Was Jack the Ripper Queen Victoria’s grandson?

History's Greatest Conspiracy Theories

This episode explores the enduring conspiracy theory that Prince Albert Victor, grandson of Queen Victoria, was the notorious serial killer

Key takeaways

• The 'Royal Conspiracy' theory suggests Sir William Gull covered up Prince Albert Victor's crimes to protect the monarchy.
• Pop culture, including BBC dramas and graphic novels like 'From Hell', plays a significant role in popularizing these theories.

Main topics

• Jack the Ripper conspiracy
• Prince Albert Victor

Notable quotes

There's no smoking gun or dripping knife.

Conclusion

The episode demonstrates how the human desire for a cohesive narrative

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:02) As recent years attest, royal scandals have a habit of coming to light. But what if the mother of all royal scandals is still waiting to be revealed? Could it be that an heir to the British throne, a grandson of Queen Victoria, might have lived a double life as a serial killer? It may sound far-fetched, but for several decades many people have claimed that Prince Albert Victor, also known as Eddie, was in fact the notorious Victorian murderer Jack the Ripper. Could they be right? Speaker 2 (0:33) Welcome to Series 3 of History's Greatest Conspiracy Theories from History Extra. I'm Rob Attar and in today's episode I'm joined by Dr Drew Gray of the University of Northampton to investigate the most shocking candidate for the Ripper murders. Speaker 2 (0:51) Just to begin with, what do we actually know about the killer who's popularly referred to as Jack the Ripper? Speaker 1 (0:56) Well, we know very little, actually, about the Whitechapel murderer who's called Jack the Ripper. There's been so many people that have been suspected of being the killer, but we have very little forensic evidence. We have quite a few witness descriptions, but there's some similarities, but they're not entirely consistent. There's no smoking gun or dripping knife. There's nothing like that. So it does allow for a lot of speculation on the case because we really can't be clear about who the killer was. Can Speaker 2 (1:23) we even be sure about how many victims this killer had or even if it was only just one killer? Speaker 1 (1:29) They're both very good questions, actually. I mean, there are generally seen as five canonical victims and those five women, most experts on the case would accept were killed by the same man. And it is generally seen to be a man, although there have been suggestions that it was a woman. There have been suggestions that more than one killer was involved, but there's very little, I mean, there's very little evidence for any of it, but there's very little evidence to suggest that. And it's quite unlikely. Serial killers are generally not more than one person. The police file that's held at the National Archives in Kew contains more than those five women. And probably most experts today would accept that we could probably make that list stretch to six. But there's really no consensus over the others. Was Speaker 2 (2:20) it unusual in the late Victorian era to have such a high profile crime that remained unsolved? Speaker 1 (2:26) That's difficult. We probably think that... more crimes are solved than they actually are, even in our 21st century with all the technology and forensics that's available to police today. Solving a stranger murder series that the Whitechapel murders are, in the sense that there's no obvious connection between the killer and his victims, that's always incredibly difficult. And if we look back at other serial killers, people like Stephen Wright or the Yorkshire Ripper, For example, again, the fact that these murderers attack individuals who are not connected makes it much more difficult for the police to solve because the police will immediately, if the murder has taken place, look for the close family, close family, work links, that kind of thing. And that's not easy to do. Speaker 1 (3:14) The police across the 19th century had problem-solving crimes like these, although these are unusual, that these sorts of crimes don't exist. But in 1888, in the period when the Ripper murders took place, there was another series of murders in London, bodies found in the Thames, known as the Thames Torso Murders or the Thames Torso Mystery, and that's not been solved either. So there are precedents for not solving sort of serial killings or unusual crimes. Speaker 2 (3:41) Now, as you alluded to earlier, there have been a huge number of potential suspects put forwards over the years. But one that I'd like to talk to you about today is Prince Albert Victor. What can you tell us about him? Speaker 1 (3:52) Well, he's the grandson of Queen Victoria. So I'm not very good with my modern day royals, but we could probably work out where he would fit. He's directly in line to become king at some point after Edward VII, I think, was Queen Victoria's heir. So this was an individual who was directly in line to the throne. So a very important figure in late 19th century Britain. He was serving in the military. He kind of had a reputation for being what we might call a bit dissolute. You know, he liked to party. I suppose that would be a way to put it. Which wouldn't be unlike his father, I should think. There's lots of rumours about him. He died relatively young and it's suggested that... he might have died as a result of a disease he picked up, for example syphilis, but there's no proof that that's the case and it would probably be quite difficult to prove. And yes, he's associated with scandals like the Cleveland Street scandal, which took place in London in the 1880s and featured a homosexual brothel, which is kind of, again, entirely speculative. And we cannot be sure of that, but he's been associated with that. But I think that's partly about his association with a kind of dissolute lifestyle. Speaker 2 (5:08) But am I right to say that he wasn't associated with the Jack the Ripper killings at the time, that that actually came later? It Speaker 1 (5:14) came later, but in Ripper of Lore, he was associated relatively soon with that, but not necessarily as a direct participant in it, but that his name came up. in the way that sometimes names come up in investigations. There are very few people who are actually associated with the Ripper at the time that we know of. I mean, most of the three key suspects that have come down to us have come down to us from a policeman's memoir, the so-called MacNorton Memo, and that's Kosminski, who's widely accepted to be the principal suspect, Montague Druitt, and a man called Michael Ostrog, a strange sort of kind of Russian... Doctor. Those are the three names, along with a couple of others that were probably pulled out at the time. But again, without knowing exactly what was in the heads of the police at the time, which is difficult to know, it's hard to give them too much credibility. Speaker 2 (6:04) So when and why was this prince actually specifically put forward as a candidate to have been Jack the Ripper? Speaker 1 (6:11) It looks like it's come in the 20th century. And there's a suggestion from a man named Thomas Stowell. This is kind of like the 1960s, 1970s, early 1970s, that this is a possibility. And actually, we could even credit the BBC for putting this forward because there was a TV series in 1973 which featured two fictional detectives, Barlow and Watt, from Z Cars, I think, and Softly Softly. I think they were the two TV series that they came out of. And they kind of pitched them up with a sort of drama documentary, which looked very closely at some of the evidence we do have. So from police reports at the time, from coroner's inquests that were held, and the BBC sort of recreated those as a costume drama, done very straight. And then you have Barlow and Watts, not in a police thing, but it looks like they're in their own home, kind of... going through the evidence and trying to work it out and leading us to try and work that out. And at the end of that, they interview a man named Joseph Sickert, who claims that he's the illegitimate son of Walter Sickert, the Victorian painter. It's out of that and then a following book by a man called Stephen Knight that we start to frame this Ripper royal conspiracy. Speaker 2 (7:37) Am I right to say there are actually two different versions of this conspiracy? There's one where Prince Albert Victor was himself the killer, and then another one that actually implicates a royal doctor. Speaker 1 (7:46) That's right, yeah. Speaker 2 (7:47) Called William Gull, who I believe would have actually been quite an elderly man