American Ripper

First I love documentaries and this is about 50% documentary and 50% conjecture.Learning about this serial killer was interesting and scary, but the attempt to draw a connection to Jack the Ripper is very so-so with at best coincidences.Worth your time?If you love documentaries about crime and wasting half your time,you're good to go.

Remember Geraldo Rivera and Al Capone's vault? This is the same thing. All sorts of hype and absolutely nothing to show for it. If Amaryllis Fox had any credibility before this show, she has surely lost it now. I suspect the people who put up the money for this and saw it go swirling down the drain, decided that a second season of nothing but circumstantial evidence wasn't worth it.

Well I learned two irrevocable things about this series: #1. I wasted 8 hours of life watching it. #2. We still don't know who The Ripper was. This series lost me on series 7 when Jeff Muddget convinces himself, after every other expert debunks all his theories, that H.H. Holmes escaped his own hanging death and exacted revenge on all the people that assisted in his capture or criminal trial. What's worse is although quite sexy in her own way, the CIA operative Amaryllis Fox actually entertained this theory. The first few episodes I found somewhat entertaining as it did shed facts of the crimes, and hopes that there was some plausibility to the claim Holmes was linked. All in all, I guess The History Channel succeeded in what they set out to do and that was to get people to watch. I confess I watched all 8 episodes but I figured, "what the hell," I've already wasted 6 hours of this debacle.

I watched this gripping story and am still disappointed that any results of dredging the river near a factory Holmes owned was not revealed. Amarylis and Jeff visit this spot towards the end of the presentation and agree that it would have been easy and indeed probable that incriminating evidence may have been discarded underwater. They agree it should be dredged and checked but the show just ends there. I am to this day wondering if anything like that was done! Quite frustrating reallly, and not logical that it wouldn't have been followed up on given their 'thorough' investigation'. Hopefully someone will reveal this to those of the watchers who may be also wondering.

The amount of recap in this series is astounding. Instead of 8 episodes, they could've made it into 5. I bet they said the same phrases a hundred times: what they're investigating, what they hope to find, what their expectations were, etc. It actually got mildly infuriating because it was constant recapping. The actual content was good and interesting, though. You can probably just watch the last 3 episodes to get all the info you need, and avoid literal hours of filler shots and repetition.

Don't forget the fact that this series only has one season, so it left off without answers to several questions they'd already posed. Frustrating.