The Jack the Ripper murders enter 2666 not as a separate investigative plot but as a historical reference point in a discussion of crime, social attention, and the limits of language. The case is described as famous yet unresolved: no one knew the killer’s identity. Its importance lies in the contrast between a murder that becomes narratable and deaths that society barely recognizes.

The Case as Historical Reference

A white-haired man recalls Jack the Ripper while arguing that extreme violence was not invented by modern society. He says that people in earlier centuries also committed terrible crimes, including serial killings, but that the archetypes of cruelty and madness persist even as public sensibilities change. The Ripper case anchors this claim in a crime familiar enough to be called the most famous of its day, but whose perpetrator was never identified.

The recollection broadens from the unresolved case to the historical uses of language. In the man’s account, words once filtered death, trimming reports to fit society’s fears. They could make a crime legible, but they could also serve avoidance rather than revelation. The reference therefore does not offer a solution to the Ripper murders; it shows how a famous unsolved crime can be remembered while the social meaning of violence remains unsettled.

Legibility and Unequal Attention

The comparison turns on who is counted as part of society. The speaker contrasts deaths largely ignored in public accounts—people who died during the Paris Commune and enslaved people who died during transport—with individual murders that drew extensive attention. He argues that the latter deaths could be written about because their victims and perpetrators were socially legible. The Ripper case belongs to this history of crime rendered memorable through public narration, even though the killer himself remained unknown.

This contrast gives the reference a critical function in the novel’s treatment of violence. Being widely reported or remembered does not mean that crime has been explained, and the presence of words does not guarantee revelation. The case stands beside the broader question of why some deaths become stories that disturb society while other deaths remain outside its field of concern.

Relation to the Santa Teresa Killings

The Ripper reference resonates with the killings in Santa Teresa, where the number of dead women is discussed in uncertain terms and the possibility that the total is higher remains open. One young man tells Jean-Claude Pelletier and Manuel Espinoza that more than two hundred women have died since 1993 or 1994; he suggests the figure might be two hundred and fifty or three hundred, but says no one will ever know. The passage juxtaposes that uncertainty with the historical fame of a case whose killer also remained unidentified, while shifting attention from the notoriety of an individual murderer to the accumulation of women’s deaths.

Elsewhere, Chucho Flores describes a recurring cycle: rising numbers briefly make the killings news again, public talk grows, and then attention fades as people return to work. This pattern sharpens the contrast with the enduring cultural recognition of the Ripper case. In the novel, the historical comparison helps expose how public memory can preserve a famous criminal mystery even as ongoing violence becomes ordinary, disputed, or forgotten.