Jack the Ripper's face unveiled in new TV doc

Notorious Victorian serial killer, Jack the Ripper, was a stocky 30-year-old with a moustache, receding hairline and bushy eyebrows,according to a composite drawing created for a British documentary.

Jack The Ripper: The First Serial Killer, airing Tuesday on the U.K.'s Five channel, shows a composite of the prostitute killer created by a Metropolitan Police analyst using 118-year-old witness statements.

"It's a popular misconception that nobody ever saw the murderer, that he just vanished into the fog of London," former Metropolitan Police commander John Grieve said in a statement.

"Well, that's just not right. There were witnesses at the time who were highly thought of by the police."

Grieve said witness statements had enough similarities to suggest they might be speaking about the same man. The computer-generated composite sketch was created from those descriptions. He's described as being between 25 and 35 and standing between five-feet-five-inches and five-feet-seven inches tall.

Jack the Ripper has remained a part of cultural lore and has been invoked in such films as 1979's Murder by Decree, the British-Canadian production starring Christopher Plummer as Sherlock Holmes in search of the killer, and the 2001 Johnny Depp movie From Hell.

It wasn't just the shocking nature of his crimes that made him endure, but rather that he was never unmasked. More than 200 people have been accused of the murders of five East End prostitutes in 1888.

In her 2002 book Portrait of a Killer, crime novelist Patricia Cornwell named impressionist painter William Richard Sickert, who depicts a murdered London prostitute in some of his paintings.

Others named as possible suspects include the Duke of Clarence, Prince Albert Victor, and Alice in Wonderland author Lewis Carroll.

Canadian-born Dr. Thomas Neil Cream, a serial murderer hanged in 1892 in London, has also been considered a suspect because he said, "I am Jack ..." before his death. But Cream was serving time in Illinois for another murder when the Jack the Ripper crimes hit London.