How the Jack the Ripper Myth Was Created | Murder Maps - Season 5 Episode 2

Added: 2026-06-02

[00:00:01]From alleyways in the heart of London to the quietest country lane, they've all witnessed cruelty and violence, jealousy and despair.

[00:00:13]They've seen crimes of passion, coldhearted murder.

[00:00:20]They've seen killers escape and killers brought to justice.

[00:00:25]In this series, we'll be investigating the most notorious crimes [music] and intriguing mysteries.

[00:00:35]>> Stories of men and women who killed, of the police who hunted them and the victims who were left behind, from the files of Scotland Yard and far beyond.

[00:00:47]This is the dark history of our streets.

[00:01:13]Heat. Heat.

[00:01:32]They called it the autumn of terror.

[00:01:37]In the last months of 1888, somebody was murdering women on the streets of London. A killer who struck with terrible violence before disappearing into the night.

[00:01:51]A killer who eluded the best of Scotland Yard. A killer the press dark Jack the Ripper.

[00:01:59]First had been Polly Nichols, a 43year-old mother of five. Her body had been discovered [music] in the street on the 31st of August. 8 days later, they found the body of Annie Chapman. She had been a coachman's wife. She had middle class aspirations for her daughters. But her life had been destroyed long before her murder by alcohol. And like Polly, her body had been viciously mutilated after death.

[00:02:32]>> What fascinates me about these murders is what it tells us about the individuals.

[00:02:40]These are not faceless anonymous victims. It's something where from the start because they're known, people talk about it. There was actually a certain degree of victim blaming where it was believed that these women were responsible for their own failures in life because they were indolent, because they were morally defect. And so naturally, this is the consequence of of what you get for being that way.

[00:03:14]The Jack the Ripper murders was one of the first instances of a media frenzy.

[00:03:19]It was in the press interest to play up the horrors of the East because that sold newspaper. They would write articles explaining the darkness, the dangers, the terror of the East End of London. What this series of murders did was draw the attention of the establishment and people came to visit the East End [music] to see for themselves what was going on.

[00:03:48]And that was largely through what was being published in the newspapers.

[00:03:58]With the police baffled by crimes they simply had no experience of. It was the press who shaped the narrative of the killings. Murders were good for business and editors were keen to spin the story out day after day. For their millions of readers, newspapers became the authority on what was happening in White Chapel.

[00:04:20]We rely on those same reports today.

[00:04:27]In the 1880s, recordkeeping for the police wasn't the same as it is today.

[00:04:31]And actually, since the murders, a lot of the official records have been lost, including some of the inquest reports.

[00:04:40]>> There was no proper regulation of the archives. Then they were dismissed as scrap. It was common practice if they wanted a bit of space for some new papers to just send somebody into the basement, say, you know, take out [music] handful of something, get rid of it, and just um move everything in. We also have less than we would have done because during the second world war a number of police records were destroyed in bombing.

[00:05:07]You have an amount of material in the national archives at Q but [music] it's pretty small but the best surviving coherent evidence is [music] therefore that from the newspapers.

[00:05:21]We do have to be very careful because there [music] were lots of inconsistencies in these press reports.

[00:05:27]Partly this was because the police were very tight [music] lipped at the time of the murders that they didn't give much away to the press and so the press had to rely on reports from coroners, reports from witnesses um and witness testimony was often unreliable and contradicted um other accounts.

[00:05:54]Nowhere is that lens more distorting than when it comes to the women murdered that autumn. To some in the contemporary [music] press, they were fallen women somehow conniving in their own deaths, deserving of their fates.

[00:06:16]Some newspapers really felt that [music] the circumstances surrounding poverty, especially in the East End, [music] were appalling. But at the same time, there was also disgust.

[00:06:29]The Daily Telegraph, [music] for example, emphasized the vice and criminality of the people of White Chapel and talked about how the authorities [music] needed to be regulating them, particularly those who lived in common lodging houses and prostitutes.

[00:06:46]There was a rather a nasty slant in some of the reporting that suggested, you know, that the poor of the East End had brought this upon themselves. Um, you know, by being so lentious and drunken and idle and unproductive, um, this was a kind of natural, even necessary uh, sort of like the grim reaper scythe, clearing them away.

[00:07:07]If the investigation starts from a place of these women are society's waste, they are morally defect. Everybody who lives in White Chapel is one of society's losers, there's going to be an attitude of contempt. So, they're going to cast all sorts of aspersions. They're going to have all sorts of prejudices when they approach this case.

[00:07:52]Louisie Deemshoots was a street salesman. He had been to market in South London and in the early hours of Sunday morning was returning to White Chapel with his pony and car. It was just striking 1:00 a.m. when he turned down Bernest Street.

[00:08:10]Between numbers 40 and 42, the houses lining the street were interrupted by a set of double gates. Beyond them lay Duckfield's yard. Deemshutz guided his pony into the narrow court. Towards the end of the yard, lights still shone from the windows of the socialist club where Deemshutz was a steward. But just by the gates, it was pitch black. Suddenly, his pony shied to the left. Deemshoots urged it on, but the creature refused to pull straight.

[00:08:44]It was then that Deesh saw her.

[00:08:52]In this point, the horse shied away from his bundle lying in the gateway. Looking down, the man reached over with his whip and plotted it. Taking the horse and cart further into the yard, he got down, came back, and found a woman lying there with a throat cut.

[00:09:07]We'd seen none of the mutilation and organ removal that we expect of the ripper at this point. Some people suggest that the ripper was actually interrupted partway through this murder and that's why we don't see these extensive injuries.

[00:09:23]>> It's thought possibly that the murderer was standing behind the gate and when the salesman went to get a light and parked the horse, the murderer slipped out from behind the gateway and headed west over towards the city.

[00:09:36]Whistle blasts pierced the White Chapel night. Police came running. A doctor was summoned. The dead woman he found was still warm.

[00:09:46]Dutfield's yard was sealed off and its cottages searched. But as the police scoured the area for clues, less than a mile away, another discovery soon sent men running through the night. A second body had been found.

[00:10:12]The last day of September 1888 saw two women found murdered on the streets of London. It was 1:00 a.m. when the first was discovered in Duckfield's Yard, White Chapel. And just 45 minutes later, the second [music] would be found less than a mile away.

[00:10:49]At 1:45 in the morning, police constable Edward Watkins was circling Miter Square in the city of London. He'd been on patrol nearly 4 hours and had passed this way more than a dozen times already. The lone gas light in Miter Square had a fault. Its light [music] was weaker than normal and PC Watkins was using his lantern to peer into the darkest corners of the square.

[00:11:16]And that is how on his 15th patrol of the night, he found her.

[00:11:26]The throat has been cut, have been slashed down the face. The tip of the nose is missing. She's been ripped open from the vagina to the breast bone.

[00:11:34]Inside's lifted out and dropped over one shoulder, and a kidney has been removed.

[00:11:41]>> This [music] is a body where there is clearly anger. There's clearly [music] a very determined attempt to damage to hurt to humiliate.

[00:11:55]>> Seems surprising that given White Chapel by then was swarming with police and detectives actually [music] looking for the killer. How on earth was he able to kill twice on the same night?

[00:12:08]>> This was also the only one of the murder sites that was actually [music] in the jurisdiction of the City of London Police rather than the Metropolitan Police.

[00:12:16]It would have been very easy for the merger to have slipped from Burner Street into [music] the city. You got to remember as far as police are concerned, these were two separate forces. [music] Police powers stopped at the boundary.

[00:12:27]In fact, it makes most sense for him to move to another area because that [music] police of that area have got to be informed what has happened. So everything works in his favor by crossing the boundary.

[00:12:42]Despite the watchmen on duty in a warehouse opposite, despite PC [music] Watkins regular patrols, nobody had heard a thing. But as police scoured the area in nearby Goulston [music] Street, another discovery was made. Discarded in a doorway was a large scrap of material.

[00:13:03]It had been sliced from the apron of the woman lying in Miter Square, but was smeared with blood.

[00:13:10]Just above the piece of apron on the black painted door jab, someone had written a message.

[00:13:22]Reports vary as to which it [music] was.

[00:13:24]The Jews are not the men that shall be blamed for nothing, but the Jews are the men that will not be blamed for nothing.

[00:13:31]Because this was found so close to the [music] flooded piece of apron, it was thought potentially the killer himself had written this message.

[00:13:41]>> Charles Warren, the commissioner of the Metropolitan [music] Police, came along to the scene, said that chalk graffiti should be removed. He ordered that to be wiped off and cleaned off at a very early stage.

[00:13:57]>> He did not want any trouble. And when it comes down to it, that was his priority, not discovering who might have murdered one or more um unfortunates [music] in White Chapel.

[00:14:12]>> I have no idea what the message went. In fact, I've never met anyone who could tell me what the message meant. It obviously meant something to the killer, but what it means is I don't know. Are the Jews to blame or are they not to blame? Where do we go? I I just don't know anyone who's come up with a rational explanation.

[00:14:30]News of the two murders spread fast.

[00:14:33]Within 20 minutes, the first newspaper had the story. The editor of Lloyd's Sunday newspaper stopped the press to produce an extra special edition that went out that morning. Rival newspapers scrambled to catch up. They called it the double event. The murder maniac sacrifices more women to his thirst for blood under the star. The Globe dubbed the killer a detestable assassin and the evening news proclaimed a [music] reign of terror in White Chapel. The major papers soon reproduced the letters received [music] by the central news agency. Jacked the Rippers apparent promise of Horus to come had been fulfilled.

[00:15:18]Wherever the letters came from, they were publishing gold. Sales soared to new heights. [snorts] But as had been the case with Polly Nichols and Annie Chapman, less interest was shown in the lives of the victims themselves.

[00:15:36]The woman found in Duckfield's yard was identified as Elizabeth Stride. She was 44. Few who met her would have guessed it from her perfect English, but Elizabeth was Swedish. Born in 1843 on a farm just outside Goththingberg. Her name had once been Elizabeth Gustaf's daughter. Elizabeth was not yet 17 when she embarked on the half-day walk to Goththingberg. [music] She was to become a maidervant in the home of a middleclass family. It's not known exactly what happened to Elizabeth [music] in Goththingberg, but within 5 years she would be pregnant, unmarried, and under suspicion.

[00:16:22]When Elizabeth was working as [music] a servant in Goththingberg, she found herself pregnant. And we don't know the circumstances around this, but it's highly likely it would have been somebody within [music] her master's household because sevens had very little freedom of movement. At this [music] time in Goththingberg, there was a scheme that had been brought in which was to regulate prostitution.

[00:16:47]uh prostitutes register [music] was created and this was to keep um the general population safe from venerial disease and syphilis. [music] Now any women suspected of being prostitutes meaning single women who were pregnant um mistresses [music] of men were also put on this register.

[00:17:08]Elizabeth went on the prostitution registers [music] and had to be examined um for sexually transmitted diseases on a regular basis and at seven months pregnant it was found that she'd contracted syphilis and she miscarried her baby.

[00:17:25]Elizabeth eventually secured a new position and her name was removed from the register but the public humiliation could not so easily be forgotten.

[00:17:36]Perhaps that's why she chose to leave.

[00:17:38]In 1866, Elizabeth boarded a ship for England. She had no intention of going back. In London, Elizabeth found work as a servant. In time, she also found a husband, a carpenter named John Stride.

[00:17:54]Though their marriage would be a troubled one, John's death in 1884 seemed to break something in Elizabeth.

[00:18:03]The last years of her life were marred by arrests for soliciting drunken disorder and obscene language.

[00:18:16]She had learned that if the world didn't care about her, she was going to take the world for a ride. And she became a con artist. and she lied about having been in the wreck of the Princess Alice which was a pleasure cruiser which went down on the tempames. She had lied to another woman who thought that Elizabeth was her sister. She had lied about having an industrial accident in a laundry that she had worked in. All of this to try to eek by and make a living.

[00:18:55]She drifts into [music] alcoholism and back into her original trade [music] of prostitution based in white chap. for somebody who [music] had gone through the trauma that she experienced in Sweden, um, being in prostitution, having contracted [music] syphilis, having miscarried, and to have to go into this [music] line of work again after all these years of not being in it would have been incredibly difficult.

[00:19:45]Elizabeth's final movements on September the 29th, 1888 are unknown. At some point, she ate a meal of potatoes, bread, and cheese. She acquired a red rose which was pinned to her chest and some little sweets or cashews to freshen her breath. But exactly where Elizabeth went or whom she met are mysteries.

[00:20:31]We don't know why Elizabeth Stride was out on the night she was killed. We don't know who she met, but several witnesses claimed to have seen her.

[00:20:43]>> One man called Matthew Packer, who was a green grosser, suggested that he'd sold grapes to Elizabeth Stride. and a man who may have been her murderer, although he didn't come forward until a few days after the murder, and he did keep changing his story.

[00:20:59]There were other men that night that claimed to see her with a man who was kissing and hugging her. And police constable Smith saw her at about half with a man in a deer stalker hat and a dark overcoat.

[00:21:13]You have a lot of witness statements which are unverifiable. This is the problem. A lot of people who think they saw Elizabeth Stride, but there's really no proof that they did or didn't. One was by Israel Schwarz, who didn't speak any English, but he had believed he had seen two people arguing nearby Dutild's yard, and the man had pushed a woman he believed to be Elizabeth [music] Stride into the road. However, he was scared off and ran away quite quickly before he could ascertain anything.

[00:21:52]>> Was the man Schwarz saw Jack the Ripper, or was Elizabeth's murder completely unconnected with the other cases?

[00:22:06]I am still not convinced that the double event was a double event.

[00:22:14]>> It's doubtful whether she was a Jack the Ripper victim.

[00:22:19]The knife that was used to cut her throat was uh very blunt.

[00:22:25]>> It's plausible both murders were actually committed by different people and that it was just coincidence that they happened to be committed. so close together and um within such a short space of time.

[00:22:37]>> Elizabeth at this time had been separated from her then partner, a man called Michael Kidney who was violent and who she had left on a number of other occasions. So whether it was Michael Kidney or whether it was somebody else is questionable. At the time there were policemen involved in the case who also thought that she was not a Jack the Ripper victim but as far as the senior officers [music] concerned she was a Jack the Ripper victim.

[00:23:08]There are few such doubts about the other victim found that night the woman in Miter Square. It was not until the 5th of October 5 days after the murder that she was identified. Her name was Katherine Edos. The injuries she suffered left no doubt that this was the work of Jack the Ripper.

[00:23:42]In a way, Katherine Edetos was killed by the rain.

[00:23:46]Every summer, thousands of Londoners left the city and headed for the hop harvest in Kent. It was an opportunity to make a little extra money. And with accommodation and beer thrown in, it was the nearest thing to a holiday they would get. Like so many others, Katherine Edos left London in August 1888 and went looking for work in the fields.

[00:24:08]Like so many others, she was to be disappointed. The awful weather that year had devastated the harvest. There simply wasn't the work. Katherine was forced to turn around and walk back to London. She arrived in White Chapel on the 28th of September.

[00:24:27]Within 48 hours, she would be dead.

[00:24:36]Her life had taken her all over the country. She was born in Wolverampton, but life among the factories of the Black Country was not for her. In 1862, she met a traveling peddler named Thomas Conway, who quickly caught her eye. Aged 20 and pregnant with her first child.

[00:24:55]Catherine left Wolverampton behind for a life on the road. It was one of uncertainty and frequent hardship.

[00:25:07]>> She didn't marry Thomas Conway. we don't think, but she did have children with him and was with him for 20 years. It's important really not to romanticize the life that um Catherine and Thomas Conway had on the road together, they had no home of their own. And while it may have seemed fun standing on the corners singing ballads to anybody who was interested potentially in listening and buying them, this was not a stable life at all. Especially if you had children.

[00:25:54]The couple lost an infant daughter [music] in 1869 and a son 10 years later.

[00:26:03]Thomas Conway grew violent and [music] Catherine turned to drink. In 1881, the couple separated permanently.

[00:26:12]Catherine took up with another man, John Kelly, whose love of drinking matched her own. It was Kelly who in 1888 had accompanied Catherine to Kent for the harvest. After they returned to London, the couple spent much of that late September weekend drinking.

[00:26:35]They pawned his boots for half a crown, which was a good sum of money really for them. She then went off and, you know, perhaps had a meal, but also got drunk.

[00:26:55]She was found [music] at about 8:30 p.m.

[00:26:57]She was taken into Bishop's Gate Police Station where she was left in the [music] cells to sleep it off and she was released at about 12:30 a.m.

[00:27:08]She was still very much drunk at the [music] time, but she demanded her release and they sent her off into [music] the night where she wandered around a bit quite probably looking for John and where he had gone. There is absolutely no evidence at all that Katherine [music] Edetos was a prostitute.

[00:27:28]>> Her friends, her family insist she was not a prostitute. She was a drunkard, but that was the extent of her immorality.

[00:27:42]At 1:35 a.m., three men were leaving the Imperial Club on Duke Street when they saw a woman and a man standing together by a passageway leading to Miter Square.

[00:27:54]The woman's clothes, the men would later say, matched Catherine's.

[00:28:00]Just 10 minutes later, her body was found in Miter Square.

[00:28:08]But as had been the case after the murder of Annie Chapman, there were no further murders for weeks. For more than a month, in fact, Jack the Ripper lay low.

[00:28:23]>> The pattern with serial killers tends to be that they escalate in terms of their violence, in terms of the gaps between the murders becoming shorter. But sometimes killers do stop for a time.

[00:28:34]And a lot of the time this is because of a lack of opportunity after the double event. There were many more police on the streets and it would have been much harder for him to commit a murder at this time. Also, if we go by the theory that he did kill Elizabeth Stride but was interrupted partway through the murder, it could have been that he was spooked by this experience and so wanted to be more cautious after this.

[00:29:06]As the weeks passed, journalists became more desperate for new angles. Was the Ripper Jewish or a doctor or a madman or all three? Could blood hounds be used to help find him? Were the police not doing enough, or were they doing too much and letting criminals elsewhere in the city off the hook?

[00:29:29]While the press dug ever deeper for stories, on the 16th of October, George Lusk, the head of a local vigilance committee, received a package. It was a small 3-in square cardboard box. Inside was another letter, and with the letter was part of a kidney.

[00:29:55]The letter is addressed from hell and reads, "Mr. Lusk, sir, I send you half the kidney I took from one woman. Preserved it for you.

[00:30:06]Tell the piece I fried and ate. It was very nice. I may send you the bloody knife that took it out. If only you wait a while longer." Signed, "That me when you can, Mr. Lusk." A lot of argument has been gone on about this kidney. Was it a student hoax as Mr. Lass thought or was it Katherine Edo's kidney?

[00:30:32]In those days there wasn't a test to differentiate human blood from animal blood for instance. Um, so how good the identification of it as firstly a human kidney and secondly a human kidney that had come from Katherine Edetos is, we don't really know for sure.

[00:30:55]>> The other interesting thing beyond the kidney is the fact that it wasn't signed Jack the Ripper. And so if this was Katherine Edo's kidney and so this was a letter from the Ripper, he was making an interesting statement here. The killer was making a statement saying, "I'm not Jack the Ripper. This is a name that I haven't created myself."

[00:31:19]>> Whether the letter was real or the work of another enterprising journalist, no new murder came on its heels. The last weeks of October slipped by, and November began without [music] incident.

[00:31:33]The people of White Chapel must have hoped the autumn of terror was over.

[00:31:57]The lodger of number 13 Miller's Court was behind on the rent. She'd taken the room 8 months earlier, but by November she was 29 shillings in her rears. So that Friday morning, the landlord sent his assistant to [music] collect.

[00:32:14]Miller's court was little more than an alleyway flanked by workers cottages and public toilets.

[00:32:20]Number 13 was a single room, hardly bigger than the bed inside.

[00:32:27]At around 10:30 that morning, Tommy Ba knocked on the door of number 13.

[00:32:34]Nobody answered. He went to the window.

[00:32:37]A pain was [music] broken, left unrepaired, and stuffed with a rag to keep out the chill of the night. Boa reached through, pulled the muslin curtain aside. [music] What he saw in the tiny room beyond sent him running from the courtyard.

[00:33:12]The lodger murdered in number 13 Miller's Court was called Mary Jane Kelly. Or so she told people.

[00:33:22]Less is known about the life of Mary Jane than any of the other victims. It's not known whether that was her real name or where she was born. And if she had any family, they may not ever have known that [music] she was a victim of Jack the Ripper.

[00:33:44]Of the five women, Mary Jane Kelly [music] is the biggest enigma. We simply don't know that much about her.

[00:34:04]She was different [music] to the other victims in that she was much younger.

[00:34:07]She was around 25. Um they were all in their 40s [music] when they were murdered.

[00:34:20]There's all sorts [music] of stories about her Irish background and marriage and such like and a lot of it cannot be confirmed. It cannot be checked up.

[00:34:33]Really since the [music] time of the murders, people have been trying to investigate her past, have tried to find some sort of [music] record of her somewhere, and it just doesn't exist.

[00:34:49]We know only what Mary Jane told people.

[00:34:52]We have fragments of her life with pieces missing and some [music] which don't fit together at all. She told some people she was born in Limmerick, to others she was Welsh, but she appeared to have no regional accent. When she first came to London around 1883, she worked at an upmarket brothel in the West End. But over the next 5 years, her circumstances would change.

[00:35:21]>> She's the victim that we can see most clearly as a career prostitute. There are stories that she went to France for some time and that potentially she was lured into a brothel there but somehow managed to escape. Now this would explain why she did not go back to the West End. She did not go back to Nightsbridge because she was hiding from the people who had trafficked her.

[00:35:49]>> By the March of 1887 she was soliciting in Spittlefields.

[00:35:55]It was there she met Joseph Barnett, a porter at Billingscape Fish Market. The pair was soon an item, moving from dingy room to dingy room. In the spring of 1888, they arrived at number 13 Miller's Court. For a time, Mary Jane was able to leave prostitution behind, but when Barnett lost his job and their debts began to mount, she was forced back onto the streets. Her relationship with Barnett fell apart. He left her on the 30th of October.

[00:36:30]Like much of the rest of her history, Mary Jane's movements on the last day of her life are unclear.

[00:36:40]Now, on the night of the murder, Kelly was out on the main road by the church, [music] Christ Church, Middlefield, working for customs.

[00:36:49]A lot of her clientele [music] would have been sailors who came in via St. Catherine's docks. She would have pied her trade from [music] the very rough music halls and the taverns, pubs in the area.

[00:37:03]>> She picks one up, takes it back to her room, and then she's seen going into the room. It's heard singing. She gets rid of the customer pretty quickly [music] and goes back on the street again. There are lots of witnesses who came forward and said they saw or heard things [music] that night and that they believed they saw Mary Jane with a number of people. There were people who even thought they saw Mary Jane Kelly after the time she was supposed to have died.

[00:37:30]>> Around 4:00 in the morning, there's this faint cry of murder. Such cries as this are common place in the era. And when heard, the cry is just ignored.

[00:37:41]>> In the privacy of Mary Jane's room, the killer [music] indulged his hatred of women to the full. The level of gore made even the sensation peddling journalists pause, but only briefly. By the following Sunday, the national newspapers were detailing every cut and stab of the Ripper's knife.

[00:38:03]For once, it can be said there was no exaggeration to their [music] horrific reports.

[00:38:19]A fifth woman was now dead, but police were still no closer to finding the man responsible. The fear was that he would keep killing until he was caught. But after the horrors of Miller's court, weeks passed, then months, then years.

[00:38:37]There were still murders, of course, and violent ones in White Chapel as elsewhere. And journalists would try to keep the story going, linking new crimes to old horrors.

[00:38:48]>> When serial killers aren't caught and cease murdering, there might be several reasons for it. It might be because they've died or committed suicide. It might be that they've moved away or changed their modus operandi. It might be that they've been imprisoned for another crime.

[00:39:04]>> It is possible that Jack may have just stopped.

[00:39:08]By the brutal murder of Mary Kelly, he's achieved all that he wants to do to a woman's body. He can't do anything more than what he's already done. And that Mary Kelly uh murder may have just been the culmination of his ambitions.

[00:39:30]The disappearance of the killer robbed press and public of an arrest, trial, and execution. Of an ending to the story, of any meaning to it at all. That didn't stop the theories. Police still had their suspects, an English barrista, a Polish Jew, a Russian petty criminal, but no compelling evidence for any of them. In the many decades since, the list of suspects has only grown. Even now, hardly a year goes by without some new claim to have solved the unsolvable.

[00:40:09]>> I don't think that we'll ever really truly know his identity. And there's a sense that this makes him more alluring >> because the picture is incomplete.

[00:40:20]People think the the solution must be in the police reports or in the press reports. If only we could look at it more carefully.

[00:40:32]>> It taps into our fascination with murder mysteries as well as these kind of boldly men that seem to be almost innate parts of of the inhumity of of this big brutalizing force uh that is the city.

[00:40:46]>> Because we know nothing about him and we don't know anything about him. He can be as imaginatively created as you want. He can satisfy us in all different spheres, films, books, ballet. Jack's appeared in them all.

[00:41:04]>> We go on so-called ripper walks now of his murder sites. We play board games where we try and capture him or more worryingly help him escape. We read about him in fiction.

[00:41:15]This is the beginnings of the creation of a mythology around devious, secret, anonymous, brutal mass killings.

[00:41:28]We're also still attracted to the idea of violence in a perverse way. And the violence was particularly extreme around these cases. Perhaps we're not much different to our Victorian predecessors that murder still sells.

[00:41:45]Jack the Ripper and figuring out who Jack the Ripper was has become a type of parlor game and the women are just clues. They're not real people. We have skirted over the fact that they're human beings and that they had families and people cared about them and they were part of communities in order to continue to play this game.

[00:42:10]There was a killer in White Chapel that autumn, but he was not Jack the Ripper.

[00:42:16]Jack the Ripper never existed. He was a creature of the newspapers, born to sell newspapers.

[00:42:23]It's a testament to the power of journalism that he became so much more.

[00:42:28]Whether we like it or not, Jack the Ripper is lodged in our imaginations.

[00:42:33]Who is he?

[00:42:35]He is what society wants him to be. He is the foreigner to hate, the rich man to resent, the poor man to fear. He is all of us and none of us a figure of myths more than history. A monster of our own making.