Scotland Yard fights to keep Jack the Ripper files secret
Scotland Yard is fighting an extraordinary legal battle to withhold 123-year-old secret files which experts believe could finally provide the identity of Jack the Ripper.
Scotland Yard is battling to keep 123-year-old files on Jack the Ripper secret. Photo: REX FEATURESBy David Barrett, Home Affairs Correspondent 9:15AM BST 15 May 201160 Comments
Four thick ledgers compiled by Special Branch officers have been kept under lock and key since the Whitechapel murders in 1888.
Scotland Yard is battling to keep 123-year-old files on Jack the Ripper secret.Trevor Marriott, a Ripper investigator and former murder squad detective, has spent three years attempting to obtain uncensored versions of the documents.
But he has been repeatedly refused because the ledgers contain the identities of police informants – and the Metropolitan Police insist that revealing the information could compromise their attempts to gather information from “supergrasses” and other modern-day informants.
Last week, Mr Marriott took Scotland Yard to a tribunal in a last-ditch attempt to see the journals – containing 36,000 entries – which he believes contain evidence which could finally unmask the world’s most famous serial killer.
The legal case has cost the taxpayer thousands of pounds and has even involved a senior Scotland Yard officer giving evidence anonymously from behind a screen.
The ledgers provide details of the police’s dealings with thousands of informants from 1888 to 1912, including some who provided information during the original Ripper investigation.
A sample of about 40 pages from the Scotland Yard ledgers was released to last week’s tribunal, but with the names of informants and other key details blacked out.
According to Mr Marriott, the files contain the names of at least four new suspects, as well as other pieces of evidence.
He said: “I believe this to be the very last chance that we may have to solve the mystery of Jack the Ripper.
“To have any possibility of getting near the truth about those horrific crimes we must see what these ledgers contain.
“It may be that within them we find the final piece of the jigsaw that would unlock this mystery and lead to the identity of the killer, or killers, albeit 123 years too late.”
Jack the Ripper slaughtered at least five women between August and November 1888 in the slums of Whitechapel, east London, but various experts have claimed other murders may have been committed by the killer on earlier and later dates.
The police made several mistakes in the inquiry and detection techniques of the time were basic – with no fingerprinting and science unable even to distinguish between animal and human blood.
As a result, there is no conclusive evidence to point to the true identity of Jack the Ripper and the case remains one of the world’s great unsolved mysteries. Among a long list of possible suspects are Queen Victoria’s grandson the Duke of Clarence, who died in an asylum in 1892, and the painter Walter Sickert.
Mr Marriott, who joined Bedfordshire Police in 1970 and worked as a detective constable until the mid-1980s, began researching the Jack the Ripper case in 2003. He has previously published one book on the subject which put forward the name of Carl Feigenbaum, a German merchant executed for the murder of a woman in New York, as a new suspect.
On uncovering references to the ledgers in 2008, Mr Marriott applied to see the documents under the Freedom of Information Act. The Met refused and he appealed to the Information Commissioner who also decided the books should not be revealed.
Now Mr Marriott has undergone the final appeal stage to the Information Tribunal, in which the case is heard by a panel of three judges.
The three-day hearing involved a detective inspector, identified only as ‘D’, speaking to the court from behind a screen because of his sensitive role running the force’s intelligence-gathering operation from informants.
Detective Inspector ‘D’ told the tribunal that unveiling the files could deter informants from coming forward in future, and could even put off members of the public from phoning Crimestoppers or the antiterrorist hotline.
“The interpretation on the street will be that the police have revealed the identity of informants,” said ‘D’.
“Confidence in the system is maintaining the safety of informants, regardless of age.”
Det Insp ‘D’ said the passage of time did not make publication of informants’ identities less sensitive because their descendants could be targeted by criminals with a grudge.
“Look at one of the world’s best-known informants, Judas Iscariot. If someone could draw a bloodline from Judas Iscariot to a present day person then that person would face a risk, although I know that seems an extreme example,” the officer said.
Another senior officer, Detective Superintendent Julian McKinney, told the tribunal that releasing names would make police officers less capable of preventing terrorist attacks and organised crime, and make informants vulnerable to attack.
Det Supt McKinney said: “Regardless of the time, regardless of whether they are dead, they should never be disclosed.
“They come to us only when they have the confidence in our system that their identity will not be disclosed.”
But Mr Marriott said a number of historical files have previously been released which contained details of informants.
He argued there was no evidence to show descendants of informants who have been named had come to harm.
The tribunal decision is expected later this year.
I seriously doubt that releasing these files would make today’s informants less likely to assist the police.
Most of them would probably love to read the files too!
I hope that this guy wins and the documents are released. There is no sensible reason for this level of secretiveness now, it has been long enough that even the revenge against family members makes the police look silly.
Though, it does add fuel to conspiracy theories about the Royal Family, Government Officials and so on.
Maybe the government just wants to keep the mystery alive?
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