American Ripper: the History TV series

Note: This is a review and not a debunking. The assertions by the television series about H.H. Holmes have not been verified and are therefore taken for granted.

In 2017, the History television channel aired the eight-episode series American Ripper starring former CIA agent Amaryllis Fox and former lawyer Jeff Mudget who attempt to verify if the American serial killer H.H. Holmes and Jack the Ripper might be the same person. The real name of H.H. Holmes was Herman Webster Mudgett and is in fact Jeff's great-great-grandfather.

The series is undoubtedly well done from a narrative point of view, the two travel between London and the United States and meet many important personalities such as the famous ripperologists Paul Begg and Donald Rumbelow, but despite this the arguments of the two investigators are incredibly weak and are based on an stunning number of conjectures. To support their theory, the two must in fact force themselves into believing that there are traces of the fact that Holmes traveled to the United Kingdom at the time of the Jack the Ripper murders because after the murder of Mary Jane Kelly there were passengers named "H. Holmes" or "Alex Gordon" (one of Holmes's pseudonyms) on a ship from London to New York. The clue, so to speak, is obviously laughable, since they are very common names.

Furthermore, the two to support their hypothesis must endorse the assumption that the letters sent to the press and the police signed Jack the Ripper were sent by the real killer, while today everyone agrees that they were fakes. The worst is reached in the last episode, when Mudgett and Amaryllis Fox take the bait of one of the most popular Jack the Ripper hoaxes, the one according to which there is an existing photo of Elizabeth Stride alive, although today it is widely known that the picture shows another woman.

The series ends with a stalemate at which the authors themselves admit that it is not possible to prove that Holmes and the Ripper are the same person, but they add that it cannot even be concluded that they were not, as if the two statements were equivalent. Nevertheless, Mudgett does not give up and on the credits he says he does not want to abandon his theory and wants to continue investigating it.

In reality the only thing that emerges from the series is that the juxtaposition between the two serial killers is very far-fetched: the two have different modus operandi, the victims are different, and while Holmes often devised ingenious methods to hide the corpses, Jack the Ripper he left them on the street where anyone could see them.

Amaryllis Fox and Jeff Mudgett touch a huge number of topics in their investigative effort, but fail to answer the most obvious questions: like why H.H. Holmes should have chosen Whitechapel to carry out murders outside his own country, how he knew the area so well and why they decided to compare his deeds with those of Jack the Ripper and not with those of any other serial killer of that era. Until then, the only mystery that connects H.H Holmes and Jack the Ripper is how two people who should be critical and familiar with investigations can believe such a weird theory.