The Danger of ‘Facts’ That Refuse to Die

In 1888, a series of brutal murders in London’s Whitechapel district terrified the public and baffled police. But something else emerged from those crime scenes: a name that never existed—Jack the Ripper. The most famous serial killer in history is a collective fiction. The letters signed “Jack the Ripper” were almost certainly hoaxes, likely written by a journalist named Frederick Best at The Star. Police had no evidence the five canonical victims were killed by the same person. Yet the name stuck because it solved a narrative problem: the public needed a single, coherent villain to fear and hate. Messy reality—multiple attackers, unknown motives, jurisdictional squabbling—could not satisfy that hunger. So the press and police collaborated, consciously or not, to create one. That template has never really gone away. Watch any breaking news story today—a mass shooting, a political scandal, a terrorist attack—and within hours a “mastermind” or “lone wolf” emerges in coverage. Even when facts are thin, the demand for a clear antagonist is immediate. The 2013 Boston Marathon bombing offers a textbook case: initial reports named a “dark-skinned man” and an “Saudi national” as suspects, even though the actual perpetrators were Chechen brothers. The false narrative spread because it gave audiences someone to hold responsible before any evidence was vetted. Why do these false “facts” refuse to die? Part of the answer lies in how the human mind processes stories. The PNAS research on science and storytelling finds that narrative coherence—a clear villain, a causal arc—trumps factual accuracy in how people remember and retell events. Elizabeth Loftus’s work on the misinformation effect shows that even eyewitness memory can be overwritten by post-event information. When a story satisfies emotional needs, the brain tends to lock it in, and contradictory facts fade. The same psychological machinery that made Jack the Ripper immortal still drives how we consume breaking news. Media literacy training helps people spot obvious falsehoods, but as the Carnegie Endowment study notes, its effectiveness depends on how it’s taught. And critical disinformation scholars point out a deeper problem: solutions like fact-checking place the burden on individuals, while groups like QAnon have shown that information evaluation itself can be weaponized. It’s not just about bad facts—it’s about appealing narratives that feel right regardless of evidence. So what do we do about this? For journalists covering a breaking story, the first discipline is to resist the “villain frame” until the evidence demands it. That means refusing to name a suspect without documentary corroboration, and pushing back against the assumption that a single perpetrator must exist behind every crisis. For audiences, the most practical habit is to ask, “Who benefits from this version of events?”—then look for primary sources, not just amplified summaries. The lesson from 1888 isn’t about who Jack the Ripper really was. It’s about why we needed him to exist. That is exactly the kind of dangerous “fact” that refuses to die—and the only cure is a reporting habit that values documents over drama, and accountability over narrative convenience. When the next breaking story breaks, pause before you accept the villain. Look for the evidence. Ask what got left out. The truth may be messier—but it’s the only thing worth keeping.