'A more dreadful sight I never saw,' uttered PC Edward Watkins, still reeling from the shock.

A few hours earlier, at 1.44am on September 30, 1888, the officer on his beat in London's East End had turned on to Mitre Square and stumbled upon a corpse so mutilated that, as he later told reporters, 'it was difficult to discern the injuries to the face for the quantity of blood which covered it'.

The Whitechapel Murders were truly most foul. Each of the five female victims was savagely disfigured and her blood left to spill across the cobbles of Victorian London.

But perhaps the most terrifying aspect of this quintuple homicide, committed over less than four months, is that for more than a century, the killer's identity was a mystery. Instead, he simply became known as Jack the Ripper.

In 2014, the Daily Mail exclusively revealed how amateur sleuth Russell Edwards had identified one Aaron Kosminski, a Jewish immigrant from Poland, as the fabled killer.

The Mail has further astonishing evidence as to how Kosminski's hitherto-unknown ties to the highly secretive Freemasons motivated his sadistic killings – and how his Masonic connections shielded him from law enforcement, despite widespread conviction within the police that Kosminski was indeed the murderous Ripper.

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