Word: killers
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...government, the police department and the medical establishment of 1920s Los Angeles - that has the novelty of being virtually unknown today. The script, by TV writer-producer J. Michael Straczynski (Babylon 5, Jeremiah), juggles elements of L.A. Confidential, The Black Dahlia, The Snake Pit and any number of serial-killer thrillers. But at its center are the heartache and heroic resolve of a woman who has lost the one person she loves most and is determined to find him, dead or alive, against all obstacles the authorities place in her way. In that sense the movie is a companion piece...
...that she was ripped up like a pig in the market," her entrails "flung in a heap about her neck." Thus the account in London's Star newspaper of the policeman who found the body of Catherine Eddowes, a prostitute murdered in the autumn of 1888 by the serial killer the media dubbed "Jack the Ripper." But if the Ripper's notoriety was fueled by a fiercely competitive media market with newspapers trying to outdo one another in relaying gory details of the crimes, unearthing clues, floating theories and taunting the police, his killing spree remains an object of fascination...
...crimes and the killer are intertwined with London's identity and history," says Julia Hoffbrand, co-curator a new major exhibition, "Jack the Ripper and the East End," at London's Museum in Docklands. Of the many hardscrabble neighborhoods of Dickensian London, none was more blighted than Whitechapel, a grim, crowded East End hellhole, rife with poverty, disease, crime and homelessness. Prostitution was widespread; alcohol was plentiful. Whitechapel as an ominous, foggy maze of gaslit, cobbled streets, alleys and dead ends "is still very much the public image of the East End now," says Hoffbrand...
...Most middle-class and wealthy Londoners were blissfully ignorant of conditions in Whitechapel until the autumn of 1888, when Scotland Yard realized that a serial killer was loose in the area, and Fleet Street helped create the legend - and even the name - of the knife-wielding "Ripper." Until the brutal slayings ended some two and a half years later, sensationalistic coverage of the Ripper was relentless, his exploits recounted by reporters and artists in a manner that exposed the squalor of Whitechapel to a fascinated audience - and shaped London's perception of the East End. Playwright George Bernard Shaw once...
...many papers, though police considered it hoax, possibly written by a journalist. Still, the name stuck. "It seized the public's imagination," Hoffbrand says. It also resulted in a torrent of other gruesome - and probably fake - letters being sent to newspapers and police, each purporting to be from the killer...