  5. 5

    What use did the police make of photography during the murder investigation?

    Model answer

    The body of the last victim was photographed where it lay in her room, one of the first times a scene was recorded that way in a British murder case.

  6. 6

    What did the police surgeons contribute to the enquiry?

    Model answer

    Doctors such as George Bagster Phillips and Thomas Bond examined the bodies and reported on the wounds, the weapon and the time of death.

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