The millions of years of criminals. Reptile criminals, reptile
murderers, reincarnated in our day and age -- Jack the Ripper a
reptile, Jack the Reptile, unable to feel love (no oxytocin receptors),
a dinosaur, a throwback to the cold-blooded Saurian age, unearthed by
the first tentative excavations of archaeology, the first chippings
unearthed the soul of an old dinosaur from the Devonian hills...it
wandered up the Test to Reading, thence down the Thames to London and
to the dank alleys and the Isle of Dogs and found the worst rabble and
nested there.

Poor Jack, just an ordinary sneakthief, infected with the fossil soul
of the Rippersaur!

Like you and me, like any of us, he failed in various endeavors, but,
sensitive soul, he failed once too often for his liking, and turned to
drink. This was by no means a safe course in Old Blighty, given the
Darwinian bent of alehouses everywhere, cutting their grog with all
sorts of unsavory chemicals, formaldehyde, arsenic, and worse, leavings
from Bedlam distilled in the miasma of Fleet Ditch...anyway, poor
Jack's long-suffering conscience was the first and most critical victim
of the blinding white light of the poisoned spirits. Jack's weakened
facilities were usurped and undermined in quick succession, and a gray,
cantankerous Tuesday morning found him reeling in the corner of a
squalid hovel -- the cheap pasteboard walls no barrier to that evil
archaic dinosaur soul.

Felt good, at first, to be imbued suddenly with terrible purpose. Any
purpose felt better than none, surely. They say that when he saw, laid
out for him, the future that this new entity dictated, the only
remaining offal of his mild-mannered frail facilities collapsed and ran
out his anus in a viscous, foul-smelling flux he attributed to a
questionable kidney pie bought from a disreputable vendor in the deep
shadow of Cheapside.