An attempt to shed some new light on JTR

[Fiver]

One thing that I would say with regards to the world of Ripperology; there's essentially 2 camps of thought.

One group seek to preserve the mystery and myths surrounding the case and tend to stick rigidly to the known "facts."
They're traditionalists who know the case intricately and have spent considerable time and effort maintaining the integrity of the case. They are to be rightly respected and admired for their contribution to the case. This group however tend to not embrace change and can often feel aggrieved by the idea of the boat being rocked. They are rigid in their views and trying to change their minds is virtually an impossible task.

Then we have the other group, who accept nothing, believe noone, and challenge everything. They favour the idea of trying to actually solve the case and bring it to a definitive conclusion; as opposed to keeping the case alive for the sake of it. They are open minded about the case and tend to not commit to following any one given suspect in favour of another. They ask questions, lots of questions, but are sometimes shut down by the other group for trying to bring new ideas and alternative views on the case.

There's not really a right or wrong in terms of which group one tends to favour or fall into automatically, but it does help to have an idea which individuals fit into which group.

This is an inaccurate description.

I haven't seen anyone seeking to "preserve the mystery and myths surrounding the case". The people you lump together as traditionalists disagree wildly on many points - number of victims, level of anatomical knowledge, authenticity of the letters, whether the Ripper has been identified, etc. This is hardly surprising, since period police and doctors disagreed wildly on these points.

The hidebound ones that I have seen are the ones proclaiming with absolute certainty that they have solved the case. At best, this involves selective interpretation of the available information. It typically involves interpreting all events through the lens of assuming guilt. Frequently, it involves ignoring things that undermine the theory. In extreme cases, it involves claiming provably false statements as facts.

I haven't seen any posters "who accept nothing, believe noone, and challenge everything", either. If they truly did that, they would be unable to reach any conclusions. Re-examination of events of the case can be useful, but often these "new" ideas are anything but new, and at times they are clung to with the same commitment as the most fervent suspectologist.

A fair amount of people try to treat the case as a whodunnit. In a whodunnit, we have a clear list of suspects. In the Ripper case, we don't even have a clear list of victims. In a whodunnit, times, especially times of death, are accurate unless deception is involved. In the Ripper case, times are vague, unsynchronized estimates. In a whodunnit, witness contradictions are a clue. In real life, they usually occur due to human perception being fallible. In a whodunnit, anything odd found at or near the scene of the crime is a clue or a red herring. In real life, it may just be a random bit of rubbish.

Trying to solve the Ripper case is like trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle when we don't have a picture on the box. And we don't have all the pieces. And there are pieces of other puzzles in the box. And in some cases, we only have descriptions of pieces that are now missing. And some of those descriptions contradict each other. Rearranging the known puzzle pieces or discovery of new pieces could give us a better view of the puzzle, but they're unlikely to recreate the whole picture.