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The title of this article is conjectural. Although it is based on canonical information, the actual name is conjecture and may be supplanted at any time by additional information released from canonical sources. If this occurs, please move this page to the appropriate title. |
| “ | Play my game. The game is to hide. I like to hide. I like to take... the pieces. I hide. I take the pieces. | ” |
–Whitechapel demon, The Whitechapel Fiend | ||
This unnamed Whitechapel fiend, widely known as Jack the Ripper, was a murderous demon that lurked around the Whitechapel district of London in 1888. While the killings remained unsolved for mundanes, local Shadowhunters were able to extirpate them.
History[]
First killings[]
On August 31, 1888, the body of its first victim, Mary Ann Nichols,[1] was found in Buck's Row, where the killing also took place. Its second victim, Annie Chapman, was found on Hanbury Street on September 8.
On the 30th of September,[1] Elizabeth Stride's body was found in Dutfield's Yard at one in the morning, with similar injuries but seemingly incomplete compared to the others. Catherine Eddowes was then found in Mitre Square only forty-five minutes after.
All of its victims were prostitutes operating in the East End of London, specifically Whitechapel. The bodies were found disfigured, their throats cut deeply and their abdomens emptied, with several long cuts that looked like precise and delicate surgical incisions—the contents were either removed or placed on other parts of the women's bodies. The killings were brutal and vicious, each murder considerably worse and more terrible in nature than the last.
Downfall[]
By October 1888, the series of suspicious murders has not only caught the attention of the mundane press but the London Enclave's as well. The press soon fabricated a letter, signed by a fictitious "Jack the Ripper" claiming to have performed the demon's deeds, to keep selling the story.
Despite the mundane possibilities, the impossibility of it—particularly the distance between the locations where Stride and Eddowes were found and the amount of time it would have taken to perform the crimes consecutively, as well as the conditions, the speed and darkness, under which Chapman's murder was accomplished—caught the Shadowhunter Gabriel Lightwood's attention. Gabriel began investigating the murders and soon considered the likelihood that the killer was a demon.
On November 9, 1888, after about a month of scouting the area without seeing a hint of the demon, Gabriel, Cecily, Will, and Tessa Herondale heard of the Ripper's latest murder: Mary Kelly, killed and discovered the morning after another long, uneventful night of patrolling. When they returned home, the demon beat them to it and, after knocking out the sitter Bridget Daly, hid the children, Anna Lightwood, James and Lucie Herondale, in the chimneys. It challenged the adult Shadowhunters and asked them to play with her.
When Brother Zachariah arrived, he informed them that their studies indicate that the demon had child-like intentions. Tessa came to the conclusion that the demon child wanted a mother and, due to its obsession, had been killing women to take their childbearing organs. Immediately after she announced her theory, the ghost of Jessamine Lovelace called out to the demon and invited her to play with her dollhouse in exchange for the children. When it revealed where the children were, their parents retrieved and secured them with Bridget, and Jessamine briefly distracted the demon with her dolls. When they returned, Jessamine offered to play hide-and-seek. She told the demon child to close her eyes so she could seek first, and when she did, Will banished her with his seraph blade.[2]
Legacy[]
Though the mystery was never solved for the mundanes after its death, the legend of the Whitechapel fiend lived on through stories, the continued theories, and various publications regarding the Ripper.
In 2008, Tessa Gray, as a guest lecturer on the role of Shadowhunters in mundane history, relayed the story to the Shadowhunter and mundane students of the Shadowhunter Academy.[2]
Physical description[]
The demon appeared like a small girl, with the pale and smooth face of a child that looked barely five years of age. Her eyes were entirely black, with no whites. The demon could also take the form of a fog.[2]
Trivia[]
- Cassandra Clare once said that she might consider this demon a Greater Demon.[3]
References[]
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Jack the Ripper on Wikipedia
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 The Whitechapel Fiend (first and only appearance in flashback)
- ↑ "I'd say greater," Cassandra Clare on Twitter