I would agree that it is hard to prove much of what happened then, and that forensic evidence is either too old or missing, leading to supposition rather than fact. But I have read many reports from the times, including the reports of Bond and Llewellyn, two doctors who performed autopsies. And from their notes are all the "facts" we are going to get. Everything else is theory. Yet, in their notes, the stomach contents section contains no mention of grapes. That is all I meant. A movie is all well and good, and theorizing how Jack got his victims compliant is also interesting to do, but just going by the evidence we have (the doctor's reports), it is not provable that any such thing like the movie posited happened. There is a difference between theorizing and going completely against established facts, like the movie does. And there is a difference between saying "you can't prove this" when the underlying facts either support that extrapolation or they don't. There is no proof that Mary Kelly was pregnant, as has been posited; neither is there proof that the victims even knew each other at all. There is also nothing to "prove" that Mary Kelly was really the woman killed last. But we do have her lover's identification of the body; thus, we would have to "start" by ignoring the identification of the body by the one person who knew Kelly best in order to suppose that Mary did not die at the hands of the Ripper. This is not to rule out the possibility, but it's dangerous to say "this is true, this is not" when the basics, such as autopsy reports, do not support this. Starting with Depp as Abberline (who was short, fat and middle-aged, not addicted to opium and died not of an overdose but of old age) and using many fictitious characters like Kidney, the movie was more in the spirit of the murders and the era rather than interested in putting forth a plausible explanation to the killings. I got my information about the stomach contents from:
Jack the Ripper A to Z by Paul Begg, Keith Skinner, and Martin Fido.
The Complete Jack the Ripper by Donald Rumbelow
Jack the Ripper: Inquest of the Final Victim by John Smithkey III
The Casebook: Jack the Ripper at
www.casebook.org
These are a good starting point for any interested party. The first book puts forth (as does Begg's recent Jack the Ripper: The Definitive History) the circumstances of the events of Autumn 1888 while resisting the temptation to name a suspect.
Your point about the positions of the bodies is a good one, since, as you say, we cannot know for sure whether the bodies were moved or not. A lack of blood at a couple of the crime scenes still makes me pause for thought. Why would he move one or two and not others? He obviously cared nothing about them being discovered. But then why kill Mary Kelly in her lodgings? It was only the coincidence of her being behind on her rent and MCarthy sending someone to get it from her that led to her being discovered so quickly.
I've been interested in this case for about 25 years now. It's still as fascinating as it was when I started.