‘The murders were turned into fiction’: How the 19th-Century tabloid press created the mythology of Jack the Ripper

In short, argued Frayling, anyone trying to find out Jack the Ripper’s identity might have been looking in the wrong direction. And the same has been true of Ripperologists ever since. “We want to prove that the Ripper was a decadent aristocrat or a bohemian artist or a homosexual or an immigrant or a madman,” he said. In fact, the killer might not have fitted into any of those neat, sensationalist categories. Whoever it was who murdered those five women, it wasn’t “the character invented by the press, the police and late Victorian society”.