I was listening to a podcast host describe in gruesome detail Jack the Ripper’s various eviscerations, as a person does while pottering about in the yard on a fine April afternoon.

I find this a strangely satisfying diversion, despite the horrific topic.

A well-crafted podcast can transport me from a sunny day, my hands smudged with the good soil, to the dank, fog-draped alleys of London’s East End in the dreadful late summer and autumn of 1888. This distracts me from the otherwise vexing task of trying to rid the place of both new weeds and old leaves, that stubborn detritus of spring.

The episode on this particular day happened to focus on that most infamous of serial killers.

But there is a wealth of other legendary mysteries that I find equally fascinating.

And as with most online matters, the volume of podcasts delving into every nasty nook and creepy cranny is prodigious indeed.

Their quality varies widely, to be sure.

I have occasionally deleted an episode after just a few minutes when it became clear that the host, who seemingly decided on a whim to start recording, knew less about the subject than I did — and I’m hardly an authority on any of the cases that intrigue me.

There is also an inevitable redundancy when dozens of podcasters delve into rather ancient stories — dating back 134 years, in Jack the Ripper’s case. The chances of any significant developments in these stories is slim. And when they happen they’re likely to generate publicity in outlets far more prominent than the sort of podcast people produce in their garages.

(Or possibly their dungeons, based on the sound quality that some have. Or, rather, don’t have.)

For all that, the lure of these tales is, of course, the attraction of the unknown.

Jack the Ripper is legendary in part — perhaps it’s even the largest part, considering subsequent slayers have surpassed even his brutality — because we don’t know who he was.

And despite the library’s worth of books whose authors claim they can answer that question — and with a smugness that only the prospect of rich royalties can induce — the reality is that none has done so.

This almost certainly will continue to be true, for eternity.

The odds of actually solving a case that predates by many decades even the basic practices of forensic science that we take for granted today are minuscule.

And that’s being charitable.

Indeed, many in the field of Ripperology profess to not even concern themselves with suspects, preferring instead to investigate the many tangents.

(That this subject has a widely accepted, pseudoscientific name — Ripperology — illustrates the persistent fascination with the case, as though its practitioners were studying rock formations or ancient civilizations or some similarly respectable field.)

These people, some of them authors and some podcasters, contend that they find it more compelling to study Jack the Ripper’s era than to continue the quixotic pursuit of the murderer’s identity.

I even believe some of these people.

But for me — and I think for other neophytes — this case and others in the genre beckon us with the power of that singular question — who did it?

(Or whodunit, if you prefer.)

Perhaps because I use these topics to stave off boredom, rather than pursue them as a serious academic researcher, the reality that a solution is all but unreachable isn’t discouraging.

I simply appreciate that, while I’m trying to coax quackgrass roots to give up their powerful hold on the soil, I can let my mind wander, to know that somebody killed those women in 1888 and to ponder the great mystery of why we still can’t put a name to him.

(A real name, that is, not that cruel, but undeniably catchy, nickname. Which, in a rare example of widespread consensus among Ripperologists, was almost certainly bestowed not by the killer himself, but by an enterprising journalist who, I have to concede, had a knack.)

Among other well-known unsolved crimes, a couple that have rich deposits in the podcasting world also are known by monikers — the Zodiac killer, and D.B. Cooper.

Both have claimed considerable amounts of storage space on my phone, enlivened many hours of yardwork drudgery, and entertained me on hikes or long drives.

The Zodiac, in common with Jack the Ripper, is believed to have killed five people. The Zodiac committed his crimes in the San Francisco Bay Area during 1968 and 1969. He wrote many letters to area newspapers, taunting police and including, in some messages, cryptograms, one of which he claimed included his identity. Unlike Jack, the Zodiac coined his nickname without any assistance from the media.

As with Jack the Ripper, the Zodiac’s legacy has spawned a considerable — though comparatively puny, by Ripper standards — collection of books. Many of those are also “suspect books” — in which the author fixates on a particular person and endeavors, with flights of logical fancy that are entertaining if not frequently ludicrous, to prove that he’s the culprit.

D.B. Cooper is the name, almost certainly an alias, of the man who, on the day before Thanksgiving in 1971, hijacked a Northwest Orient 727 flying from Portland to Seattle.

(The hijacker actually gave his name as Dan Cooper when he bought his $20 ticket in Portland. A garbled phone conversation between police and a reporter resulted in Dan becoming D.B. And D.B., perhaps because it sounds cooler than Dan, it remains.)

Cooper let the passengers disembark in Seattle after receiving his ransom of $200,000 in $20 bills, along with four parachutes. He jumped out of the 727 — unusual among passenger jets, it has a retractable staircase in the bottom of the fuselage — in Western Washington, not far north of the Columbia River, and was never heard from again.

A boy digging in the sand along the Columbia found some of the ransom bills in 1980, a tantalizing clue that hasn’t, however, solved the case.

The idea that we might come to know who Cooper or the Zodiac was remains somewhat plausible, if only because they happened comparatively recently, and there is rather more tangible evidence associated with each.

I suspect, though, that half a century from now, when both cases have passed their centennial, the identities of the Zodiac and D.B. Cooper will remain as elusive as Jack the Ripper’s.

But I also imagine that, for people with obstinate vegetation to deal with or other, unstimulating tasks, the prospect of spending an hour or two pondering these spectres of the always fading past will remain enticing.

Jayson Jacoby is editor of the Baker City Herald.