Useful Notes / Jack the Ripper

Yours truly, Jack the Ripper...

"Dear Boss: I am down on whores and I shant quit ripping them till I do get buckled... My knife's so nice and sharp I want to get to work right away if I get a chance."

— "Dear Boss" letter

Jack the Ripper was a serial killer, commonly held to have killed at least five prostitutes in the Whitechapel area of London's East End during the autumn months of 1888. The Ripper is not just a serial killer, but THE Serial Killer. Despite the Ripper's infamy and the panic caused among the citizenry of London, the killer's identity was never conclusively discovered, and they were never caught nor arrested. As such, the Ripper's identity has made a large contribution to the case's fame, and it is one of the main Stock Unsolved Mysteries used in fiction. While far less well known serial killers have reached far more impressive numbers, what made the Ripper's fame was the media coverage and panic among the citizenry.

The Ripper's known victims were:

• Mary Ann "Polly" Nichols (31 August)
• Eliza Ann "Annie" Chapman (8 September)
• Elizabeth Stride (30 September)
• Catherine Eddowes (30 September)
• Mary Jane Kelly (9 November)

There is some controversy concerning the actual total, with some investigators including other prostitute murders performed in a broadly similar fashion before and after the 'canonical' five. In addition, there is (and will likely always be) a lack of consensus in the case of Elizabeth Stride, the only canonical victim to show no signs of postmortem mutilation. All five of the canonical victims died with their throats cut, and all but Stride were heavily mutilated; this, combined with a witness report and the fact that Stride's body was still warm when police arrived, led investigators to assume that in Stride's case the killer was interrupted, leading to the attack on Eddowes later the same night (what has come to be known as the "Double Event").

From the complex nature of the mutilations, involving relatively quick and neat removal of specific organs, it is probable that the killer had at least some knowledge of anatomy — as would a doctor, butcher or (in the theories involving royalty) a keen hunter. Unlike the other victims, Mary Kelly was killed indoors, safely away from any prying eyes, and thus, the mutilations to her body were considerably more severe than the others.^note  Here's◊ some◊ very grotesque images (NSFW) if you're interested.

The murder and mutilation of prostitutes cut almost straight to the heart of Victorian morbidity, causing a wave of panic in London. This was exacerbated by a series of taunting letters to the Central News Agency and the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee between the "Double Event" and Mary Kelly's death. One of these letters, commonly called the "From Hell" letter, purported to include half of Catherine Eddowes' missing kidney -"Tother piece I fried and ate it was very nise". All except this last are now usually considered to be hoaxes perpetrated by the reporters themselves, including the one in which the Ripper received his famous name. (The other letters show a much higher degree of literacy and spelling ability than the Eddowes kidney letter. Additionally, the half-kidney was ravaged with Bright's disease, consistent with Eddowes' known poor state of health.)

Besides these communications, the only clue the killer left behind was found on the night of the "Double Event", consisting of some bloody pieces of Eddowes' apron found in an alleyway; it is theorised that they were thrown there after the murderer used them to wipe his hands. A chalk inscription above the apron pieces, "The Juwes^note  Most likely a misspelling of "Jews"; however, three characters from Masonic lore, Jubela, Jubelo, and Jubelum, are also said to be collectively known as the "Juwes", which has led to any number of theories that the Freemasons were involved in the killings in some way are the men who will not be blamed for nothing", was also assumed to have been written by the killer for reasons unknown. However, the inscription was cleaned away before it could be properly recorded, due to fears that it would incite the populace, and given the general antisemitism of the times it cannot be definitively established whether the phrase refers specifically to the Ripper murders.

Things became even more complicated when the killings (probably) stopped after Mary Kelly's death, and the case went more or less cold. Although as noted a few similar murders briefly revived fears for some years thereafter, it was and is widely believed that the killer's growing psychosis reached full expression with the Kelly murder, after which s/he either committed suicide, died naturally or was arrested or committed for other reasons.

The suspects named then and since represent an extraordinary cross-section of society of the time, ranging from a homeless Jewish butcher to various middle-class medical students to the second-in-line to the throne. The theory that the killer was a woman, a vengeful/insane midwife dressed as a man, has also been bandied about from time to time. Another popular notion has it that the killer had been infected with syphilis — a sexually transmitted infection (STI) that causes progressive brain damage in its last stages — and was out for revenge. Another (the basis for most of the Royal theories) held that the five victims were bound by knowledge of a highly sensitive secret harboured by one, probably Kelly, and killed by Mysterious Government Agents to keep them from talking.

Chief Inspector Frederick Abberline, the distinguished DI in charge of the case, apparently pinned his colours on George Chapman, a Polish immigrant barber-surgeon who killed three wives in succession; when Chapman was convicted, Abberline sent the officers a telegram reading "You've got the Ripper at last!" However, Chapman's known MO was poison, not the knife, and while it is not unknown for serial killers to change their MO, it is virtually unheard of to go from a rage-driven knife murder to the more distanced act of poisoning.

More recently, there has been some speculation that the Ripper was American, based on a similar contemporary murder in New York and the coincidence of the chief suspect in that case having spent some time in England. Another theory — advanced by crime writer Patricia Cornwell — points the finger at the painter Walter Sickert, whose works show a distinct fascination with low Victorian life, as either directly responsible for the killings or aiding in the Royal cover-up. Cornwell's theory is almost universally mocked by serious Ripperologists as a case of deciding the culprit before examining the evidence.

The latest purported breakthrough in the case is a DNA analysis of the shawl Eddowes was supposedly wearing on the night of the murder, sponsored by British author Russell Edwards. This appears to implicate longtime leading suspect Aaron Kosminski, another Polish immigrant barber who ended his life in an insane asylum and who certainly fits the criteria well. However, as might be guessed, the provenance of both the shawl (which doesn't appear on the official list of Eddowes' effects, but was handled by at least two of her descendants prior to testing) and the test results themselves are hotly disputed. It has further been pointed out that given Eddowes' history of casual prostitution, singling out any specific man based solely on contact with her must be considered a dicey proposition at best.

Bruce Robinson, the British director of films such as Withnail and I, spent 15 years researching and writing a book on the Ripper ("They All Love Jack") and came to the conclusion that the killer was a man called Michael Maybrick. Maybrick's brother, James, was the victim in an infamous Victorian murder trial that led to his much younger wife, Florence, being sentenced to execution, later commuted to life imprisonment. He was also himself accused of being the Ripper in 1993 after the discovery of a Diary in which he confessed to the crimes. Although the Diary is undoubtedly a much later forgery, Robinson argues that there is a scintilla of truth behind it. Namely, that Michael left enough clues to point to his brother's guilt, then framed his wife for James' murder, in order to cover his own tracks. The book is a fierce, angry, often foul-mouthed polemic aimed at the British Establishment who, in Robinson's view, deliberately did not catch the Ripper because they knew he was, like them, a high-ranking Freemason, an argument which does somewhat stretch credulity. It is also compelling, fascinating, incredibly well-researched and very long.

The name "Jack the Ripper" influenced the nicknames of a lot of later killers, especially Peter Sutcliffe, the "Yorkshire Ripper". Originally he was given other names, including "Leather Apron" and "Mr. Hyde", but Jack's the one that stuck.

The Ripper case is particularly tantalizing for writers who want to make a moral lesson or Historical In-Joke about Victorian London, as the case was never solved and much of the documentary evidence associated with it has been either lost or destroyed. It is also fairly common in stories whose pitches involve the phrase "Very Loosely Based on a True Story". As a testament to his infamy, Jack the Ripper was voted the worst Briton of all time by the BBC.

It has also attracted a reasonable number of dedicated students called "Ripperologists" and also a fair number of guided walks in the East End on the subject.^note One pub in the area has a prominent sign at the bar that reads, "Your Tour Guide Is Lying To You" as a Take That! to the often sensationalised nature of these tours.

Related tropes:

• Adaptational Attractiveness: Related to the below — a woman addicted to alcohol as at least some of the victims were, after leading the harsh life they did, isn't going to be as pretty when she reaches her forties as the actresses who are usually cast.
• Age Lift: All but one of the five canonical victims were in their forties when they were murdered, but you certainly wouldn't know this from most film or TV adaptations, which cast much younger actresses.
• Ambiguous Gender: A few theories claimed he may have not been a "he" at all, and may have been another prostitute or a woman who had some reason to hate them.
• Ax-Crazy: If the gruesome murders are not enough for you, try reading his letters to the police.
• Badass in a Nice Suit: Commonly depicted as a dapper Victorian gentleman (see page image and Iconic Outfit below), even though this would have been a blinking neon sign in 1880s Whitechapel.
• Beethoven Was an Alien Spy: The various theories as to Jack's identity, with the former particularly true for the conspiracy-theory ones which involve a member of the Royal family.
• Card-Carrying Villain: His letters are far from subtle about being a Serial Killer, to say the least.
• The Conspiracy: Some theories maintain that the Ripper didn't work alone; how big the alleged conspiracy may have been is anybody's guess.
• Couldn't Find a Pen: Averted. In his first letter, he said that he tried to do this, but he couldn't write with blood because it "went thick like glue" and used red ink instead.
• Criminal Mind Games: Perhaps the first murderer to send taunting letters to the police.
• Deadly Doctor: As mentioned above, many suspect that the Ripper was a doctor by trade.
• Disposable Sex Worker: A curious aversion, considering how frequently this trope and serial killers are associated; despite the lowly social status of the victims, the killings so horrified Victorian society—inclined to be sentimental about 'fallen angels' and 'soiled doves' at the best of times—that they formed the impetus for numerous social reform movements, and the police's inability to locate the killer (and arguably inept handling of the investigation) spurred numerous reforms in the Metropolitan Police and its methods.
• The Dreaded: The mere mention of his name could produce panic in London during his rampage.
• The End... Or Is It?
  • While the killings supposedly stopped with Mary Kelly's gruesome death, the lack of a captured suspect and a series of other slasher-like murders in the following years led to fears that Jack had or would "come back". Additional killings elsewhere - notably a similar murder in New York - stoked fears that Jack had moved on to other urban hellholes.
  • One prominent example was the Thames Torso Murders, which began in 1887 and ended in 1889 (overlapping the Ripper murders) and were likewise unsolved. While there were similarities (the bodies were mutilated in a manner that implied considerable knowledge of anatomy, and the one victim to be positively identified was a suspected prostitute), the distinct difference was that the Torso killer dismembered his victims and disposed of the limbs separately, rather than merely removing their organs, and none of their heads were ever found. The most famous of the four victims was the so-called "Whitehall Mystery", because her body was found during construction of the new Metropolitan Police headquarters, the famous New Scotland Yard. While there was press speculation at the time that the Ripper and the Torso killer were the same person, police at the time concluded there was no connection and nearly all modern scholars agree.
• Epileptic Trees: The various theories as to Jack's identity, with the former particularly true for the conspiracy-theory ones which involve the Royal family.
• Faux Affably Evil: His first letter has him come across as this, inviting them to try and catch him and "kindly" giving his trade name between giving gruesome details about how he killed his latest victim and what he plans on doing with the next and mocking the law enforcement.
• Finger in the Mail: A part of a kidney, widely believed to have been taken from the Ripper's fourth victim, was mailed to the authorities. It was accompanied by a letter many modern scholars believe to be the only genuine letter written by the killer him/herself, in which the Ripper claimed s/he cooked and ate the other part of the kidney.
• Flanderization: After Mary Ann Nichols' murder, the police put out a request for a man seen walking down the street carrying a black bag at around the time of the murder to come forward, because they believed that he might have seen something and been a potential witness. As a result of this statement about someone who was not officially a suspect, practically every fictional depiction of the killer will show him carrying around his weapons and killer-trophies in a black Gladstone bag.
• A Foggy Day in London Town: Most adaptations take place in foggy weather, as was typical for the time period in the UK back then.
• Freudian Excuse: The FBI profile, mentioned below, posits that the Ripper had "a domineering mother and a passive or absent father," and suggests that his mother was a heavy drinker who "enjoyed the company of many men," explaining why all his targets were alcoholic prostitutes.
• Gaslamp Fantasy: Some stories depict Jack as having been some sort of supernatural creature like a demon or a ghost or a vampire.
• Gender-Concealing Writing: There are those (including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) who believe the killer may have been a woman, aka "Jill the Ripper." They base this theory on the fact that a woman would have been more easily able to gain the female victims' trust— and if she posed as a midwife, would not have attracted attention if she was spotted carrying bloody clothes.
• Gorn: The Ripper was a Serial Killer who mutilated his victims, so of course. Many details of the crimes are definitely not for those with weak stomachs. How much of this is reflected in works depicting him is left to the creators' discretion.
• Government Conspiracy: More than one theory holds that Jack was either a Royal or had something to do with the Royal family.
• Hiding in Plain Sight: The consensus among the more serious Ripperologists is that the Ripper was, like most serial killers, a seemingly ordinary person who could blend in with the population of Whitechapel without arousing suspicion. This trope also applies to the relatively recent theory that he was none other than Charles Allen Lechmere, the witness who allegedly discovered the body of Polly Nichols.
• Historical Villain Upgrade: The Ripper murders were undeniably gruesome, but he was hardly (as often portrayed) the very worst Serial Killer of all time, or even of Victorian Britain. ^note That dubious distinction might go to Amelia Dyer, a Victorian "baby farmer" who murdered about 400 orphan babies. The case grabbed the popular imagination mostly due to being sensationalized and notably unsolved.
• Iconic Outfit: Popularly depicted with a top hat, cape and usually a cane, seemingly following the lead of a witness who saw such a man in the vicinity of Mary Kelly's murder. Thing is, Whitechapel was an extremely poor, working class neighborhood; someone dressed this much like a 'toff' would have stood out like a sore thumb had he spent much time in the vicinity. It's believed that if he existed, he was a (relatively) innocent gentleman simply out slumming for an evening, as was very characteristic of the era (prostitutes, remember?) and the real Ripper more likely wore clothes that didn't draw attention.
• I'm a Humanitarian: If the letter about the kidney is authentic.
• Jack the Ripoff:
  • Trope Namer. Was the namesake of quite a few other killers, most notably Peter Sutcliffe (a.k.a. "The Yorkshire Ripper", although he used a hammer rather than a bladed weapon), as well as "Jack The Stripper" (a.k.a. the Thames Nude Killer), a unknown murderer of at least six prostitutes in West London in the 1960s.
  • H. H. Holmes, the first well-known American serial killer (and also a Deadly Doctor) was a near contemporary of Jack, and comparisons were made when Holmes' crimes were revealed. Holmes was speculated by some to actually be the Ripper, with one of his own descendants championing that theory in the 2010s. However, his targets were in no way limited to prostitutes, like all of the (known) victims of the Ripper.
• Jurisdiction Friction: Given the location of the killings, there were two competing agencies investigating the murders: the Metropolitan Police and the City of London Police. They didn't do a good job of sharing information and had pursued different leads. Also, there were multiple senior officers overseeing the case, which lead to interpersonal conflicts that hindered the investigation.
• Karma Houdini: In theory and the general conclusion. Some suggest that the fact the murders stopped rather suddenly may mean that the perpetrator could have died or maybe been imprisoned for unrelated crimes, but there's absolutely no way to know for sure. The other suggestion is that the Ripper simply left London and committed more murders elsewhere.
• The Killer Was Left-Handed: Actually, he wasn't, but the persistent claim that he was shows just how pernicious this trope is. Investigators at the time believed this to be the case—an assumption that may have hurt their investigation.
• Knight Templar: In more than a few appearances of Jack in fiction, it is speculated that he was a maniacal prude and that his motive for the murders was that he considered prostitutes immoral and filthy and that he was doing God's work by punishing them, even at times having his mother be a prostitute herself to add to this.
• Monster Misogyny: The real one's known victims were all women, and that's usually the case in fiction too.
• Murderers Are Rapists: As far as we know, a notable aversion. Of course, the victims were prostitutes and they were mutilated so badly it can't be known what was forced and what was not. He may have subjected his victims to something called piquerism though.
• Not the First Victim: It has been questioned if Polly Nichols was really the first woman to be killed by the Ripper, as another Whitechapel prostitute, Martha Tabram, had been stabbed to death earlier that month. Most investigators dismiss this idea however, as the M.O. was different. Attempts have also been made to connect the Ripper with the Thames Torso Killer or the Servant Girl Annihilator, two other unidentified serial killers who had started killing before 1888.
• Ominous Opera Cape: He tends to be depicted wearing one of these in fiction, but it's very unlikely that he actually dressed in one while out on the prowl.
• Organ Theft: For some reason, the Ripper stole some of the organs from his victims, including the uteri of Annie Chapman and Catherine Eddowes and Eddowes' left kidney.
• Politically Incorrect Villain: Possibly. At the end of the “Night of the Double Event” (wherein both Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes were killed), someone is purported to have written “The Juwes are not the ones who will be blamed for nothing”. The Police reportedly had this scrubbed before any photos could be taken and circulated.
• The Profiler:
  • In October 1888, the London police commissioned police surgeon Thomas Bond for his opinion of the crimes. Bond's report analyzes forensic evidence from the crime scenes and speculates about the killer's personality and background. It's considered to be the earliest surviving offender profile.
  • In 1988, the FBI published a psychological profile of the Ripper murders; it can be read here (of course, since the profile was written a hundred years after the crimes, at best it's an interesting thought experiment).
• Riddle for the Ages: We'll never identify Jack with any degree of certainty; it all happened too long ago. Whoever he was, he's obviously long dead by now, and most of what little evidence was gathered has been since been lost. And yet the allure of the mystery keeps drawing more Gull-Catchers to the dance.
• Sadist: Definitely. His mocking and cruel letters to the police, his unnecessarily brutal manner of killing and glee at not being caught all paint him as this. He seemed all too pleased that the populace of London was terrified of him and there's a lot of psychological abuse in his methodology. On the other hand, all the evidence suggests that his victims were killed rapidly, with all the extreme brutality happening after they were dead.
• Serial Killer: The Trope Codifier.
• Serial Killings, Specific Target: Some theories and fictional depictions show one of the victims as more intentional than the others, who are killed as a distraction.
• Shrouded in Myth: The various theories as to Jack's identity, with the former particularly true for the conspiracy-theory ones which involve the Royal family.
• Significant Anagram: Some of the theories of the Ripper's identity depend on obscure ciphers and anagrams from Victorian writings. One of the more far-fetched maintains that some sentences in Lewis Carroll's writings can be anagrammed into confessions to the crimes. Most serious Ripperologists scoff at this notion, some pointing out that the same twisting could be done with sentences from Winnie the Pooh!
• Stock Unsolved Mysteries: Making speculation of the killer's identity a very common pastime.
• The Spook: One of the most famous examples. Nobody will ever really know who Jack the Ripper really was.
• Technology Marches On: The murders occurred when forensic investigation was in its infancy at best, meaning that much crucial evidence from the crime scenes was overlooked or lost. Attempts to test it with modern techniques have been inconclusive since the evidence has degraded, lost, or been improperly handled over time.
• The Unreveal: The Ripper's identity was never confirmed and probably never will be. New suspects are proposed from time to time, but the evidence is far from definitive and always offers just as many problems as solutions.
• The Unsolved Mystery: The definitive example in modern pop culture.
• Victorian London: More precisely late Victorian London, in the final months of the year 1888, but somehow the Ripper murders became one of the defining images and enduring cultural memories from that time. Later artists, such as Alan Moore, point out the Ripper murders totally obliterated the optimistic certainty that characterized the era at its height.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Some have speculated that the Ripper was motivated by wanting to draw attention to the awful conditions in the East End.
• Wretched Hive: The East End of London in the 1880's was not a nice place be, to say the least, even before Jack came along. It was extremely overcrowded, mainly with Jewish refugees fleeing persecution in Russia, and poor people who'd come to London from all over the UK to find work. Sewerage systems and water sanitation were nonexistent, providing a breeding ground for a plethora of nasty diseases. Unemployment, homelessness, and starvation were rampant. Ironically, though, the murders helped make the public aware of the horrific living conditions, which paved the way for future social reforms.

Jack the Ripoff, while a pun on this guy, is a trope about copycat killers in general — though, yes, some of them are copies of Jack.

The following works feature appearances by or references to the Ripper case.

---

Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Ciel in Black Butler investigates the Jack the Ripper murders. Turns out that the killers were his aunt and her flamboyant shinigami butler.
• The Case Closed movie, 'Detective Conan Film 06: The Phantom of Baker Street involves both hunting for Jack the Ripper in a computer game and the descendant of the real ripper.
• Case File nº221: Kabukicho has an arc of the Ripper roaming around the street of Shinjuku, killing beautiful people with one of them being the daughter of the Ward Mayor Sebastian Moran. The case itself drove Dr. John H. Watson to the East side where he seeks Sherlock Holmes' help about it. At the end of the arc, the Ripper is revealed to be a recurring character who brainwashed a detective that had a crush on her. She killed because of an inferiority complex stemming from her being unable to have a sex reassignment surgery due to her small penis; after she killed her victims, she arranged their corpses into "angels" and ate the wombs of her female victims so that she could feel she had one. It is also revealed that she was hired by the Mayor to kill his son, James (a.k.a. James Moriarty) except she ended up killing his twin sister instead.
• Cain of the Count Cain series investigates Jack after his fiance was murdered. One of the more unusual interpretations of the murders, what with the Magic from Technology raising of the dead among other things.
• Jack the Ripper Hopper is the second combat-oriented Frankenstein in Nobuhiro Watsuki's Embalming, his special body alteration involves his lungs and thrachea, allowing him to inhale ludicrous quantities of air and eject them through his body to either fly or cut people to shreds with high pressure air. The manga also feature Mary Jane Kelley as his latest victim turned in a deranged Frankenstein looking for her daughter and Inspector Abberline as a secondary protagonist and an Action Survivor.
• Ghost Sweeper Mikami posits that Jack the Ripper wasn't a single person, but rather a possessed shaving razor that could possess those cut by it, meaning that it was being wielded by the previous victims as it slew the women.
• One of the tattooed convicts in Golden Kamuy is responsible for a string of grisly murders targeting prostitutes in the city of Sapporo. After one victim's kidney is sent to the local newspaper's offices alongside a letter marked "From Hell", a reporter familiar with the Jack the Ripper case begins investigating and discovers that the timing of the murders, the state of the victims' corpses, and, comparing a map of Sapporo to the Whitechapel district of London, even the locations of the bodies match up perfectly. This allows him to pinpoint the exact time and place the killer will strike again, and the main characters set an ambush for him. The convict turns out to be Michael Ostrog, a historical Ripper suspect whose real-life fate was never recorded, with the heavy implication that he's the real Jack the Ripper trying to relive his killing spree.^note In reality, Ostrog couldn't have been the Ripper; evidence proves he was serving time in a French prison when the killings took place.
• The manhwa Jack the Ripper: Hellblade has an anti-heroic Jack killing demons disguised as prostitutes, which always revert to human form upon death, as well as turning out to be the other creation of a certain Victor Frankenstein, who has been alive for at least 400 years.
• Who could forget JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Phantom Blood and its Vampire Jack the Ripper, transformed by a super powered Aztec mask-awakened arch-vampire, of a sort bred by ancient superbeings to be consumed? No, really.
• An early-twentieth-century flashback story in The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service has Jack the Ripper's ghost haunting a telescope and possessing voyeurs who use it. The story is notable for its explicit acceptance of the theory that the Duke of Clarence (not actually named, but instantly recognisable from the manga's inclusion of a much-reproduced photograph) was the killer.
• In Moriarty the Patriot, the original Jack the Ripper is Jack Renfield, who is a war veteran and taught the Moriarty brothers to fight. The Whitechapel serial killer is actually using his nickname to gain fame which led William James Moriarty to punish him for using his mentor's name and harming innocent civilians. Then it turns out it's a crime syndicate that is using the nickname in order to instill fear and change in Victorian society. Williams disapproves of this because they put the lower class in danger. So, he and his brother Louis kill all of them.
• In Nobunagun the Ripper is reincarnated in the present day as a man named Adam Muirhead. While Adam is a good guy, he's still a rather scary, Ax-Crazy Psycho Knife Nut. The finale reveals that the original Ripper was, of all people, Florence Nightingale. She was reluctantly killing women who were unknowingly infected with a deadly man-made biological weapon to prevent the disease from spreading to the rest of the population. Since the ordinary folk would have never believed her, she kept to the shadows and allowed the legend of the Ripper to spread.
• The protagonist in Hiromu Arakawa's short series Shanghai Youma Kikai is is revealed to be a demon, and the original Jack the Ripper near the end of the first chapter.
• Record of Ragnarok has Jack the Ripper as one of humanity's representative in the tournament. He's portrayed as the Token Evil Teammate of the humans, being Ax-Crazy with an obsession with the color of a person's soul (which he can see with his right eye) when they are afraid. He was a Son of a Whore who got his Start of Darkness when his mother revealed she never actually loved him, leading him to kill her, track down and kill his deadbeat father, and continue killing. He acts as the human to fight in the tournament's fourth round, with his opponent, rather fittingly, being the Token Good Teammate of the gods, Heracles. The battle ends in Jack's victory, giving humanity its second win in the tournament. A spin-off manga reveals the he is not the original Jack, but an anonymous killer who killed the one doing the Ripper murders (a journalist named Luke Evans) and stole his identity. He was recruited into MI6 and performed several assassinations to save England.
• After the intro, Soul Eater opens with Maka and Soul defeating Jack The Ripper, who was turned into a kishin egg from eating human souls.
• In the first chapter of Time Eliminator, the main character is hired to erase these killings from history by a descendant of the detective that worked on the case.

Comic Books

• 2000 AD: The comic had dealt with this a couple of times.
  • Judge Dredd has gone up against Jack the Ripper.
  • Nikolai Dante has The Rippers, an elite group of assassins working for Britannia who are genetically engineered to evoke the Jack the Ripper image to bring terror to their targets.
  • One of Tharg's Terror Tales had this cross over with Alice in Wonderland, where it turns out that Jack is actually Alice.
• American Vampire: Gets mentioned in one volume. Prince Albert committed the murders because he went insane after a brief encounter with the corpse of Dracula.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The comic spin-off "Tales of the Vampires" included a story in which the Ripper was a vampire, the twist being that the policeman investigating turned out to be a vampire as well, who eventually killed the Ripper for being too splashy and risking exposing the existence of vampires to the public. The comic "The Origin" claimed that the Ripper used to be Caligula.
• CSI: The first graphic novel had a Jack the Ripper copycat killing prostitutes in Las Vegas during a convention of Ripperologists.
• The DCU:
  • Batman: The first Elseworlds graphic novel, Gotham by Gaslight, features a Victorian era Batman tracking the Ripper to Gotham City. Surprisingly enough, no attempt was made to link him to any of Batman's usual villains. His identity is revealed to be Jacob Packer, an American doctor-turned-lawyer and former friend of the Wayne family. In a very shocking change, when this story was adapted into an animated film, the identity was changed to Commissioner Gordon.
  • Doom Patrol: Jack the Ripper was Red Jack (a Star Trek Shout-Out), a godlike being who claimed to be both Jack the Ripper and God Himself while fighting the Doom Patrol.
  • Hellblazer: In the Royal Blood arc, the cause of the original murders was the crown prince getting a prostitute pregnant. Queen Victoria went batshit and ordered the royal family's surgeon to dispose of the evidence. As he lacked the stomach for murder, he was made the host for the demon Calibraxis, which cheerfully went and killed several other prostitutes. Now it's being tried again, with a politician deciding to have the Prince of Wales possessed by the same deamon in order to give him the backbone to turn the county into a fascist nightmare, resulting in the prince going around and eating people until Constantine tricks the demon into entering the politician.
  • Justice League of America: One story, fused with H. G. Wells' The Island of Doctor Moreau, features Jack the Ripper as an orangutan (which is also a Shout-Out to Edgar Allan Poe's The Murders in the Rue Morgue).
  • Madame Xanadu: The series involves the Ripper, but rather than reveal his identity his actions are described by the Phantom Stranger to be the universe's "balancing act" response to actions undertaken by Madame Xanadu centuries ago. As it goes, Jason Blood / Etrigan fathered a child on one of the Ripper's victims, and had she carried the child to term, it would have been the greatest horror that could ever walk the Earth. The Ripper murders were a byproduct of the universe attempting to prevent this from happening, and ultimately succeeded. Afterwards, Stranger, while not actively interfering, does take matters into his own hands, and arranges for the Ripper to fall and break his neck rather than continue, because while he "only observes" what takes place, he was as repulsed as any by the murders, even though he accepted the necessity of them.
  • Resurrection Man: Possibly, the Ripper was Vandal Savage, who was stopped by Resurrection Man.
  • Superboy: In one issue, Project Cadmus is hired to analyze the Ripper's DNA and find out who he was. Instead, Mad Scientist Dabney Donovan uses the sample to create a monster called Ripjak.
  • Supergirl: Or he was Mary Kelly's boyfriend, encouraged by the demon Buzz from Peter David's run.
  • Superman: In an early 1970s story, the ghost of the Ripper fell in love with Lois Lane while she and Clark Kent were doing an extended visit with one of his descendants; the ghost arranged a form of mystical time travel to send Lois back to Whitechapel to be murdered by his earlier self so she could join him in the afterlife, only to be foiled by his own obsessions — the earlier Ripper refused to harm Lois because she "was not like the others".
  • Wonder Woman: The Elseworlds Wonder Woman: Amazonia is set in a world where Jack has become King, and the British Empire is a misogynistic dystopia.
• Doctor Who (IDW): In the storyline "The Ripper's Curse", the Eleventh Doctor, Amy and Rory face an alien war criminal called Mac'atyde, who uses a human disguise hide in Victorian London, but needs to consume chemicals produced in human organs when in a state of fear, and therefore commits the murders to feed. The graffiti about "Juwes" is an attempt to pin the murders on his enemies, the Ju'wes, who of course the London authorities have never heard of. The publisher blurb claims "it's the first time ever that the Doctor goes up against JACK THE RIPPER!", which it isn't (see Literature, below).
• From Hell: The comic by Alan Moore is a deconstructive and metafictional examination of the Ripper murders. The title is a reference to the letter to the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee that contained what was claimed to be Catherine Eddowes' kidney. The graphic novel is considered one of the most detailed and accurate portrayals of the period and setting. It uses a widely discredited theory by Steven Knight that noted physician Sir William Gull committed the murders because the victims knew of a child Prince Albert Victor (not Victoria's husband, but her eldest grandson, who died before she did) had with a commoner as its base, but Moore explicitly states that he doesn't actually believe it. In the Appendix, "Dance of the Gull-Catchers" he states clearly (see the quotes page) that the crime is unsolvable and ultimately people should focus on improving the treatment and protection of sex workers and women in general.
• Hack/Slash: Jack the Ripper is heavily implied to have been a slasher.
• Hellraiser: One comic reveals that Ripper became a Cenobite.
• The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Macheath is Jack the Ripper — he fled to Buenos Aires after the last Whitechapel murder, and returned to London in 1910. Naturally, he never stopped killing. As a sidenote, he claims to have committed the original murders when he was only 19.
• Martin Mystere: In the Italian comic book, a vampire Richard Van Helsing discovers that the Ripper is an ancient mythical force, divided into several knives, which force their holders to kill. Van Helsing searches for and destroys the knives, including one which is destroyed by Sherlock Holmes.
• The Marvel Universe offers several contradictory explanations of who Jack the Ripper was.
  • Astonishing: Issue #18 from the horror Anthology Comic had an adventurer visiting the grave of Jack the Ripper (with the absurd inscription 'Jack the Ripper — Murderer') and being killed by the Ripper's ghost. The story was later reprinted in Dead of Night #6.
  • Doctor Strange: One issue had it that he was possessed by a servant of the Dimension Lord Dormammu.
  • The Mighty Thor: Issue #372, featuring an immortal(ish) serial killer whose preferred method was killing women with his knives, included a carefully hedged speculation that he might have been Jack the Ripper.
  • Nightcrawler: During Volume 4, a spirit with a fondness for knives and pretty women, heavily implied to be Jack the Ripper, is a commander in Azazel's army.
  • Shang-Chi: Master of Kung Fu #100 featured a story titled "Red of Fang and Claw, All Love Lost". In it, the Ripper was an experiment of Fu Manchu's, who escaped and hid in London. The hero fought him at the end of the story.
  • Thunderbolts: In issues #166-167, the Ripper is Mr. Hyde, with the assistance of Satanna, and finally the other Thunderbolts and Inspector Abberline, once they learn the prostitutes have been possessed by evil spirits.
  • Wisdom: The series by Paul Cornell has Pete Wisdom battling hundreds of Jack the Rippers. A villain basically opens up portals to Alternate Universes and unleashes their versions of Jack the Ripper onto the streets of modern day London, with plenty of Shout Outs to other versions of Jack the Ripper in popular culture.
• The Maze Agency: One issue had a killer picking off members of a group of 'Ripperologists' (people interested in the mystery of Jack the Ripper) by cutting their throats, using a twisted interpretation of the poems the Ripper sent to the newspapers to determine the order.
• Nightmares on Elm Street: Cybil studies Jack the Ripper, and Freddy bases her nightmares around that theme.
• Peter Pan: In the French Darker and Edgier Prequel by Regis Loisel, Jack murders Peter's abusive prostitute mother apparently out of pity for him, but still clearly traumatizing the poor boy. Furthermore, it's implied that this event in fact launched the Ripper murders, as it apparently made Jack loathe all prostitutes as abusive monsters.
• Rachel Rising: In the Urban Fantasy graphic novel series, a demon called Malus claims to a young girl named Zoe Mann that her great grandfather was Robert Mann, one of the many suspects for the Ripper, and later he gives her a very special knife that he calls "Jack". Later still, the origin of the knife turns out to be even darker than that, as the "knife" is actually the remains of Lucifer's sword that broke when he fell from Heaven, and Malus has given it to any number of profoundly evil people to wield over the years.
• Star Trek: The Next Generation: One comic drove holodeck problems about as far as they could go by having the alien Jack the Ripper (from the episode below) take over the system.
• The Strange Talent of Luther Strode: Jack The Ripper was a devotee of the Hercules Method. "Was" not because he died, but was ritually bound and trapped in a very small box. He get lets out.
• Strangers in Paradise: In the arc "Molly & Pooh", a pair of high society killers believe they've discovered the identity of the Ripper and dispatch him in his old age. This story has virtually nothing to do with the rest of the series, and never connects back with it in any appreciable way.
• Whitechapel Freak: The 2001 comic by David Hitchcock uses Jack the Ripper as an underlying background figure in a story that focuses on a traveling freak show. The Ripper is a legless man strapped onto the shoulders of a midget.

Comic Strips

• There's a strip in FoxTrot where Paige takes a liking to dissecting frogs in biology class, and feels horrified at her own delight. Andy comforts her by saying that it could mean she could make a good surgeon, but then Jason pipes in that she could make a good Serial Killer as well. Paige cries out in horror at this, while Jason comments to himself: "Didn't Jack The Ripper study biology?"
• The Phantom: In "The Phantom as Sherlock" the Phantom becomes a Sherlock Holmes lookalike to catch Jack Hack. Hack's real name is Rumbelow, a Shout-Out to real life Ripper scholar Donald Rumbelow.

Fan Works

• Noa mentions in Blood Ties (Fullmetal Alchemist) that Jack the Ripper was a vampire.
• Profesor Layton Vs Jack The Raper has the killer resurrected into present day, and the mystery is pursued by Professor Layton, as well as crossed over Death Note characters, and King Shakespeer, not to mention Jams Bound. With Rouge Angles of Satin and a romantic subplot along the way. Almost certainly inspired by the before mentioned Sherlock Homes vs. Jack the Ripper.
• The Victorious time travel AU fic "Across the Years" ends with the implication that Beck would have become the Ripper after he vanished from public life after 1882, as in the new timeline Beck visibly drowned while trying to escape arrest in 1869 and there is no record of the Ripper murders, with only Jade and Sikowitz recalling the murders.
• In Say It Thrice, Sanduleak is revealed to have been the Ripper in life. And, ironically, met his end when one of his would-be victims managed to turn the tables on him.
• Sherlock Homes vs. Jack the Ripper: Complete with werewolves and a zombified Albert Einstein.
• Ultimate Sleepwalker: The New Dreams depicts Jack the Ripper as the illegitimate son of an Italian count who fled to Great Britain and conceived Jack through an affair with a prostitute. The embittered Jack grew up hating his lowborn origins and the mistreatment he received from his family, and studied the occult. A Deal with the Devil turned him into a malevolent supernatural demon that possessed different people and compelled them to commit the murders, which explains why the police never managed to catch him. It's only after Sleepwalker confronts and imprisons Jack in the Mindscape that the murders finally stop.
• It's strongly hinted in A History of Magic that being afflicted by a Witch's Kiss from the witch form of Alice Liddell drove Lewis Carroll insane to the point he became Jack the Ripper.

Films — Live-Action

• Amazon Women on the Moon features an In Search of... spoof that suggests that Jack the Ripper was really... the Loch Ness Monster.
• In The Butchers, Jack the Ripper is one of the six famous serial killers brought back to life by a Tome of Eldritch Lore. And Jack turns out to be a woman. (The other serial killers are Albert Fish, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Ed Gein, and the Zodiac Killer.)
• In Deadly Advice, Jack the Ripper is one of the five murderers providing advice to Jodie on how to kill her mother (and anybody else who gets in her way). The Ripper turns out to be a complete unknown, who complains about people assuming he has to be Prince Albert or the queen's personal physician or someone else famous. In a possible nod to Real Life Ripper suspect Aaron Kosminski, he says he was hairdresser.
• Doctor Strangelove featured General Jack D. Ripper, an unhinged Wing Commander^note No, not that one who would become the Trope Namer for General Ripper after single-handedly starting World War III.
• An unproduced script for a Doctor Who motion picture had the Doctor defeat an alien Jack the Ripper.
• Edge Of Sanity, starring Anthony Perkins of Psycho fame, claims that the Ripper was actually Edward Hyde, as does the Hammer Horror Doctor Jekyll and Sister Hyde.
• From Beyond the Grave: The spirit that possesses Edward in "The Gatecrasher" is strongly implied to that of Jack the Ripper. (This is made much more explicit in the short story on which it is based. See Literature below.)
• From Hell, (loosely) based on Alan Moore's same-named graphic novel. Inspector Abberline, played by Johnny Depp, gradually uncovers a complicated conspiracy behind the murders (involving the Royal Family, natch.)
• In Jack the Ripper (1976), Klaus Kinski plays Jack the Ripper as a doctor whose mother was prostitute, and who murders streetwalkers as a way of paying back his mother for her abuse.
• The Lodger, based on the novel of the same name and directed by Alfred Hitchcock.
• Man in the Attic (1953), another adaptation of The Lodger, starring Jack Palance.
• In A Man with a Maid, a Victorian aristocrat buys a former madhouse and converts it into a "love nest". Unknown to him, Jack the Ripper lives in secret passages lining the building.
• G.W. Pabst's 1929 film Pandora's Box has Jack The Ripper turn up at the end to kill Louise Brooks' character after first seeming willing to spare her.
• Razors: The Return of Jack the Ripper (2016): A young writer believes she has discovered the holy grail of terror, the knives used by Jack the Ripper for his notorious murders. But when the knives go missing the writers are plunged into a world of terror.
• The villain of Red Eye is named Jackson Rippner, and even does a Lampshade Hanging on his Meaningful Name.
  Lisa: "Jack" for short?
  Jackson: Nah, I haven't gone by "Jack" since I was about nine years old. Last name's Rippner.
  Lisa: Jack Rippner... Jack... Rippner... Jack the... oh. Oh! Well, that wasn't very nice of your parents!
  Jackson: Yeah, that's what I told them. Right before I killed them.
• The Ripper features Jack returning to the material world via a ring in the 1980's. He's also played by special effects master Tom Savini.
• The Ripper (1997): A Made-for-TV Movie that makes Prince Albert the Ripper.
• The horror movie Ripper: Letter from Hell is about a study group of Ripperology students with the same initials as each of the victims, who are killed off one by one by a copycat.
• The Ruling Class: The Ripper doesn't make an appearance personally; rather the big plot twist of the movie is that after being tortured physically and mentally into "behaving" by a quack psychiatrist, the protagonist — Jack — is thought to be cured of his god complex on the basis that he identifies by his real name again… only for it to turn out that violently shattering his previous Christlike persona and beating nihilism into him has caused him to develop an entirely new persona based around Jack the Ripper, one which acts superficially normal but is a deranged, misogynistic sadist just like its inspiration.
• Historical In-Joke (albeit an anachronistic one) in Shanghai Knights. The reason the killings stopped? Jack tried to victimize Chon Lin and...
  Jack the Ripper: Nice night for a walk.
  (Chon Lin kicks his ass and dumps him in the river)
  Chon Lin: (in Chinese) FUCKING LOSER!!!
• It is subtly implied in Sherlock Holmes (2009) that Lord Blackwood was the Ripper, or was at least involved somehow.
• A Study in Terror and Murder by Decree had people decide to pull out the big guns and had the world's most notorious serial killer hunted by the world's greatest detective, Sherlock Holmes.
• The Made-for-TV Movie Terror at London Bridge has Jack's ghost haunting the eponymous structure after its brick-by-brick move to Arizona.
• Time After Time features H. G. Wells going forward in time to stop Jack the Ripper in 1970s San Francisco. Jack fits in a bit better than Wells does:
  Jack the Ripper: "Ninety years ago I was a freak. Today I'm an amateur."
• In The Wolfman (2010), it's mentioned that Aberline was in charge of the Ripper case before being assigned to Blackmoor. Historically, he was.

Literature

• In James Lovegrove's Age of Heroes, the immortals Hippolyta and Theseus reflect on how the last time they met before the present day was when they teamed up to track down and kill the Ripper. Hippolyta notes with amusement all the conspiracy theories that have built up about his identity over the years, when it turns out he was just a dockhand who was killing prostitutes to vent his rage over his erectile problems.
• Anno Dracula by Kim Newman follows the investigation of the Ripper murders in an alternate history where Count Dracula married Queen Victoria and became ruler of England. In this continuity, the prostitutes were all vampires and the killer was Doctor Jack Seward, the last of Dracula's would-be killers, the investigation into his crimes being used to give a government agent 'access' to Dracula and Victoria.
• In the Area 51 series, the Ripper was one of the alien hybrids who have been pulling humanity's strings for centuries on the behalf of their hibernating masters. He in particular, however, suffered a bad case of Clone Degeneration and went crazy, running around killing women until his comrades put a stop to him.
• The Big Book of Jack the Ripper Stories anthologizes many stories about Jack, including The Lodger and a deleted chapter from Stephen Hunter's I, Ripper showcasing the Ripper in Hell, where he's forced to read the complete works of Edward Bulwer-Lytton for the rest of eternity.
• The Cutthroat has protagonist Isaac Bell investigate a series of murders in the United States. He mentions the details to an associate who comments that they're similar to those surrounding Jack the Ripper. After some more investigation, he comes to the conclusion that Jack the Ripper moved to the United States and started killing again.
• The Decorator: 19th century Russian detective Erast Fandorin hunts Jack the Ripper. This particular version of Jack the Ripper is a Russian who came to Britain and then left back home (he's caught in Moscow).
• Doctor Who Expanded Universe
  • The Doctor Who New Adventures novel The Pit says that the Ripper murders were committed by a cult performing Human Sacrifice to summon an Eldritch Abomination.
  • Past Doctor Adventures novel Matrix has the Doctor's Enemy Without the Valeyard ("The Trial of a Time Lord: The Ultimate Foe") become the Ripper, in order to feed the Dark Matrix, a Gallifreyan AI containing all the evil of the Time Lords. This creates an Alternate Universe where the Matrix becomes the "Spirit of Jack the Ripper" and exerts a baleful influence over Britain into the 20th century, as well as the Valeyard using the Dark Matrix to create corrupted versions of the Doctor's other selves (the Seventh is the only one who escapes by shielding his conscious mind from the assault).
  • The Doctor Who fan chronology Ahistory gets round the contradiction here (and in the audios, comics, and series) by proposing that the Ripper murders are an "unfixed point in time"; since they're recorded as an unsolved mystery, any solution the Doctor learns cannot be a definitive one.
• Dacre Stoker's and Ian Holt's Dracula the Un-Dead proposes that the Ripper was not just a vampire, but a lesbian vampire — specifically, Countess Elizabeth Bathory, quite undead. In order to do this, they push Jack's spree four years into the future from when it actually happened, which is honestly just the start of how many times the authors fail history class.
• Dust and Shadow: An Account of the Ripper Killings by Dr. John H. Watson, by Lyndsay Faye. Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
• In the Fate Series, Jack the Ripper is a summonable Servant. However, unlike most Servants, because Jack's identity was never discovered, instead of summoning the one true Jack the Ripper, each of the classes Jack can be summoned in will instead result in a different version based on a theory of the killer's identity.
  • Fate/Apocrypha features Jack the Ripper as the Servant Assassin of Black, whose Master is a prostitute. This Jack is also a skimpily-dressed little girl◊. Her original summoner acquired her original knives, stabbed the prostitute with them, and used them as the catalyst to summon her, but she kills him, reclaims the knives, and makes a contract with the prostitute. This interpretation goes by the explanation that she was a wraith, an evil spirit born from the resentment of London's prostitute's aborted children, who cut up women because she is obsessed with returning to the womb and was looking for the right woman to be her mother. The killings stopped because a Magus figured out what she was doing and exorcised her. She has two Noble Phantasms. One is "The Mist: Darkened Misty Metropolis", which allows her to recreate the conditions of her murders by shrouding the field with the polluted fog of coal smoke and sulfuric acid common during her time. The fog is fatal to ordinary people; Magi and enemy Servants continuously take damage and it makes them constantly go in circles no matter how they try to escape. Another is "Maria the Ripper: The Holy Mother of Dismemberment", which makes it so if her target is female, it is night time, and foggy, then one hit from her knives will instantly eviscerate her target from the inside out. She also has the Skill Information Erasure, which causes everyone to automatically forget what she looks like as soon as she leaves an area, which represents how she was never identified in life.
  • Fate/strange Fake features Jack the Ripper as the Servant False Berserker. Rather than a physical manifestation of an interpretation of Jack's identity, this Jack is instead an incarnation of the Ripper legend itself. Because of this, he has no true form (and at one point even briefly shifts into the form of Apocrypha's Assassin) and no idea who the real Jack the Ripper was. He'd like to find out though. He later clarifies that while he can freely shape-shift into people, he can only shape-shift into items associated with the Ripper legend. For example, he can turn into a watch based on a legend that Jack the Ripper was possessed by a cursed watch, but he can't turn into a flag because no Ripper legends involve flags. Also, he's completely calm and rational despite being summoned as a Berserker... or maybe it's because he was summoned as a Berserker, so he ironically becomes a Cloudcuckoolander's Minder to his bizarre Master Flat Escardos. He also has two Noble Phantasms. One is "Natural Born Killers: Thou Art Unworthy of a Tragic Demise", which is based on the theory that Jack the Ripper was really a group of people. It allows him to make copies of himself, limited only by his supply of energy. With his current Master, he is able to make 520 copies. His other Noble Phantasm is "From Hell: The Evil Mist Will Perish With London's Daybreak", which is based on the theory that Jack the Ripper was really a demon. It allows him to transform into a demon whose strength is increased by the fear and unease of anyone in a 5 km radius. He can even use both abilities at the same time, but since the demon form consumes more energy, he can only make 200 copies.
• In the Philip José Farmer's novel A Feast Unknown, Jack the Ripper is the father of the two heroes Lord Grandrith and Doc Caliban (expies of Tarzan and Doc Savage, respectively).
• Jack the Ripper shows up in the 1888 segments of Final Destination: Destination Zero. Turns out he died when Death caused him to be crushed and ground up in the mechanisms of a bridge.
• In "The Gatecrasher" by R. Chetwynd-Hayes, Edward Charlton and his trendy friends hold an impromptu séance - and summon forth the spirit of Jack the Ripper. Saucy Jack soon has total dominion over Edward and together they prowl Soho, picking up working girls to butcher back at the flat off Edgware Road. When the downstairs neighbour grows suspicious that those stains on his ceiling are maybe not the result of spilt red wine after all, its time for the pair to part company. This story was later adapted in a segment of the Anthology Film From Beyond the Grave.
• In Harry Turtledove's short story "Gentlemen of the Shade" a Victorian gentlemen's club of vampires discover a newly turned vampire named Jack who begins killing Whitechapel prostitutes. This brings unwanted attention so the club captured him and imprisoned him in the foundation of the Tower Bridge, then under construction.
• The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray has a character named Stitch-Face. He's a serial killer who has murdered several women, before removing their tongues, eyes and kidneys, and in cases where he's interrupted he kills again shortly after in the same place- although some of the cases are the work of a copycat and part of something darker. Did I mention that this guy aids the protagonist and is ultimately instrumental in stopping the return of the local malevolent evil?
• Stephen Hunter's I, Ripper, told from the point-of-views of both Jack and the intrepid reporter on his trail, who turns out to be Thomas Dare.
• The SF thriller "Jack" by Tess Riley. A shady secret organization gets access to a time machine, which comes in handy as the royal house fears new accusations that the Ripper was one of them. (Unsurprisingly Spoiler:no dead celebs were harmed, but you'll never guess who did it.)
• The short story "Jack's Little Friend" by Ramsey Campbell: a modern day man finds a box with the names and dates of the murders carved in to the back. Inside is a saliva-like substance which is actually a Puppeteer Parasite, turning him into the next Ripper.
• One of the Jakub Wędrowycz stories shows that the protagonist was Jack the Ripper. He accidentally travelled back in time to the nineteenth-century London, and the key to the time machine fell into a bowl of soup in a house inhabited by Time Police androids masquerading as prostitutes, seconds before dinner time.
• Asamatsu Ken's Cthulhu Mythos anthology Kthulhu Reich features one story, "April 20th, 1889", about an occultist hunting for the Ripper. The title is a reference to the date of Adolf Hitler's birth, which it is revealed was brought about by the Ripper performing the blood sacrifice of five prostitutes at the instruction of Nyarlathotep.
• Many novels have Sherlock Holmes going up against the Ripper mystery. One, Michael Dibdin's The Last Sherlock Holmes Story, is notable for the Ripper being Holmes himself, when he's subsumed by his alternate personality, Professor Moriarty.
• The Lodger by Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes has a serial killer called "The Avenger". Although his MO is toned down, the killings and the panicked public reaction are clearly based on the Ripper.
• Terry Moore's Molly and Poo short stories feature the Ripper.
• The Monstrumologist: Dr. John Kearns is actually the Ripper.
• A Night in the Lonesome October by Roger Zelazny features Jack's dog as the main character. In the novel Jack is a magic-user, actually on the side of good and kills to obtain the materials to stop an eldritch armageddon and/or when affected by his curse.
• Brazilian-born comedian Jô Soares wrote O Xangô de Baker Street, where it was implied Jack the Ripper moved to England from Brazil, where he left victims Holmes failed to connect to the killer.
• The Peculiar Mating Habits of Wasps is a story in which Watson notices that Sherlock Holmes has no alibi for the nights of the Ripper murders, and begins to suspect foul play. As evidence mounts, Watson finally follows Sherlock only to find out that Holmes has indeed been behind the slayings and the prostitutes had all been approached by the same client: a man infected by an alien creature which was controlling him, using the prostitutes as incubators for its eggs. Holmes had been following it and killing the larvae, explaining the mutilations. The story ends with the whole affair taken care of, with an obligatory title drop.
• In the President's Vampire series, it's offhandedly mentioned that Jack was a "starchild" created by Aleister Crowley in the same sort of ritual later used by the Order to create the Boogeyman.
• The mystique of the Ripper in fantasy is deconstructed in Roz Kaveney's Rhapsody of Blood Urban Fantasy series. The Ripper turns out to be a rather incompetent and pathetic black magician who is hunted down and executed by one of the heroes as a minor incident in the story, with very little difficulty.
• The Michael Slade novel Ripper describes a series of occult-themed murders in 1990s Vancouver (investigated by Slade's fictional elite task force Special X) which are revealed over the course of the novel to be directly inspired by/copied from the Ripper murders by way of Aleister Crowley, thus advancing an occult-motivated theory of the original crimes (and postulating an identity for the Ripper himself). Note that it doesn't conclusively state who the Ripper was, only who Crowley's followers and the novel's own killers think he was. The "Ripper's Trunk" could've been yet another example of Crowley's theatrics.
• The young adult novel Ripper by Stephan Petrucha is centered around the idea that the reason the killings stopped in London was because Jack relocated to New York. The novel follows the main character as he tries to catch Jack once the killings start again. Jack is revealed to be the detective that the main character has been working with. Oh, and it turns out the main character is Jack's son. At the end, Jack gets away once again.
• Richard Laymon's Savage: From Whitechapel to the Wild West on the Track of Jack the Ripper, where Jack, also known as Roderick Whittle, continues his killing spree in the frontier.
• Jack turns up as the Big Bad of Alex Grecian's Scotland Yard Murder Squad series from the third book onwards. In the series, his crimes stopped because he was captured by the Karstphanomen, a vigilante cult dedicated to catching vicious criminals and making them suffer what their victims did. When he's accidentally freed after years of this torture, he becomes even more ruthless than before.
• In the Secret Histories series by Simon R. Green, Mr. Stab performed several gruesome human sacrifices in Victorian Whitechapel in order to obtain immortality. It worked, but this form of immortality had consequences for which he was not prepared.
• Shadow Police: In The Severed Streets, the team think they are dealing with the spirit of Jack the Ripper, conjured by London's collective memory of him. The truth proves to something more complicated. Quill encounters the real Jack the Ripper while in Hell.
• In Shadowrun: Streets of Blood, the main characters encounter a crazed serial killer who is actually a clone of Jack the Ripper. Over the course of the story the characters solve the mystery of who the original ripper was.
  • That's what the antagonists want them to think. In reality, the Killer's psychosis was the result of severe conditioning. And the people who cloned him had no idea who the real Ripper was, they just cloned the person that would fit into their schemes to discredit the monarchy.
  • Also referenced in the Shadowrun short story "Whitechapel Rose", whose eccentric decker protagonist patterns his online persona on Jack the Ripper.
• Simon Ark: In "The Treasure of Jack the Ripper", Simon is called in by an old friend who is an antiquarian bookseller to authenticate a journal and map which purports to hold the solution to the mystery of Jack the Ripper. Inevitably, this leads to a murder in the present day.
• Sorcerer Conjurer Wizard Witch by Kim Newman has the protagonists of Anno Dracula fighting an evil magician in an alternate history where Count Dracula failed to become ruler of England. As a Mythology Gag, there's a scene where they discuss Jack the Ripper, revealing that in this timeline he was a resentful nobody who committed his crimes in an attempt to become a story that would be remembered forever. As in literally to be transmuted from a flesh-and-blood human into a living legend, surviving in the collective unconscious of humanity. When he succeeded, all evidence of his human life vanished, so the mystery will remain forever a mystery: any attempt at solving it must fail, because any suspect anyone thinks of must necessarily be someone who still exists, and therefore not the real culprit.
• Stalking Jack The Ripper: Exactly What It Says on the Tin. Forensic students Audrey Rose Wadsworth and Thomas Cresswell investigate the Whitechapel murders.
• While not directly related to the Ripper murders, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was published before the spree began, and its role in popular culture developed the image of the Ripper as a gentleman by day and maniac by night. The Ripper himself was also nicknamed "Mr. Hyde" after the character in the story.
• A Study in Terror (see Film above) had a novelisation by Ellery Queen that included Ellery himself as a character in the framing story. The novel also changes the ending and reveals a different character as the Ripper.
• The fourth book of the Sword of Truth series featured a serial murderer of prostitutes very much in Jack the Ripper's style. Except worse; his murders tended to be torture sessions several hours long, with him having enough medical training to keep them alive throughout. And he seems to have had a lot more victims.
• Bertolt Brecht's Author Tract Threepenny Novel identifies the Villain Protagonist Macheath with Jack the Ripper.
• A central character in the later books of Time Scout.
• Gordon Korman's kids' trilogy about the Titanic has the Ripper stowing away aboard the ill-fated ship. He dies after the ship sinks.
• The Warhammer spin-off novel Beasts in Velvet by Jack Yeovil (actually Kim Newman again) features the Warhammer universe's version of the Ripper murders, investigated by the Warhammer universe's version of Dirty Harry. (It's better than it sounds. The solution proposed in the novel has actually been seriously put forward for the Ripper crimes by a couple of writers, although it hasn't been widely taken up.)
• Paul West's novel The Women of Whitechapel and Jack the Ripper focuses on the Ripper's targets.
• "Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper", a short story by Robert Bloch.
  • Bloch later wrote another story about Jack the Ripper, titled "A Toy for Juliette". Harlan Ellison wrote a sequel to that story, "The Prowler in the City at the End of the World". Both stories were first printed in the Dangerous Visions anthology.
  • Bloch also wrote two novels about the Ripper: The Will to Kill (1954) and Night of the Ripper (1984).
• Titanic features him as an antagonist with the main characters discovering that he is a passenger aboard the doomed liner, and that he had to give up killing due to injuries he sustained in a carriage accident.
• Undead Girl Murder Farce: Jack the Ripper gets a Historical Badass Upgrade where he becomes an Oni hybrid all thanks to having the cells from an immortal demon and other monsters, making him deadlier and more dangerous. He is a member of Professor Moriarty's organization called the Banquet, which is composed Aleister Crowley, Frankenstein's monster and Carmilla.
• There is an entire cottage industry built around non-fiction "true crime" books identifying the Ripper. Over 200 such books have been published, and most of them identify wildly different people as the Ripper.
  • One of the more notable was The Diary of Jack the Ripper, supposedly written by one James Maybrick, a middle-class merchant type, and later 'discovered' under some floorboards in the early 1990s. Now largely discredited, it nevertheless caused a huge sensation at the time. (Although Maybrick was a real person, as it happens, who may have been picked for the hoax as he was the victim in another mysterious and controversial Victorian murder case, when his wife Florence was convicted of poisoning him: the prosecution evidence for murder as opposed to suicide or accident was weak and it was believed by her supporters that she had been convicted solely because of her admitted adultery.)

Live-Action TV

• Babylon 5: In the episode "Comes the Inquisitor", the inquisitor Sebastian is revealed to be Jack the Ripper, cryogenically preserved by the Vorlons and revived when needed.^note A typo in the script led to Sheridan saying that Jack the Ripper was active in the West End rather than the East End; unfortunately, as the camera was focused on his face at the time, the subsequent dub to have him say East rather than West was extremely obvious. An earlyish hint that the Vorlons might not be as good as they want the younger races to think, unless they saw it as suitable punishment for the man.
  Sebastian: In the pursuit of my holy cause, I... did things. Terrible things — unspeakable things. The world condemned me... but it didn't matter, because I believed I was right and the world was wrong! I believed I was the divine messenger! I believed I was—
  Sheridan: Chosen?
  Sebastian: I was found by the Vorlons. They showed me the terrible depth of my mistake. My crimes. My presumption. I have done four hundred years of penance in their service; a job for which they said I was ideally suited. Now... perhaps... they will finally let me die.
  Sheridan: I think that might be wise.
  Sebastian: Good luck to you in your holy cause, Captain Sheridan. May your choices have better results than mine. Remembered not as a messenger, remembered not as a reformer, not as a prophet, not as a hero, not even as Sebastian... Remembered only... as Jack.
• In the Cimarron Strip episode "Knife in the Wilderness", written by Harlan Ellison, Jack continues his work across America ending in Cimarron City where he meets his end at the hands of Indians.
• In The Collector, Jack the Ripper turns out to be a woman who sold her soul to the Devil for the power to turn into a man in order to kill without being caught. Specifically, Jack's last victim, Mary Kelly, was the Ripper.
• Criminal Minds, which regularly references real-life serial killers, has made several nods to the Ripper, including an episode centering around a gender-flipped reproduction of the murders carried out by a woman against male victims. There are also plenty of episodes featuring Jack the Ripoffs.
• The Doctor Who episode "A Good Man Goes to War" reveals what put a stop to his killing spree — a Silurian detective named Vastra ate him. Apparently, he was stringy.
• The pilot of NBC's Dracula (2013) offhandedly mentions that the Ripper was a myth. The Order of the Dragon created him to cover up the murders committed by a vampire who'd been stalking the streets of London. They were the ones who sent the letters to the press and even mutilated the corpses so that no one could tell they'd been fed on.
• Elementary: In one episode, Sherlock Holmes claims to have worked out the Ripper's true identity, but he's currently focused on trying to solve the Black Dahlia murder so we don't get to hear his results.
• A Fantasy Island episode, also titled "With Affection, Jack the Ripper", was written by the same writer as the episode of The Sixth Sense, Don Ingalls. Criminologist Lorraine Peters who uses a time portal to confirm her suspicion that Jack the Ripper was a doctor, Albert Fell. Fell follows her back through the portal, grabs Peters and takes her back to 1888, where the enigmatic Mr. Roarke intervenes fortuitously, and Fell dies moments later while fleeing.
• Forever: In "The Frustrating Thing About Psychopaths" a Serial Killer is copying various other famous serial killers, including Jack. Flashbacks show that Henry was the doctor who examined the body of Jack's last victim, Mary Kelly. Adam also claims to have been in London at that time, leading Henry to worry that Adam might be Jack, but in the flashback Henry observes that Jack's hand left a larger than average mark on Mary's neck, and when Henry finally meets Adam in person in "Skinny Dipper" he's a fairly slight man.
• Forever Knight portrayed the Ripper as a vampire who was somehow tainted, even as a human, so LaCroix was unable to finish draining him. He ordered Nick to kill him, but Nick did not, and the man went on to become Jack the Ripper. Later, he traveled around and was responsible for a number of other serial killer cases. He is eventually killed in a fire after attempting to attack Natalie in a car.
• Jack himself never appeared in Friday the 13th: The Series, though a few of his possessions show up as cursed antiques. (A scalpel in "Doctor Jack", and a medical syringe in "Better off Dead")
• In the Get Smart episode "House of Max", Jack the Ripper is an animated wax dummy.
• In Goodnight Sweetheart (a time-travel sitcom in which only certain people can time travel between the 1940s and 1990s by walking up a street in London) at one point Gary walks up it the wrong way from the 1940s and ends up in the 1890s. It emerges that Jack the Ripper was also a time traveller, and simply hid from the police in a different time. His disappearance is explained when he pursues Gary to the 1990s and is promptly run over by a bus.
• On Grimm Jack the Ripper's spirit gets to work in modern Portland by possessing Captain Reynard. Turns out all his victims were Wesen prostitutes, leading to him appearing in the Grimm journals...almost a century earlier in Luxembourg. No one knows when or where his first spree was, but given his London accent and tendency to sing creepy Irish folk songs with Killarney changed to Whitechapel, either that was his most recent, he's originally from there, or it's just his favorite.
• The 1973 series Jack The Ripper linked with the police drama Z Cars. The program featured Z Cars detectives Barlow and Watt investigating the murders from an historical perspective.
• The centenary of the murders in 1988 led to the production of a big-budget CBS/Thames Television International Coproduction Mini Series simply titled Jack The Ripper, starring Michael Caine as Abberline. The series aroused some critical hostility for claiming to be highly historically accurate while actually engaging in heavy Very Loosely Based on a True Story. It fingered Sir William Gull for the killer, but dropped the royal-conspiracy elements to show Gull as simply a spontaneous homicidal maniac, with the conspiracy being solely to cover up his actions after he was caught.
• In the Kolchak: The Night Stalker episode "The Ripper", Jack is an immortal being who has killed (and eaten) women over the centuries for sheer sadism.
• In Legends of Tomorrow, Jack the Ripper is one of the Encores (dead villains brought back to life by Astra) who meet up in "The Great British Fake-Off". Since none of the others know what Jack looks like, John Constantine attempts to take his place. This doesn't go well, and Zari nearly becomes his next victim before he's sent back to Hell.
• The Hitcher in The Mighty Boosh is a Card-carrying Victorian Cockney who boasts about teaching Jack the Ripper everything he knew.
• In the Murdoch Mysteries episode "Snakes and Ladders", Scotland Yard detective Edward Scanlon arrives in Toronto pursuing the serial killer Harland Orgill, who he suspects of being Jack the Ripper. It transpires that "Scanlon" is actually Orgill. Whether he's also the Ripper is unrevealed.
• The short-lived series The Others (2000) had a psychic empath called Mark meet a woman called Mary Jane in their shared dreams, and for the two of them to fall in love over the course of the episode. Then it's discovered that Mary Jane is Mary Jane Kelly, the Ripper's fifth and final victim. Despite a desperate attempt to save her, he fails.
• The Outer Limits (1995): In the Revival episode "Ripper". Although Jack is never the Ripper, he's just framed for it by a body surfing entity due to stumbling upon one of the murders and then trying to unravel the mystery. Double points by having "the Ripper" entity taking over David Warner's character. Warner played Jack the Ripper in Time After Time.
• On Peep Show, Butt-Monkey Mark is offered a chance to give historical tours of London — he does a Ripper Walk with reluctance but eventually gets into character and enjoys it. This being Peep Show, it doesn't last.
• Referenced in Penny Dreadful when Season 1's grisly werewolf killings lead to speculation that the Ripper had resumed his murders. This ends as of Season 2, presumably because the historical Jack, however evil, never committed any crime on the scale of the Mariners' Inn massacre.
• Psychoville featured Jack as 'the one who was nevered captured' as a part of David's hallucination while in a waxworks museum full of serial killers. Then followed up with a creepy musical number. It's also mentioned in one of the series' websites that one of the patients at Ravenhill Hospital belived himself to be a reincarnation of Jack. Him and David were good friends, and made trump cards of serial killers.
• Ripper Street is set in Whitechapel in 1889, six months after the Ripper murders. The first episode sees detectives from London's H Division battle to solve murders they initially believe may have been committed by the infamous killer, but the conclusion prompts the chief inspector to resolve to move on from the Ripper case and focus on current cases. The seventh and eighth episodes see the department's medical examiner, Captain Homer Jackson, being framed for a new Ripper murder, but the team are able to prove his innocence.
• Sanctuary (2007): Jack the Ripper is given the name John Druitt (after Montague Druitt, one of the real-life leading suspects for the murders), is the villain of the pilot and Sanctuary head Helen Magnus' former fiancée. He later reappears as an ally, minus the insanity that caused him to murder... Maybe. And it was later revealed that the insanity was not, as first thought, caused by brain damage from his teleporting ability, but rather was the result of his body being invaded by a malicious energy creature in a Shout-Out to the below Star Trek episode. His teleportation was what made him vulnerable to the energy creature, so the initial theory wasn't wrong, just incomplete.
• In Sherlock in Russia, Jack the Ripper is suspected by Sherlock Holmes to be Russian which explains the premise of the show: Holmes goes to Russia to look for him after killing his latest victim.
• In the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World's episode "The Knife", the explorers meet the two men blamed for the murders in Stephen Knight's royal conspiracy theory: Sir William Gull and Robert Anderson. The Ripper turns out to be both of them.
• In The Sixth Sense 1972's "With Affection, Jack the Ripper" a man is driven mad during a paranormal experiment when he inhabits the body of Jack the Ripper.
• The Sleepy Hollow episode "Blood and Fear" reveals that the 'Ripper' was essentially the killer's knife, possessed by an evil spirit that compels the wielder to kill. Realising that its previous crime sprees were all halted during a wave of disease, Ichabod Crane and Abbie Mills are able to stop the knife by having Ichabod deliberately infect himself with malaria and confronting the current Ripper directly, allowing them to claim the knife.
• An episode of Sliders has them traveling to a parallel world where people who suffers mental health problems is sent to a Victorian London fictional world with actors so they can relax thinking they live in more simple times. Arturo is sent there and impersonates Sherlock Holmes. Problem is, someone is really killing prostitutes (actually actresses) Ripper-style.
• In the Smallville episode "Cure", when the immortal Curtis Knox attempts to dissect Chloe for the concentration of Kryptonite near her heart, she calls him a "Jack the Ripper wannabe". Knox nonchalantly responds, "I was Jack the Ripper." It's also heavily implied that his true identity is Vandal Savage.
• One sketch on Snuff Box has Matt Berry giving Jack The Ripper tours of London, but then abandoning a tour group mid-speech. Rich Fulcher steps up to finish the tour, but is comically ignorant about the history, ultimately claiming James Bond as the true culprit.
• Special Unit 2 — Jack turns out to be an ogre, but one entirely unlike Shrek.
• Star Trek: The Original Series: The episode "Wolf in the Fold" postulates that the Ripper was (and is and will be) actually an immortal Energy Being that feeds on the biological signatures of human fear (especially fear from women) called Redjac. Adapted by Robert Bloch from his short story, noted above.
• In "A Rip in Time", the first episode of Timecop, a timetravelling cop travels back to 1888 to catch a criminal who has killed, and displaced, Jack the Ripper.
• In an episode of The Twilight Zone (1959) from 1963 entitled "The New Exhibit", Martin Balsam plays the curator of a wax museum who becomes so obsessed by five wax figures of murderers, including Jack the Ripper, that he commits murder to protect them.
• Parodied by The Two Ronnies in their The Phantom Raspberry Blower Of Old London Town series of sketches, written by Spike Milligan (as you can immediately tell from the Goon-esque title).
• The Veil episode "Jack the Ripper" (1958) is a made-for-television film introduced by Boris Karloff, in which a clairvoyant identifies the Ripper as a respectable surgeon whose death has been faked to cover his incarceration in a lunatic asylum.
• Laszlo Cravensworth from What We Do in the Shadows (2019) was Jack the Ripper, a fact he mentions casually.
• A 2009 ITV drama called Whitechapel (TV Series) has someone re-creating the Ripper murders in 2008 London. More or less, as location filming problems and the changing geography of the city (most of the relevant streets have now gone in slum clearances) has meant some murders have moved location slightly, something noted by the characters. The first episode does have someone stabbed 39 times in line with the Martha Tabram murder (one of the non-canonical ones before the five), but survives when the one aimed for her heart glances off a rib.
  • For extra points, many of the characters have very similar names to the real life figures- although the lead detective's first name is changed as it was the same as a serving police officer, which is not allowed.
• Wynonna Earp: Just before Wynonna sends him back to Hell, the revenant who calls himself Jack of Knives claims that he was the Ripper when he was human. While this is treated with skepticism in-universe, his MO certainly matches that of the other Jack.

Music

• Nick Cave did a song entitled "Jack The Ripper", which, ironically enough, is not a Murder Ballad. The protagonist is in a relationship with an abusive woman who, among other things, accuses him of being a sex maniac like Jack whenever he makes advances to her.
• Jack the Ripper "sits at the head of the Chamber of Commerce" in Bob Dylan's surreal stream-of-consciousness song "Tombstone Blues".
• Swedish Power Metal band, Falconer, features the song, "Jack The Knife" about dear ol' Jack.
• Iced Earth song "Jack" was inspired by Jack the Ripper.
• "The Ripper" by Judas Priest
• Oddly enough, one without saying Jack The Ripper, Lordi's Blood Red Sandman, in which, Mr. Lordi claims to be Jack The Ripper by the way of using an alternative press nickname from the time, The Leather Apron.
• Macabre's "Jack The Ripper" is sung from the perspective of one of infamous letters.
• Morrissey's "Jack The Ripper."
• Motörhead
  • The song "Jack the Ripper" (from the album March ör Die) is about him coming back, hiding behind various disguises and one night appearing beside you in the night to claim your life.
  • Jack is alluded to in one verse of "Red Raw" (from the album Inferno), which is about crazy killers in general.
  Monster in the gaslight, shivers in the cold, looking for a bad girl
• "jack-the-ripper◆" by sasakure.UK
• "Jack The Ripper" was the Signature Song of UK Shock Rock pioneer Screaming Lord Sutch (actually a Cover Version of an obscure novelty song by American singer Clarence Stacy).^note Stacy's song was something of a Filk Song for the 1959 British Jack the Ripper film, using the line "Is your name Mary Clark?" as a refrain, since Jack is shown in the movie saying that to his victims It's since been recorded by many other artists, including the Gruesomes, The White Stripes, the Fuzztones, and The Horrors.
• Sigh's "In the Mind of a Lunatic"
• Thin Lizzy's "Killer on the Loose" makes many references to Jack the Ripper.
• The Belgian Progressive Rock band Univers Zero's "Jack the Ripper" is a particularly terrifying song, despite being all instrumental.
• Vernian Process: The Curse of Whitechapel.
• There is a deathcore band called Whitechapel (Band), named in reference to the area in which the murders were carried out. Their first album, The Somatic Defilement, is a Concept Album based on Jack the Ripper and their murders.

Radio

• I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again did a sketch retelling the story of Jack the Ripper with Jack as a mysterious figure who rampaged around London ripping people's underwear off. They performed a revised version for their 25th anniversary show.
  Sergeant: We've got to stop him sir, the people are losing patience- and their knickers!
• In the third episode of TAPS Para-radio, hosts Jason Hawes and Grant Wilson of Ghost Hunters fame made light of the fact that one of the suspected Jack the Rippers, Aaron Kosminski, was a hairdresser.

Tabletop Games

• The Dracula Dossier gives the GM the option of bringing Jack into the campaign (Stoker himself included the Ripper killings as part of the Icelandic edition of Dracula). One of the ways to kill him is listed as "being beamed into interstellar space to dissipate".
• In the Dungeons & Dragons campaign setting Ravenloft, the darklord Malken was an amalgam of Jack the Ripper and Mister Hyde: A serial killer who was the evil alter ego of Nova Vaasa's good-hearted ruler, Sir Tristen Hiregaard.
  • There is also a monster in the extraneous source book Cityscape, that is called a Ripper. Although it isn't human it is an obvious reference due to its ability to hide among humanity and serial killer nature.
  • Another domain, Paridon (a not-quite Victorian London setting— no gaslights and almost no firearms) has its very own Ripper, "Bloody Jack," who kills every 13 years. It's actually a series of non-human killers harvesting... something... for the domain's darklord.
  • And the domain of Invidia (at least in 2nd Edition) had the Midnight Slasher stalking the streets killing women who was actually female herself. The domain's then-darklord had an affair with her father, driving him to kill his wife and then himself. As a final act, the darklord then kissed the child (who had witnessed the deaths) on the forehead, driving her into madness and pathological hatred.
  • One of the included adventures in the Masque of the Red Death setting had the heroes investigating the actual Ripper murders (on a more supernatural version of Earth). The killer turned out to be the deranged spirit of a doctor's dead wife possessing the bodies of homeless men.
• Hunter: The Vigil has it that Jack the Ripper stopped killing (in a manner the public would notice) because he became a member of The Ashwood Abbey, who felt they could direct his darker impulses in more constructive directions (or rather, destruction directed towards the supernatural). This proved ineffective, as he repeatedly relapsed into killing innocents, though the Abbey tried to cover it up. They finally decided to do away with him, since even depraved, hedonistic, wealthy thrill-seekers have standards. They gave him the concession of not eating him, something he apparently did.
  • Death wasn't the end of Jack, though. When he died, he spawned a spirit of murder incarnate, who still stalks Britain to this day.
  • The folks at The Wraith Project made his knife into a Dark Artifact.
• The default Mutants & Masterminds campaign setting has Jack-a-Knives, a Jack the Ripper interpretation as a possessing spirit.
• Savage Worlds campaign setting "Rippers" features the Big Bad "Jack" who was one of the first Rippers. The Rippers get their name from their habit of ripping parts from monsters and implanting them into themselves . By the game's time, Jack is so deformed that he needs to rip human parts in order to survive.

Theater

• In a case of art imitating life, one of the possible suspects for the Ripper was Richard Mansfield, whose claim to fame began with a stage production of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. His performance was so good that people began to suspect it wasn't an act, and to dispel the rumors he did comedies for a while.
• Jill The Ripper is a play based around the theory that Jack The Ripper was a woman.
• In the Mrs. Hawking series, part VI: Fallen Women has the protagonist Mrs. Hawking hunt down Jack the Ripper.
• Frank Wedekind's play Pandoras Box has the protagonist Lulu finally dying as an East End prostitute, murdered by Jack, as described in the film section above.
• "Mack the Knife", originating in The Threepenny Opera, with later well-known renditions by Louis Armstrong, Bobby Darin, and Ella Fitzgerald in 1956, 1958 and 1960, with victim Louie Miller mysteriously vanishing after withdrawing his savings, and ladies Jenny Diver, Sukey Tawdry, Lotte Lenya and Lucy Brown forming a line as soon as "Mackie" Macheath is back in town.

Theme Parks & Attractions

• The London Dungeon, being about the horror history of London, naturally features Jack the Ripper.

Video Games

• When the time-set in Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs is 1899, aka Victorian London, in the streets of The Ripper's old haunts (such as Bucks Row and Hansbury Street), it's essentially expected for him to be mentioned, which he is in the protagonist's journals. It's also said that the professor who visits him performed autopsies on his female victims, as well as the strong hint that Mandus experimented on him or made him one of his manpigs. However, he's only briefly mentioned, and is practically irrelevant to the story itself.
  I am to have a visitor, the distinguished Professor A. He is come to ascertain my mental well-being after my prolonged absence from the club. But I am not stupid. He is here to spy for them. When they stalked The Ripper, he was often called to pontificate upon lacerations and missing organs. And now he comes to me, to doff and wheedle and 'my dear sir' and 'but you must still grieve' and 'perhaps just a quick look at your engines, the triumph of the age'. He knows nothing of loss, nothing of sacrifice. But to refuse? That would simply poke the hornet's nest, invite a swarm of interlopers and thieves. I must entertain this buffoon and submit to his intrusion. Perhaps I should show him the tripery. See whether his stomach, so trained by rummaging in the innards of clumsily vivisected whores, is strong enough to stare into the real engines of his golden age. I may even introduce him to Jack, or his sons at least. We have stronger locks on the windows now, and we bring their toys to them.
• Arcanum has the 'Whytechurch Murderer', who prowls the streets of Caladon's Whytechurch district butchering prostitutes. The killer shares his body with a powerful demon, and is forced to murder for the demon's amusement.
• Assassin's Creed Syndicate, the 2015 game set in Victorian London has a Story DLC titled "Jack the Ripper", dealing with the fallout of his crimes in which it's revealed that Jack the Ripper was a rogue Assassin who took over the London cell and was attempting to enforce the Brotherhood through fear and chaos. After the events of the DLC, all evidence of his identity was destroyed to prevent compromising the Brotherhood any further.
  • Before that, Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood featured an Expy, Malfatto, a corrupt doctor who is basically Italian Renaissance Jack The Ripper.
• Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow features an enemy called "Ripper", a recolor of the already annoying Fleaman who is turned into an actual threat by his troublesome habit of hurling knives.
• In City of Heroes, a set of bones in the Atlas Park MAGI office are noted to have been housed in the British Museum during the Jack the Ripper killings, which stopped after the bones were placed under MAGI's care in Paragon City.
• Criminal Case: Mysteries of the Past has the Scarlet Slayer, an Expy of Jack the Ripper who has been murdering prostitutes in Sinner's End and serves as the main antagonist of said district.
• Disgaea: Hour of Darkness features a monster class named Lantern, a scarecrow with a few special attacks with "Jack" in their name, including "Jack The Ripper". The fourth tier is even named "Jack".
• Jack the Ripper appears in the Nintendo 64 game Duke Nukem Zero Hour as a boss during the 1800s London levels. However, he's treated as a throwaway boss character and nothing more. Still, the game shows that Jack was stopped by a time-traveling Duke Nukem.
• Fallen London has "Jack-of-Smiles" an obvious Expy of Jack the Ripper, although Jack-of-Smiles is rather more supernatural, being as he can Body Surf. Every so often, someone commits a Jack murder or two and is either killed or detained. The player may investigate this, and eventually discover that Jack is the knives. Knives made in a specific workshop in Polythreme occasionally possess people holding them, turning them into Jacks, at least until they drop the knife. The player is then given the choice of destroying the workshop, ending Jack forever or learning the truth of who created it: The Masters, naturally, as part of a failed experiment that they'd prefer ended but were too lazy to deal with. The player may also (if they pay Fate) temporarily BECOME Jack.
• Fallout 3 contains chainsaw swords called Rippers, and one of them is a unique model called Jack.
• One of the cases in Floor 13 features young women being gruesomely murdered in the docklands area and a member of the Royal Family as a prime suspect.
• In Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, a Chocolate Frog reveals that Jack the Ripper was actually a vampire named Herbert Varney and he was slain in early 1889 after a specially-trained Ministry task-force was sent after him.
• In the 8-bit era, a Text Adventure called simply Jack The Ripper was released for the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, and Amstrad CPC. It was the first game ever in the UK to be rated "18" by the British Board of Film Classification, due to its graphic murder scene images. The Ripper is working for supernatural entities wanting to bring about the decay and destruction of the world, but is stopped just in time by the protagonist.
• The 2003 adventure game Jack the Ripper had the Ripper travel to New York after leaving London in 1888, and the game picks up thirteen years later in 1901. The player takes on the role of a New York reporter who discovers that a recent string of murders share the same MO as the original murders and inadvertently comes face to face with the killer himself.
• Master of Darkness features Jack the Ripper as the first level boss fought beside the River Thames, and is revealed to be under the control of Count Massen, channeling the powers of Dracula.
• MediEvil 2 has a boss named "The Ripper" who runs around 1800s Whitechapel and kills prostitutes. You do the math. He kills Sir Dan's love interest, leading Dan into a 10-Minute Retirement... until he finds a time machine.
• The Metal Gear Solid series has Raiden (birth name Jack), whose skill relies heavily on blades, stealth, and speed. His alias during his past as an unusually skilled child soldier was Jack the Ripper.
  • In Raiden's spin-off game, Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, Sam and Monsoon manage to make Raiden realize that he's been using his self-proclaimed "heroic causes" as an excuse to avoid admitting to himself that he's been killing for the enjoyment of it. Once Raiden accepts his true nature, he is able to enter Ripper Mode, during which his attacks devastate enemy armor and he is able to slice through cuttable enemies without entering Blade Mode. Also he glows red and laughs, psychotically. The Final Boss even greets him by calling him "Saucy Jack".
• The Order: 1886 has Jack as one of the game's main antagonists, a vampire who stalks the city at night so that he can find victims to feed upon.
• Jack from the Dreamcast fighting game, Power Stone, nicknamed "Jack the Slayer" is an insane and psychotic serial killer who takes delight in murdering people with a pair of knives and looting the corpses.
• In 1996, there was a Full Motion Video game called Ripper. Taking place in the future, the killer involved was clearly ripping off Jack in every way except the victims. The new Ripper kills former members of a roleplaying club by way of making them explode from the inside via cyberspace. The culprit is one of four people decided randomly.
• A case of What Could Have Been: A separate project, also called 'Ripper', was once in the works at EA's Visceral Games as a God of War-esque hack and slash but with more emphasis on story. Said story would have you play as Jack (but never definitively identifying him as a real person, merely a man named 'Jack') and kill several people, including his real-life victims. But in a twist, its revealed that nearly all his victims were in fact evil vampires, and only a barely-sane Jack knows the truth. The project was ultimately cancelled due to EA's constant shifting of priorities and members of development team being movied to other projects.
• In RuneScape, a demon named The Ripper is mentioned in the quest "One Piercing Note", in connection with the recent murder of several nuns in a convent. Rippers were implemented as a Slayer monster in November 2015. The murderer at the convent was one of the nuns.
• Shadowman had a plot about a demon called Legion gathering five serial killers and using magic to make them immortal as part of a plan to bring about The End of the World as We Know It. Four of the killers were fictional but the fifth was Jack the Ripper, the game also reveals that Jack killed and dissected the women in the hopes of discovering their souls and the murders stopped after he followed Legion to a hellish afterlife to construct his Evil Tower of Ominousness. In the game he is portrayed as having a cockney accent, and a walking style similar to Mick Jagger's.
• The adventure game by Frogwares, Sherlock Holmes Versus Jack the Ripper. Perhaps notable in that the player character collects evidence that positively identifies one (historical) person as the murderer, but he isn't arrested for it since the real killer was never caught. Many genuine suspects questioned by the police of the day are encountered along the way, and the game's designers incorporate real documents, physical evidence, and maps of the area from the actual Whitechapel investigation into the mystery. The in-game culprit is a vengeful Jewish butcher who'd contracted syphilis from a prostitute and passed it on to his family, leaving one of his sons disfigured. Rather than report him to the police and risk kicking off huge anti-Semitic riots, Holmes arranges for the Jewish community to quietly apprehend the man and keep him imprisoned until the disease finishes him off.
• The Shin Megami Tensei series features a super-deformed Jack the Ripper as a semi-recurring Demon of the Foul race, and he is the third of the "Jack Brothers" alongside Jack Frost and Jack o' Lantern. His most notable appearance is in the Virtual Boy spin-off Jack Bros, where he, his brothers and a Pixie are the only playable chaacters.
• In the computer game adaptation of Space 1889, you may encounter (and fight) Jack the Ripper while exploring London.
• In Splatterhouse, Dr. Henry West became the mysterious Jack the Ripper after a series of murders he committed, as he claimed to be "bored" while in London.
• In a backstory blog for Star Trek Online, it's revealed that Jack the Ripper is actually an alien entity that possesses people and had stopped by Earth temporarily for a few murders. The intervention of both the Na'khul and members of the 29th century Starfleet would force it to go off-planet once more.
• Sakuya Izayoi, of the Touhou Project series has a spellcard in Touhou Youyoumu ~ Perfect Cherry Blossom and Touhou Eiyashou ~ Imperishable Night called "Jack the Ripper." Appropriate, considering her attacks consist of throwing thousands upon thousands of knives at enemies. Her other spellcards in her boss appearance also have a "serial killer" theme, being called "Another Murder" or "Killer Doll".
  • When she's not making references with them. Illusion World [The World] anyone?
• A Vampyre Story mentions a "Jack the Gimper"-there's even an autographed photograph in the protagonist's bedroom. It's implied that you'll have to deal with him in the sequel.
• In the Adventure Game Waxworks (1992), one of the scenarios has Jack the Ripper as the protagonist's demon-possessed twin brother. Your job is to hunt him down and kill him without getting caught by a lynch mob or the police.
• In We Happy Few, the legend of Jack the Ripper has been turned by Wellington Wells into a boogeyman for children, known as "Foggy Jack"; it's said that if you go out into the fog at night after curfew, he'll "take" you and you'll never be seen again. A list of victims found at the "O" Courant makes the connection explicit, as the listed names match those of the Ripper's.
• In the Knight's Court area of Marleybone in Wizard101, a (literal) cat burglar known as Jacques the Scratcher has been attacking and robbing (or "scratching" as they call it) local women, and Scotland Yard requests your help in tracking him down.
• In World Heroes 2 Jet and Perfect, there's one character simply called "Jack". The game's based around Time Travel, so of course it's the Jack. He uses Freddy Krueger-esque claws and foot-mounted knives to battle, has a red mohawk, and tends to get a bit... messy. His intro pose shows him in Victorian-era garb, which he shreds.

Visual Novels

• In Van Helsing's route of Code:Realize, Jack the Ripper is identified as a man named Jack Blackman and has been apprehended once, but escaped from custody and set up shop in the sewers, wearing a harlequin mask to hide his face as he stalks and butchers women. Jack was one of the subjects of Hidden Strength, a program which tried to create Super Soldiers by torturing them physically and emotionally until their minds broke and unlocked Power Born of Madness; unfortunately, the process also left them uncontrollably deranged. Jack's insane ramblings suggest that he focuses his homicidal impulses on women he sees as "impure" because his mother abused him when he was a child and Hidden Strength has irrevocably locked him into that trauma.

Webcomics

• The main antagonist of Mayonaka Densha possibly.
• In this comic (the third one on the page) by Warren Ellis, Saucy Jack finally reveals his identity (Note: this version does not avert Murderers Are Rapists.)
• Zatanna & the Ripper has Jack the Ripper as the main antagonist who superheroine Zatanna must capture in order to return to the present day after she is Trapped in the Past.

Web Original

• Epic Rap Battles of History has Jack the Ripper (played by nerdcore rapper Dan Bull) battling against Hannibal Lecter (played by series co-creator Epic Lloyd).
• Everyman HYBRID gives us the villainous HABIT, an entity capable of Demonic Possession. He boasts a rather long Historical Rap Sheet, which includes being Jack the Ripper. A bit of (perhaps unintended) Fridge Brilliance arises from this: Jack the Ripper was never caught because HABIT possessed a different person for each kill.
• During the second episode of the High Priestess mini-arc of Vaguely Recalling JoJo, Jack the Ripper does a filk song based on the Japanese 24 commercials.

Western Animation

• The Batman: The Brave and the Bold episode "Trials of the Demon!" was apparently based on the Ripper murders (made Lighter and Softer so as to be allowed in such a show) with the Ripper replaced with the Gentleman Ghost and the murders substituted with reversible "soul stealing". The story had Batman in his Gotham By Gaslight costume, and Whitechapel is actually mentioned. Sherlock Holmes gets thrown in for good measure.
• In the time travel episode of Celebrity Deathmatch, Johnny and Nick witnessed Sherlock Holmes fight Jack the Ripper. In the episode, Jack is portrayed as an Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain who can't seem to hit who he's aiming at, while Holmes is portrayed as an Idiot Hero who is oblivious to what's going on. Sherlock Holmes won (accidently), only after Jack murdered Watson.
• Clone High: One of the new clones introduced in the revival, where it's revealed their real identity was actually a large, glamorous Black woman (an Ink-Suit Actor for her voice actress Jackée Harry). Due to the circumstances of the show, she's friends with fellow historical villains Christopher Columbus, Ivan the Terrible, Lizzie Borden, and Vlad the Impaler.
• The DuckTales (1987) episode "Dr Jekyll and Mr McDuck" featured a mysterious London criminal known as Jack the Tripper.
• In Family Guy, Quagmire, somewhat unsurprisingly, was Jack the Ripper in a past life.
• Freaky Stories: The final episode, set in Victorian London during Christmastime, features his killings as a backdrop, leading the staff of an inn to suspect their latest guest (a large bearded man with a list of names) of being him. It's actually Santa Claus... or so they believe until they discover the real Santa tied up in a closet. "Merry Christmas and to all a good night!", indeed Jack.
• Jack the Ripper shows up briefly in Futurama when the virtual reality program Kif and Amy are in malfunctions.
• In a Reddit AMA with Bill Cipher, Bill mentions Jack the Ripper liked wearing clown masks and apparently had some contact with the triangular dream demon.
• In The Simpsons episode "Eternal Moonshine of the Simpson Mind", Chief Wiggum asks sarcastically to a fleeing Homer, "Well then, if you know everything, who was Jack the Ripper?" to which Homer replies "The Queen's private surgeon". Chief Wiggum has only one response, "Wow."
• Had Spider-Man: The Animated Series been renewed for a sixth season, there would've been a story arc in which Carnage would be sent to Victorian London through a dimensional wormhole and would commit the Ripper murders (Offscreen, obviously.)
• In Total Drama World Tour, Chris hires Jack the Ripper for a challenge in which the contestants have to catch him to win. It's really Ezekiel in a costume.
• On the X-Men: The Animated Series episode "Descent", a man implied to be the Ripper showed up in the employ of Nathaniel Essex, he who would become Mr. Sinister. Additionally, Sinister refers to him as "Jack" and also takes credit for giving him life.

Real Life

• In February 2010, in the Dutch city of Lelystad, a serial stabber was nicknamed "Jack de Prikker" (Jack the Stabber) by Dutch media.
• Serial killer Jack the Stripper was named after the original.
• A number of other serial killers have been known as "...Ripper" in reference to Jack, most notoriously Peter Sutcliffe, the "Yorkshire Ripper" of the 1970s.
• Jackson Pollock's paintings earned him the sardonic nickname "Jack the Dripper."
• German Serial Killer Peter Kürten was originally dubbed "The Düsseldorf Ripper". After the revelation that he sometimes drank his victims' blood, he became better known as "The Vampire of Düsseldorf".
• The Other Wiki devotes a whole article to the nearly 30 individuals who have been seriously proposed as suspects for the Whitechapel murders, with varying degrees of plausibility. Apparently it might be anyone from a vast conspiracy to... Lewis Carroll.

---

Just like Jack the Ripper, just like mojo hand...

---