Jack the Ripper conference gets inside the mind of a 19th-century monster

THOUGH his brief reign of terror was very real to the residents of London's Whitechapel district in 1888, Jack the Ripper has gone on to become one of culture's greatest monsters, taking his place in popular entertainment alongside his fictional contemporary, Mr. Hyde.

His story has inspired both the director and writer of "Psycho" - Alfred Hitchcock ("The Lodger") and Robert Bloch ("Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper"); he's been serenaded by musicians such as Morrissey and Judas Priest; on screen, he's been pursued by H.G. Wells, Sherlock Holmes and Johnny Depp.

In her new book, What Alice Knew, Drexel University English professor Paula Marantz Cohen sics another historic figure on the trail of the notorious serial killer: novelist Henry James, joined by his psychologist brother William and invalid sister Alice.

The Ripper lore "is such a fascinating and enduring story," Cohen said. "It will never be solved, so it opens up so many areas for speculation and exploration."

Cohen and fellow Drexel professor Fred Abbate decided to delve into some of those areas by hosting an interdisciplinary conference, examining the Ripper from a wide array of perspectives. Just in time for Halloween, "Jack the Ripper Through a Wider Lens" invites a host of academics, criminologists, writers, artists and psychoanalysts to expound upon the legacy of "Saucy Jack" (to borrow the title of another homage, Spinal Tap's never-realized rock musical).

Speakers will include renowned Ripper experts such as Martin Fido, Drew D. Gray and Christopher T. George (co-writer of the real-life "Saucy Jack" equivalent, "Jack the Musical: The Ripper Pursued"); and psychoanalysts Jean Hantman, who will talk about the emotional, as opposed to physical, murder that happens in abusive families; and Mikita Brottman, who will discuss the graphic novel and film "From Hell."

Asked for the Ripper case's resonance with modern-day thinkers, Cohen rattled off a host of provocative themes. "There's the sexual aspect. There's the sense of Victorian England, a period when the whole notion of psychology was just taking off, when Freud was writing, so you can overlay it with all kinds of interesting psychological elements. The victims were prostitutes living in a very poor area, so you can think about social class and issues of class warfare.

"Then look at the number of television shows and movies that deal with serial killing. Clearly, what would cause someone to kill and kill again, and kill in a signature fashion, is something that I think fascinates people as much if not more today than before."

The conference was born out of its co-chairs' coincidental fascination with the Ripper. As Cohen was penning her novel, Abbate, a philosophy professor at Drexel's Pennoni Honors College, was preparing a class titled "The Jack the Ripper Case and the Logic of Criminal Detection." Given the many other serial killers who've come along in his wake, why has this one murderer kept a firm enough grasp on the popular imagination to inspire a philosophy course 120 years after his unsolved crimes?

"First of all, they were ghastly murders," Abbate said. "But the trappings about them are also interesting: This is a Victorian killing that takes place between midnight and 6 a.m., so you can just imagine some creepy character walking around these little streets of the East End of London. There have been serial murderers who have been much worse in terms of numbers of killings, but I think there's something enduring in the images we project, and the fact that so many suspects have been put forth."

More than a hundred names have been offered up as possible Ripper suspects over the years, some more credible than others (Lewis Carroll being one of the more far-fetched). Though declaring "case closed" has been a favorite pastime of self-proclaimed Ripperologists, Cohen and Abbate decided to shift the conference's focus largely away from the whodunit aspect.

Still, theories are sure to abound, particularly during Friday's opening-panel discussion, "Shadow and Substance: The Pursuit of the Serial Killer." The panel features three members of the Vidocq Society, Philly's members-only crime-solving club.

Although his fellow panelist, profiling expert Richard Walter, has definite ideas about the Ripper's identity, John Maxwell, former chief inspector of the Philadelphia Police Department's Detective Bureau, keeps a veteran investigator's open mind about the case.

"It will be interesting to explore the theories and myths that are out there and see how much evidence and how much weight are behind the individual perspectives," Maxwell said. "I myself don't have a particular theory that I hang my hat on. Quite honestly, one of the things you want to learn from these cases is not to settle on a prime suspect early on in any investigation and say, 'This is the guy.' One of the hallmarks of a good investigator is to be totally objective all the time."

Of course, one era's open-mindedness tends to be a later generation's crackpot fantasy. Such is the case with optograms, the Victorian-era claim that the last image a dying person sees would be imprinted on his retina, thus offering a potential lead in the Ripper case.

"As early photographic technology developed, people thought that they saw a connection between photographic plates and how they believed the biology of the eye worked," explained Craig Monk, a professor of English and associate dean in the faculty of Arts and Sciences at the University of Lethbridge, Alberta. Monk will discuss the idea of optograms and their parallels with his own major area of interest, autobiography.

"Why would people think that somebody writing a story about themselves is more reliable than any other kind of fiction?" asked Monk, pointing to firsthand accounts written by several investigators in the Ripper case. "They didn't catch him and, moving forward, they had every reason to try to write stories that would rehabilitate their tarnished reputations. So they're really no more reliable than the idea of a fleeting image across a dying person's eye."

"The boundaries of disciplines are eroding and changing and shifting," said Cohen of the disparate viewpoints the conference hopes to offer. "We're looking to take something that obviously has a certain amount of dramatic value, that is gory and sensational, but to look very seriously at its context and the question of what makes something into a story that continues to capture the public imagination."