No murder in the checkered history of crime has held public interest more than Jack The Ripper. (QMI Agency Files)

LONDON - It's nine o'clock on a moonless night. I'm standing on the cobblestones of Mitre Square when a figure looms out of the darkness into the glow of the streetlight. I see him coming but the woman beside me doesn't and when he stops beside her she jumps in fright.

It's just a homeless man, I assure her. But I understand her sudden panic for we've just been hearing what happened in Mitre Square on Sept. 30, 1888, when, perhaps, a figure loomed out of the darkness beside a woman named Catherine Eddowes.

Eddowes, 46, a prostitute whose patch was the streets here in Whitechapel, in London's then seedy East End, was the fourth victim of Jack the Ripper, probably the most famous (or infamous) serial-killer - though certainly not the most prolific - in history.

More than 120 years later he still excites the imagination. That's why, every night of the year, tourists join "Ripper Walks" to be guided to the sites of his atrocities.

Our guide this night is Donald Rumbelow, who has spent a lifetime studying the Ripper case. He's a former detective, former curator of the City of London Police Crime Museum and the author of The Complete Jack the Ripper, which many believe is the definitive book on the subject.

As we walk Rumbelow puts us straight on some of the myths surrounding the murders. For instance:

- Despite what you saw in a dozen movies, there was no gaslight - in fact no lighting at all - in most of the streets in Whitechapel in 1888.

- Fog-shrouded? No. Records show there was no fog on the nights of the murders.

- And the prostitutes - there were five certain victims - weren't perky little minxes, like actress Heather Graham's Mary Kelly in the most recent Ripper movie, From Hell, starring Johnny Depp, in 2001.

On the contrary, says Rumbelow, they were drink-riddled, old-before-their-time crones "at the sharp end of the worst social conditions in Europe . . . a procession of tired, broken-spirited women trudging the streets in men's hob-nailed boots, offering gin-puffed lips and tired flesh to any man who wants it, for fourpence, twopence or a loaf of stale bread."

Rumbelow's commentary evokes Victorian Whitechapel, but at many of the sites we have to use our imagination for much has changed, thanks to the Blitz in World War II and post-war slum clearances. Mitre Square, for instance, is still cobblestoned but the tenements and grim warehouses that surrounded it have been replaced by shiny new blocks of offices.

One of our last stops is The Ten Bells, a pub frequented by at least two of the victims. Mary Kelly - at 25, the youngest victim, the others were all in their 40s - went from there to her death on Nov. 9, after which the Ripper vanished, to re-emerge in legend.

Jack the Ripper is almost a cottage industry in The Ten Bells. On sale are all kinds of Ripper doo-dads, and a mural lists six Ripper victims (but experts discount the first name, Martha Turner).

IF YOU GO

Several firms offer Ripper walks for tourists. The writer joined one run by The Original London Walks. Participants meet every night at 7:30 at the Tower Hill subway station. Rumbelow is the guide every Sunday and on Mondays, Tuesdays and Fridays on alternate weeks. The cost is 8 pounds (about $13). For more information, see walks.com.