FATHOM EVENTS
After a bone-chilling premiere, "Jack the Ripper: The Definitive Story" is back for another nation-wide screening on Thursday, October 27th. Fathom Events, who imported the docu-drama from the UK, is putting up another double feature for Halloween-hungry fans.
The murders in London's Whitehall district have still never been solved, but that doesn't mean there aren't plenty of fun facts and creepy conjectures about who the Ripper was. For example, did you know...
- Jack is credited with five known murders, all of female prostitutes. All but one of these murders occurred in the streets of London, and one of the bodies was found inside the basement of the Metropolitan Police Department.
- Despite the swarming English press, police managed to keep secret several details of the murders. The crime scenes were so horrific that the cops feared "copycat" killings.
- The police identified over 400 potential suspects in the case, including doctors, women, social reformers, upset husbands, and a relative of Queen Victoria. A reporter claimed a man named Peter J. Harpick had committed the crimes, but admitted later he had just created an anagram for Jack the Ripper.
- George Bernard Shaw claimed Saucy Jack was "the greatest reformer of our time" because of the attention he brought to Whitehall's poor living conditions.
- Police photographed the eyes of Jack's last victim, hoping that her eyes had captured the image of her killer. Needless to say, it didn't work.
In 1888, a mysterious letter was sent to Scotland Yard. "I keep hearing the police have caught me," it said in scrawled letters, "but they won't fix me just yet." Police had become desperate for clues during the "Autumn of Terror," in which five women had been savagely murdered in the streets of the Whitechapel district of London. Now, they had not only a letter in the hand of the murderer -- they now knew what he preferred to be called.
"Yours truly," it read menacingly, "Jack the Ripper."
The letters, which were released to the public in the hopes of turning up new leads, turned some unusually bloody killings of local prostitutes into the most studied murder case in history. The juicy details were practically built for gore obsessed London newspapers. In nearly every case, a Whitechapel streetwalker was brutally sliced up before her organs were methodically harvested...just out of view of potential witnesses.
For the first time this year, the largest dance music festival in the nation, Electric Daisy Carnival was held last month in Las Vegas. The massive three day event gathered over 200,000 people, uniting dance music fans under the desert sky with the synthesized sounds of the world’s most talented dance music artists. Beginning in 1997 in Southern California, the prestigious festival has fallen victim to controversy with its growing popularity. During the 2010 event, there were reports of an overdose which caused the Los Angeles Coliseum Commission to hold off on having further raves within the city and question age restrictions. Not to disappoint fans, this year the show indeed went on to move across state lines to Las Vegas Motor Speedway, where the festival returned (safely!) as an 18 and older event. This year’s lineup featured European sensations such as Swedish House Mafia, Tiesto, and David Guetta along with a slue of top DJs and producers.
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