In the Gotham by Gaslight Elseworld’s comic, the plot revolves around a version of Batman that came to exist in the late 1800s coming into conflict with Jack the Ripper. Amusingly as a red herring, on the boat back to Gotham from England Bruce and his friend Jacob Packer see a pair implied to be Sir William Gull and Albert Victor, the Duke of Clarence, among the passengers.
Both men have historically been associated with the Jack the Ripper murders, either as the actual murderer or as part of a conspiracy revolving around said killings. A popular theory being that Albert had married an Irish shopgirl and had a kid, and Queen Victoria and the Freemasons then dispatching her physician Gull out to assassinate the six witnesses to the hushed up wedding ceremony.
This theory being popularised by the Sherlock Holmes film Murder by Decree, which was was then lifted and expanded upon by Alan Moore in his graphic novel From Hell.
Aside from his alleged career as one of the world’s most notorious serial killers, a claim which has since been discreditted, Gull was actuallly a very prominent doctor in his day. He was the first to name and diagnose anorexia noervosa, in addition to advancing the understanding of myxoedema, Bright’s disease, and paraplegia.
Comparitively little is known about Albert, however. The suspicion that he was Jack the Ripper has been disputed by there being evidence that he wasn’t in London at the time. There has been a lot of speculation as to his health, mental health and sexuality, with some claiming that his death of flu at the age of 28 was actually a result of syphilis… but again, this is all speculation.
As to Jack the Ripper’s identity within the DCU proper, there are several contenders. In Hellblazer Jack the Ripper was stated to be Gull, but possessed by a demon by the name of Calibraxis, while in the 1990s Superboy series Cadmus Labs clones a monster supposedly created from Jack the Ripper’s blood, but it is eventually dropped into a magma pit.
In Matt Wagner’s Madame Xanadu series, it features the titular character attempting to discover the murderer in order to save the lives of the local woman, the immortal magician having settled in Whitechapel at the time. It turns out that Jack is himself a mundane murderer, but his identity is being deliberately hidden by the Phantom Stranger.
This is because the last official victim happened to be pregant with the child of Jason Blood, aka the human host of the demon Etrigan, and to prevent the child growing up to be the worst dictator the world has ever seen, the Stranger allows her and five other women to die to save billions in the future.
Xanadu is understandably horrified by this, and the Stranger ends up causing Jack to fall into a sewer once he had completed his task. The murderer not being caught is to put down to the resulting fall paralysing him, and then him being eaten alive off-panel by hundreds of rats.
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