Lucy Worsley has traced back our true crime obsession to Jack the Ripper (Picture: BBC)
Jack the Ripper’s crimes took place 133 years ago but historians argue that its impact is still very much evident in the way we consume content.
Today, true crime is a multi-billion pound industry that is unavoidable when searching podcast charts, streamer top 10s, or picking up a book to devour.
There is an ever-growing obsession with picking apart the motives of serial killers, and discovering every detail of a gruesome murder. We’re respectable members of society by day, and then in our leisure time, we’re part-time detectives.
Making a Murderer podcast had us engrossed, TV and cinema are continually making material about killers, often attracting huge stars as their lead – Zac Efron played Ted Bunby and David Tennant took on the role of Dennis Nilsen. While Netflix series, Don’t F**k with Cats: Hunting an Internet Killer taught viewers what can happen when people tried to find out the truth.
When Nicola Bulley went missing during a dog walk, amateur internet sleuths decided to pour their time into figuring out what happened. Her husband Paul Ansell was often at the centre of their theories, before Bulley’s death was ruled as accidental. Later, a review into the handling of their investigation found that the police lost control of the public narrative early on and allowed ‘external voices’ to drive the search.
The emergence of true crime obsessives can be traced all the way back to 1888 when serial killer Jack the Ripper was active, historian Lucy Worsley told Metro. He caused havoc in Whitechapel for three years killing at least five women – Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kell.
In her latest documentary, Lucy Worsley Investigates, she sets out to prove how it became the prototype for all true crime stories.
Jack the Ripper’s crimes were between 1988 and 1991(Picture: Bettmann Archive)
At the time, newspapers saw ‘huge success’ when putting the story on front pages. It tapped into an appetite, with the general public always wanting more and having their own everyday discussions. Part of the beauty of history for Lucy is getting to understand the present through looking at the past, and she feels they are many learnings to be taken for this particular story.
‘It’s sort of Ground Zero for the way in which multiple killings get covered,’ she stated. Since then, people who create content have been trying to replicate the same level of interest, Lucy has deciphered.
The case highlighted two key areas of the obsession, the first being fear and genuine concern. ‘People were worried, and thinking “this is really bad”.’ Before the Industrial Revolution, a lot of the population made a living from the land, and their greatest fears were dying from war or disease. Once they’d migrated to the city, their lives were safer, which meant they could have ‘a sort of luxury fear’.
Lucy called the case ‘ground zero’ (Picture: BBC Studios / Tom Hayward)
‘They had capacity to worry about stranger danger. Statistically it’s not that likely that you’re going to be murdered, and yet, if you live in the city, it probably occupies more space than it should do in your mind,’ Lucy, 50, explained.
‘They wanted change to help prevent crimes,’ she added. ‘People were motivated to try do the right things such as improve housing.’
However, on the flip side, there was a fascination with the ongoings – a sort of ‘horror and distaste for the victims’ that even led to dark tourism. Some of the more affluent members of society would visit the area for a fun day trip, before returning to their homes. ‘They wanted to experience the terror and violence of it.’ This is where the term ‘slumming it’ transpired from.
People became fascinated by the story (Picture: BBC Studios / Carlo D’Alessandro)
Another clear message from the reevaluation of the crime is how female victims are portrayed. Part of the news coverage included printing sketches of the women’s dead bodies.
‘It’s a world made by men. It really is,’ Lucy summarised before exhaling.
‘It’s so creepy, sick and distasteful. They were glamorising the bodies of these poor dead women.
‘We haven’t evolved past that. We think that we must be much better than those Victorians, but lots of their pleasures, habits, and voices are still with us.’
Lucy is having to contend with learning about women through men, as they were who wrote most of the documents available to us from this time. Therefore, Lucy has been forced to learn how to read between the lines in all aspects of her career. At her day job as Chief Curator in Hampton Court Palace, she digs deep to find out more about the women who lived there, as they are rarely mentioned in sources. In her podcast Lady Killers, she’s trying to readdress the balance of the often missing sex. If women are present then they are often portrayed as victims, so she seeks to look at women who committed crimes.
Pulling apart misconceptions is just something Lucy does. In Jack the Ripper’s case, it is still widely believed to be factual that each of Jack’s victims were prostitutes. However, what isn’t often realised is in the Victorian age the classification incorporated women who were living with men outside marriage, women who had had illegitimate children, and women who had relations with men for pleasure.
‘If you think you know a story, you can always learn it again. With history, the job is never done,’ Lucy took the opportunity to point out.
Men wrote most historical documents (Picture: BBC Studios / Carlo D’Alessandro)
People may also be unaware that it’s been proven extremely unlikely that the killer came up with his own name, it was instead placed on him by a journalist. Lucy said her ‘mind was blown’ by how clear it was that his famous letter admitting to the crimes in red ink and signed Jack the Ripper was not written by the perpetrator.
‘It was written by someone who was good with words, who was telling a story, and come up with this quite enticing concept,’ she noted.
‘They sent it to the news agency, not to the police because they wanted to keep the story rolling forwards. Loads of people today think there was a serial killer who called himself Jack the Ripper.
‘That’s just fake news.’
Lucy looks at history in her own way (Picture: BBC Studios / Tom Hayward)
In the following episodes, Lucy looks at The 1605 Gunpowder Plot and William the Conqueror’s invasion of England in 1066. One again, they are stories that have been covered multiple times, but Lucy is focused on what hasn’t been said.
Her efforts of producing interesting historical documentaries and books does not go unnoticed, with people often writing to let her know that she’s the reason they have pursued a career in the field. ‘They’ll email me and say “I’ve got my degree and now I want your job”,’ she shared with a smile. Her mini-series, Six Wives, which transformed the wives of Henry VIII from caricatures to people with full back stories, even inspired the smash hit musical Six. Each new cast member still has to watch her show as part of their induction. Lucy isn’t done with Henry VIII either – she plans to look at why we’ve taken a ‘jovial pleasure’ in the way he beheaded his wives.
Educating and inspiring aren’t the main reasons that Lucy does what she does. ‘I’ll tell you a secret…’ Lucy half-whispered with a mischievous expression. ‘It’s lots of fun. It’s very selfish.’
Lucy Worsley Investigates will air on BBC Two at 9pm on January 3
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