The historian who took on Jack the Ripper has died

Philip Sugden, who has died aged 67, was the first academic historian to apply scholastic rigour to the notoriously flaky field of “Ripperology” – the study of the serial murders of Victorian prostitutes in the East End of London by a mysterious knife-wielding maniac popularly known as Jack the Ripper.

Sugden disdained many of the books about the Ripper killings (at least 30 in the last half-century alone) as a monstrous cult industry. In The Complete History Of Jack The Ripper (1994) he returned to primary sources, stripping away layers of misinformation, distortion, hoaxes, fakery, invention and speculation that had accreted over more than a century to uncover and re-examine the unvarnished facts. His book, correcting many of the errors and myths that pervaded earlier works of “Ripperature”, was acclaimed as the gold standard of the genre.

Discounting most of the outlandish theories about — and contenders for — the killer’s identity canvassed by earlier writers, Sugden painstakingly reconstructed the murder and mutilation of between four and nine prostitutes in Whitechapel in the years between 1888 and 1892.