OPINION: It's a bold claim, but I am going to make it: I believe I have solved the mystery of who Jack the Ripper was.

Between 3 April 1888 and 13 February 1891, 11 women were murdered in the Whitechapel district of the East End of London. Most were prostitutes. One survived long enough to reveal telling details about her assailant. Another was stabbed 39 times. Seven had their throats cut. Four suffered grotesque abdominal mutilations. Two were killed on the same night. One was beheaded.

Then, and ever since, these horrific crimes have been ascribed to an unidentified serial killer: Jack the Ripper. He has become the most notorious felon in the annals of crime. More books have been written about him than any other murderer.

GETTY IMAGES Author and broadcaster Gyles Brandreth has written numerous books. In his latest, he theorises that Jack the Ripper was not the only serial killer terrorising London in the 1880s and 1890s (file photo).

But who was he? For more than a century, speculation has been rife and the scores of those accused range from a simple-minded barber to Alice in Wonderland author Lewis Carroll, from Queen Victoria's doctor (Sir William Gull), to her surgeon (Sir John Williams), to her eldest grandson (Prince Albert Victor). Recently, American crime writer Patricia Cornwell has convinced herself (if few others) that the perpetrator was the celebrated artist Walter Sickert.

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I now believe I know the truth. I have stumbled on it, almost by chance, partly through exploring the papers of my ancestor (my grandmother's first cousin), Victorian journalist and social reformer, George R Sims, and partly through my interest in Oscar Wilde.

Hulton Archive/Getty Images Jack the ripper terrorised London between April 1888 and February 1891.

For some years I have been writing historical detective stories inspired by the real-life friendship between Oscar Wilde, playwright and aesthete, and Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes. They were an odd couple, introduced in the summer of 1889 by an American publisher who had come to London looking for up-and-coming authors to write murder mysteries in the wake of the Jack the Ripper killings. As a result of the meeting, Conan Doyle produced his second Holmes adventure, The Sign of Four, and Wilde wrote The Picture of Dorian Gray.

At the time, Wilde lived with his wife and two sons in Tite Street, Chelsea, where, extraordinarily, one of his immediate neighbours was Melville Macnaghten, recently appointed as head of the Metropolitan Police Criminal Investigation Department and tasked, in 1894, with producing a definitive report on the Whitechapel murders.

After reviewing the evidence, Macnaghten concluded that only five of the murders were the work of the same hand and, of the police's prime suspects, Macnaghten became convinced that 31-year-old Oxford graduate Montague John Druitt was most likely the guilty party. There was no hard evidence to link Druitt with the murders but according to the police, Druitt was a doctor, and because the murders involved body mutilation, doctors, barbers and butchers were seen as likely culprits. In addition to this, the Ripper-style murders ceased around the time of Druitt's suicide in December 1888.

In fact, as Oscar Wilde knew (he and Druitt had been contemporaries at Oxford), Druitt was a lawyer, not a doctor, and his suicide was most probably prompted by the discovery of an illicit relationship he had with a schoolboy.

It is clear from reading Macnaghten's report, and from even a cursory study of the police files of the time, that the police operation, though extensive, was haphazard at best and hopeless at worse. The Whitechapel murders were committed before the advent of fingerprinting. Forensics were minimal. Hundreds of so-called witnesses were interviewed, but what they had or hadn't seen in the dark, fogbound alleys of Whitechapel varied from one witness to the next. It is apparent from the lack of evidence that the police, quite literally, did not have a clue. As Oscar Wilde noted, the Whitechapel constable doing much of the legwork even gloried in the name Pc Thick.

In the aftermath of the first murders, the press had given the Whitechapel killer the sobriquet Leather Apron. This was because of an early suspect, Polish Jewish John Pizer, a slipper-maker and boot finisher who was known as a prostitute-baiter and wore a leather apron. Pizer was rapidly ruled out (he had alibis) and a new, more telling sobriquet sprang to the fore when someone claiming to be the murderer sent a postcard to a news agency in which he called himself Jack the Ripper.

That someone was almost certainly a journalist and not the killer, but the name caught the public imagination, and Wilde (always fascinated by the power of names) later maintained that it was the potency of the sobriquet that helped give Jack the Ripper his near-mythic status. In my view, it is also what confused the police, persuading them that they were looking for just one murderer - Jack the Ripper - although confronted with an assortment of murder victims killed in a variety of ways. Even Macnaghten's "canonical five victims", as they came to be called, were not slaughtered in identical fashion.

Having read Macnaghten's report and the unpublished papers of George R Sims - a friend of Wilde and Macnaghten and a journalist who covered the story from the start - my conclusion is that at least 10 of the 11 Whitechapel murders, plus others committed in London between the summer of 1888 and the spring of 1894, were the work of two of the other prime suspects featured in Melville Macnaghten's report.

Both men were Eastern European emigrants eventually incarcerated in London lunatic asylums. In my book, I name them and explain their strange history and relationship. But they were not alone. The murders they perpetrated were part of a deliberate campaign that involved atrocities designed to create terror and undermine the British state and the Royal Family in particular.

The 1880s and 1890s were febrile times, when anarchists and revolutionaries were busy making murderous mischief in European capitals. In London one of the places where they gathered was the Club Autonomie in Soho, whose members included a Russian anarchist (and psychopath), who, I believe, is the one who masterminded the killings.

It's a complicated story, involving espionage, police incompetence, skulduggery, and the exploitation of mentally ill people, as well as the brutal murder of innocent women.

I have written it as fiction because I cannot prove everything I assert, but I believe in all essentials it is a matter of fact.

- Gyles Brandreth is the author of Jack the Ripper: Case Closed.