This from the conclusion of Chapter 4 of Begg's Jack the Ripper: The Definitive History.
Whether or not Martha Tabram was murdered by Jack the Ripper is now debated, but it was undeniably accepted by the majority of investigators at the time and although Martha Tabram hadn’t been disembowelled or mutilated, a cut in the abdomen 3 inches long and 1 inch deep may have been an attempt at ‘ripping’ and the frenzy of the attack took it well beyond the league of ‘normal’ murder. The coroner concluded that the murder of Martha Tabram ‘was one of the most horrible crimes that had been committed for certainly some time past. The details were very revolting . . . and the person who had inflicted the injuries could have been nothing less than a fiend’. Young constable Dew, looking back with the benefit of perhaps more than just a modicum of hindsight, recalled that ‘Already I had formed the view that we were up against the greatest police problem of the century. A third heinous crime shortly afterwards proved how right this theory was’
I am chary of subscribing to any theory that discounts the beliefs of those much less removed in terms of geography and time from the murders that we ourselves are without citing grounds for such a dismissal. What the authorities of the time may have lacked in knowledge concerning psychological profiling and the pathology of sexual manias, they made up for in terms of chronic familiarity with the stark actualities of violence, assault and murder.
I think it noteworthy that Tabram's murder was not viewed with further sad resignation as 'violence as usual' or 'another drunken night in the depths of London', it stood out as particularly savage in an age where murder and brutality against women in particular could not be said to be at all rare.
I'd like to read counterpoints that seek to explain why Tabram was unlikely to be an early Ripper victim, because I'm frankly not seeing many.