John Dykes gambled away everything he had, then slid from pickpocketing into armed robbery on the road between Mile End and Bow. When he held up Charles Wright at gunpoint, his haul amounted to a penknife, a seal, and five shillings and eightpence, hardly a fortune worth a man's neck.
He was convicted at Newgate and hanged on this day in 1721, just 23 years old, the end of a fall from gambling debts to the gallows that had taken only a few short years.
In the early hours, the killer known as Jack the Ripper struck twice within the same hour. His third victim, Elizabeth Stride, was found with her throat cut and still bleeding, her killer likely interrupted before he could mutilate her further. Denied his ritual, he found a fourth victim within the hour: Catherine Eddowes, whose body was left with her intestines arranged over her shoulder and part of her womb removed.
Weeks later, a Londoner opened a parcel addressed simply "From Hell" to find half a preserved kidney inside, accompanied by a taunting letter. Tests suggested it may have belonged to Eddowes herself, though the claim was never proven and the killer was never caught.
Before 1829, London had no unified police, just a patchwork of parish constables and private watchmen who could barely keep pace with a city rife with theft, riot and violence. Home Secretary Robert Peel changed that, pushing through the Metropolitan Police Act and creating a single force answerable to the Crown rather than local vestries.
Its headquarters took its name from the street behind it, a quiet lane called Great Scotland Yard, and the name stuck long after the force outgrew the building. The new constables, soon nicknamed bobbies and peelers after their founder, were unarmed, uniformed and deeply distrusted at first by a public wary of state surveillance. Within decades Scotland Yard would become the model for modern policing worldwide, and its name a byword for criminal investigation itself.
Jack the Ripper was a woman. That was the possibility London newspapers began to report: that the killer who had horrified the world for months was a woman disguised as a man, living and working unnoticed in Whitechapel. By the time the story spread, she had reportedly vanished. Police were confidently believed to be "at last on the track" of the murderer, and there was suddenly talk of "his or her crimes".
Who, it was asked, could walk the streets at night without suspicion, possess the anatomical knowledge the mutilations suggested, and risk being found beside a body? One answer: a woman who was, or had been, a midwife. Discovered bending over a victim, she need only say she had been passing by and thought the woman required her medical attention. Though largely discounted, the Jill the Ripper theory has never completely gone away.
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