NetGalley ARC | The Return of the Ripper?: The Murder of Frances Coles

I received a free digital ARC from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Rating ⭐⭐⭐⭐

I will never stop reading books about The Five and Whitechapel. We will never know who Jack the Ripper was, and so I appreciate every (sensible) theory and love to read all I can on the topic. These women deserve to have thir stories told, and while it will never happen, Jack deserves to be forgotten.

Side note: I don't like the cover. I think it is a risky game ever putting a face to a potential suspect.

As you may well know, The Five were violently murdered in 1888, with at least six additional murders occurring in Whitechapel from 1888 through 1891.

Here the author makes the case for the murder of Frances Coles being one of the victims. Her body was found in February 1891, yet another bloody and violent death. For many at the time, it looked eearily familiar and residents worried that the Ripper had returned - if he'd ever left in the first place.

The difference between Coles and the other women, however, is that there was a serious and viable suspect for her murder. In that case we are left wondering if he was Jack the Ripper (he couldn't have been, as he was at sea during some of the murders), if he worked with Jack the Ripper (unlikely. That psychopath would not have had a partner), or if this was a stand-alone event (most likely). Yet James Sadler was never convicted of murder and the case remains unsolved (I'm pretty sure he did it).

My main issue with assigning some or all of these additional murders to Jack is that some simply do not fit. By the time Mary Kelly was murdered, Jack had been escalating - and very quickly. I can't even look at the autopsy photos, even in black and white. They're horrific. I think it is possible another serial killer was operating in that period and after Jack 'stopped', but I do not think Coles is a victim of either.

So, in the two years between Kelly's murder and that of Coles, we either have to believe that he suddenly stopped killing for whatever reason (left London, was imprisoned, died), or that he de-escalated (while all murder is terrible, some of the women killed in that period were not subjected to the violence that Kelly in particular was).

There are so many variables to consider - more than I have laid out - and this case will forever hold a place in the collective heart of crime and true crime fans because we so badly just want to KNOW. If we can identify the monster, we know what to look out for. But we can't, and so everyone is suspect.

The author takes a deep look into the murder of Coles; roughly half the book is spent there. We move through the case with the police, from the discovery of her body up through the inquest. he details the evidence against Sadler and explains how the case fell apart and why Sadler was never convicted.

Turton does an excellent job transporting the reader to the slums of Victorian London, a place I would love to see with my own eyes but then leave just as quickly as I arrived. Whitechapel itself remains an endless source of fascination for me, what it must have been like to work and survive in such a place.

While I do not agree that Coles was a Ripper victim, I appreciate the research that went into this text, because there is a plethora. In addition to laying out the case, or no case, for Coles being one of the victims, the author provides maps and images, as well as brief list of all involved in one capacity or another.

Half the book is dedicated to Coles, the other half is a profile of Jack and delves into the murders of The Five. Here the author shows how Coles' death might be connected, but also why some of those connections do not actually work. He also does this, less in-depth, with a few of the other murders considered the to be part of the ten 'Whitechapel Murders' (The Five are included in that count).

I do not believe Coles was a Ripper victim, but I appreciate the time and attention she was given here. All of these women, whether they were victims of the Ripper or not, were some of the most vulnerable in society. For decades no one cared because they were prostitutes, so obviously they had it coming, right? WRONG. All of these women mattered, and even though justice is no longer possible, they were living, breathing human beings who deserved so much better.

Recommended.