The Truth in Urban Legends // EmmaJane McBride

As part of our guest edited month "My Dark Places," Emma Jane McBride examines our infatuation with true crime and its intersections with urban legends.

Jack the Ripper is one of the most popular true crime stories. So much so that Jack has become familiar to us: we think of an aesthetic of unsmiling black-and-white antique photographs, greasy streets of London’s Whitechapel, and a tattered black coat clinging to a figure who slinks away from his latest victim. A grisly body lies in a back alley for someone to find in the small hours of the morning. Jack the Ripper is a Victorian murder-mystery. An uncaught killer.

Not only is Jack the Ripper one of the most famous true crime stories, but he is also one of the most famous unsolved crimes. He is uncaught, unknown, and given how much time has passed from then and now, he will most likely remain this way.

And here is where the road diverges: Is the story we tell of Jack theRipper an account of true crimes, or an urban legend of collective fear and imagination?

Jack The Ripper’s first speculated victim was found at 3:40 in the morning on the 31st of August in 1888. Her name was Mary Ann Nichols.The next victim was found on the 8th of September, named AnnieChapman and nicknamed Dark Annie by friends for her dark hair.Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes were killed within hours of each other on the 30th of September. The last speculated victim wasMary Jane Kelly, who was born in Ireland and died in Miller’s Courton the 9th of November. The four-month stint of the Ripper’s crimes was a period of intense scrutiny, panic, and attentiveness. The unsolved open case became a pointed finger at the incompetence of the police and showcased the neglect that the poorer classes faced from the government.

The collective trauma and lingering fear of the unsolved serial murders drove home a lasting impression. The domestic and international presses created a contemporary sensation. The locals, stuck with a bitter metallic taste in every remembrance of Jack the Ripper, might have minted a new legend from the murders. And so, the facts of the crime tip into the urban legend tripping of a grieved public, a collective coping mechanism.

It was understandable as to why they did it. Newspapers and gossip both travel well and quickly. When one informs the other, facts mutate into wild claims. Imagination, it seems, invites imagination.Breaking news stories drive home realities, especially ones that happen a few neighbourhoods over. They hit too close to home. Urban legends, on the other hand, happen everywhere and nowhere. Theirs isa sleeping mythos, sprawling yet invisible, and oh-so easily awakened. As long as we are careful not to summon them, they will stay away from us. As long as the photographic proof of Bigfoot orUFOs or whatever boogeyman there is remains just too grainy, we will keep searching for valid proof.

There is ample time and distance separating us from the Londoners of theRipper’s era, but we’re still doing the same urban legend hunting and tripping. This time it’s over computers, rather than campfires and newsprint. It’s different unsolved cases, such as Jon Benet Ramsey or the Zodiac Killer—or cases that don’t even prove to be real at all, like the Momo Challenge. But we still speak of these cases, these killers, these legends, and in doing so, we keep them alive. As strong as our taste for stories is, our hunger for the truth can be even stronger.We might be fascinated by the mythos of Jack the Ripper, horrifically so, but we still must know that whoever committed the murders was areal, tangible human being.

This desire for truth turns even the least inquisitive of us into detectives. In her memoir MTrain,PattiSmith drawls “yesterday’s poets are today’s detectives.They spend a lifetime sniffing out the hundredth line, wrapping up a case.” In the Ripper’s story, the case itself has never been wrapped up. Neither has the Zodiac’s or Jon Benet Ramsey’s. It’s a tantalizing invitation. Solving a cold case, especially one so infamous, is rife with excitement.

YetI must ask: to what end? What does solving the case do? There’s over a century between today and the first of these gruesome murders of The Ripper. What happens when we know the beginning of the story, rather than its ending? What will happen to the Ramsey family that hasn’t already? Surely the Zodiac, whoever he—or she—or they—were, is dead now. As we slow down and think about what it means to unravel an urban legend, we need to stop and think about finding the truth in a true crime mythos, too. Cui bono? Who benefits?

Justice may be served by solving these cold cases, but that seems to be the obvious answer. These are, first and foremost, criminal cases—a fact people seem to forget at times, especially in online forums. The people who truly gain something would be the families of the victims, their descendants, and perhaps criminology students who could pick apart the case at conferences. But for the general public, why must we be fascinated by the urban myth in order to reach for the truth of it?

There is no one way to write an urban legend down, no way to analyze just one telling of the Ripper mythos, or Zodiac’s, or Black Dahlia’s. The inconsistency of the telling (and re-telling) is just one of the reasons why we continually try to solve it. Investigations occasionally turn up with new evidence, though more often than not they are the barest breaths of wind pushing an old, creaking vessel onwards. Every investigation leads to more people learning about the facts of the story (with varying degrees of accuracy and conjecture). This line of knowledge, this loop of storytelling, creates a cycle. It inspires people to try and solve the mystery. We all think, if someone else can’t solve it, can’t help, maybe I can do it.It is a perpetuation of a grim task. A voluntary one, but grim all the same.

But it is also poetic. It’s about the stories we tell each other in order to survive.

And sometimes it does yield a true result in the midst of all that legend. Sometimes the truth of the crime must walk hand-in-hand with its mythos. This holds not just with the tale of Jack the Ripper, but with any of our spooky stories which have sprung up from the remains of a true crime. These characters that fascinate us so much were real people long before they were urban legends. We can’t all be Michelle McNamara, devoting our lives to capturing the truth about the Golden State Killer or any number of other boogeymen out there, but the urge to try is, seemingly, what makes us human. The urge to try to tell stories in the dark, rather than becoming the dark, is what separates us from the monsters after all.

Emma Jane McBride is a Canadian student who dabbles between academic, fictional, and technical writing, and enjoys finding balancing points between genres. She is currently studying at the University ofWaterloo for English, French, and Technical Writing.