Message #259124

[Keira Kensington]

For his climax, Ed Norris looks again at the photographs of Carrie Brown’s corpse. He points out that two large slashes on the body form an “X” (or a cross or a “t” or two random slashes, depending on your perspective.) The “X” he says is the Roman numeral ten, because this is the Ripper’s tenth victim. Where does he get ten victims? They are the five accepted victims— known by Ripperologsts as the canonical victims; Kelly’s wife Sarah; three of the alleged, or non-canonical victims murdered before August 31, 1888; and “Old Shakespeare.”

There are a number of problems with this theory. First, there are actually twelve non-canonical victims besides Carrie Brown, four of which were killed before August 31. Why arbitrarily choose three? If even one of the remaining non-canonicals was killed by the Ripper, or if one of the chosen three were not, then the theory fails. Carrie Brown is the only victim marked by a number and, though Norris has has told us that a serial killer’s MO is like his signature, he concludes that this singularity proves, without a doubt that James Kelly was Jack the Ripper.