TikTok is a great place to go down some rabbit holes, and get convinced to buy into some conspiracy theories. And Kiki Schirr-Genius has aided her TikTok community down a rabbit hole with her own favorite theory about famous French impressionist artist, Edgar Degas.
Based on her theories, and some very impressive scientific and historical evidence, the artist best known for drawing and painting ballerinas was actually leading a double life as serial killer Jack the Ripper.
First and foremost, Kiki shared that Jack the Ripper famously killed women in their early 20s, specifically women that he thought were sex workers, and around that time Edgar Degas had begun to develop quite a hatred for women as well. Not only that, but many ballerinas, which he often painted, were also compelled by culture and necessity to perform sex work at that time in history.
Degas’s downward spiral of morality is partially credited to the fact that he was going blind in theory due to something called Stargardt’s diseasewhich can also deteriorate the part of the brain that makes moral decisions. This causes a black or gray lesion right behind the eyes, something that has been detected in psychopaths and serial killers.
Degas was a rich and connected artist living in Paris, and would make the journey to London to visit friends or family and, according to Kiki, murder people. At the height of Jack the Ripper’s murders, Degas is documented taking a trip to the South of France, which in some respects may clear his name. But according to Kiki, he wrote more letters to his famous connections during this trip than he did in the five years before or five years after. She thinks this is because he was trying to create an alibi for himself.
It’s often speculated that Jack the Ripper himself may have been a surgeon, because he seemingly knew the right places to cut to remove organs, or to kill someone, and seemed knowledgeable regarding human anatomy. But his unsteady hand and jagged extractions suggest that maybe he hadn’t been a trained surgeon after all, but an artist who had witnessed human dissections multiple times and who had an obsession about how everything on the human body worked, much like Degas.
It’s speculated that Jack the Ripper attempted to pin a couple of his murders on Jewish people by writing on a wall “The Juwes (sic) are the men that will not be blamed for nothing” in chalk over the apron of one of his victims. Curiously, Kiki said it was written in a way that would be uncommon for a native English speaker. Something that Degas was not. He was also famously antisemitic, and often used chalk in his drawings.
Kiki also theorized that the organs Degas may have cut out of his alleged victims could have been stored in his wax statues. Statues that have already been scanned, and have had organic matter found in them.
Needless to say, she pretty much has her audience convinced that famous impressionist Edgar Degas also conducted murders in London, and the evidence she brings forward is pretty compelling.
Unfortunately for the millions of people KiKi has convinced, the public will probably never know the truth about Edgar Degas’s supposed double life, and the identity of Jack the Ripper.