Dead by Jack

The play tells the story of the 5 women killed by Jack the Ripper at the end of the XIX Century in Whitechapel, London and then provides an insight on modern American victims whose killers haven’t been caught yet.

It is common knowledge that Jack The Ripper’s victims were prostitutes and while that wouldn’t make their deaths any less important, that is not factual. They were just women down on their luck. Some were addicted to alcohol, some were rejected by their husbands or turned away from jobs or suffering from tuberculosis. All of them had to live in and out of workhouses and sometimes had to sleep rough, on the streets if they couldn’t find the money for a bed. Even his last victim, Mary Jane Kelly -the only prostitute- had given up that lifestyle a couple of years before being killed in her own house, in her own bed, where she was sleeping alone.

When the five women have told their stories and the play moved to its conclusion, a woman stands up in the audience and interrupts the narrator. She wants to tell her story too. She was also brutally killed, and her killer hasn’t been secured to justice yet. The play provides four options for the modern victim, which would allow each production to make their own choice according to casting and artistic decision.

The goal is to give a voice to these women’s stories and to point out that while Jack The Ripper has acquired notoriety for escaping justice and for his gruesome modus-operandi, his fame is mostly due to the amplification he received from the newspapers at the time. He is one of the very first sensational cases who could be widely documented by the press and by the use of photography. He certainly is more famous than his victims, who were simple labeled as “prostitutes.”

Yet, there are so many “Jack The Rippers” out there today, everywhere. In fact, there are so many that even the media cannot catch up, and a lot of these victims go unnoticed, in particular if they are not “first class citizens”. Out of the hundreds of thousands, we focused on four cold, unsolved, murder cases in the USA. 

There are so many similarities with Jack The Ripper’s victims. A lot of women down on their luck. White women, Black women, Native American women, Latinas, nonbinary…

Each production can decide on the modern victim according to their objective and their casting. The play touches on a wide range of topics that are particularly relevant today, from the MeToo movement, to representation, to misinformation, double standards and social perception.