History Channel Series American Ripper Links Jack the Ripper and H.H. Holmes

Posted on June 25, 2017

The History Channel will premiere an 8-part series called American Ripper on Tuesday, July 11 at 10 pm ET/PT. The series is about a controversial theory linking Jack the Ripper with H.H. Holmes (Herman Mudgett).

Jack the Ripper is well-known as London's notorious serial killer. H.H. Holmes was equally vile having murdered as many as 200 in his self-designed hotel, which later became known as his murder castle. The hotel included a gas chamber, trap doors, basement furnace and dissection room. Jack the Ripper and Holmes both lived around the same time period in the late 1800s.

Jeff Mudgett, the great-great-grandson of Herman Mudgett, believes Holmes and Jack the Ripper were the same man. In the series, he leads an investigation that secured permission to exhume the presumed body of H.H. Holmes for DNA testing.

The History Channel says the series hunts down evidence linking the two killers including "Holmes' personal copy of his published memoir, housed at the Library of Congress; clues about his earliest victims in Holmes' hometown and childhood home in Gilmanton, N.H.; crime scene evidence from the Jack the Ripper murders including photos, eyewitness accounts and coroners' reports; new interviews with numerous historians and detectives; and new leads in the search for long-lost remains of Holmes' many victims."

MYSTERY