This is the Fall Line.

Author and historian, Halle Rubenold, is asking audiences to question almost everything

we think we know about one of the most famous unsolved cases in history.

The series of late 19th century murders credited to an unknown serial killer, known as Jack

the Ripper.

Over the many years that Jack the Ripper and his crimes have been studied, a number of

other writers and researchers and filmmakers have asserted that their projects are focused

on the five women canonically considered to be the victims and yet until the release of

Halle's book, The Five, in 2019, Little was known about any of the victims' lives.

And what's more, based on what Halle Rubenold has found, it turns out that what we thought

we knew about these women has been surmised on thin evidence at best.

Thousands of hours, and who knows how many resources, have been spent trying to identify

the killer or killers who we've come to know as Jack the Ripper.

But in her work, Halle Rubenold has taken a different path, an assertion that perhaps

trying to identify Jack the Ripper will not answer our questions or solve our problems.

Because much as in the case of Samuel Little, it's not so much about the killer as it

is about the victims, how they were portrayed, the thin line they walked between housing

insecurity and outright homelessness, and the bleak structures of Victorian society that

limited their freedoms and dictated their actions.

It made the margins wide, and the pedestals very high and very narrow.

In her new podcast, Bad Women, The Ripper Retold, Halle builds on the themes of her book, The

Five, which is the first deep dive into the lives of the women who are murdered.

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