Lucy Worsley Investigates

Newspapers were now competing to provide the most lurid coverage they could.

And look, we've got gory illustrations of Polly's injuries on the front page.

Blood and Gore continue to characterise the true crime genre today.

But what drove the papers towards this sensationalism in 1888?

Media moguls had invested heavily in the new rotary presses.

These ones could churn out 10,000 newspapers in an hour.

But margins were tight in this business.

For anyone to make a profit there had to be huge sales.

So this meant that proprietors were after really splashy stories.

To discover the vital ingredients of a really splashy story.

I've enlisted a former crime reporter who's very familiar with the business.

Paul, why was it that the press got obsessed with this particular case?

The Ripper case had all the kind of classic elements of a salacious tabloid story, didn't it?

Because it had the element of sex to it.

It was a whodunit.

Obviously, the murderer was on the loose.

There was the conspiracy theory element to it that it could have been somebody from the elite.

And then you just got this whole sense of moral outrage that something so vile could, could take place in London.

Do you think it was quite new in the 1880s to read about this kind of story in the mainstream papers?

The mainstream seemed to be working off the back of the popularity of the shilling shockers and the penny dreadfuls, those salacious fictions that were sold for a penny on street corners.

And so they saw how popular they were and crime started getting more into the mainstream press.

That's a bit of a new development.

Now, as a crime reporter today, how do you know what's ethical to print?

Well, today it's a lot easier because the press, broadcasters, they have regulators so they have rules to follow on accuracy, privacy, harassment and things like that.

It's the kind of Wild West that it was in the 1800s and they were just thinking about how can we generate more readers?

It just seemed like a free for all.

If you look back on it.

I guess there was so much here that was novel and exciting and in a horrible sort of a way thrilling to the Victorian readers.

It would have been thrilling.

It would have been shocking.

More people bought these newspapers when they led on these stories.

And then if you fast forward to now look at the popularity of true crime, the true crime genre, there's still this sort of thirst for this kind of story.

Here was one of the first unsolved cases to connect with a mass audience.

The Victorians already enjoyed mystery novels, and now this real life case tapped into their fears about violence and kept the reader guessing.