What got you hooked?

[Roy Corduroy]

Charles Van Onselen's The Fox and the Flies got me hook, line and sinker. I had read the Diary back then but it didn't ring a bell.

[Tani]

Well I can remember as soon as my mother said the name "Jack the Ripper" (I think it was my mother!) I was interested. Since she told me briefly about him (since I was just a young kid) I was just fascinated (but so little I knew!) So when I got older I started researching more into it and uncovering more of what he did. The mystery entices me more than any other mystery does, and I think ever since I just heard the name "Jack the Ripper" I was hooked! And I still am a kid I guess...fast approaching...14. (Err...not kidding either)

[Grim]

I only got interested recently after seeing the movie "From Hell" with Jonny Depp.

[Khanada]

When I was six or seven, we lived in Pittsburgh, and my mother and I were standing in the checkout line of a local department store. A little boy about my age or a bit younger was running around shouting and screaming, knocking into displays and people. His parents totally ignored him, and I stood gaping open-mouthed, because I knew that I would have been marched to the car and paddled right there in the parking lot (it was the late 1970's, parents could still do this). The boy slammed into my mother, who was already annoyed and aggravated by his behavior and his parents' lack of action, and I remember the look on her face even now. About this time, an elderly lady in the line in front of us looked at my mother, smiled cheerfully and said one of the worst things she could possibly have given voice to: "Isn't he just the cutest little boy?" My mother's response was one I remember as a 'classic' to this day, one that I still believe should be in Mad Magazine's Snappy Answers To Stupid Questions: "Yes, and so was Jack The Ripper as a child!"

But the thing is, you see... People in my family like to make up stories to tell. One of my mother's absolute classics is what I call The Stonewall Jackson Highway Story. (I think my aunt may still be a little cheesed about that one.) And when I'd be on car trips with my grandfather, he told stories about the lost Indian brave, Falling Rock. Each story began with Falling Rock leaving his village to go on some adventure, and invariably he'd get lost. Sometimes people would catch sight of him, and when they did, they would help his tribe out in their own search for him by marking the spots of their sightings with signs, which are still there to this day. (If you've been to non-flat areas of the US, at least, you've seen them. You know those signs you see along the road, the yellow ones that say FALLING ROCK in big black letters? Every time we'd pass one on a car trip, there was a Falling Rock story -- Grandad started telling them to my mother in the 1950's.)

Because of this, for years, I just assumed that Jack The Ripper was another one of these characters that people in my family made up. (Not all of them had stories as elaborate as old Falling Rock!) So in the mid-1980's, when I was in my early teenage years, a lady my mother worked with gave Mom a bag of old paperbacks that her own older teens had discarded. Since I was the age that her kids had been when they discovered and enjoyed the books, she thought I would like them, too. My two favorites were Stephen King's Christine (which combined my loves of vintage cars, Pittsburgh, and ghost stories), and a nifty little tome called The Book of Lists. Inside the latter, I found a fund of bizarre trivia, including two enlightening lists entitled Ten Possible Jack The Ripper Victims, and Ten Possible Jack The Rippers.

And that's the first time I realised that old Jack, as it happened, wasn't a vague bad boy invented by my mother -- Jack was real, and not only that, but Jack was a much badder boy than I could ever have begun to imagine. The centenary was right around the corner, and it runs like a runway train from there.

The aspect I've come to enjoy the most, lately, is simply reading about everyday life around the time of the Ripper murders.

I'm sorry... That rather got to be story time, didn't it?

[perrymason]

What first sparked my interest was the 100 year anniversary of the crimes, and a general interest in the Late Victorian Period. But after I read my first 2 books, its the belief that at least one of the accepted victims has no place among a Canonical Group that really hooked me. Believing that there is a different victims list to begin with is dangerous and very addictive, because you eliminate even one of the Ripper tally and the rationale you can use for the variances present in other Ripper murders is eliminated.

Meaning.....who would we be looking for if the actual Canonical Group was only the three women that were murdered outdoors almost identically with postmortem abdominal mutilations.. including in 2 cases...the uterus and other organs being taken?

The man that might just cut a throat then be scared off or move indoors for a free-for-all might really be a precise killer with fixed methodologies, fixed objectives, some anatomical knowledge and some considerable knife skills.

Thats why Im hooked...cause if someone finds the right string to pull then the whole thing may someday be unraveled...and be nothing like the urban legend.

Cheers all.

[Barnaby]

Robert Bloch's "Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper." Scared the hell out of me as a child.

[Frank]

I think when I was about 15 years old I watched the Michael Caine mini series and was rather fascinated. Not because of the "solution" but because of the mystery and the atmosphere of the film. But I wasn't hooked then.
Some years later I went to the library and borrowed three books about the topic. One was about the Royal Conspiracy, the second about the diary, the third I cannot remember. None of these could convince me. And I stilled wasn't hooked.
On and off I came back to the topic, while reading John Douglas and similar occasions, and I became interested in serial killers in general.
Some month ago I visited casebook.org and suddenly I was hooked. Since then I try to get more knowledge in the case by reading books, watching documentaries, and visiting casebook.org.

[j.r-ahde]

Hello you all!

Lots of these "how did you get interested?" -threads!

I did read about this case shortly in the 1970s, the press making comparisons with JtR and The Yorkshire Ripper!

At that time; no long-term interest!

In 2004, the legendary murders at Lake Bodom in Finland (those happened in summer of 1960) took a new turn. I followed that case very intesely, and looked a Ripper thread for a change!

That change continues...

All the best
Jukka

[Celesta]

Khanada, That was a great post. My dad was prone to tell such stories, although back in the '50s. "Fallling Rocks!"


When I was a kid, not so much was known about JtR. Even Rumbelow hadn't written his book yet.

[robhouse]

I got interested in the case around 2001. I was reading a lot of non-fiction books at the time... adventure books really... Into Thin Air, books like that. Also I started reading books about maritime disasters. So I read Heart of the Sea, about the wreck of the whaleship Essex. I found I was very interested in the historical aspect of the book, in other words the whaling industry which was based in Nantucket near where I live (Boston MA). And so I started reading history books. But at the same time, I discovered that I was not so much interested in reading broad history books, but rather focusing on a specific event that took place at a specific time and place, and viewing history through that event. The Titanic is a good example of such an event, since reading a book on the titanic disaster is very elucidating about the times... Also books about wars... I read many books on the Civil War, the American Revolutionary War, World War II.

In any case, I had finished reading some book (cant remember what), and I was trying to think of what to read next. I was trying to think of a historical event like this. I remember I was riding the subway in Boston on my way to work, and it just popped in my head... Jack the Ripper. I realized that I knew absolutely nothing about the case. I was not even sure if it was a real story or if it was a myth. I looked on Amazon and tried to determine what was the highest rated book on the subject. I bought Sugden's book, and was hooked. I think it was the mystery that got me the fact that the case is not solved. Also, I was fascinated by the era... Victorian London.

And then ultimately, I didnt accept Sugden's dismissal of Aaron Kozminski as a suspect, so that set me off on my researches.

Rob H

[Lord Lucan]

I became interested in the late 70's when my mother was given a Reader's Digest book on the worlds greatest mysteries. There was a section on unsovled crimes and dissapearances and Jack featured there quite heavily.
It's sparked my interest and it's been so ever since.

[truebluedub]

I had heard of it through a magazine called Ireland's Own which my grandfather purchased and also from watching an episode of Remington Steele but I only really became interested because of the suggestion of Fenian involvement through the Tumblety connection. So it was an ethnocentric interest in an Irish aspect of the case.

Chris Lowe