Jack the Ripper breakthrough as woman ‘genuinely convinced’ she’s unmasked him

A theory about a famous French artist being Jack the Ripper has gone viral on TikTok.

A video spouting suggestions that impressionist Edgar Degas travelled from Paris to London to carry out the Whitechapel murders has had more than 13 million views and two million likes, despite containing much speculation and no concrete evidence.

TikTok creator Kiki Schirr (@schirrgenius) talked for nearly seven minutes about why the thought it might be Degas due to his “dislike for women and Jews”.

Jack the Ripper butchered and murdered at least five women in the Whitechapel area of east London over just a four month period from August to November 1888.

Three victims had internal organs removed, which led to a theory that the killer had some anatomical or surgical skills.

Police actually investigated the brutal killings of 11 women, mainly prostitutes, from April 1888 to February 1891, known as the Whitechapel murders.

It is widely agreed that the third to the seventh of them, known as the Canonical Murders, were definitely carried out by the Ripper.

Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly were killed over nine weeks from August to November 1888.

They all had their throats cut, post-mortem injuries, including to the vagina, and body parts were taken from Chapman, Eddowes and Kelly. So, how did Mr Edwards “confirm” Kosminski as the Ripper?

In her video theory, she says: “We all know that Jack the Ripper killed women, specifically ones that he probably mistook for women of the night.”

Her next big clue was that Degas was in his early 50s at the time of the murders, and she believes he had started a deep hatred of women.

She added: “He’d always been a bit of a misogynist, but he was degrading into a horrible, awful, misanthrope of a person that people did not want to be around,”

Her off-the-wall theory continued that Degas was “wealthy, well connected, and he lived in Paris, which was just a short train ride away from London where the murders occurred.”

Another clue, she claims, is that Degas had a friend in London, James McNeill Whistler, who he used to visit by train, be he stopped going after the murders, much to the disappointment of his friend.

More compelling evidence, according to Ms Schirr, comes in the form of a two-week trip that Degas took to southern France around he time of two of the murders and the fact he wrote letters to many of his famous friends around the same time.

She suggests this may have been to create an alibi for himself as some of the letters were allegedly sent from near to the murder scenes.

She said: “Why did he write to all of these society gossips, these long pages, long letters that are full of witticisms and quips?” she asks.

As if that was not enough to convince most viewers, she goes on to suggest that as a classically-trained artist, he would have probably attended human dissections, multiple times, giving him anatomy skills – enough to remove the organs and body parts the Ripper so famously did.

Her clincher is that the Ripper wrote “The Juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing,” near to one of the murder scenes, and Degas did not like Jews and was likely to carry chalk, due to his work as an artist.

She then says Degas’ painted ballerinas in such a way that there were “dark shadows in the background,” representing “the men trying to arrange a tryst with them later that night.”

She said: “Look at how many of his paintings are all about that woman’s body and have no face,” she urges viewers. “Look at all of his pastels where the darkest line on the woman is the line cut across her neck.”

Signing off from the video, she added that she could not get the thoughts out of his head.

She continued: “Did this artist get away with murder?” she asks. “Did he steal organs?

“The pretty paintings of ballerinas that hang in little girls’ rooms to this day, were they painted by a murderer?”

Viewers had mixed views with some thinking she was onto something while many thought she was firing darts in the dark.

While her theory may be way wide of the mark for most, it has not the first time Degas has come up in discussions about he Ripper.

In her 2003 book Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper Case Closed, by crime author Patricia Cornwell, she tried to convince readers that the Ripper was in fact a British artist named Walter Sickert, who was a protege of Degas and was greatly influenced by his work.