Worsley, True Crime and Jack the Ripper

A few days ago I watched an interesting documentary in which Lucy Worsley investigated Jack the Ripper, but rather than look at the crimes, motivation, and identifying who the criminal was she took a “media and society” perspective focused on the genre of true crime journalism.

Within the documentary and podcast genre there are people that like to investigate and study crimes from the past, explore them in depth, and then discuss them at length.

In this episode of Lucy Worsley Investigates she takes a look at the emergence of a more scientific approach to investigating crime, and, at the same time, at the emergence of a more detail oriented form of journalism to feed the newspapers of the time.

We can’t help but think about whether worse crimes were committed before hand, but because journalism was less advanced the news was forgotten by time. If Jack the Ripper, and newspaper journalism were both growing at the same time then it makes sense that Jack the Ripper was so prominent within the lore of the time, right into the modern day.

Through journalism drawings were prepared, to illustrate articles, detailed descriptions of what was done to the women was provided to the public, with little censorship.

“She uncovers a story which goes beyond a single murderer and his five victims – Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine and Mary-Jane - to a burgeoning newspaper industry desperate for readers and a Victorian society that wasn’t designed to support the most vulnerable.

Lucy explores how this unsolved case fuelled a new sensationalist journalism, which set a template for many of the true crime stories that followed.” from the BBC programme’s page.

I bring up this specific episode because we don’t often get a “media and society” approach to True Crime documentaries so it provides us with an interesting change of perspective that is interesting to fans of the genre, whether in podcast, book, or video.