EX-MURDER DETECTIVE STEVEN KEOGH IS ON THE TRAIL OF JACK THE RIPPER – AND HE’S FOUND SOME SURPRISING REVELATIONS
As a former Scotland Yard Detective Inspector, Steven Keogh spent much of his career hunting killers. Now, he’s using his skills to delve into one of the most notorious unsolved cases in British history. As his new book Murder Investigation Team: Jack The Ripper is released, he tells us how a 21st-century investigation would have caught their man.
What made you want to write this book?
Abberline, was spookily similar to mine. I was a detective inspector when I retired from investigating murders at Scotland Yard, and that’s what he did. Before I went to Scotland Yard, I policed Whitechapel, and that’s what he did. And before that, I investigated terrorism, and that’s what he did. Our careers had followed a path, so I started thinking, “What would I have done to solve the crimes in his position – and what would I do differently now?” That’s really the premise of the book, but I didn’t want to just write another book about what happened. It’s easy to think of Jack The Ripper as a fictional character, but the victims were real people, and the witnesses to the murders would have been affected by what they saw for the rest of their lives. So, while the book deals with the facts, I tried to introduce the cases in a way that adds life. To do that, every murder is introduced via first-person accounts, which are taken from the comprehensive evidence given in the coroner’s inquests at the time, so you see it from the witnesses’ point of view.
One obvious difference between the investigation then and now would be forensics, wouldn’t it?
Yes. The murders happened in 1888 and back then, they didn’t have fingerprints, DNA, or blood-pattern analysis, so forensics were limited. What they did have was pathology, so they could determine a cause of death. They could also use it to hazard a guess at time of death, but that was unreliable. The other thing they had was photography, but they didn’t use it very well. One of the things I enjoyed about writing this book was witnessing the evolution of the investigation. We see Jack The Ripper and his crimes developing, but parallel to that, we see the police developing their understanding of what was required of them. For example, when they started out, they didn’t take photos of the bodies or crime scenes, so for the early murders, they relied on witness descriptions. But by the time you get to the seventh murder, the police are taking photos, and also using blood to understand what went on during the crime.
How much did not having modern systems affect them?
It sounds boring, but one of the most crucial things that would have helped them solve this would have been computers. For example, after one of the murders, the police printed 80,000 app
