TikTok sleuth busts open 'Jack the Ripper' mystery by identifying a 'creepy, ... trends now

For 136 years, the identity of Jack the Ripper has confounded history buffs.

Some say the killer was Lewis Carroll, the 'Alice in Wonderland' creator, others suspect Winston Churchill's dad — Lord Randolph Churchill.

Others still say it was likely a non-famous local of Whitechapel, East London, where the gruesome slayings occurred in the 1880s.

Now, a TikToker from Tennessee has added a name to the list of suspects.

Kiki Schirr, a perky, freckled redhead, unveiled her theory in a video filmed in the passenger seat of her Hyundai Santa Fe.

It's already clocked up more than 14 million views.

In it, she explains why she thinks French impressionist artist Edgar Degas was the killer.

The painter and sculptor is celebrated for his works of ballerinas, bathing females and prostitutes.

Schirr says Degas's subject-matter says more about him than was previously understood.

His obsession with women's bodies makes him a prime suspect for the killer who stalked cobblestoned London by twilight.

'Those are the thoughts that I cannot get out of my head,' Schirr says in her viral video.

'Did this artist get away with murder?'

Her theory casts a sinister shadow on the 'pretty paintings of ballerinas that hang in little girls rooms to this day,' she adds.

'Were they painted by a murderer?'

At least a dozen murders between 1888 and 1892 have been speculatively attributed to Jack the Ripper. 

But only five of those, all committed in 1888, were linked by police to a single murderer.

These so-called 'canonical five' victims were Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Kate Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly.

They're often presented as prostitutes killed while plying their trade, but this is disputed.

At the time, police suspected the Ripper was a butcher, due to the way his victims were killed and the fact they were discovered near to the dockyards, where meat was brought into the city.

Several people have been identified as the serial killer.

But no theory is widely accepted. It's now doubtful the mystery will ever be solved.

Degas is a prime suspect, Schirr says in her seven-minute addition to the enigma.

For one, she says, he lived at the right time.

Born in Paris in 1834, Degas was in his early 50s at the time of the killing spree, she says.

At that time, records show, he 'was beginning to really hate women,' she adds.

'He'd always been a bit of a misogynist, but he was degrading into a horrible, awful misanthrope of a person,' she adds.

Victorian cops were searching for a butcher, but Schirr says the murders could also have been the work of a painter.

'Degas was a classically-trained artist, he had attended human dissections, probably multiple times,' she says.

She uses biographical accounts of Degas and his oeuvre to suggest he was a psychopath.

He was 'obsessive about knowing every detail about how a body worked,' she says.

He often compared women to horses and other animals, she adds.

His studies of women in Paris bars in the late 1800s indicated late-night trysts with men, she added.

Oftentimes, Degas' pastel pieces of women bore the 'dark line' of a ribbon 'cut across' their necks, she says — reminiscent of the Ripper's throat-slitting escapades.

She also addresses an anti-Semitic scrawl left in chalk on a wall beside a clue in Eddowes' murder — a key element of Ripper lore.

The language used suggested at a French speaker, she says.

Degas, she adds, was an artist who could well have had a piece of chalk in his pocket.

As well as motive, Schirr says Degas had plenty of opportunity.

He was rich and well-connected, she says.

'He lived in Paris, which was just a short train ride away from London, where

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