Melville Macnaghten
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Sir Melville Leslie Macnaghten was Assistant Commissioner (Crime) of the London Metropolitan Police from 1903 to 1913. A highly regarded and famously affable figure of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras he played major investigative roles in cases that led to the establishment and acceptance of fingerprint identification. He was also a major player in the pursuit and capture of Dr. Crippen, and of the exoneration of a wrongly convicted man, Adolph Beck, which helped lead to the creation of the Court of Criminal Appeal in 1907.
Macnaghten caricatured by Spy for Vanity Fair, 1908
A page from the Macnaghten memorandum of 1894, in which he names three suspects
Jack the Ripper
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Jack the Ripper was an unidentified serial killer active in and around the impoverished Whitechapel district of London, England, in 1888. In both criminal case files and the contemporaneous journalistic accounts, the killer was also called the Whitechapel Murderer and Leather Apron.
"With the Vigilance Committee in the East End: A Suspicious Character" from The Illustrated London News, 13 October 1888
Women and children congregate in front of one of the Whitechapel common lodging-houses close to where Jack the Ripper murdered two of his victims
The sites of the first seven Whitechapel murders – Osborn Street (centre right), George Yard (centre left), Hanbury Street (top), Buck's Row (far right), Berner Street (bottom right), Mitre Square (bottom left), and Dorset Street (middle left)
29 Hanbury Street. The door through which Annie Chapman and her murderer walked to the yard where her body was discovered is beneath the numerals of the property sign.