Jack the Ripper doesn’t scare me because he was brutal.
Plenty of men have been brutal. He scares me because he erased himself so completely that we’re still tripping over his shadow more than a century later. He didn’t just kill people — he vanished inside what he did and let the world rot trying to name him.
Whitechapel was already a graveyard before he showed up. Poverty, filth, overcrowding, women surviving however they could. And that’s the part that makes my stomach knot — his victims weren’t just women, they were disposable in the eyes of society. Poor. Vulnerable. Sex workers. People the world had already decided not to protect. Jack didn’t create that cruelty; he exploited it like it was an open door.
He killed fast. Efficiently. Like someone who knew exactly what he was doing and exactly how long he had to do it. The murders were intimate in the worst possible way — close, personal, deliberate. Not rage-fueled chaos. Precision. Control. A man who wasn’t just taking life, but asserting dominance over bodies no one else seemed to care about. And the fact that he did it in public streets without being caught feels less like genius and more like indictment.
Then came the letters.
And everything got worse.
Whether he wrote them or not almost doesn’t matter anymore. They worked. “Dear Boss.” Mocking. Playful. Confident. The kind of tone that makes your blood run cold because it sounds entertained. He turned murder into performance, taunted the police, joked about escalation, promised more. Fear stopped being local and went national. Jack didn’t just haunt Whitechapel — he haunted imagination.
What really fucks with me is how quickly he became myth. Suspects stacked up like trading cards — doctors, butchers, artists, royalty. Everyone wanted him to be someone important, someone fascinating, someone worth the attention. Meanwhile, the women he killed were flattened into footnotes, remembered more for how they died than who they were. That imbalance is part of the violence. Always has been.
And then he just… stopped.
No arrest.
No confession.
No body.
No ending.
One day the murders happened, and then one day they didn’t. Jack the Ripper didn’t get caught. He didn’t get punished. He didn’t even get confirmed. He dissolved into fog and theories and books and documentaries and people arguing online like he’s a riddle instead of a man who butchered women and walked away.
That’s the real horror. Not the knife. Not the blood. But the silence after. The unanswered question hanging there like a bad smell that never goes away. Jack the Ripper proved something deeply unsettling: if the victims are invisible enough, a killer doesn’t even have to be clever to escape. He just has to wait.
We still want to solve him. Still want to name him. Still want to believe there’s a final truth waiting to be uncovered. But maybe the truth is uglier than any reveal. Maybe Jack the Ripper wasn’t special. Maybe he wasn’t brilliant. Maybe he was just a man who understood how little women like that mattered to the world around him.
And that thought is way more terrifying than any identity we could pin on him.