This episode discusses the Jack the Ripper murders and includes descriptions of murder, violence against women, poverty, sex work, alcohol addiction, and postmortem mutilation. While I’ve deliberately avoided unnecessary graphic detail, some descriptions of the victims’ injuries and crime scenes are necessary to understand the history and the investigation.

More importantly, these were real women—not characters in a Victorian horror story—and I’ve tried to treat their lives and deaths accordingly.

Please listen with that in mind, and use your own discretion.

London, 1888. Women are being murdered in Whitechapel, police are struggling to find their killer, newspapers are feeding a terrified public—and somebody sends a letter signed with a name that will become immortal:

Jack the Ripper.

There’s just one problem.

We have no idea if the murderer wrote it.

For the first Naked History Halloween episode, we’re stripping away more than a century of fog, top hats, conspiracy theories, dubious suspects, disputed letters, and questionable “case closed” claims to find the real history underneath the legend.

We follow the murders of Mary Ann “Polly” Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly; enter the overcrowded streets and lodging houses of Victorian Whitechapel; examine what police were—and weren’t, capable of investigating in 1888; and watch as newspapers, hoaxers, fear, prejudice, and public fascination transform an unidentified murderer into one of history’s most recognizable monsters.

Because Jack the Ripper may be famous.

But almost everything we think we know about him is built around an empty space.

We don’t know his name.

We don’t know his face.

We don’t even know for certain how many people he killed.

And maybe that’s exactly why we’re still talking about him.

Music Credit:

• "In The West" Kevin MacLeod (⁠⁠⁠incompetech.com⁠⁠⁠)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License ⁠⁠⁠http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/⁠⁠

• Music track: lavender by massobeats Source: ⁠⁠⁠https://freetouse.com/music ⁠⁠⁠Royalty Free Music for Video (Safe)