Welcome to the hottest feud between US and Great Britain ever since a group of uppity
peasants filled a harbor with tea. It's Jack the Ripper, the original slasher icon
and Victorian heartthrob- as in he'll cut your heart out while it's still throbbing-
versus Zodiac, the deadly killer so enigmatic that he could still be out there...
though after 51 years it's likely a strong breeze would be all it took to kill him off.
Which macabre mass murderer comes out on top? Who's the best brutal butcher? The top satanic,
salacious slayer?! The... ok, you get it, let's start the fight.
In the blue corner is Jack the Ripper, no stranger to mystery- you could say he basically
wrote the book on enigmatic killers. It's not known just how many victims Jack really had,
as he only took direct credit for a few murder victims who matched his MO, and Victorian England
was a pretty murdery place to be. Most experts agree that Jack didn't simply wake up one day
and decide that murder was on the menu, then go back to a normal life afterwards- it's likely that
the much publicized Whitechapel murders were simply only part of a lifelong killing spree.
What victims did Jack claim after his much publicized public debut? We may never know.
There's really not much that we know about Jack, given that out of 2,000 interviews conducted by
police nobody was able to finger a suspect. There was scant little evidence to review as well,
seeing as forensics was a still developing field,
though the killer was suspected to be either a butcher, surgeon, slaughterer,
or doctor given the skill and precision of some of the cuts into the dead bodies.
So what's Jack bringing to this fight? Well, an extraordinary set of stealthy killing skills,
given that most of his victims were prostitutes who at the time
often worked alongside other prostitutes for safety. Jack may have been spotted once or
twice shortly before his victims were found dead, but nobody was ever able to get a clear
enough look at him to provide police with a solid lead. It's also believed that most
of his victims were killed with a swift slash across the throat, making Jack a very skilled
and efficient killer. No doubt he'd have to be in good shape in order to overpower his victims
to the point that a single throat slash was the killing blow, or extraordinarily stealthy.
Jack's preferred murder weapon is believed to be a knife, and he no doubt possessed an
extraordinary appetite for violence, given the horrific state his victims were discovered in.
After the initial killing blow, the bodies were often mutilated to the extreme,
making Jack one extremely cold-blooded killer.
Despite a massive reward and equally large manhunt though,
Jack managed to remain anonymous, meaning Jack was not just extremely violent, but very intelligent.
This combination of savagery and smarts is going to make Jack a very fearsome opponent indeed.
In the red corner, representing his home country of the United States of America, is Zodiac,
the man who terrified a nation throughout the 60s and 70s. If your parents wouldn't let you spend
the night at a friend's house without talking to the parents first, or let you stay out past 10
on a weekend- it's because they grew up under the terrifying shadow of the Zodiac Killer.
Jack and Zodiac share a striking similarity in that they both have five canonical murders. Both
however are accused of multiple other murders, and it's extremely likely that both killers had been
committing murders their entire lives- or at least continued it past their original killing sprees.
Zodiac has a higher confirmed body count than Jack though, given that two of his murders had
double victims. His first three murders targeted lovers out on a romantic tryst,
and couples all over northern california refused to visit lover's lanes or take secluded picnics
for years because of fears over Zodiac. Zodiac utilized a handgun in most of his murders,
ambushing his victims and opening fire at close range, though on occasion he
used a knife- only either when his victim was unaware or after having been tied up.
To this day nobody knows for sure who Zodiac was, and it's likely he's now dead. Much like Jack,
it's believed Zodiac went on killing after his official spree was over, and he himself said in
a letter to the press at the start of his spree that he already had 37 victims under his belt.
This too was another similarity with Jack- Zodiac loved the attention of the murders and contacted
the press on numerous occasions. Once he even called in to a tv show discussing the murders,
and he even called the police to self-report a murder. Unlike Jack's letters to the press,
Zodiac included a cipher along with the typical edgelord murderer crap that we're
all supposed to be super impressed by- yeah, you like killing people,
we get it. Easy to be a super scary killer when you're ambushing people with a gun.
Zodiac brings a keen intellect to this fight,
as clever as many suspect Jack secretly was despite his efforts to portray himself as
ignorant in his letters to the press. His ciphers have stumped the best cryptoanalysts for decades,
and only recently was another one of his ciphers cracked by a team using a custom-built computer
program. The cipher itself wasn't particularly clever, simply difficult to crack with no clues,
and most interestingly used techniques outlined in a US military cryptography manual from the 1950s-
meaning Zodiac may possibly have had military service experience.
We do have one eyewitness account of Zodiac though, as he was nearly caught on October 11th,
1969 when he was spotted by three teenagers as he killed a taxi driver. Rushing to the scene,
two policemen spotted Zodiac walking away from the scene,
but the dispatcher had said the suspect was black- because it was the 1960s. The description
given of Zodiac was of a pretty average man, approaching middle age, about five foot ten.
So who wins in our killer showdown?
Jack brings stealth, precision, and an extraordinary savagery to this fight,
making him a formidable opponent. Zodiac certainly shares a willingness to kill,
but doesn't even come close to matching Jack in terms of sheer ferocity. While Jack murdered and
then mutilated his victims with nothing but a knife, Zodiac often simply ambushed his victims
and shot them at point blank range. Anybody can pull a trigger, and it doesn't take much skill to
kill someone who's already tied up or totally not expecting to get gunned down in a hail of bullets.
Zodiac may have been smart enough to use military-grade encryption, but in the world of
serial killers, he really wasn't anything special. His body count may have been high, but truthfully,
Zodiac was mostly just a punk with a gun. Jack cut the kidney out of a woman, sending half to a
newspaper and keeping the other half for himself so he could eat it. Simply put, Jack's on a
totally different level of crazy and savage both, and blows Zodiac completely out of the water.
Zodiac was nothing more than a paunchy aging white guy with a gun who got saved by racism,
and the moment you take that gun away from him he's no more a threat than any male
Karen- so we're going to give this fight to the killer so brutal that
his crime scene photos still make us gag: Jack the Ripper.
Now go check out siren head vs cartoon cat vs long horse, or click this other video instead!