Tom Holland

Well, I mean, it's fair to say that the police files, you know, they remain open.

They're still open.

And of course, the ambition of people to solve the murders, to put it mildly, has never abated.

And I think that in 2025, as in 1888, Jack the Ripper is this kind of nightmarish figure of legend still, kind of stalking people's fantasies and fears.

But he also remains, you know, a standing temptation to amateur detectives to play Holmes and finally crack the case.

Yeah.

And I think there's one final explanation.

He is the first modern serial killer.

Presumably there must have been figures like him before, but they just weren't recognized as such.

And it's telling, I think, that even in the Sherlock Holmes stories, he's operating as

In a world where crimes are readily explicable, where there are discrete clues which you investigate and you find and you put them together and they reveal to you the motivation of the murderer and then you go and arrest the murderer.

And this is how crime had been understood basically forever.

So all the penny dreadfuls, you know, there are women being murdered by their jealous lovers in red barns and things like that.

Or there are highwaymen who are holding people up or footpaths or whatever.

you know, sexual jealousy or greed or whatever.

These are explicable motivations.

The thing that people find so frightening about Jack the Ripper is there seems no motive to the crimes.

And the police struggle with this.

The press struggle with this.

The general public struggle with this.