I want to suggest a candidate suspect for Jack the Ripper, but I have an ulterior motive for doing so. I hope at the end of this post you won’t think I wasted your time.

Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton was born in 1821 and died in 1890. He was a military officer, a famous explorer, a successful author and translator, a poet, an ethnographer, an Orientalist, and a diplomat. He was a controversial figure due to his atheism and his sexual promiscuity, as well as for the daring content of his writings. Sir Richard was notorious for having secretly visited Mecca, a city barred to non-Muslims, and lauded for his efforts to find the source of the Nile River. He was the translator of One Thousand and One Nights and the Kama Sutra, introducing these texts to the English-speaking world. He spoke eight languages, and could recite the Quran from memory.

Here are some facts that qualify Burton as a Jack the Ripper suspect:

• Although he lived in Austria-Hungary in 1888, he is known to have visited London that year. The precise dates of the visit are unknown, but may have coincided with the five “canonical” murders.
• Burton was an expert soldier, fighter, and fencer, with knowledge of many weapons. He wrote a treatise on the use of the bayonet; it was conjectured that Martha Tabram was killed with a bayonet.
• He famously could disguise himself as a native of any culture he visited. Several witnesses who may have seen The Ripper reported a “shabby genteel” “foreigner.” The latter term is usually interpreted as meaning “Jew”; but Burton could have disguised himself as any kind of immigrant, Jewish or otherwise. And he seems like the kind of man who would have dressed up a bit, even when slumming.
• Sources cannot agree on what height Burton was; but one source states he was 5’2”. He was also mustachioed. These facts agree with the reports of the witnesses. Burton was however in his 60s in 1888, and the witnesses reported someone much younger. Yet with Burton’s skill in disguise and the dark streets, it’s possible he was the man witnesses saw.
• Burton was a racist and a vicious antisemite, the kind of man who would shout “Lipski” at a Jew, as did the Elizabeth Stride suspect. Most importantly for our purposes, he was a misogynist, who wrote about women as if they were mere sex objects. Identifying The Ripper as a misogynist is no stretch.
• A widely known rumor accused Burton of murder. Burton spent his life denying this—but is recorded on several occasions as admitting to the crime, even boasting of it.
• He was sexually promiscuous and experimental, and according to the mores of his time, a sexual deviant. He may have been bisexual. Burton was as honest about his sexual activities as one could be in Victorian Britain and not go to jail. He wrote about prostitution from an anthropological perspective, and as with his other research on sex, participated in the activity. The Ripper may have targeted prostitutes, and was said to be “sexually insane.”
• While not formally trained, Burton studied anatomy and physiology, and wrote about the medical traditions of ethnic groups he visited. The Ripper was believed by some to have had medical expertise.

None of this is actual evidence that Burton was The Ripper; it’s all circumstantial. And there are certainly some flaws, particularly Burton’s age. But he’s a better suspect than maybe half of the “usual suspects.” He’s certainly a better choice than Montague John Druitt, who has been described as the “no. 1 suspect.” Druitt is only considered because he was mentioned by Assistant Chief Constable Sir Melville Macnaghten, who presumably knew more about Druitt than we do. But based on what we know today, Burton is a far better suspect.

I hope I have convinced you that Sir Richard Francis Burton should be taken seriously as a Ripper suspect.

But here’s the thing.

Burton was NOT Jack the Ripper.

The idea is absurd. I absolutely guarantee you that The Ripper was not a famous or prominent individual. Such people live under a spotlight of attention, and would make very poor serial killers. In the 136 years since the Whitechapel Murders, there has never been an identified serial killer who was famous before they were caught; serial rapists, yes, like Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein, and Sean Combs—but not serial killers. And note that even with those three rapists, many people knew what was going on—it just took the authorities a scandalously long time to act.

So why did I research Burton as a Ripper suspect? It was an experiment.

I decided to choose one person at random from a list of prominent Victorians, ideally somebody I knew nothing about. I would pick one person and one person only, and then make the case they were The Ripper. The only thing I knew about Burton before I began was that he was an explorer.

If I couldn’t make the case Burton was The Ripper, that would be the end of the experiment. The whole point was to demonstrate that any prominent Victorian could be The Ripper if you cherrypicked facts from their life.

Famous people are trivially easy to investigate. Everything I learned about Burton I learned in less than an hour, at two in the morning, by looking online. Imagine what I could have come up with if I had spent months or years examining him through the lens of a predetermined conclusion, that he was The Ripper.

Ripperologists choose famous suspects precisely because they are easy to research—there are whole books about them, both from the period and by later historians. They have academics devoted singularly to their lives. All the legwork has been done.

It’s irresponsible. And worse, it’s lazy.

Jack the Ripper was not a famous person. They were an otherwise ordinary individual. They may or may not have been diagnosed with a mental illness. They may or may not have been suspected by friends and family (I’d wager not, based on most of the serial killers I’ve studied). But I doubt the police at the time ever suspected or even heard of the real Ripper. And they would have had an astronomically easier time investigating an ordinary Victorian than we do.

Jack the Ripper was not Lewis Carroll, or Walter Sickert, or Prince Eddy, or Vincent van Gogh (who, to be fair, wasn’t famous), or Leopold II (a genocidal maniac, but not a serial killer), or Helena Blavatsky, or Alistair Crowley, or even William Withey Gull.

Or Richard Francis Burton.

Solving the Whitechapel Murders is a fool’s errand—but it’s fun and educational to try. Can we please keep our theories grounded in reality, and not be lazy about it?