Granted, I listened to this long book rather than actually reading it, so maybe helps to make it a more interesting and compelling story than how it's portrayed in the mostly negative reviews here. Yes, most of the case the author presents is conjecture, but then so were all the other possibilities presented over the years, including the contemporary ones. Overall, however, I think she offers one of the more believable ones. Considering the facts that crime-scene studies and evidence gathering was poor to non-existant in the late 1800s, that very little of what was collected or written by the police has survived, and there was no such thing as serial killer profiling back then, we'll never know for sure who committed those murders--assuming they were all by the same person, and that there weren't many others in other locations never connected. Still, I think the author at least presents a strong and previously overlooked possibility.