FOR 120 years, they lay hidden from the public. Now, British authorities are set to release the files on Jack the Ripper.
"Dear Boss, I am writing you this while I am in bed with a sore throat, but as soon as it is better I will set to work again on the 13th of this month.
"I think that my next job will be to polish you off and as I am a member of the force I can soon settle accounts with you.
"I will tear your liver out before you are dead and show it to you.'
Signed, Jack the Ripper.
The hand-written scrawl and accompanying sketch of a man gave the devil a name and the world an enduring murder mystery that spawned countless plays, novels and movies set in London's East End.
But much of the material in the public arena on the 19th-century slayings by Jack the Ripper has been works of fiction.
Now documents locked away since the 1888 murders will be shown to the public for the first time in a historic move that will no doubt spark the Ripper phenomenon anew.
Unreleased, hand-written accounts by police and witnesses, sketches of suspects and files first kept by Scotland Yard, then housed in London's National Archives, will go on display in May.
And the public will not be spared a single drop of blood from the gruesome murders. According to exhibition co-curator Alex Werner, people are now ready for the truth.
"There have been lots of books and films, but never a major exhibition on the subject,' Mr Werner said yesterday.
"In the past, it has been left to the likes of waxworks such as Madame Tussauds and the London Chamber of Horrors.
"It has never really been seen as something for a museum to treat seriously, and it's a very gory subject.
"But the time is right to do a serious take on the subject.'
Such has been the obsession with the character that when the BBC last year asked the UK to vote on the worst Briton in the past 1000 years, Jack the Ripper came first.
(The 12th-century Thomas Becket, whose fight with King Henry II over the Church divided England, came second).
Mr Werner said that in Australian terms, it would be like rediscovering Ned Kelly - an iconic villain figure who has hung over a city or a region's history for decades.
Some of the reports found in the archives are in mint condition, as if written yesterday and not a century ago, and give a tantalising view of the attitudes and fears of the time.
"PC Neil reports at 3.45am, 31st (August) he found a dead body of a woman lying on her back with her clothes a little above her knees,' states one police account dating from the time of the murders.
Another gives a graphic description of how a victim's throat "was cut from ear to ear' with detailed description from a later mortuary report.
"They are absolutely amazing,' exhibition co-curator Julia Hoffbrand said.
"They are written on the day each woman was found, so as a step-by-step account you get a real sense of what's happening.
"The documents bring home the fact that these are real people and real events - they are very moving.'
Another witness statement is from the inquest into the murder of Katherine Eddowes, whose mutilated body was found in Mitre Square, Aldgate.
In it, Eddowes' daughter, Annie Phillips, defends her father from any involvement.
"He had no ill will to my knowledge against deceased. He left deceased between 7 and 8 years ago entirely on account of her Drinking Habits.'
Since the release of Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd - The Barber of Fleet Street, starring Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter, London has rediscovered its interest in history and the need to sort fact from fiction.
Like the Ripper, much has been written about Sweeney Todd, but the movie has refreshed the debate over the exact location of his murderous barber shop and the number of his victims.
According to Mr Werner, police files clearly state that Jack the Ripper killed five prostitutes in or near Whitechapel over a 10-week period between August and November, 1888.
Some popular literature records there having been more killings, but this may have been courtesy of the tabloid press at the time inciting fear and reporting fiction as fact.
The letter signed with the name Jack the Ripper, the first to give a name to the murderer and sent to the central news agency at the time, was potentially a fake written by a journalist.
The files show police had gathered 170 names as suspects, including the Duke of Clarence and prominent barrister Montague John Druitt, but the murders were never solved.
"So what we are displaying is really the archival evidence, the originals to allow the public for the first time to see the surviving records on display,' Mr Werner said of the exhibition, which opens in London on May 15.
As well as the police reports and files, the Museum in Docklands has gathered disturbing photographs, taken by the Salvation Army and until now unseen by the public, of the East End, which place the depressed, poverty-stricken area in the context of the time.
Donald Rumbelow, a leading Ripperologist and co-author of Jack The Ripper: Scotland Yard Investigates, told reporters of the exhibition: "To see the documents out of the mounts will be quite something.'
