The most famous serial killer in history.   A sadistic stalker of seedy Victorian backstreets.  A master criminal.  The man who got away with murder – over and over again.  But while literally hundreds of books have been published, trying to pin Jack’s crimes on an endless list of suspects, no-one has considered the much more likely explanation for Jack getting away with it.  He never existed.

This investigation goes in search of the real story of Jack the Ripper – and this story isn’t set in the brothels of the East End but in the boardrooms of Fleet Street. This is a tale of hysteria whipped up by competing tabloid editors and publishers.  The central thesis is that Jack the Ripper was the invention of tabloid journalists, and reveals exactly who was responsible.

The key evidence for the existence of the Ripper – a serial killer allegedly responsible for at least five bestial murders – comes in the form of three letters to the Central News Agency, from a man who identified himself as the killer and called himself “Jack”.  These letters can now be plausibly traced back to shadowy tabloid journalists – not intent on solving the crime, but on boosting their careers and their paper’s sales.  The effect of these poison pen letters, combined with the gruesome crimes was to give the tabloid media its first hate figure and to boost the circulations of ailing newspapers.  The media had discovered the power of a national witch-hunt.