Jack the Ripper: Fact, Fiction, and the Legacy of Fear
The episode meticulously delves into the infamous Ripper murders of 1888, offering a comprehensive exploration of not merely the events surrounding these heinous acts, but also the socio-economic milieu of Whitechapel, where these tragedies unfolded. The narrative begins with a vivid depiction of London's East End at the time, characterized by stark poverty, overcrowding, and a burgeoning population that set the stage for such brutal crimes. Against this backdrop, the episode humanizes the canonical five victims—Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly—detailing their lives, struggles, and the circumstances that led them to the perilous streets of Whitechapel.
As the discussion progresses, we examine the role of the police and the sensationalist newspaper industry, which not only fueled public interest but also complicated the investigation. The episode highlights how the media's portrayal of the murders contributed to a culture of fear and fascination that persists to this day. Through a careful analysis of the victims' biographies, we gain insight into their realities, transforming them from mere statistics into individuals whose lives were marred by hardship and violence. The episode concludes with a reflection on the enduring impact of the Ripper murders on modern society, emphasizing the need to remember the humanity of the victims amidst the horror of their deaths, and the lessons we can draw from this dark chapter in history.
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Transcript
It's not very often that you come across a piece of history with so many facts, yet you understand so little.
Speaker A:Almost 50,000 days ago, on the tail end of an unusually cold and rainy summer, the dreariness was just beginning to set in on London.
Speaker A:The ferocity and intensity with which the murders of Whitechapel burst out of the cool London fog cut through society and turned everyone in the area into a true crime fanatic, truly laying the seeds of what we now consider a major genre of entertainment.
Speaker A:But what do we really know about the crime that birthed the true crime?
Speaker A:The name Jack the Ripper stands out in our mind, but the suspects are forgotten by most, and unfortunately, the victims were as well.
Speaker A:The murders shot into the public's consciousness and never left.
Speaker A:But just as fast as they happened, they stopped just as mysteriously.
Speaker A: What really happened in: Speaker A:Who was involved?
Speaker A:Who were the likeliest of suspects?
Speaker A:And how did the media taint the investigation and also the understanding of the murders themselves for over a century?
Speaker A:We look into all of that as we walk down the dark and winding passages of London's East End on another episode of the Remedial Scholar.
Speaker A:That's ancient history.
Speaker A:I feel I was denied critical need to know information belongs in a museum.
Speaker A:Stop skipping your remedial class.
Speaker A:Welcome, everyone.
Speaker A:Thank you for choosing to spend your time with me today.
Speaker A:If you're new here, welcome.
Speaker A:And I love that sweater.
Speaker A:I hope you're ready to learn about some evil and dastardly things today, because that's.
Speaker A:That's all I got.
Speaker A:Also, forewarning, there's a lot of violent stuff in this episode, in case you are unaware.
Speaker A:Maybe don't let the children listen.
Speaker A:And if you're squeamish, maybe skip this one, I guess.
Speaker A:I don't know.
Speaker A:But before we we get into the gruesome details of the Whitechapel murders, want to once again shout out my buddy Kevin's new show, History Goon.
Speaker A:He's doing the damn thing and we love to see it.
Speaker A:Other friends of the show you should check out are the Macabre Emporium, the Real Creature feature, and of course, west of Nowhere.
Speaker A:That's with a K, because we're edgy like that.
Speaker A:That's my other podcast with my great friend Shane, and we talk about, you know, just crazy news stories instead of, like, history.
Speaker A:Right?
Speaker A:It's stuff that will be.
Speaker A:I mean, it's stuff that will be history in 20 years anyway.
Speaker A:So, yeah, go ahead, check those out.
Speaker A:Tell them who sent you.
Speaker A:If you're returning to the show.
Speaker A:Welcome back and thank you for the continued rating and reviews you have left.
Speaker A:I appreciate every single one.
Speaker A:If you send me a screenshot that you posted a review, I will personally mail you a sticker and I'll even lick the envelope.
Speaker A:Really, really good.
Speaker A:So you can do with that what you want.
Speaker A:Too far.
Speaker A:Listen, Sydney Sweeney can sell soap with her bath water mixed in, but I can't sen a heavily saturated, saturated envelope.
Speaker A:Fine.
Speaker A:Let's move on then, shall we?
Speaker A:Today we are going down quite a rabbit hole.
Speaker A:You might notice that it's been a little bit since my last episode.
Speaker A:Newsflash.
Speaker A:There's a lot of stuff in the history of Jack the Ripper.
Speaker A:So this is.
Speaker A:And you probably can see the runtime.
Speaker A:This is going to be quite the episode.
Speaker A:I thought about doing it in two parts, but I'm just.
Speaker A:You.
Speaker A:You can binge it how you want, you know, that's.
Speaker A:That's your prerogative.
Speaker A:There's a lot of winding turns and whatnot followed, but ultimately we're going to do is set the stage for the murders.
Speaker A:Right?
Speaker A:By that, I, of course, mean describe the setting in which they occurred.
Speaker A:Definitely not helping set one up.
Speaker A:That would.
Speaker A:That would be crazy.
Speaker A:We are going to look at the socioeconomic environment in which the murders took place, because that's a huge piece of this.
Speaker A:And then we're going to discuss the booming business of newspapers because they're cool and they played a big part in the interest of the murders and mythologizing the Ripper himself or even herself, who knows?
Speaker A:Then leading into each victim as they were found, discussing what put them on the dark and dreary streets of a hard place to live and a worse place to die.
Speaker A:Then looking into the police investigation as it happens between each victim and, you know, how the newspapers kind of fed the flames of the panic in London.
Speaker A:And then at the end of the line, we discuss the possible suspects, investigation methods, dispelling any rumors or myths about the case, and the changes that the Ripper murders had on life as we know it.
Speaker A:Also, I know I said Ripper and murder several times at this point.
Speaker A:So this is.
Speaker A:This is another moment that I want you to.
Speaker A:It's going to get violent.
Speaker A:So if you weren't paying attention when I said it first, here's your.
Speaker A:Here's your last warning.
Speaker A:There's going to be a lot of violent stuff, themes, languages and all sorts.
Speaker A:Weird, I know.
Speaker A:Sounds like a lot, but we can do it.
Speaker A:I believe in you.
Speaker A:Let's get into it.
Speaker A:Jack the Ripper Is, as it turns out, not a big fan of women.
Speaker A:Call me crazy assumptive or whatever, but I just got a hunch that he doesn't like them.
Speaker A:You know, we might not know much about Jack the Ripper, but we do know did didn't seem to like women.
Speaker A:Or at least I know that.
Speaker A:I don't know.
Speaker A:I don't know if everyone's caught on to that fact yet.
Speaker A:But yeah, that's.
Speaker A:That's the kind of groundbreaking investigative reporting we do here at the Remedial Scholar.
Speaker A:Another thing we do know is that whoever the Ripper was had to have had an intimate knowledge of the Whitechapel area.
Speaker A:Reasoning is essentially because of how quickly the killer evaded witnesses in some very close situations, even when the bodies were discovered to be still warm when they were found.
Speaker A:Also, I want to pause for a second.
Speaker A:I'm going to be making some jokes and it is not at the victim's expense, and I don't think that I wrote anything like that.
Speaker A:But I'm going to let you know ahead of time that if I make a joke, it's because this is a very dark story and I have to bring my mood up, otherwise I'll cry.
Speaker A:And you don't want to watch me cry.
Speaker A:Just so you know, nervous laughter and silly jokes are to keep me sane while I tell this dark tale.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker A:I'm not being rude to the victims, just so you know.
Speaker A:Anyway, so what do we know about the Whitechapel district and London's East End at the time?
Speaker A:If the conditions of the region did not inspire the Ripper, they certainly helped contribute to not only the confusion of who they were, but on a larger scale aided the killer in both providing victims, in addition to a number of labyrinth like alleyways to slip through.
Speaker A:It should also be noted that this was not isolated to Whitechapel or even the East End.
Speaker A:This was kind of happening all over London during the 19th century.
Speaker A:Not the murders, but the burgeoning of slums with the massive population densities, full of people who had no steady job, lived in shabby apartments or even in lodging houses.
Speaker A:There's also a misunderstanding when it comes to these places because it's not like that's all that there was.
Speaker A:Just like any section of large metro area, you know, there's wealthier districts and then there's not so wealthy districts, and then there's definitely, you know, a mix, but there's a correlation here with the environment and the story itself.
Speaker A: From: Speaker A: By: Speaker A: million in: Speaker A:That's.
Speaker A:That's almost.
Speaker A:Was that.
Speaker A:Yeah, that's almost 6 million people in a hundred years.
Speaker A:That's crazy.
Speaker A:That's a lot.
Speaker A:The expansion due to a lot of immigration and London, once confined by medieval walls, to expand further, which then absorbed a lot of the surrounding townships.
Speaker A:Some of the factors contributing to the large influx of people Were the industrialization of London, with many factories and docks, hiring.
Speaker A:It was a major economic opportunity to people who had none elsewhere.
Speaker A:Immigrants from Ireland fleeing to London to escape the famines and Jewish immigrants on the run from the tsarist campaigns made their way there as well.
Speaker A:The rapid immigration created a housing problem, which created very poor urban planning.
Speaker A:And many of the buildings were converted from something something else or thrown together in a haphazard banner to accommodate.
Speaker A:Not a lot of code built homes in the area.
Speaker A:No real consideration in terms of ventilation, sanitation or hydration.
Speaker A:A lot of people stayed in lodging houses which were akin to like a shelter kind of thing today.
Speaker A:Many of the places for rent in the area were day to day, which meant if you could find work, you could sleep inside.
Speaker A:But, you know, also not super easy to do because there's a bunch of other people looking for work too.
Speaker A:The other issue with that system is that you have very permanent residents or you have very few permanent residents, which means no real local economy to grow, which then just continues to compound these issues.
Speaker A: Whitechapel in: Speaker A:In London, Whitechapel had 188 per acre.
Speaker A:Employment opportunities in the area were also not very fruitful, which added to the lack of consistency in the lives these people through the lives of these people.
Speaker A:There's a lot of tailoring, cobbling type shops, a lot of sweatshop type environments.
Speaker A:Some people could find work as a housemaid, but oftentimes you were being a housemaid for somebody only slightly less destitute than you.
Speaker A:Odd jobs, one offs and the criminal circuit all kind of fed the hungry pockets of those in the region.
Speaker A:Prostitution was a big one, and while technically not illegal at the time, it was heavily regulated.
Speaker A:For instance, it was illegal to loiter and solicit in public places, which would really h the common form of the ax which was cruising the streets right well off brothel.
Speaker A:Sex work was out of the aim of these laws, you know, they greased a few elbows, if you know what I mean.
Speaker A:So basically the well to do were fine with paying for sex, but not so much allowing poor people to do it.
Speaker A:A rule for thee, not for me.
Speaker A:There were also laws imposed to crack down on venereal diseases, which allowed police to arrest women who are suspected of prostitution, and then they are subjected to health exams, and then, if they were indeed infected, were sent to a hospital for an extended period of time.
Speaker A:This was kind of two pronged because it not only allowed them to arrest any sex workers, but also aimed at preventing venereal diseases from infecting soldiers.
Speaker A:That was their real issue with it.
Speaker A:The last bit of setting we need to discuss are the police, the constabularies, the constables.
Speaker A:Whitechapel is in a fun spot because there's the Metropolitan Police, whose H Division division was responsible for the area.
Speaker A:But then also you had the City of London police, who often battled in trying to solve crimes by not sharing evidence or suspects with one another because their pride and jurisdiction is very important and more important than solving crimes.
Speaker A:Apparently very reminiscent of the issues plaguing the police in the search for the Zodiac killer in the greater San Francisco area in the 60s and 70s.
Speaker A:A lot of issues came from the lack of police cooperation in different jurisdictions in each department.
Speaker A:Kind of wanted the glory, as it were, of catching this killer.
Speaker A:So there's some of that going on in this tale.
Speaker A:Well, there's a lot going on, but that is part of the story itself.
Speaker A:So this is where we enter the story.
Speaker A: p the Whitechapel district in: Speaker A: women murdered from April of: Speaker A:There are only five of them that are strongly attributed to the Ripper, which are known as the canonical 5.
Speaker A:Even some details regarding these women have had questions raised.
Speaker A:But for comprehensive storytelling, we will discuss the canonical five first and then others at the end that might be the Ripper's work.
Speaker A:And that leads us to Mary Ann Nichols.
Speaker A: th of August,: Speaker A:She's a middle child.
Speaker A:And beyond that, we know very little of her youth.
Speaker A: th of January,: Speaker A:As mentioned, newspaper booming right at this point.
Speaker A:So there's a stable employment, you know, there's over 400 newspapers in London alone, so plenty of work to be had, I imagine.
Speaker A:They lived there for the next 10 years and they also had five children.
Speaker A: In: Speaker A:Things weren't all well and good though, because Mary began to drink.
Speaker A:She argued that she began to drink because William was being unfaithful and he said that she was drinking and that made their marriage crumble.
Speaker A:They had separated, but William was paying her allowance.
Speaker A:But this was cut short when he accused her of taking in a lover.
Speaker A:Not really sure if that's fair, William.
Speaker A:You get to gallivant with some floozy, then you leave your wife and now she finds someone to spend time with and you're like, nah, no more money for you.
Speaker A:Unreal.
Speaker A:She had appealed to this, this to the authorities.
Speaker A:But after William said that she had abandoned him with their children, they sided with him.
Speaker A:And naturally this caused Marianne's financial situation to be more tense than anyone would like.
Speaker A:She moved in with her father again after the other man and her split.
Speaker A:Her father was not exactly excited to have her home either, you know, not pleased that she was getting super drunk all the time.
Speaker A:They would fight often and fight about the drinking especially, and this would lead her to leaving his house to strike out on her.
Speaker A:She tried to find various jobs.
Speaker A:She was briefly employed as a domestic servant, but this didn't last as between her drinking and alleged thievery, she would not be asked to return to this job.
Speaker A:Marianne was now staying in the common lodging houses I mentioned before, a daily rate to get a bed for the night.
Speaker A:This put her in the East End at Wilmot's, which is a lodging house for women only.
Speaker A:And this evidently is where she came by the name Polly.
Speaker A:She had like a dorm situation with three other women.
Speaker A:And one of these women described Polly as a very clean woman, but someone who kept to herself as if she was melancholy, being weighed down by some sort of trouble.
Speaker A:This same woman also described her as not being fond of men, not a fast type woman.
Speaker A:Her father also said something similar, that while she was living with him she was not acting immorally, only keeping company with a lower class of woman.
Speaker A:But no, you know, canoodling or anything.
Speaker A:He didn't say canoodling, you know, that that's my word.
Speaker A:I threw that in there.
Speaker A:I only add this because there's a lot of, you know, Heavy handing the press's part in these stories to paint these women as absolute ladies of the night who can only ever be described as caring strictly for carnal pleasure, money and booze.
Speaker A:And that's not necessarily true, you know, these are women who are down on their luck, forced to resign.
Speaker A:Their last possible item for sale to find a bed for the night in a city with bad options for work.
Speaker A: ,: Speaker A:Days later she would turn 43 and 30 August.
Speaker A:It was apparently a very fine day.
Speaker A:The sun peaked through and but storms did move in in the afternoon and then a downpour later in the day.
Speaker A:As the rain subsided, fires broke out in different areas, which seems like the most amount of news you'd be getting from a night in London.
Speaker A:At the time, Mary or Polly was spending her time in a pub called Frying Pan, which lay at the junction of Thrall and Brick Lane.
Speaker A:She spent her money on booze, which meant she had no money to spare for a room.
Speaker A:And when she had left the pub in a slight stupor, she was escorted out of the laundry house because she didn't have any money.
Speaker A:She walked away, but turned and in a laughing manner said, I'll soon get my dose money.
Speaker A:See what a jolie bonnet I have now.
Speaker A:Yeah, I'm also going to be doing bad accents again, so buckle up at around 2:30, which also the fact that I just made her like a dude.
Speaker A:Like a cockney dude.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:Just imagine that at around 2:30am of the 31st, essentially Mary Paulie was staggering around when she saw one of her friends from Wilmot who had just come from watching those firefighters, you know, work it, work it, sister.
Speaker A:Yeah, they didn't have a lot of TV back then actually, they didn't have any.
Speaker A:Or radio.
Speaker A:So, you know, options for entertainment super limited.
Speaker A:Especially when you're poor.
Speaker A:Hey, go watch some firefighters do their thing.
Speaker A:I don't blame her.
Speaker A:Anyway, upon seeing her friend, Mary had told her that she had actually made triple the amount for her lodging fees, but had actually spent all of it by that point.
Speaker A:So she's pretty good with money, obviously making real good financial decisions.
Speaker A:Her friend insisted that she come back to Wilmot's, that she would cover her for the night, which is a great friend.
Speaker A:These women, you know, had either nothing or next to nothing, but she was concerned with the well being of her friend.
Speaker A:In her drunken State tried to help her, right?
Speaker A:Mary refused and somehow still complained that she was penniless.
Speaker A:So she had to go make money.
Speaker A:Make that money.
Speaker A:Somehow she began to stumble away and told her friend, it won't be long before I'll be back.
Speaker A:Wandering down Whitechapel Road, that was the last time she was seen Alive.
Speaker A:At around 3.40am on 31 August, a man named Charles Cross and Robert Paul found Paulie Nichols in Buck's Row.
Speaker A:A dark thoroughfare, this area had plenty of warehouses, stables and other dwellings, but it was super dark.
Speaker A:The lanterns either didn't work well or were never put in.
Speaker A:Compounded by the lack of infrastructure in the shabby part of town as a big theme.
Speaker A:There was hardly any lanterns in the area because it was considered kind of a dark, like people didn't care about it.
Speaker A:Essentially, Charles Cross was walking through Buck's Row when he saw a body.
Speaker A:Well, he didn't know it was a body at first.
Speaker A:He thought it was some sort of discarded cargo or tarp or something like fell off of a carriage.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:Because it was near the gate for Brown's Yard, which is a stable.
Speaker A:So as Robert Paul, AKA Robert Paul Champagne, AKA rpc, AKA none of those names are real, shows up, they realized it's a body, but still not overly concerned.
Speaker A:Which this happens a few times in this story because they see a drunken lady potentially sleeping off her troubles.
Speaker A:And it's kind of unfortunately not super uncommon in this area at the time.
Speaker A:But also, how you not know that's a dead body, you know what I mean?
Speaker A:So they were like, well, she's probably drunk, but we should probably still check on her.
Speaker A:So they did.
Speaker A:They walked closer, felt her hands, which were cold, but the rest of her body was warm.
Speaker A:And I don't know what they touched to figure that out, but her hands cold, I don't know.
Speaker A:And also super dark.
Speaker A:They can't see the extent of any of her injuries.
Speaker A:So they flagged down a constable, which if you haven't figured that out yet, that's another word for police.
Speaker A:That's what they call them over there, Cross the pond, a constable named John Neal, and basically were like, hey, can you figure out what's going on with this lady?
Speaker A:Because we got to get to work.
Speaker A:So John Neal was patrolling the area and says that he had made his rounds through this exact spot a half an hour prior, didn't see anyone, anything.
Speaker A:He noted her position after declaring her dead, stating that she was on her back, legs straight out, skirt pushed up to the knees.
Speaker A:Her eyes were wide open and her new bonnet lay discarded next to her.
Speaker A:The only wound that he could find definitively was her cut across her throat.
Speaker A:Throat.
Speaker A:PC Neil called for backup, which he then directed to retrieve a doctor who then arrived around 4am Dr.
Speaker A:Llewellyn pronounced her dead pretty quickly, and he confirmed that while her hands and wrists were cold, her legs were warm and indicated that she could have been dead for only a half an hour or more.
Speaker A:So kind of crazy, that means the Ripper could be in the shadows, like right around while they were checking on this lady.
Speaker A:Several men from a nearby horse slaughterhouse had not heard anything.
Speaker A:And then when they heard people moving around and yelling and stuff, they went outside, discovered, investigated.
Speaker A:These men were questioned pretty quickly, but then also quickly eliminated because it was clear they had no idea what was going on.
Speaker A:Another man was questioned, the local night watchman who admittedly dozed off on occasion, but he was sure that he had not during those hours, although he had to be called to the area where the body was found.
Speaker A:So he could have just been, you know, on a patrol somewhere or else and just hadn't walked through that area in a little bit.
Speaker A:When her body, body was taken to the mortuary, the full scope of the brutality was discovered.
Speaker A:Her clothes soaked in blood, especially down her back.
Speaker A:There was a small pool of blood where her body lay, which made some consider that she was moved there from a different spot since nobody heard anything.
Speaker A:But like, that would also mean that like so much more blood would be around in like a path, right?
Speaker A:Like blood's not going to pool up in one spot, but not drip as you move the body.
Speaker A:Anyway.
Speaker A:The coroner hadn't got a good chance to inspect the body before a couple of what is described as sea penile workers had stripped the body and cleaned it before he had actually got to do his examination, which, like they were doing that for funerary purposes, but also they're trying to do an investigation and they just ruined every bit of evidence.
Speaker A:So not great.
Speaker A:He did note that her throat had been sliced not once but twice.
Speaker A:Her abdomen had been cut open as well, disemboweled to a certain point.
Speaker A:Not so far that they were like hanging out all over, but also not good.
Speaker A:The next part part was to identify the body, but her clothing and items found on her person were pretty generic, so it'd be difficult to find someone's identity based on that alone.
Speaker A:Body was photographed and these photographs were shown around the district to see if anybody knew her.
Speaker A:Yeah, photographs like this, this story's old, but it's not so old that there's not some super disturbing pictures about these things which kind of blew my mind.
Speaker A:Eventually, some leads pointed to Mary Ann Monk.
Speaker A:No shortages of Marianne's in the 19th century London.
Speaker A:Marianne Monk had actually befriended Marianne Nichols at a workhouse.
Speaker A:When they worked together in April and May of that year, Ms.
Speaker A:Monk was brought to identify the body.
Speaker A:She confirmed it to be Marianne Nichols.
Speaker A:She also provided information which led police to Edward Walker, Mary's father.
Speaker A:On Saturday, September 1, Edward was brought to the mortuary to identify the body of his daughter.
Speaker A:And that's.
Speaker A:That's gotta suck, right?
Speaker A:Given how strained their relationship was, how they parted on poor terms, you know, I can't imagine he felt great.
Speaker A:Then her eldest son arrived and also recognized his mother.
Speaker A:Followed by her estranged husband who apparently had some animosity towards the son, which is weird.
Speaker A:Apparently the ex, William Nichols was affected deeply by the sight of his now dead former bride.
Speaker A:And according to a newspaper, he had exclaimed I forgive you as you are what you have been to me.
Speaker A:Did he actually say this?
Speaker A:No clue.
Speaker A:Because we're going to find out.
Speaker A:The press like to play fast and loose with some of the details about the killing.
Speaker A:You know, gotta sell those papers.
Speaker A:And all the failed authors now had the perfect place to practice their writing newspapers.
Speaker A:Marianne Nichols was a.
Speaker A:She was buried in an attempted private ceremony on 6th September.
Speaker A:But with it being such a crowded neighborhood, word had gotten out pretty quickly.
Speaker A:And the details about her murder had gotten out.
Speaker A:And word spread around the neighborhood which both intrigued and terrified people.
Speaker A:But this was just the beginning.
Speaker A: The first week of September: Speaker A:Police were hard at work tracking down leads of any suspect people might have.
Speaker A:Their investigation in lodging houses led to suspicions of men who had a dislike towards women, particularly prostitutes.
Speaker A:Which still confused how anybody could draw that conclusion.
Speaker A:But anyway, their queries led to a name which popped up with several interviews with sex workers.
Speaker A:This man is referred to as Leather Apron.
Speaker A:Cool name.
Speaker A:Must be a family name in the community.
Speaker A:Had previously harassed prostitutes in the area.
Speaker A:Even like extorting money from them.
Speaker A:He was also described as.
Speaker A:As a quote, Jewish looking man.
Speaker A:Not my words.
Speaker A:This is London in the late 19th century.
Speaker A:Struggled with anti Semitism and this is not helping them beat that case.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:The newspapers also fan the flames of curiosity, even linking the two other murders in the area from months prior to this one.
Speaker A:There's being that of Emma Smith, who was attacked and robbed in April, but then survived long enough to go to the hospital and tell them that she was attacked by a group.
Speaker A:Group.
Speaker A:And then on August 7th, Martha Tabrum, she was another sex worker who was stabbed many, many times by what police determined to be a bayonet from a soldier.
Speaker A:And this is due to the fact that she was last seen with a friend of hers, with two soldiers.
Speaker A:But no suspects were ever charged.
Speaker A:And now the papers are starting to link these killings to Marianne Nichols, whether genuinely or strictly to sell papers, who knows?
Speaker A:And while we don't know if the two women I just mentioned were victims of the Rippers, what we do know is the next.
Speaker A:That was Annie Chapman born either Eliza Annie or Annie.
Speaker A:Eliza Smith.
Speaker A:Her father was in the military, but by the time she was born is only referred to as a servant in records.
Speaker A:Annie was the oldest child of her family with three sisters and one brother.
Speaker A:And her sisters apparently did not get along with her or vice versa.
Speaker A:Still, her life was not set up to be a tragedy, not first, anyway.
Speaker A:She married at the age of 28 to a man named John Chapman.
Speaker A:John was a coachman driving coaches for members of the aristocracy.
Speaker A:You know, pretty decent job, all things considered.
Speaker A:There's a photo taken of the two at around this time and they're dressed very well, her dress large and pluming, her hair done neatly in braids, and she had a large belt buckle on.
Speaker A:And John stood next to her leaning on a mantle decorated with filigree and showing off the chain of his pocket watch, which not a super common item at the time.
Speaker A:And it was a signature tool of coachman and you know, just to show off, basically, like I'm.
Speaker A:Yeah, I'm that coachman.
Speaker A:What's up?
Speaker A:This type of photograph is something that would be on display in a mantle or like on a mantelpiece in like a parlor, which was a sign of middle class at the time.
Speaker A:So this couple goal oriented, right?
Speaker A:They did not desire life and drabs and boarding houses.
Speaker A:So how did Annie end up in Whitechapel under those circumstances?
Speaker A:Well, tragedy had fallen upon Annie long before Ripper had though that they had ambition and aspirations of wealth.
Speaker A: r the third child was born in: Speaker A:John.
Speaker A:John Alfred Chapman.
Speaker A:John Jr.
Speaker A:Was born with some sort of disability.
Speaker A:It doesn't specify.
Speaker A:It's like he was born Disabled, essentially.
Speaker A:John Jr.
Speaker A:Was sent to live in a home to care for people with disabilities.
Speaker A:And I don't know if his life and care was better for this or not, but I'm going to go Ahead and pretend it was was.
Speaker A:Two years after his birth, the Chapman's had another tragedy strike.
Speaker A:Emily, the oldest daughter, caught meningitis and succumbed to the disease at ages 12.
Speaker A:This turned both of them into unconsolable drunks.
Speaker A:But Annie was worse for the wear than John was.
Speaker A: ey had a mutual separation in: Speaker A:But John would keep paying around 10 shillings a week to keep Annie housed at the very least.
Speaker A:And he had been also arrested for drunkenness a few times around this same time and, and now she was alone.
Speaker A:The weekly payments continued until John's death on Christmas Day 18.
Speaker A:He died of cirrhosis of the liver, which, you know, you get that from drinking a lot.
Speaker A:But this meant that the money had stopped and this put Annie in a bad spot.
Speaker A:She tried taking odd jobs.
Speaker A:She would crochet, make flowers, like put together bouquets basically.
Speaker A:But when left without any other options to pay for lodging, she would turn to sex work.
Speaker A:She was staying at a variety of places at the time, moving from one common lodging to another.
Speaker A:And adding to all of this that she had tuberculosis and is also thought to have syphilis, but that's not confirmed.
Speaker A:So she's got a lot of sad stuff happening with Annie.
Speaker A:Not exactly being a career prostitute by any means.
Speaker A:She only had a few people who were considered, you know, regulars.
Speaker A:One man who is referred to as Harry the Hawker, whatever that means, and the other who was Edward or Ted Stanley.
Speaker A:Old Ted was also known as the pensioner because he had told people that he was a former military man who was, you know, drawing a pension because he retired essentially.
Speaker A:But eventually it came out that he was not actually in the military.
Speaker A:So that's fun.
Speaker A:Stolen valor.
Speaker A:Apparently not a new concept.
Speaker A:Teddy and Annie were somewhat of an item, especially according to Stanley, who it is reported that he had directed the deputy of her lodging house to turn away Annie if she had attempted to enter with another man.
Speaker A:Ted also paid for her bed many times, even paid for a friend of hers.
Speaker A:He would stay with her over the weekend, typically, you know, departing early in the morning on Sunday.
Speaker A:After Stanley was away for a month, he returned.
Speaker A:And this would kind of cause a rift between Annie and her friend Eliza Cooper, whose bed he had paid for before.
Speaker A:According to Ms.
Speaker A:Cooper, she had loaned Annie a bar of soap, all right, and then Annie lent it to Ted, who then used it.
Speaker A:And over the next few days, Eliza asked Annie where the soap was and she never returned it.
Speaker A:So then Eliza starts slashing Annie.
Speaker A:Annie all up, right?
Speaker A:No, you know, A little girl on girl ripper action?
Speaker A:No, of course not.
Speaker A:Well, maybe, I guess we don't know for sure that she didn't.
Speaker A:But Eliza had confronted Annie.
Speaker A:Toss.
Speaker A:And then Annie tossed a coin to her witcher to go get more soap.
Speaker A:Like, go, here's some money.
Speaker A:Go buy yourself some new soap.
Speaker A:Leave me alone.
Speaker A:And Eliza not pumped about that move.
Speaker A:A few days later, they were at a pub and soap came up once more and Annie just slaps Eliza and screams, think yourself lucky I don't do more.
Speaker A:More.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker A:All right, Annie.
Speaker A:And then Eliza punches her twice.
Speaker A:Once in the eye and then once in the chest.
Speaker A:All right, Annie bruised up super bad.
Speaker A:I'm gonna go ahead and attribute this to the tuberculosis that was on the 1st of September.
Speaker A:Next few days, Annie's pretty lethargic, sore, her health is failing.
Speaker A:Ran.
Speaker A:Another friend ran into her on the third and remarked how bad the bruise looked on her face.
Speaker A:And then the next day, she said she looked very pale.
Speaker A:Perhaps a vampire was draining her, who knows?
Speaker A:When her friend saw her in the PA state, she asked if she was eating anything.
Speaker A:She said, no, I hadn't.
Speaker A:Haven't even had tea.
Speaker A:And her friend gave her some money to go get food, but also told her, don't spend it on rum.
Speaker A:You know, not.
Speaker A:Not judging, but it seems like she's in a lot of pain from being beat up and plus a tuberculosis plus depression.
Speaker A:She must have let her drink a little rum, dude.
Speaker A:I don't blame her.
Speaker A:Friday, September 7th, that same friend sees Annie once again.
Speaker A:She's sober this time.
Speaker A:She asks Annie if she's going to Stratford to work her trade, but Annie says she too ill to work.
Speaker A:Her friend departs, then comes back a little later.
Speaker A:And by that time Annie has not moved, but it has decided she needs to go to work, otherwise she won't have a bed to sleep in.
Speaker A:Annie went back to the lodging house at half hour to midnight, asking to go into the kitchen.
Speaker A:Another lodger stated that he had a drink with Annie and she seemed pretty drunk by herself.
Speaker A:She didn't leave until 1am A different lodger comes in, sees her in the kitchen, also stating that he saw her organize some pills that she had, probably from going to a clinic of some sort earlier that day.
Speaker A:She departs, and then the two men assume she had went back to her room.
Speaker A:But once she had left the building or but she had left the building once more.
Speaker A:At around 1.30am on September 8, the night watchman asks her for rent, which she doesn't have.
Speaker A:She says she spent it all buying Levi birthday presents.
Speaker A:What?
Speaker A:That's super sweet.
Speaker A:No, but she then goes to meet the director of the place, tells him that she doesn't have the money but she will be back with it, don't worry.
Speaker A:Keep her.
Speaker A:Keep.
Speaker A:Keep a light on.
Speaker A:He ribs her a little, you know.
Speaker A:Says that she had.
Speaker A:She had it or had it.
Speaker A:Had.
Speaker A:Had.
Speaker A:She had it, but had spent it on booze.
Speaker A:Not wrong.
Speaker A:As she composes herself in the hallway before telling both men she's going to be back.
Speaker A:Keep her bed for her.
Speaker A:Don't give it away to somebody else.
Speaker A:She leaves, walking towards Brushfield street, then to Spitalfields Market, which is a lovely name, Spitalfields.
Speaker A:At half past five in the morning, Annie is seen with a man and heard being asked will you by?
Speaker A:And Annie replying yes.
Speaker A:The witness confirms the time because of the clock nearby striking half hour.
Speaker A:You know, the bells.
Speaker A:She made her way down the same street.
Speaker A:The woman did not see the man as he had his back to her, but she did see Annie's face.
Speaker A:This was around.
Speaker A:Sorry.
Speaker A:She did see Annie's face.
Speaker A:This was at 29 Hanbury street which I'm gonna throw out some addresses.
Speaker A:It's not super important, but there's maps.
Speaker A:You can follow along if you'd like.
Speaker A:After the witness leaves a few moments after, presumably then, a man named Alber Radish is living in a flat just next door to 29.
Speaker A:At 27, he walks into the backyard to go use the outhouse because they don't have indoor plumbing.
Speaker A:Walking past the privacy fence that had separated the two yards, he hears voices.
Speaker A:He hears a woman saying no.
Speaker A:And then he hears a thud against the fence.
Speaker A:And he just assumes that the thud was the sound of wood as the unit next door had a wood packing business ran by a woman, I guess.
Speaker A:Fair enough.
Speaker A:Enough.
Speaker A:If I heard a woman say no and then her a thud, I'd be pretty suspicious about what was happening.
Speaker A:But it's just somebody next door throwing some wood around.
Speaker A:Just before 6am A car man who lives in a flat at 29 discovers Annie's body.
Speaker A: s and founds the band corn in: Speaker A:No, but the man who found her body was named John Davis, which kind of hilarious to me.
Speaker A:One of the workers who got rid of Polly Nichols clothes was named James Hatfield and welcome Home Sanitarium.
Speaker A:Anyway, sorry.
Speaker A:Davis ran into the nearby Back door.
Speaker A:A back door to number 29, which had basically a long hallway through it and opened into the actual street.
Speaker A:The front, like this way he came from is essentially like.
Speaker A:Think of it like a backyard.
Speaker A:He goes to the street, alerts some men who are walking nearby, and then they all go back to confirm.
Speaker A:Annie was lying between the steps of the apartment and the building or apartment building and the fence.
Speaker A:Her head facing the house face up.
Speaker A:Her clothes were pushed above her waist, her white striped stockings visible.
Speaker A:She had a handkerchief around her neck that she was already wearing.
Speaker A:Her face and hands covered in blood.
Speaker A:Her hands raised up and her palms kind of facing upward like to her face, as if she was trying to struggle or stop the bleeding.
Speaker A:The man or the men ran to go find police.
Speaker A:One man left to go find a drink to calm himself down, which, understandable, that's probably the most normal reaction in the story.
Speaker A:Inspector Joseph Chandler arrives after a few moments and has to shove past onlookers.
Speaker A:Quickly secures the area, ordering people to be cleared out.
Speaker A:He also had another officer fetch reinforcements to maintain the crime scene integrity as well as to go find a doctor.
Speaker A:Around 6:30 in the morning, the surgeon arrives.
Speaker A:Dr.
Speaker A:Phillips.
Speaker A:He arrived to a massive crowd.
Speaker A:Reported to be over 100 people, maybe several, several hundred.
Speaker A:His testimony is as follows.
Speaker A:Quote.
Speaker A:The left arm was placed across the left breast.
Speaker A:The legs were drawn up, the feet resting on the ground and the knees turned outward.
Speaker A:The face was swollen and turned on the right side.
Speaker A:The tongue protruded between the front teeth, but not beyond the lips.
Speaker A:The tongue was evidently much.
Speaker A:Was.
Speaker A:Yeah, evidently much swollen.
Speaker A:This is how he wrote it.
Speaker A:The front teeth were perfect as far as the first molar, top and bottom.
Speaker A:Very fine teeth.
Speaker A:They were all right.
Speaker A:That seems not important.
Speaker A:The body was terribly mutilated.
Speaker A:Okay, this is the important stuff.
Speaker A:The stiffness of the limbs was not marked, but was evidently commencing.
Speaker A:He also noticed that the throat was dissevered deeply, that the incisions through the skin were jagged and reached right around on the neck.
Speaker A:On the wood impaling between the yard in question and the next.
Speaker A:Smears of blood corresponding with where the head of the deceased lay were to be seen.
Speaker A:These were about 14 inches from the ground and immediately above the part where blood from the neck lay.
Speaker A:That's all before the post mortem had been done.
Speaker A:That's just his like on the scene observations.
Speaker A:Body transported to the mortuary and is clear this time that the body should not be touched, except for it was once again stripped and washed.
Speaker A:Similar to Paulie Nichols still, the post mortem was done, this time revealing the similarities between the two women and even escalation in ferocity.
Speaker A:Throat once again slit twice from left to right.
Speaker A:The cuts even reached down to the vertebra vertebrae.
Speaker A:The abdomen once again cut, but this time her intestines had been removed and draped over her shoulder.
Speaker A:Super disturbing.
Speaker A:Even more disturbing is her uterus, bladder were both removed.
Speaker A:And she was also bloated in the face and tongue protruded from her mouth, meaning that she could have been strangled, probably was strangled before she was like, that's how she was killed.
Speaker A:And then he slit her throat to really make sure she was dead, I guess.
Speaker A:Items used are likely tools of a surgeon.
Speaker A:Postmortem knives, butcher tools, but not leather working tools, because those were never long enough.
Speaker A:Because if you think about working with leather, you're working in a very like, finite amount.
Speaker A:But if you're doing surgery or cutting meat for a butcher shop, you're going to be going into the body pretty deep, right?
Speaker A:They also noted how the precision, how they noted the precision it took to remove the reproductive organs in pretty much one motion.
Speaker A:They the killer had some working anatomical knowledge.
Speaker A:The surgeon estimated that all of this could have taken around 15 minutes or up to an hour.
Speaker A:Annie Chapman was put to rest on Friday, Friday 14th September.
Speaker A:Her relatives paid for the funeral and were able to keep it a secret from prying eyes both of the press and the public.
Speaker A: ,: Speaker A:Well, her grave no longer exists, but there are markers of memorial and that this is true for most of the women.
Speaker A:I don't think any of their original graves exist anymore.
Speaker A:So following the murder of Annie Chapman, people started to freak out a little bit.
Speaker A:This is just over a week since the last body was discovered.
Speaker A:Two days after Marianne Nichols was buried, Scotland Yard assigned Chief Inspector Donald Swanson to the case.
Speaker A:Police began doing door to door canvassing of the area, looking for anyone with, you know, weird demeanor or bloody clothes, which I get, I get that that's obvious that you're looking for that, but come on, guys, do you not think that the person's gonna hide the clothes or you think they're just gonna walk around in the same clothes all the time?
Speaker A:Anyway, they threw in 145 plain clothes officers to help the investigation.
Speaker A:As mentioned, the surgeon who performed the aut noted that the same knife must have been used for both Annie Chapman and Polly Nichols, along with the same cuts.
Speaker A:You know, they followed the same paths.
Speaker A:Basically, there were Blood spatters in the yard where Annie was found which indicated that the violence did happen there.
Speaker A:She hadn't been moved.
Speaker A:Police finally found the man that people called Leather Apron that I mentioned before.
Speaker A:John Pizer was his name.
Speaker A:And he was a Jewish boot maker in the area who did have a bit of a temper.
Speaker A:And I only emphasize that he is a Jewish bootmaker because there's an anti Semitic, anti Semitic, like I don't know, veil in London at this time and kind of everywhere at this time, I guess.
Speaker A:But in the description was that the person was Jewish and this guy is a, is, he's Jewish.
Speaker A:But he also has an alibi anyway.
Speaker A:He had, he was actually has an alibi for both victims.
Speaker A:So I got to tell you, he's probably not the guy.
Speaker A:There were a few others that were arrested, but no evidence had linked them to either crime.
Speaker A:Police were also starting to get criticized at every angle for not apprehending anyone, but also just kind of for being police.
Speaker A:They were criticized for not having enough officers and then they were criticized for not putting out a reward.
Speaker A:And a few newspapers had directly blamed the police for the murders.
Speaker A:By this point you should have solved this.
Speaker A:You should have solved this before the first murder happened.
Speaker A:The press also shifted from random acts of violence to a single actor operation.
Speaker A:They put out information of the murders, how they were linked, what could be helpful.
Speaker A:Helpful.
Speaker A:But now you also just kind of released a litany of information to the general public to now run rampant with these details.
Speaker A:The public was watching and that was obvious because the killer had acted twice in an eight day period and then wouldn't kill anybody else until the end of September.
Speaker A:Meanwhile, theories ran wild.
Speaker A:The anti Semit, anti Semitism article spread like wild of fire.
Speaker A:This leather apron character mentioned heavily despite not being tied to either crime.
Speaker A:He's just an angry man that, that yells at prostitutes sometimes and they're like, it's gotta be him.
Speaker A:The press were also stalking police to get information.
Speaker A:They were bribing some of the officers for the inside scoop.
Speaker A:There were even some vigilante parties coming together.
Speaker A:George Lusk and other local businessmen founded the Mile End Vigilance Committee to aid police with their efforts.
Speaker A:Public attention wasn't solely on finding someone responsible.
Speaker A:During the doldrums between the murders, the public had a field day with hundreds of tip letters, letters coming in.
Speaker A:Also a fair amount of jokers sending in letters for their own jollies.
Speaker A:One such letter would give Burke to the name we now use, Jack the Ripper.
Speaker A:It was delivered to the Central News Agency on September 27.
Speaker A:Although you know, it was just set in another pile of letters that had a very similar tone.
Speaker A:It was written in red ink and it reads as follows.
Speaker A:Dear boss, I keep on hearing police have, have caught me, but they won't, they won't fix me just yet.
Speaker A:I've laughed when they look so clever and talk about being on the right track.
Speaker A:That joke about leather and gave me real fits.
Speaker A:I'm down on whores and I shan't, shan't quit ripping them until I do get buckled.
Speaker A:Grand work.
Speaker A:The last job was I gave the lady no time to squeal.
Speaker A:How can they catch me now?
Speaker A:I love my work and want to start again.
Speaker A:You'll soon hear of me with my funny little games.
Speaker A:I saved some of the proper red stuff in a ginger beer bottle over the last job to write with, but it went thick like glue and I can't use it.
Speaker A:Red ink is fit enough, I hope.
Speaker A:Haha.
Speaker A:The next job I do, I shall clip the lady's ear off and send them to the police officers just for a jolly.
Speaker A:Wouldn't you keep this letter back till I do a bit more work and give it, give it out straight.
Speaker A:My, my knife's so nice and sharp.
Speaker A:I want to get to work right away if I get a chance.
Speaker A:Good luck.
Speaker A:Yours truly, Jack the Ripper.
Speaker A:Don't mind me giving my.
Speaker A:Don't mind me giving.
Speaker A:The trade name wasn't good enough to post this before I got all the red ink off my hands.
Speaker A:Curse it.
Speaker A:No luck yet.
Speaker A:They say I'm a doctor now.
Speaker A:Haha.
Speaker A:So despite the skepticism of it, the press sent it to the police and they ignored it as a hoax.
Speaker A:At least they did until bodies were found the next day.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A: th September: Speaker A:Two women killed in very similar manners, both belonging to the canonical five.
Speaker A:First woman, Elizabeth Stride, AKA Long Liz.
Speaker A:Because long stride, like you take long wrong steps.
Speaker A:It's silly, but it's kind of fun.
Speaker A: ay, she was born in Sweden in: Speaker A:I'm gonna go out on a limb and say his name was Gustav.
Speaker A:Also that's kind of one of my favorite naming traditions that exists in the world.
Speaker A:Like don't get me wrong, I appreciate like the naming tradition of some Hispanic families where they add both last names of their parents, right?
Speaker A:But the like Scandinavian, Norwegian, Swedish people who got, you know, this is like, you know, you are my child.
Speaker A:That's Your last name.
Speaker A:Like it?
Speaker A:I don't know.
Speaker A:There's something super fun about it.
Speaker A:And I wonder if people still do that over there.
Speaker A: at she moved to Gothenburg in: Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker A:She then moves to a different parish in Gothenburg a little while later.
Speaker A: And then in: Speaker A:And then in April that year, she gave birth to a stillborn daughter.
Speaker A:Very sad.
Speaker A:The reason she was registered as a prostitute is not because she was caught being a prostitute.
Speaker A:Excuse me, she wasn't caught being a prostitute, but rather she was unwed and then also pregnant.
Speaker A:And they're like, well, the only way that that could be is you're probably a prostitute, right?
Speaker A:No, but they are.
Speaker A:Part of the process in Sweden at the time was, you know, if you are unwed and pregnant, you have to be screened for venereal diseases.
Speaker A:And probably good for her because it was found that she did have syphilis, which ultimately led to the stillbirth.
Speaker A:But they were to acknowledge it and treat her somewhat, I guess, so sad that the baby died, but she ended up living for a little while longer anyway.
Speaker A:Later that year she is treated for the venereal diseases and then discharged in November.
Speaker A: arrives in London in July of: Speaker A:Liz allegedly started staying on and on again, off again with a man named Michael Kidney.
Speaker A:And he said that she was working for a family and Hyde Park.
Speaker A:But you know what the job was?
Speaker A:Nobody really knows.
Speaker A: In March of: Speaker A:He's a carpenter.
Speaker A:They move in together and they open a coffee shop in Poplar.
Speaker A: taken over by another man in: Speaker A:Three years later, the steamship Princess Alice collides with another ship in the Thames.
Speaker A:600, 700 people died in that incident.
Speaker A:And then Liz starts telling people that her husband and children died in this shipwreck.
Speaker A:She was also missing a good portion of her teeth and had been telling people that she was kicked while scaling the mast of the ship to try and escape, and nobody was ever able to corroborate.
Speaker A:This story is probably concocted so she could get pity money from local churches.
Speaker A:Basically.
Speaker A: In: Speaker A:Put her in an infirmary for a week.
Speaker A:After leaving the infirmary, she then moves to Whitechapel.
Speaker A:She's still Married to John, but the marriage begins to wear down.
Speaker A: John dies in: Speaker A:And then Elizabeth kind of goes off of the rails a little bit, really.
Speaker A:Just, she stops caring, she does what she wants.
Speaker A:She begins to drink very heavily, starts scamming people, which is assumingly assuming where the Princess Alice story comes from.
Speaker A:That's one of the scams that she was running.
Speaker A:She also is arrested during this period for being drunk and disorderly.
Speaker A:She moves in with Michael Kidney at this point and then starts working odd jobs.
Speaker A:She's also not the best roommate either, as he describes their relationship as stormy.
Speaker A: In: Speaker A:And then in April of that year, she charged Kidney with assault, but then didn't show up for court proceedings.
Speaker A:So they just kind of were like, all right.
Speaker A: In July of: Speaker A:Oh my heck.
Speaker A:In mid September, she requested some more financial assistance from the local Swedish church.
Speaker A:And she had typically, like, she went to this church quite a bit.
Speaker A:She was arrested a few days later, ultimately being arrested eight times in the year and a half leading up to her death.
Speaker A:Tuesday 25th September, Michael Kidney interacts with her for the last time.
Speaker A:Next day, a local doctor and street preacher comes to a lodging house to try and afford children the sanitation and medication that they might need, you know.
Speaker A:And he listened to some of these women discussing the murders.
Speaker A:Liz had shouted, quote, we're all up to no good.
Speaker A:No one cares what becomes of us.
Speaker A:Perhaps some of us will be killed next.
Speaker A:And then she also talks to a friend this day about the falling out she had with Michael.
Speaker A:Liz spends the weekend cleaning room at the lodging house, being paid to do so, which in turn probably, you know, was supposed to go to rent.
Speaker A:At 6:30 on 30 September, she sees a woman who ran the house that she was staying at and the pair have a drink together, walk back to the lodging house she's seen leaving within the next hour or so, passing a friend of hers and showing off the money that she had been paid for the work that she did earlier.
Speaker A:The watchman of the house says she seemed very cheerful as she left.
Speaker A:At 11pm, two men see Liz exiting a public house with a man described as short, with dark mustache, sandy eyelashes, whatever that means.
Speaker A:What is sandy like?
Speaker A:Did he have like eye boogers in them?
Speaker A:I don't, I don't understand.
Speaker A:I guess I've never really paid attention if anybody's got like dirty blonde eyelashes.
Speaker A:I don't know.
Speaker A:Also, like, did they manage to clock the color tone of these eyelashes of this man?
Speaker A:At a quick glance anyway, they noticed, they noted that he was wearing a bowler style hat along with a morning suit and coat, essentially a long tailed coat, fancy pants McGee over here was also apparently raining pretty heavily and the pair were seen essentially making out in the doorway.
Speaker A:Saucy.
Speaker A:This surprised the other patrons because this guy looked like he was, you know, of importance.
Speaker A:He had some respectable clothes on, he seemed smartly dressed.
Speaker A:And they were kind of confused as a man like that would be doing something like low class basically in public.
Speaker A:So yeah, anyway, they also tried to get the pair to, you know, come back, have a drink.
Speaker A:They seem like fun, right?
Speaker A:And they were like, nah, we don't really want to hang out with you.
Speaker A:And then one of the men said, that's Leather Apron getting round you, which is essentially like, hey you, you might get murdered.
Speaker A:And the pair left shortly after that.
Speaker A:So it was probably not a good sign.
Speaker A:Like I know I said Leather Apron had been questioned and had an alibi.
Speaker A:But essentially this name was still used in the press.
Speaker A:Like the Ripper moniker hadn't been coined yet.
Speaker A:So it was like Leather Apron or the Red Knife and like random stuff like that.
Speaker A:So essentially these guys were like, are you sure you want to hang out with that guy?
Speaker A:He could be the killer.
Speaker A:And you, you could be next.
Speaker A:Spoiler alert at allow at around 11.45pm, a laborer sees her with a man who is in a short black coat and a sailor's hat.
Speaker A: She is seen at: Speaker A:Think like Sherlock Holmes style hat.
Speaker A: And then at: Speaker A:He stated that he saw what he thought was a domestic dispute.
Speaker A:The man that she was with throws her down, attempting to toss her into the street essentially.
Speaker A:So he kind of just crosses the street also, you know, he, he could hear that they were yelling, but bad news, Israel does not speak English, so he has no idea what they're actually saying.
Speaker A:There's also another man.
Speaker A:So there's three dudes on the street.
Speaker A:And then Elizabeth, the one man who threw her to the ground, another man approaching on the opposite end of the street, and the guy who threw Liz down then yells Lipsky and points at the other man, not Schwartz, and they both kind of get the heck out of there.
Speaker A:Now Lipsky is a reference to a murder that happened a Year prior, a man named Israel Lipski had killed a woman named Miriam Angel.
Speaker A:She was found in her bedroom with acid poured down her throat.
Speaker A:How this.
Speaker A:After this event, a wave of anti.
Speaker A:Antisemitism spread through London.
Speaker A:And so this Lipski thing was kind of a slur of sorts.
Speaker A:Now how did this man mean it when he said it?
Speaker A:Nobody really knows because like I said, Schwartz did not speak English.
Speaker A:So he only heard Lipski because he understood that that was a name.
Speaker A:He did identify the woman he saw on the street that night as the dead body of Elizabeth Stride.
Speaker A:He described the man who threw her to be around 5 5, age 30, dark hair, fell fair skin, small brown mustache.
Speaker A:He was full faced, broad shoulders and drunk.
Speaker A:The other man he saw was around 5 11, around 35, light brown mustache and hair and a dark overcoat.
Speaker A:And then like a black hard felt hat, which is like essentially like a top hat.
Speaker A:So two conflicting descriptions very close together.
Speaker A:The man who saw Stride with a man in dark coat and deerstalker hat was a police officer.
Speaker A:Both men identified her body as the woman that they had seen.
Speaker A:So who is right?
Speaker A:Adding to the confusion, a third man, James Brown, says, hey, get on up.
Speaker A:No, it's very hilarious that another musician's name pops up like, I think I'm gonna call it, I think Jack the Ripper is actually Jack White.
Speaker A:This is all lining up.
Speaker A:A man named James Brown says he saw Stride with a man who he describes as a stoutish and 5 foot 7 with a long coat.
Speaker A:And now I'm wondering if old Lizzie wasn't some sort of plain face, you know, where she kind of just looks like a bunch of people.
Speaker A:Like no defining features.
Speaker A:They're like, yeah, that's a woman.
Speaker A:That's probably Elizabeth.
Speaker A:That's rude.
Speaker A:I said I was going to make fun of the victims, but I forgot I wrote that.
Speaker A:So anyway, what we have is that she was seen by a number of different people within two hours of her death with a man ranging from 5 foot 5, 575 11, from 28 to 35 ish, wearing a dark coat that's either long or short.
Speaker A:The hat that's either rounded or a deer stalker type or a sailor hat.
Speaker A:Pretty, pretty broad range.
Speaker A:I do think, however, not so much of a peculiar trend after all.
Speaker A:Like, she was a sex worker.
Speaker A:I mean, yes, up to this point, the women you've met usually had men who stayed in their rooms from time to time.
Speaker A:Like more regulars, I guess you would call it.
Speaker A:This to me seems like a woman working, so she can drink and have a room.
Speaker A:Like it's not necessary that she like may not have entered in any of agreements with any of these fellas, but propositioning be happening, right?
Speaker A:Anyway.
Speaker A:Or maybe she did.
Speaker A:Maybe, I don't know what the going rate was back then, but maybe she, you know, was just like really chasing paper.
Speaker A:Realistically, no way to verify all of these accounts because none of them are verifiable aside from the policeman and Schwartz identifying the body.
Speaker A:And you know, there's even summation that she was not even a victim of the Ripper at all.
Speaker A:So in any event, at 1am, a jeweler named Louis Dime shoots Dean shoots.
Speaker A:Deemshoots, I don't know, is driving his car into Dude Gutfield's yard.
Speaker A:This is a storage type place.
Speaker A:And he had finished his work day.
Speaker A:He was selling his wares and was going to store his, you know, carriage and ponies and stuff.
Speaker A:And his horse stopped at the gate and would not go further.
Speaker A:And he leaned forward on his car and saw that there was dark shapes.
Speaker A:So then he took his, his whip and prodded it and it was very heavy because he couldn't move it with the whip.
Speaker A:So then he jumped down, have a little look.
Speaker A:He struck a match and as he did it burnt out, right?
Speaker A:But in that few seconds of flickering light, he saw a woman lying on the ground.
Speaker A:He then ran into the nearby International Working Man's Educational Club, of which he was a steward.
Speaker A:And he was looking for his wife out of fear that this was her.
Speaker A:Like his immediate reaction was, lady on the ground, where's my wife?
Speaker A:Understandable, not knocking him at all for doing that.
Speaker A:But anyway, he finds his wife safe inside, then told a few people inside about the woman outside, not knowing if she was drunk, her dead.
Speaker A:And again, listen, I know they didn't have good lights and everything is dark, but come on man, maybe it's just like wishful thinking on his part, like maybe, maybe she's alive.
Speaker A:We better check, like knowing full well she's definitely not.
Speaker A:So he takes a candle outside with him, leading several people with and saw all of the blood and the woman's throat having been cut.
Speaker A:So they all rush to find a constable Deem shoots his and another guy running up and down a nearby street just kind of yelling murder.
Speaker A:Like literally yelling bloody murder.
Speaker A:Just yelling murder, murder, murder.
Speaker A:Somebody come out.
Speaker A:PC Spooner arrived on the scene.
Speaker A:That's what we were needing.
Speaker A:PC Spooner asking what the fuss was all about.
Speaker A:Why is everybody yelling murder?
Speaker A:And then they're like, hey there's a body here.
Speaker A:He's like, ah, yeah, that makes sense.
Speaker A:He leaned down, lift her chin up and felt that she was still warm.
Speaker A:More police showed up and once more had to keep people out of the area.
Speaker A:They fetched further assistance and another officer confirmed the warmth of her face, but that her wrist held no pulse.
Speaker A:Duh.
Speaker A:I don't know if you looked at the ground, but there's blood everywhere, dude.
Speaker A:And her neck is separated, essentially.
Speaker A:Dr.
Speaker A:Blackwell arrives at 1:16am, confirming she's dead.
Speaker A:Places that she had been dead for 20 to 30 minutes.
Speaker A:He observed a silk scarf on her neck which was pulled to the left as if, like, somebody had, like, grabbed it to move her around.
Speaker A:He stated that her death would have been fast, within a minute and a half, and her windpipe severed, so she couldn't have made a sound at all.
Speaker A:Elizabeth was wearing a long black jacket with flowers pinned to it that weren't, you know, there when she left the lodging earlier in the day.
Speaker A:She had a black skirt, black bonnet scarf that I mentioned, and then had, like, a couple random items in her pocket.
Speaker A:The police interviewed everybody at the scene, inspected the area.
Speaker A:They found a locked door to a loft, but then when they bashed it in, they found it was empty.
Speaker A:Empty.
Speaker A:So it's kind of lame.
Speaker A:She was 45 years old, died in relative obscurity and buried in a plot paid for by the parish she belonged to, as she had no family near to do so.
Speaker A:Dr.
Speaker A:Phillips did this postmortem as well, aided by Dr.
Speaker A:Blackwell.
Speaker A:They noted a clear incision on the neck, six inches in length and all arteries and vessels cut through cleanly.
Speaker A:The cut also tapered on the right side of her neck.
Speaker A:Many people point to this as being different enough to not be the work of the Ripper.
Speaker A:Others hypothesized that it was basically like he was interrupted in the middle of this.
Speaker A:Like it tapered because he had to, like, yank it out sooner than he would have.
Speaker A:Because if you remember, he's done two slits across the neck and this one, you know, anyway.
Speaker A:Some contemporary accounts even cast doubt on this being the work of the Ripper as well.
Speaker A:But if you view this as an interrupted killing, you know, it.
Speaker A:This next one makes a lot of sense.
Speaker A:So.
Speaker A: ,: Speaker A:Her father was a tin worker, mother was a cook, and she was a child.
Speaker A:Sorry.
Speaker A:When she was a child, her father and uncle both left as left their tin business, moved to London and found jobs.
Speaker A: il the death of her mother in: Speaker A:And then she and her sisters are sent to a workhouse slash industrial school.
Speaker A:Basically learn how to be a good housemaid.
Speaker A:Her aunt then takes care of her which gives her access to school once again.
Speaker A:Around 21, she becomes involved with a man named Thomas Conway.
Speaker A:He's a pensioner who served in the Royal Art Royal Irish Army.
Speaker A:Almost dipped into an Irish accent just now.
Speaker A:The pair would sell books written of Thomas's exploits in the military and also would compose, sing, song, compose and sing songs known as gallows ballads.
Speaker A: ed and they would split up in: Speaker A:Then Catherine moved to a lodging house and met a man named John Kelly.
Speaker A:She is described as being pretty happy, always singing, not terribly fond of the drink, like many of the contemporaries were in this story.
Speaker A:Many people described her as having sober habits and the deputy at the lodging house she stayed at nor John Kelly, the man she became involved with, knew that she was selling her body.
Speaker A:Kelly stated that sometimes she drank too much, but not like frequent, not habitually.
Speaker A: In: Speaker A:Following the end of the season, they both walk to Hunton in Kent to London from Hunton in Kent to London.
Speaker A:They returned on Friday, September 28th.
Speaker A:They split and stayed at different lodging houses.
Speaker A:But, you know, she makes her way back to him.
Speaker A:On Saturday the 29th at around 8am, she was apparently asked to leave the lodging that she had went to on her own.
Speaker A:The pair then go and pawn some of Kelly's boots for some money and then use that money for food, which makes sense.
Speaker A:And they're seeing at 11am eating breakfast in the lodge's kitchen.
Speaker A:They have run out of money at this point and Catherine tells Kelly she is going to talk to her daughter about getting some money.
Speaker A:She leaves at 2pm, says she's gonna be back by 4pm At 8pm, Police Constable Robinson finds Catherine surrounded by people.
Speaker A:She's very drunk.
Speaker A:She's actually drunk.
Speaker A:She's not dead and perceived as drunk.
Speaker A:She's actually just drunk.
Speaker A:Robinson asks if anybody knows who she is.
Speaker A:Nobody does.
Speaker A:He pulls her to her feet, leans her against the wall and then she like slides back down.
Speaker A:She's very drunk.
Speaker A:They take her to Bishop's Gate station where she is put in what's essentially a drunk tank.
Speaker A:At 8:45 she was conscious, but when asked her name she said nothing like as in her name was nothing she passed out shortly after that in there and checked on she was checked on every so often by the police quarter after midnight she is awake and is now singing she asks when she can be released and is told when you are capable of taking care of yourself and she, she says I could do that now she is not released then she is given another 40 minutes like I don't know we'll let her cool off a little bit more and then she's given she gives her name Marianne Kelly that's the name she tells them she leaves the station at around 1am asking one officer what time it is and he says too late for you to get anything to drink and she says I shall get a damn fine hotel hiding when I get home and he says serves you right, you had no right to get drunk and pushes the door open for her says this way Mrs.
Speaker A:She leaves but when she departs the police station she turns towards the way that she had just been brought from not a good sign towards more drinking potentially instead of back where her lodging was though she didn't tell them where her lodging was but we know after the fact that she didn't live the direction she was heading at 11 or at 1:35am Three men see Catherine talking to a man facing him with her hand on his chest but in a like tender manner not as if she was like pushing him away they are seen in Miter Square which was a 10 minute walk so you know it was assumed that she met this man on the walk over there they described him as around 30 years old 5 foot 7, fair skin, mustache with a medium build and dressed in a salt and pepper colored jacket think like a dark gray wool and then a gray cloth cap and a reddish handkerchief around his neck he appears to be a sailor to these men which you know Liz Stride also seen talking to a man that could be a sailor but also docs are pretty popping in London could just be talking to a sailor around 10 minutes later PC Watkins finds Catherine Edo's body in Miter Square he had just passed through this area 15 minutes prior a doctor is called and arrives around 2am Dr.
Speaker A:Brown describes the body as being on its back head turned to the left, arms at the side, palms facing upward left left leg extended outward abdomen exposed, right leg bent at the knee and her throat cut her intestines were pulled out and thrown over her right shoulder piece of them was cut off completely placed between the body and the left arm her right ear was partially Cut through on the low.
Speaker A:Blood pooled on the left side of the body and her neck.
Speaker A:And the body was very warm and rigor mortis had not set in yet when the body was discovered.
Speaker A:He estimated that she had died within 30 minutes of his arrival.
Speaker A:And of course we know she was alive at around 1:35 when those men saw her with the man dressed in the gray wool thing.
Speaker A:There's no blood around the abdomen, meaning the cuts were made after her throat was slit.
Speaker A:She, when she arrived at the mortuary, body was stripped and a piece of her ear had fallen off of the clothes.
Speaker A:Postmortem was done in the afternoon of Sunday the 30th.
Speaker A:Rigor mortis had started to set in.
Speaker A:The body was not complete, completely cooled yet.
Speaker A:Her left hand had a bruise on the back of it between the thumb and pointer finger.
Speaker A:No injuries to the scalp, back of the head or elbows.
Speaker A:Her face had been mutilated.
Speaker A:There was a quarter inch cut on the left eyelid and another scratch from the upper lid to the nose.
Speaker A:Right eyelid had a half inch cut.
Speaker A:There was really deep cut on the bridge of the nose, which then went from the border of the left side of the nasal bone down an angle into the angle of the jaw on the right side.
Speaker A:I guess it would be the way cut all the way into the bone separated the cheek from the bone.
Speaker A:She was missing the tip of her nose from the extension of that same cut.
Speaker A:The upper lip had been split down to the gum.
Speaker A:There was another cut at the top of her nose.
Speaker A:Like just, you know, this.
Speaker A:Her face got messed up.
Speaker A:Her throat had been cut.
Speaker A:Another superficial cut made parallel.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:We have the two cut throat slices.
Speaker A:All major arteries and vessels in her neck had been completely severed.
Speaker A:Her abdomen mutilated, multiple slashes.
Speaker A:Her liver having been stabbed in the process of these cuts.
Speaker A:These cuts were not straight.
Speaker A:They were pretty jagged, like somebody like zigzagged as they drug the knife across.
Speaker A:She was also missing her left kidney.
Speaker A:And then also her uterus was removed.
Speaker A:Again, we have another uterus missing.
Speaker A:Now this is kind of why I'm thinking he doesn't like women very much.
Speaker A:Like I joke, but this is the only way to keep this from being too depressing, right?
Speaker A:I'm doing my best, doing my best not to make fun of the victims.
Speaker A:I feel like I'm doing good there anyway.
Speaker A:If I don't, it gets too sad.
Speaker A:Catherine Edo's was found to be wearing a black bonnet, black jacket, dark green skirt and white vest and a red scarf and brown stockings.
Speaker A:She had an apron.
Speaker A:Not like the leather apron apron, it's more like a waist apron you'd see on like a maid at the time.
Speaker A:This apron, though, was cut.
Speaker A:There's a big chunk missing which appeared to be slashed away and they had suspected that the killer took it away to clean himself of any blood that was on their hands.
Speaker A:Following the murder, the police are searching the area for any clues.
Speaker A:Anybody questioning every.
Speaker A:Everyone that they see.
Speaker A:One of the city detectives had been searching the area, walking from Miter Square to Middlesex Street, a few blocks away to the east, and walked north to Wentworth street and questioned two men, but their answers were sufficient to let them go.
Speaker A:He then turns back south onto Goulston street at 2.20am, having seen nothing, goes back to Miter Square.
Speaker A:By the time he gets back to Miter Square, the body's been moved, like, by the.
Speaker A:By the proper authorities.
Speaker A:Nobody came back and, like, moved it.
Speaker A:And at that time he was told about the piece of apron that had been taken from the body.
Speaker A:Around 35 minutes later, another police constable, Long, finds a piece of apron on Goulston Street.
Speaker A:He was walking past a doorway, noticed a piece of apron lying on the ground inside the doorway, covered with blood and some fecal matter, which would make sense, you know, she was just disemboweled.
Speaker A:There's probably some fecal matter in there.
Speaker A:Detective Hulse and PC Long both passed through Gholston around the same time around 2:20.
Speaker A:But neither man saw the piece of apron prior and both were confident they would have seen it had it been there.
Speaker A:So why did it arrive at this point?
Speaker A:Was the Ripper waiting in the shadows and then dropping it in some sort of weird breadcrumb trail?
Speaker A:Who knows?
Speaker A:No, obviously we do not know for certain if the blood on this chunk of apron was human blood.
Speaker A:But, you know, postmodern mortem notes discussed the apron being found and how it matched up with the apron on the body.
Speaker A:Like, the stitching was the same and also, like included a patch that was used to fix the apron.
Speaker A:Like it matched up there too.
Speaker A:There's also a chance that he took bits of clothing from other victims to clean his hands or knife.
Speaker A:We just don't know if they were missing any because they didn't pay attention to that yet.
Speaker A:Also, the clothes got removed in the mortuary before they really even got a good look at it.
Speaker A:You might also be wondering, if this killer carved up these women so ferociously, wouldn't he need more than a piece of apron to clean himself up?
Speaker A:Well, not necessarily.
Speaker A:You Know ample evidence suggests that most if not all of victims were strangled before their throat were slit.
Speaker A:And more importantly, that if the throat slicing was the first killing blow, that the blood would spray.
Speaker A:Like if he's dragging the knife across the right, the blood would spray outward in the opposite direction.
Speaker A:It's not going to spray where his hand is because the knife hasn't gone there yet anyway.
Speaker A:So.
Speaker A:So there's that he most likely did strangle all of them, which means the blood would not be flowing, which means that it would not have any of that arterial spray.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:The project protection sprays.
Speaker A:And we also need to think about the outfit that the men scene with the last two victims were wearing.
Speaker A:Even though the descriptions vary slightly, we say the same man killed them.
Speaker A:He was wearing a coat in both descriptions.
Speaker A:Yes, they're described differently, but a coat all the same.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:This means that he could have taken off the coat in preparation for their service to begin.
Speaker A:Strangled, slashes her up, puts the coat on, hides any blood.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:He also could have just very well thrown any blood stained items around like in like a nearby trash or whatever this is.
Speaker A:The Whitechapel district is a just mess of passageways and things that who would know if you threw a random discarded piece of cloth into some corner, dark corner of a house or an alleyway or something.
Speaker A:But if we are taking this piece of apron as certainty that the Ripper fled in a direction that ended in Goulston street and we have a pretty good idea of the route he could have taken, in general, few sources I've found kind of discuss the peculiarities of the timeline.
Speaker A:You know, if the murder happened between 1:35 and 1:40 in the morning, why hang out around for like an hour just to leave a clue?
Speaker A:Well, from Miter Square to Goldston street, it's a 10 minute walk.
Speaker A:If you're like speed walking, do you think someone who just killed a woman is going to be basically lightly jogging through this area?
Speaker A:Or do you think that maybe he's going to be kind of moving slowly, slowly through the shadows?
Speaker A:Because that's kind of what I think.
Speaker A:I think the real reason is because he was kind of hiding in the alleyways, kind of waiting, watching patrols as they came by.
Speaker A:He's definitely not dumb.
Speaker A:He got away with all of these crimes.
Speaker A:So sitting around and waiting for a window between patrols is not that hard for him to do.
Speaker A:If he can disembowel a woman Within 15 minutes, I think there's a pretty good chance he can time a police patrol and slip through the shadows.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:There's more to the Gholston street clues as well.
Speaker A:We do not know if this next bit was from the killer or if it had just already been there.
Speaker A:But we do know that PC, long after finding the apron, does some more looking around and saw above where the apron lay was chalk graffiti that said, quote, the Jews.
Speaker A:It's spelled Jade.
Speaker A:You are J U U E S.
Speaker A:Okay?
Speaker A:The Jewess are the men that will not be blamed for nothing, whatever that means.
Speaker A:Police did not like this graffiti.
Speaker A:They were worried it was going to cause more anti Semitism around the town.
Speaker A:Instead of finding someone to take picture of it, they opted to have it removed.
Speaker A:You know, this is part of the infighting between different police factions.
Speaker A:The city police were involved because this was actually in their area now.
Speaker A:And the metropolitan police were like, nah, this is a bad move.
Speaker A:We should probably get rid of this.
Speaker A:And the city police were like, we need to get somebody over to take a picture of it.
Speaker A:Ultimately, they did decide to remove it.
Speaker A:They did try to compromise and just remove, like, the Jews part, but no.
Speaker A:And also, like, some of them just described it as looking slightly faded.
Speaker A:Not that chalk is, like super, super saturated when it's used, but, like, good likelihood that this was not put there by the killer.
Speaker A:And also, why would he hang out to write a note while he's trying to be hidden?
Speaker A:I feel like that's not the move.
Speaker A:Anyway.
Speaker A:The fallout of the double event, as it was now being called, was, as you'd expect.
Speaker A:Press had a field day challenging the police to do anything that their ineptness not now got two women killed this time.
Speaker A:Not only did they have two murders to fuel the printing presses, but as I mentioned, now they had the Dear Boss letter and some other letters as well.
Speaker A:And you may remember the line indicating that the writer spoke of cutting off the ear of the next victim.
Speaker A:Well, that letter had not been published yet, but once the double event happened, police had to.
Speaker A:So now the ear was cut, but it was not taken or sent to the police.
Speaker A:So that's kind of a key piece here.
Speaker A:Had the killer genuinely wrote that, I believe that, you know, he would have probably taken the time to do that.
Speaker A:He would have cut the ear off.
Speaker A:Why fret about time when you're, like, throwing this lady's intestines all over the place?
Speaker A:You can't cut an ear off.
Speaker A:Like, I think that the ear that got cut was kind of more collateral damage in the ferocity of him just, like, going crazy with this knife.
Speaker A:But, yeah, like, maybe like the throat slicing just got a little too carried.
Speaker A:Well, it all got carried too carried away, but you know what I mean.
Speaker A:Anyway, there's also another letter that is found at this time, dubbed Saucy Jack, which is much shorter than the other one.
Speaker A:And it was received on 1st October, the day after the double event.
Speaker A:And it said, says quote, I was not coddling Dear Old Boss when I gave you the tip.
Speaker A:You'll.
Speaker A:You'll hear about the saucy.
Speaker A:About Saucy Jackie's work tomorrow.
Speaker A:Double event.
Speaker A:This time number one squealed a bit, couldn't finish straight off.
Speaker A:Ha.
Speaker A:Not the time to get ears for police.
Speaker A:Thanks for the keeping the last letter back till I got to work again, Jack the Ripper.
Speaker A:Now, this letter indicates knowledge of the Dear Boss letter and also of the murders that just taken place, which makes it seem more like likely to be authentic.
Speaker A:Now, the chance is that if the first one was fake, whoever wrote that could have also faked this letter, right?
Speaker A:Not that hard to.
Speaker A:Not like a stretch of the imagination.
Speaker A:And whoever wrote it, if they were working on like provided intel, they could have just as easily got that same in or more intel from the double event to write this one, right?
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:So who knows, like, eventually it will come out that these letters were fabricated.
Speaker A:But there's one letter in place particular that's probably the most famous.
Speaker A:I mean, the ones that he says Jack the Ripper in.
Speaker A:Pretty famous.
Speaker A:But this one, this one, I'm going to say more famous.
Speaker A:On October 16th, George Lusk, you know, the guy who started the coalition to find the Ripper, help the police, all that jazz.
Speaker A:He received a package in the mail, which was weird because it was not his birthday.
Speaker A:No, it was a 3 inch square box and inside half of a kidney piece preserved in wine.
Speaker A:And a letter.
Speaker A:Now, before we get to the letter, not conclusive whether or not the kidney belonged to Catherine Eddows.
Speaker A:She was missing one, but nobody really knows.
Speaker A:Also nobody knows if it was human or not.
Speaker A:But pretty creepy.
Speaker A:So the creepiness doesn't stop there either.
Speaker A:The letter reads as follows.
Speaker A:From hell, Mr.
Speaker A:Lusk sore I send you half the kidney.
Speaker A:Kidney spelled K I D N E I took from one woman and prescribed preserved it for you toddler piece.
Speaker A:T O T H E R I must.
Speaker A:That's probably the other I fried and ate it was very nose.
Speaker A:Okay, I may send you the bloodied knife knife that took it out.
Speaker A:If you only wait a while.
Speaker A:U h, I l longer signed.
Speaker A:Catch me when you can, Mr.
Speaker A:Lusk.
Speaker A:And so m I S H T E R Aside from it being addressed that it was sent from hell, the writing itself, also super striking.
Speaker A:There's something about it.
Speaker A:This is very angular.
Speaker A:It's like, it's cursive, but it seems super sharp.
Speaker A:You know, cursive is usually like very fluid looking and ornate.
Speaker A:And this is like, I don't know, I'm not a handwriting expert, but between that and the spelling error, it gives me a hunch on who it may have been.
Speaker A:And also probably written by the killer because it's creepy.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:Many people over the years have came to the conclusion that, you know, most of the letters were probably hoaxes, but this one kind of remains in contention.
Speaker A:Another interesting part of it is that there's no reference to a name in his letter.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:It just says from hell and catch me when you can.
Speaker A:The other letters use Jack the Ripper and that is drawing on some criminals from around the time.
Speaker A:There's a man named Jack the Lad, AKA Jack Sheppard, who was kind of a mythologized criminal from the 18th century.
Speaker A:Also things like Jack the Giant Slayer and the fact that Jack was a great nickname for kind of anyone.
Speaker A: In: Speaker A:So kind of case closed.
Speaker A:I don't know why more people aren't talking about that, but they did so to boost newspaper sales and boy howdy, did it work.
Speaker A:This is essentially Birth of the True crime, right?
Speaker A:As an interest, this focus people's attention on, you know, some of the most gruesome moments.
Speaker A:Some papers opted to critique the police and how they were stuck in the mud, so to speak, as a killer ran rampant around the district.
Speaker A:Others talked about a reign of terror that would soon fall across the city or already had.
Speaker A:The anti Semitic, anti Semitic and anti immigrant stances also spread pretty quickly, depending on which paper you read.
Speaker A:Overall, the onslaught of media coverage on the murders started hushing on the streets as people were more cautious about late night traveling.
Speaker A:There was another odd bit to this as the classes were kind of on display for one another throughout the lens of these crimes.
Speaker A:Well to do.
Speaker A:People often gawked at the prospect of these women who put themselves in harm's way and ended up dead.
Speaker A:There was also a bit of entertainment for the upper crust.
Speaker A:It was intriguing and there was a degree of separation for them as it was clearly only happening to women who were down on their luck.
Speaker A:The one thing to be said about this is that, you know, the true horrible conditions of Whitechapel and other districts like it were now on full display.
Speaker A:You might have had an idea as an aristocrat in London at the time, but, you know, this really illuminated the dark corners of life for people in the city.
Speaker A:People also had a general mistrust of their fellow citizens.
Speaker A:Not knowing who the Ripper was made it difficult to be comfortable around anyone, especially strangers.
Speaker A:While the voyeuristic fascination of the upper class and chanted conversations with their wealthy friends and families, People who lived in lodging houses or worked in the depths of Whitechapel truly had to be careful with what company they kept.
Speaker A:Businesses began to slow for shops in the area because people were spending less time out on the street.
Speaker A:Same time, local business owners and concerned citizens began doing patrols of the district, offering rewards for any information.
Speaker A:Police were also doing their own investigating, and there was even some joint efforts between the two police outfits.
Speaker A:That's good.
Speaker A:They interviewed around over 2,000 people and led to 80 arrests, though obviously none stuck.
Speaker A:The city police and the vigilance committee joined in offering a reward of £500 at the time, which is.
Speaker A:Is pretty substantial.
Speaker A:All these efforts ultimately fruitless in the end.
Speaker A:Some of the men we have met already, Michael Kidney, drunkenly rambling, was brought in, questioned and was eliminated as a suspect.
Speaker A:And he was.
Speaker A:He was the man who was living with Liz Stride at the time of her death.
Speaker A:John Pizer, or Leather Apron, was also previously questioned regarding Annie Chapman and Paulie Nichols deaths.
Speaker A:But he was questioned once again and then cleared.
Speaker A:Another man named John Foster, a local vagrant, was detained, though not charged.
Speaker A:Then there was Frank Raper, unfortunate name.
Speaker A:He was arrested for being super drunk and yelling to anyone who would listen about the murders of Annie Chapman and Paulie Nichols.
Speaker A:People in the bar with him were.
Speaker A:They sent for a police officer and he got detained.
Speaker A:But you know, he had no real ties to the murderers other than knowing the women like knew who they were.
Speaker A:And then things got silent.
Speaker A:The days turned to weeks, and then weeks into a month, and there was no killings.
Speaker A:This respite only made things more difficult for the police as no killings, no major suspects.
Speaker A:They might as well have not even been trying.
Speaker A:They had distributed upwards of 80,000 leaflets around Whitechapel seeking information.
Speaker A:But outside of the arrests I mentioned, nothing came about the morbid quiet that hushed the district.
Speaker A:Things began to turn in a strange way.
Speaker A:As discussed earlier, the morbid curiosity would fan the flames of the killer's absence.
Speaker A:Every newspaper had something to say which only made people more curious and had primed people to Focus more on the harsh, harsh realities of the East End.
Speaker A:Local politicians began to levy the weight of the.
Speaker A:Of what the papers reported for a sense of urgency to fix the circumstances that allowed the Ripper to thrive and then hide.
Speaker A:Still, the patrols persisted.
Speaker A:Curfews, either self imposed or directed, were issued.
Speaker A:And newspapers were starting, starting to miss Jack in a way.
Speaker A:You know, without any murders, they had pivoted to issues that plagued the area or just rehashing details of many crimes as well as printing a lot of the hoax letters.
Speaker A:But, you know, there's just not the same as the actual events.
Speaker A:Events.
Speaker A:And it's kind of an unfortunate thing, but be careful what you wish for.
Speaker A:As they say, the last victim is one that departs from the traditions of others in a few ways.
Speaker A:For starters, we know very little full truths about her, about her life or anything.
Speaker A:What we do know is passed from one of her friends.
Speaker A:But that information is subject to scrutiny as it could have just been lies from her, the victim in the beginning, or embellishments from the friend.
Speaker A:Another departure was that the other victims, comparatively she was younger, much younger than all the other ones.
Speaker A:And then the other victims, more circumstantial sex workers.
Speaker A:This girl, more of a career prostitute, as it were.
Speaker A: ry Jane Kelly was born around: Speaker A:She was around 5 foot 7 tall, described as stout but attractive features, blonde hair, blue eyes.
Speaker A:The information we have on her history kind of comes from a man named Joseph Barnett.
Speaker A:He lived with Mary Jane Kelly before she was killed.
Speaker A:And the information he learned from her was all her words.
Speaker A:Right, so nothing he found out about from like knowing somebody else who knew her to corroborate anything.
Speaker A:According to this information, she was born in Limerick, Ireland, and moved to Wales with her family at a young age.
Speaker A:Her father worked as an iron worker and she had six or seven siblings.
Speaker A:According to the man who owned the lodging she was staying at when she died, she did receive an occasional piece of mail from.
Speaker A:From her mother in Ireland.
Speaker A:She also came from some means, apparently.
Speaker A:Her lifestyle described as comfortable or well to do.
Speaker A:And one of her former roommates described her as an excellent scholar and an artist of note.
Speaker A:Of no mean.
Speaker A:Yeah, of no mean degree, as in like better than the average.
Speaker A:And, you know, some, some Victorian speech is a little flowery, a little too, dancing around the point.
Speaker A:Ish.
Speaker A:But I kind of like that.
Speaker A:Like of no mean degree.
Speaker A:Anyway, she marries a man at the age of 16.
Speaker A:She was 16.
Speaker A:The man wasn't but then he dies a couple years later in an explosion.
Speaker A:And none of the sources go on about that, so that's kind of scary.
Speaker A:He just exploded.
Speaker A:Anyway, she then moves in with one of her cousins at the time and begins to work as a prostitute.
Speaker A: She moves to London in: Speaker A:Here she meets a man who pays her to join him on trips to Paris.
Speaker A:But ultimately she stops because she didn't like him.
Speaker A:Fair.
Speaker A:There's also an alternate story from a woman named Elizabeth Phoenix.
Speaker A:She told police shortly after Kelly's description was posted that like they posted her description to see if anybody knew her.
Speaker A:And she stated that Mary Jane Kelly actually used to live with her brother in law.
Speaker A:And she was told that Mary was Welsh and her parents had abandoned her and that she claims to be Irish on occasion.
Speaker A:And in an effort to learn more, members of the press did their own investigating and found the people in the neighborhood that she said that this Mary had stayed with her brother in law.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:They learned through this that Mary Jane Kelly arrived in London and then met a French woman who kind of maybe trafficked her.
Speaker A:It forced her into prostitution.
Speaker A:She had a pretty chaotic life up to this point.
Speaker A: Safe to say in: Speaker A:A couple of men with what appears to be pretty serious intentions.
Speaker A:One of her landlords even thought she could have married one of them.
Speaker A: , who we discussed briefly in: Speaker A:And together they bounce around, you know, in different places, basically getting kicked out when they can't pay their rent or they're being too crazy when they're intoxicated.
Speaker A: In early: Speaker A:In the fall, Joseph loses his job and then Mary turns back to prosecutor prostitution to earn some money.
Speaker A:And Barnett decides he doesn't want anything to do with it.
Speaker A:So he leaves, but still keeps tabs on her, keeps talking to her and they fight off and on.
Speaker A:On October 30, they have a pretty big fight.
Speaker A:His reasoning is that she was letting prostitutes live in her room and he didn't like that.
Speaker A:And I don't know if it's because like he was worried that she's associating with prostitutes, which means that she was more likely to go back into prostitutes or something, I don't know.
Speaker A:He also said that Mary, like she was letting these women stay with her out of the goodness of her heart which kind of seems like a like he's like man.
Speaker A:She's a good person letting these women stay with her, but I don't like it, so I'm out of here anyway.
Speaker A:In any event, Mary's on her own with the exception of her friends who stay with her sometimes.
Speaker A:Mary has a woman named Maria Harvey over on the 5th and 6th of November.
Speaker A:A few days later, Mary Jane seen talking to a man who bears a resemblance to the man who was seen talking to Elizabeth Stride before she was murdered.
Speaker A:Smart dressed, long black coat.
Speaker A:On the night of November 9th, a Friday, Joseph Barnett comes to see Mary not holding on to his I'm leaving promise.
Speaker A:But anyway, she had a friend staying over, one named Lizzie Albrook.
Speaker A:Lizzie spoke very highly of Kelly, describing how she would often speak to her as if she were like her mother or like a older sister or something, telling her to live a better life than she did, not to do wrong as she had.
Speaker A:Lizzy stated that the last conversation that they had was pretty similar to that, that she wanted her to leave, to return back to her home, wherever that may be.
Speaker A:At 8pm Barnett leaves.
Speaker A: pm she is seen next at: Speaker A:She is seen walking with man who is described as stout, around mid-30s in age, blotchy face, wispy mustache and a bowler style hat.
Speaker A:The woman passed the pair offering a good night to Mary Kelly who responded in somewhat of a drunken slur.
Speaker A:She said good night, I'm gonna sing and then started singing.
Speaker A: At: Speaker A:And that woman's husband said leave the poor girl alone.
Speaker A:Only he knew.
Speaker A:At 1am it begins to rain.
Speaker A:The neighbor from earlier I.
Speaker A:I gotta tell you it kind of feels like the rain is like triggering Jack the Ripper here.
Speaker A:I, I didn't notice it while I was writing this, but now that I'm saying it every time it's been raining that all right.
Speaker A:Anyway, it starts to rain.
Speaker A:The neighbor from earlier walks past Mary's room, can still hear her singing.
Speaker A:She sees a light like through the, like the curtain on the window she can see a glow of light on the inside.
Speaker A:At 2am she asks a man for some money and he declines, says he had spent it all already.
Speaker A:To which Mary declares that she has to go find somebody.
Speaker A:That man name is George Hutchinson, and George had passed a different man.
Speaker A:Didn't think anything of it at the time, but then sees this man again.
Speaker A:Shortly after talking to Mary Jane Kelly, he sees this man play a hand on Kelly's shoulder, say something, which causes Kelly to burst into laughter.
Speaker A:And then the man joins her in laughing.
Speaker A:Kelly says, all right, and the man says to her, will be all right for what I have told you.
Speaker A:Or maybe he said, you will be all right for what I have told you.
Speaker A:I don't know.
Speaker A:It doesn't really say, but.
Speaker A:And I also don't know what that means.
Speaker A:He then puts his arm around Kelly and they begin to walk.
Speaker A:Hutchinson notices the man, remembers him and also sees him carrying a sort of bundle or pack of sorts, and he starts following them because he's a good citizen.
Speaker A:The pair pass under a street lamp.
Speaker A:Hutchinson gets probably the best look at this man that anybody could.
Speaker A:The man, pale, slight mustache, curled edges on the.
Speaker A:Curled up on the sides, right?
Speaker A:Dark hair, dark eyes, bushy eyebrows, being the good neighbor that he was.
Speaker A:Hutchinson also decides to describe this man as having Jewish appearance because that's all anybody in London can identify anybody as.
Speaker A:Apparently he said that the man had a soft felt hat which he lowered down to like try to cover his eyes.
Speaker A:Soft felt hat is essentially like a casual top hat almost, or bowler hat, it could be.
Speaker A:It's also described as wearing a dark coat, a white collar and black necktie.
Speaker A:He also had gloves in one hand and then his package in the other.
Speaker A:Well, a package, not his package.
Speaker A:And then stood around five six, five seven and was described as being around around 35 years old.
Speaker A:Hutchinson, like I said, decides to follow them.
Speaker A:Good for him.
Speaker A:Paracross Commercial street, which is kind of a busier street.
Speaker A:Then go down Dorset.
Speaker A:They stop outside Miller's Court where Mary lives and talk for a few minutes before Kelly says to the man, all right, my dear, come along.
Speaker A:You will be comfortable.
Speaker A:The man then puts his arms around Kelly and she kisses him.
Speaker A:And then she's heard saying that she lost her neckerchief or handkerchief, whatever, and the man hands her a red one.
Speaker A:He follows them as they head into the court, and then at 3am he kind of loses sight of him.
Speaker A:He tries to see them, but he can't.
Speaker A:So then he decides to leave.
Speaker A:Mary's neighbor from earlier returns to her room at around 3am in the rain, cannot see light or hear anything from Kelly's room.
Speaker A:She probably got to her room before Kelly and made it back.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:But she hears like, she goes to her room, goes to bed, but she doesn't like fall asleep.
Speaker A:She stays awake and she can hear people coming, going, and she hears people talking and stuff.
Speaker A:And one particular instance comes to mind as she her heard like footsteps leaving but never heard a door shut.
Speaker A:Kind of interesting.
Speaker A:At 4am a woman hears a faint cry of oh, murder.
Speaker A:But was not alarmed.
Speaker A:Apparently this was not an uncommon sound in the area.
Speaker A:Another one, another woman also hears this.
Speaker A: lso stated that he saw her at: Speaker A:The man who owned Miller's Court has his rent collector go get the rent money from Mary Jane Kelly.
Speaker A:Thomas Boyer goes to her room, knocks several times and even calls out for her.
Speaker A:No response.
Speaker A:Doors locked.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker A:He then assumes that she's hiding from him.
Speaker A:So he pushes the curtains aside and just sees blood and was like, oh, boy, this is above my pay grade.
Speaker A:He didn't say that, but he even runs away and goes gets the owner and he is like, just, just baffled.
Speaker A:The owner then makes that guy run.
Speaker A:No, sorry.
Speaker A:Tells the owner, owner runs up to the room, pushes a curtain open, sees the mess, sees the murder, runs away, runs to go find police.
Speaker A:When he arrives at the.
Speaker A:No, sorry.
Speaker A:The owner doesn't run to the police.
Speaker A:He has his rent fetcher run to the police station.
Speaker A:And when he gets there, he can't even like, say anything.
Speaker A:He's freaked out.
Speaker A:And all he does say is another one.
Speaker A:Jack the Ripper.
Speaker A:Awful, crazy.
Speaker A:Eventually they get tired of waiting and a police inspector says, you're good, you're going, you're good.
Speaker A:Go ahead and open the door.
Speaker A:So the owner smashes the door in with an axe.
Speaker A:And the site inside is.
Speaker A:It is gnarly.
Speaker A:It is absolutely disturbing, immense gore.
Speaker A:This is a quote from the landlord that said, quote, the sight that we saw cannot drive away from my mind.
Speaker A:It looked more like the work of a devil than of a man.
Speaker A:I had heard a great deal about the Whitechapel murders, but I declare to God I had never expected to see such a sight as this.
Speaker A:The whole scene is more than I can describe.
Speaker A:I hope I may never see such a sight as this again.
Speaker A:Yeah, I bet.
Speaker A:An officer who was trying to open the door before that was then told by one of the inspectors to go away and don't look.
Speaker A:And then this guy's like, I better look, this must be a test.
Speaker A:So he looks.
Speaker A:And what he saw tormented him for the rest of his life.
Speaker A:He wrote a memoir years later and recalled this scene in vivid detail.
Speaker A:He says, quote, as my thoughts go back to Miller's Court and what happened there, the old nausea, indignation and horror overwhelmed me.
Speaker A:My mental picture of it remains as shockingly clear as though it were.
Speaker A:But yesterday, no savage could have been more barbaric.
Speaker A:No wild animal could have done anything so horrifying.
Speaker A:All right, so that's just a brief.
Speaker A:If you're still.
Speaker A:If you are squeamish, this is pretty gnarly stuff.
Speaker A:This is your final warning.
Speaker A:Inside the room itself, very small.
Speaker A:I mean, not is 12ft by 18 or 12ft by 8ft, but it's.
Speaker A:You got to think, it's not a bedroom, it's like basically an apartment.
Speaker A:Like a studio apartment.
Speaker A:Had two tables, a chair and a fireplace in there.
Speaker A:No sign of a struggle.
Speaker A:No weapon was even found.
Speaker A:Even more bizarre was that her clothes had been folded up neatly placed on a chair.
Speaker A:Her boots were in front of the fireplace as if they were like drying off from the rain.
Speaker A:Right?
Speaker A:It was raining and then there was something burnt in the fireplace.
Speaker A:But it was.
Speaker A:Had been in there so long they had no idea what it was.
Speaker A:Dr.
Speaker A:Thomas Bond was the one to perform the autopsy.
Speaker A:And this guy, distinguished surgeon with the Metropolitan Police, like he was the guy and probably the best one for it.
Speaker A:He states that the body was lying naked in the middle of the bed.
Speaker A:Shoulders were flat, but the body was slightly inclined to the left side.
Speaker A:The, like the back left corner of the bed.
Speaker A:Her head was turned on the left side, her left arm crossed in front of her body.
Speaker A:Her right arm stretched outwardly.
Speaker A:Her legs were spread apart, wide apart, with one having a near 90 degree bend from the hip and the other like a more obtuse angle.
Speaker A:The entire abdomen was emptied, her breasts removed, arms slashed in varying means, and her face attacked with a knife repeatedly.
Speaker A:Well, not basically beyond recognition.
Speaker A:Joseph Barnett was only able to identify her by her eyes and her ears.
Speaker A:That's messed up.
Speaker A:Her neck had been cut so violently that there were visible sections showing the bone, like the bone.
Speaker A:The vertebrae had been like gouged and stuff in the other attacks, but like they could straight up see it through her neck.
Speaker A:Her internal organs had been placed in various places.
Speaker A:Her uterus and kidneys and one breast underneath her head.
Speaker A:For some reason, I say for some reason, like anything else makes sense here.
Speaker A:The other breast next to her right foot, her liver between her feet, her.
Speaker A:The intestines over on the right side and the spleen on the left side of her body.
Speaker A:Sections of her stomach that had been removed like flaps basically lay on a table, as well as sections of her thighs, like skin from her thighs.
Speaker A:The sheets of the bed naturally.
Speaker A:Naturally super dark with blood.
Speaker A:The right corner with a pool underneath the bed around 2 square feet.
Speaker A:The wall to the right of the bed had a spray of blood in line with her neck in multiple sprays.
Speaker A:Her nose, cheeks, eyebrows, part of her ears had been removed.
Speaker A:Her lips has been sliced as well as her eyelids.
Speaker A:Her neck vertebrae had gouges like I described.
Speaker A:Dr.
Speaker A:Phillips, who viewed some of the other bodies as well, was also there and stated that she had been killed on one side of the bed, then moved after some time is probably due to Ripper waiting for her to bleed out so he could mutilate her without really getting that much blood on her.
Speaker A:Because if she just bleeds out and then he moves the body, there's going to be less gore on him, essentially, and that he also.
Speaker A:Dr.
Speaker A:Phillips stated that she died from a cut to the carotid artery.
Speaker A:And, you know, she was facing the right side, which makes sense because the blood spray was on the wall.
Speaker A:And this is.
Speaker A:This is kind of like we see what Jack the Ripper truly wanted to do with all of his victims.
Speaker A:Like, this is.
Speaker A:I don't want to use the word masterpiece, because that means that he, like, it was great, but, like, this is the crescendo of his work.
Speaker A:He was.
Speaker A:This is something that he was building up to, essentially.
Speaker A:Like, he got to experiment.
Speaker A:He got to do all of the things that he didn't have time for in the alleyways and stuff.
Speaker A:Like, he was undisturbed with this body for who knows how long.
Speaker A:And this is, you know, he.
Speaker A:What.
Speaker A:He did what he wanted to do.
Speaker A:He did all of it right.
Speaker A:He was indoors.
Speaker A:You know, she never had a chance to make a sound problem, probably.
Speaker A:There's a good chance that, like, she was like, well, she invited him in.
Speaker A:She was super comfortable with whoever it was, and he slit her throat.
Speaker A:She could not have made a noise, and then, you know, mutilated her after she was dead.
Speaker A:The good news out of any of this is that all of the victims were dead before they got mutilated.
Speaker A:Not that there's a good side to any of it, but I guess it's better that they didn't have to live through that.
Speaker A:But also not great.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:Anyway, the crazy part of this to me is that Their are pictures.
Speaker A:Like I don't recommend anybody go look at them, but they're out there, you can find them.
Speaker A:I did because they were on the websites that I was using for this.
Speaker A:They are there a lot.
Speaker A:Like I like.
Speaker A:I watch a lot of horror movies.
Speaker A:I watch a lot of stuff with gore in it.
Speaker A:For instance, I'm a big fan of like the Hellraiser franchise.
Speaker A:Reading the autopsy for the first time, seeing the images, images of her in her bed like this and like writing all of this up, I could genuinely feel my throat tightening like in that pre vomit stage.
Speaker A:Like I don't usually get squeamish and I'm not really saying that I was squeamish about it, but it did make me feel super uncomfortable.
Speaker A:And I just don't ever recall hearing just how vicious the Ripper attacks were.
Speaker A:Like, I've heard that he stabbed women a bunch of times and pulled organs out, but like, I guess I just didn't think about the true intensity that that would mean it is.
Speaker A:It's baffling.
Speaker A: ,: Speaker A:Patrick's Cemetery in Leytonstone with no family present because, you know, nobody knew who her family was.
Speaker A:Her only mourners were Joseph Barnett, her landlord, John McCarthy, a few of her friends.
Speaker A:But what is interesting is that like at her funeral, that's who, but like thousands of people line the streets as the, the carriage went by carrying her coffin, right?
Speaker A:Many weeping and chanting, God forgive her, things like that.
Speaker A:Just like kind of not great, but it is nice to see the community kind of like come together to mourn somebody that had been part of like one of the most gruesome things in their area.
Speaker A:In the immediate aftermath of the.
Speaker A:In the immediate aftermath of.
Speaker A:The press unleashed a flood of sensational reporting that illustrate frustrated police News ran the only official crime scene photographs while the papers sensationalized Kelly's fate with grotesque sketches and minute descriptions of her brutal mutilations.
Speaker A:Acts that, according to investigators, took at least two hours to complete in the privacy of Miller's Court.
Speaker A:For a public already desensitized by months of lurid coverage, these images must have been super shocking.
Speaker A:That coverage intensified public horror and amplified scrutiny of the police, who faced more accusations of lethargy incompetence.
Speaker A:In response, law enforcement introduced a series of pioneering investigative techniques.
Speaker A:Trying to restore public confidence, they staged the first ever crime scene photography in the area.
Speaker A:Like meticulously documenting Kelly's room, including her dishevelled furnishing and stained Bedding.
Speaker A:One of the.
Speaker A:One of the more interesting angles that they tried is a bold but scientifically questionable thing known as retinal photography.
Speaker A:Essentially, they lit candles near Kelly's eyes and then tried to capture an image of what her eyes had seen last.
Speaker A:There's no real way to know if this helped, but it is.
Speaker A:I mean, hey, they're trying.
Speaker A:They deployed bloodhounds, hoping to trace the scent through Miller's Court.
Speaker A:Though these efforts failed since Whitechapel is just a.
Speaker A:Just a total mess of passageways.
Speaker A:Simultaneously, Liam Bond, surgeon.
Speaker A:He kind of put together a offender profile describing the marauder as solitary deviant, and he's a man who has erotic mania and intimate anatomical knowledge.
Speaker A:And this is designed to guide the investigation towards individuals fitting that pattern.
Speaker A:Mid the upheaval, political pressure mounted.
Speaker A:Queen Victoria herself implored Prime Minister Salisbury to overhaul the detective protocols and improvements.
Speaker A:Street lighting across the east.
Speaker A:Excuse me, the East End.
Speaker A:This urgency resulted in Commissioner Warren's removal, replaced by James Monroe.
Speaker A:Not that one in December, which kind of shifted this modernization and public reassurance.
Speaker A:After Mary Jane Kelly's funeral and public horror that followed, London, especially the East End, did begin to change.
Speaker A:The fear hadn't vanished, but it kind of started to push progress.
Speaker A:Whitechapel's twisted alleys and poor lit land planes were finally getting attention.
Speaker A:The city began upgrading the street lamps, widening tight passages and even knocking down some buildings to open up crowded paths.
Speaker A:Castle Alley, for example, was absorbed into old Castle street within the next year.
Speaker A:It wasn't just about catching a killer anymore.
Speaker A:It was about making sure someone like him couldn't vanish so easily into the fog again.
Speaker A:Patrol routes were strengthened.
Speaker A:Police presence, especially at night, became more consistent.
Speaker A:In a strange and grim way, the Jack the Ripper had left behind of legacy of urban reform, which is kind of wild.
Speaker A:That shift didn't happen in a vacuum, you know, it was fueled by sheer panic and pressure following Mary Jane Kelly's death.
Speaker A:Her murder wasn't just Brule.
Speaker A:It was intimate, committed indoors, and so grotesque that it shocked even seasoned officers.
Speaker A:There's a turning point.
Speaker A:The police response exploded overnight in what would become the largest and most intensive phase of the entire ripper investigation.
Speaker A:Over 300 people were questioned.
Speaker A:Almost immediately.
Speaker A:Officers went door to door, checking every room, every boarding house, every dark alley.
Speaker A:The Metropolitan and city London.
Speaker A:City of London police forces coordinated this effort.
Speaker A:They were working side by side, detectives and beat constables alike, chasing leads, and they looked at all of them, from the credible to the absurd.
Speaker A:At the same time, government felt a Lot of heat.
Speaker A:Queen Victoria herself, right?
Speaker A:Instituting that these lights be improved and some of the infrastructure be improved.
Speaker A:San Antonio upgrades also in addition to the lights, new housing initiatives were floated.
Speaker A:And, you know, on the ground, police kind of went through with some of these more experimental methods that I mentioned.
Speaker A:The press fed into this desperation.
Speaker A:Papers printed graphic sketches.
Speaker A:And then rumors circulated about foreign conspiracies, others about secret societies, mad doctors.
Speaker A:No matter how wild the story, one thing was clear.
Speaker A:The Ripper impacted the entire city.
Speaker A:Right?
Speaker A:The they forced London to confront the realities of poverty, crime, class inequality, which had been ignored for a long time.
Speaker A: And by the close of: Speaker A:It was now a symbol, a mirror held up to the darker parts of Victorian society.
Speaker A:The killer vanished into the mist, and the wake he left behind would alter the city forever.
Speaker A:But even as the murder stopped, the question refused to die.
Speaker A:Guy who was Jack the Ripper?
Speaker A:Over the decades, centuries, theories piled up like fog on a London morning.
Speaker A:Some made headlines, some made books.
Speaker A:Some were laughable, others disturbingly plausible.
Speaker A:But none could bring closure.
Speaker A:So we're gonna walk through some of the more.
Speaker A:Some.
Speaker A:Some notable suspects, but also sensationalized ones into more realistic.
Speaker A:We're gonna be begin with Carl Feigenbaum, German sailor who landed on the list mostly due to a theory of that emerged decades later after being executed in the United States for murdering a woman.
Speaker A:Also claimed he might have also been Jack the Ripper.
Speaker A:Tempting connection, but, you know, he was a traveler, he was violent.
Speaker A:He had general disregard for human life.
Speaker A:He obviously kills women.
Speaker A:So there's also no evidence that puts him in Whitechapel during the time of the killings.
Speaker A:His crimes don't quite match the Ripper signature either.
Speaker A:And the theory feels more kind of like we're just trying to pin a guy.
Speaker A:Then there's James Maybrick, the cotton merchant.
Speaker A:Merchant in Liverpool.
Speaker A:Became a suspect suddenly in the.
Speaker A:When a supposed Ripper diary was discovered filled with disturbing confessions and details of all sorts of nature, her moment kind of felt like, hey, we figured it out.
Speaker A:Well, we didn't figure it out.
Speaker A:We just found this thing and then that showed us.
Speaker A:But experts quickly dismissed it as a hoax.
Speaker A:They found that the ink was modern and it was suspect in origin.
Speaker A:There's no record of Maybrick even being in London during the murders and no connection to the East End or VICT victims.
Speaker A:The theory hangs on single dubious document.
Speaker A:And without it, he disappears from the suspect pool.
Speaker A:Now we have Walter Sickert.
Speaker A:He's A British painter.
Speaker A:And he's kind of an interesting one, not because of what he did, but because how deeply he tried to insert himself into this story.
Speaker A:He was fascinated with the Ripper murders, and like.
Speaker A:Like many at the time were.
Speaker A:But he was at a different level.
Speaker A:He even produced a series of dark, chilling paintings that seemed almost inspired by the crime crimes.
Speaker A:One was like a.
Speaker A:Inside the killer's bedroom or something like that.
Speaker A:And he even rented a room that was supposedly rented by Jack the Ripper.
Speaker A:But how would you know that?
Speaker A:You know what I mean?
Speaker A:For some, you know, his level of obsession kind of felt a little suspicious, but the facts tell a little bit different story.
Speaker A:Sickert was actually in France during some of the murders.
Speaker A:One of his most famous paintings was October.
Speaker A:October or something like that.
Speaker A:And it was painted in France during, like, two or three of the murders.
Speaker A:Pretty hard for him to do that.
Speaker A:Anyway, his fascination with the Ripper was real, but, you know, artistic, not forensic.
Speaker A:And in the end, Sickert was haunted.
Speaker A:He's a man haunted by the case, not the man who caused it.
Speaker A:Next we have Francis Tumbletee.
Speaker A:This is an interesting guy.
Speaker A:Google him.
Speaker A:He's got a.
Speaker A:He's got a crazy mustache.
Speaker A:Anyway, he checks more boxes than some of the other suspects.
Speaker A:He's an American quack doctor with the strange and unsettling obsession.
Speaker A:He reportedly collected female anatomical parts, AKA uteruses.
Speaker A:He was also, like, super misogynistic, even for the time.
Speaker A:Like, it's crazy when people in the 19th century were like, this guy hates women.
Speaker A:Everybody kind of did back then.
Speaker A:Like, it was pretty common.
Speaker A:Anyway, he was in London at the time of the murders.
Speaker A:He was actually arrested in November on unrelated charges and then fled back to the United States.
Speaker A:But there was just no evidence that kind of tied him to anything.
Speaker A:He's a walking red flag, don't get me wrong.
Speaker A:But there was no real evidence that connected him to anything.
Speaker A:Then we have John Peyser.
Speaker A:We met him.
Speaker A:Leather apron again.
Speaker A:He's got alibis for all of the things.
Speaker A:Montague John Druitt.
Speaker A:He's a schoolteacher and barrister.
Speaker A:He's interesting.
Speaker A: ,: Speaker A:Senior officer noted that Druitt was suspected by his own family.
Speaker A:That's kind of where it stopped, though.
Speaker A:But they're pretty like, his family suspected him, and then he killed himself.
Speaker A:I think maybe he was already pretty mentally unwell, and then his family are all like, are you Jack the Ripper?
Speaker A:And then he's like, I'm out.
Speaker A:The issue is, is he lived pretty far away from Whitechapel.
Speaker A:He was a barrister, which is like, kind of a lawyer.
Speaker A:So got a lot of.
Speaker A:He doesn't have a lot of free time, essentially.
Speaker A:And then no history of violence and no physical evidence that ties him to anything or, you know, anything that shows that he was, like, living a secret life or anything like that.
Speaker A:But who knows?
Speaker A:The timing of his death is the biggest, like, smoking gun, if you will.
Speaker A:Another one is known as Aaron Kosminski.
Speaker A:He's one that most modern scholars name, is probably the likeliest person.
Speaker A:He was a Polish Jewish person.
Speaker A:He immigrated to London, born in Poland.
Speaker A:He's a barber living in the.
Speaker A:Like, in the middle of Whitechapel.
Speaker A:He suffered from severe mental illness, including paranoid delusions, had auditory hallucinations.
Speaker A:He had a deep hatred of women.
Speaker A: was also institutionalized in: Speaker A:And then shortly after, he was pretty much in institutions the rest of his life.
Speaker A:Several investigators, notably Assistant Commissioner Robert Anderson Henderson and Chief Inspector Donald Swanson, named him, but they did it in, like, private journals, essentially.
Speaker A:They were like, still pretty sure this is the guy.
Speaker A:And then later people found the journals were like, hey, that's the guy.
Speaker A:There's also some controversial evidence that points to him.
Speaker A:There was a shawl or a scarf that was found at the scene, allegedly at the scene of Catherine Eddowes's murder, and was tested and claimed to have DNA matches Kosminski's descendants.
Speaker A:This sounds good in theory, but the fact that we don't know for sure if that came from Catherine Eddowes is number one.
Speaker A:Number two, they did what's called a microchondrial DNA, which is not the same as, like, a traditional DNA match.
Speaker A:So you can get a lot more matches with a micro mitochondrial DNA analysis.
Speaker A:So, yeah, he.
Speaker A:He still, besides that, is the most believable figure.
Speaker A:He lived in the right place, fits the psychological profile.
Speaker A:Already on the radar, police, but there's no conclusive proof.
Speaker A:So the mystery remains.
Speaker A:And that's kind of the paradox.
Speaker A:Jack the Ripper.
Speaker A:So many suspects, so many theories, but never one answer that just truly fits.
Speaker A:It's a case just defined by.
Speaker A:Not just by the horrors, but also, like, the ambiguity of it all.
Speaker A:Over a century later, we still don't know who he was, but in trying to figure out who he was, we learned a lot more about society that kind of created the environment that allowed the killer to go right, and one that kind of still can't stop Looking.
Speaker A:And I'm.
Speaker A:I'm going to tell you who I think it was, why I think so.
Speaker A:Then we're going to discuss some lasting impacts of the killer, some other potential victims.
Speaker A:But I want to start with some information that I learned about from a video done by absolute crime on YouTube.
Speaker A:First thing I wanted to discuss is what is called geoprofiling.
Speaker A:This is a method used by people, criminologists to analyze the mapping of crimes, multiple crimes, and the victims, and then infer based on this, if the criminal is a marauder or a commuter.
Speaker A:A commuter does exactly what it says, commutes to one location or, like, away from where they live to another location, and does the crimes over there.
Speaker A:But the crimes are super spaced out and don't fit in like a nice bubble.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:A marauder, on the other hand, kills outward from where their home is.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:They go outside of their home and try to leave, like a buffer zone so people can't find them.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:And usually their first instance is closer to their home than some of the others.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:So, like, whoever killed these women did so, you know, in the shadow of the night, slipping away from busy areas, slip through confusing passageways, which means they probably knew the area, which means they probably live there.
Speaker A:Now, you could take it either direction for sure.
Speaker A:But what I think comes into play with another piece of evidence gathered from another modern tool in the digital and computer age.
Speaker A:There are plenty of things that computers do to make our lives easier.
Speaker A:One thing that Scotland Yard has done to make their lives easier is develop a program that would analyze pattern and behavior and then tell you whether it was likely one crime was committed by the same person or not.
Speaker A:Or like, if it fits a trend.
Speaker A:This system is called Holmes Home Office Large Major Inquiry System.
Speaker A:Also, cheeky reference to Sherlock there.
Speaker A:This system was devised in the aftermath of the Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutton cliff.
Speaker A:There was an issue during that time where, you know, different jurisdictions had different evidence, but none of that information was meeting in the middle.
Speaker A:Like, they all had different things that all kind of said the same thing, and they could have linked together and found him a lot faster had that information been shared.
Speaker A:And that's kind of what Holmes does.
Speaker A:So essentially it takes all the information that you put in and can categorize things and tell you whether or not this pattern of all these other crimes can be linked to any other unsolved crimes and in the area or if it fits.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A: murders from Whitechapel from: Speaker A:Remember I talked about at the top of the episode.
Speaker A:There's been 11 in that timeframe.
Speaker A:And then they compiled them all into the program, put the canonical five together, like these are committed by the same person.
Speaker A:Analyze these by category, category and whatnot, and then see if there's links.
Speaker A:And what they found is that there was.
Speaker A:I'll get to that in a minute.
Speaker A:So my estimate is that killer is Aaron Kosminski.
Speaker A:And obviously not a drastic assumption.
Speaker A:He's the favorite for many.
Speaker A:But what I think is that it's based on the following evidence.
Speaker A:The From Hell letter was my first clue.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:How things were misspelled.
Speaker A:He's not from England.
Speaker A:And then the writing is such a stylistic way, it does not look similar to a common English, like true blue, from England.
Speaker A:Cursive.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:It's not flowy and ornate.
Speaker A:It's, like, jagged and very.
Speaker A:I don't know, something about it creeps me out.
Speaker A:And a lot of misspellings, you know, and he's not from England, he's from Poland.
Speaker A:Then you have the fact that he was a barber.
Speaker A:And at the time, barbers had some surgical.
Speaker A:Like barber surgeons, they knew some anatomical stuff.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:He matches quite a few of the descriptions.
Speaker A:He was pale, he had dark hair and a mustache.
Speaker A:And within the height range of the suspects.
Speaker A:He would have been 25,5ish at the time, which is younger than, you know, some of the 30, 35 thing.
Speaker A:But also, he's not from the area, so he's got a different, like, people from England and people from Poland do look a little different.
Speaker A:It's not, like, super obvious, but it could just be one of those things where he just looks a little bit older.
Speaker A:I don't know.
Speaker A:Taking this additional murder that I talked about, they grouped it together, and even without it, geoprofiling, where he is reported to have live fits, like, very nicely inside this orb of all of the murders.
Speaker A:And all of the murders are almost an equal distance from them.
Speaker A:And there's like, I don't know, a mental distance in your mind where, like, you feel like maybe you've walked far enough that you're wherever you need to be.
Speaker A:And he kind of fits that, right.
Speaker A:Like this space between all these murders.
Speaker A:He lived in Whitechapel, knew the area, he had no alibis to speak of, and reported to have mental illness, hated women, which.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:And then he had a record of auditory hallucinations, which started basically right after they moved to London.
Speaker A: the Ripper killing stopped in: Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:Spent the rest of his life in institutions.
Speaker A:The canonical five victims.
Speaker A:Victims, you know, they.
Speaker A:These.
Speaker A:These victims, not the only murders in Whitechapel, but they are, you know, the ones that we are, like, inclusive.
Speaker A:Like, that's Jack the Ripper.
Speaker A:The six other ones have been debated about.
Speaker A:They are all included in Whitechapel murders in general, but I don't think all of them should be included with the exception of one.
Speaker A:Now, Elizabeth Smith is the one who was attacked by a group of men.
Speaker A:She didn't die right away and told people it was.
Speaker A:It was a group of men.
Speaker A:And then she died after.
Speaker A:After that.
Speaker A:Definitely not the Ripper.
Speaker A:Rose Milet.
Speaker A:She was.
Speaker A: In December of: Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker A: ce McKenzie, murdered in July: Speaker A:Her throat was cut and she had some mutilation, but it did not match the Ripper's signature.
Speaker A: Francis Coles in February of: Speaker A:Her throat was also slashed, but that was kind of it.
Speaker A: dentified torso in October of: Speaker A:But it's also not consistent with literally anything else the Ripper has done.
Speaker A:He's open torsos, but he hasn't just left one by itself.
Speaker A:Now, you know, these are kind of suspicious deaths, but they're kind of not in congruency with the canonical five, with the exception of this one.
Speaker A:Martha Tabram, you might remember I talked about the very beginning was like, days ago.
Speaker A:It feels like this has gone on way longer than I thought.
Speaker A: ,: Speaker A:Her killing, brutal, frenzied, and excessive, set off a lot of alarms with modern investigators.
Speaker A:They reanalyzed it with Scotland Yard's Holmes system that I talked about.
Speaker A:She was stabbed 39 times in the neck, torso and genitals, and the torso specifically in her breasts.
Speaker A:And her body was posed.
Speaker A:She hadn't been disemboweled like the other ones, but the hallmarks were there.
Speaker A:Overkill, sexual violence, staging.
Speaker A:And Holmes flagged this together and said it was pretty probable that it was an early killing by the same hand of the canonical 5.
Speaker A:And what makes the link for Tabram even stronger is when you include her with the geoprofiling.
Speaker A:This map of all of the murders.
Speaker A:She fits in not quite in the middle, but very close in the middle.
Speaker A:And where Aaron Kosminski is reported to live is like a couple hundred yards from where she was found.
Speaker A:So that's.
Speaker A:That's suspicious, right?
Speaker A:You know, walking distance.
Speaker A:Well, I mean, it was all walking distance, but still.
Speaker A:And all of this matters for a few big reasons.
Speaker A:First, Tabern's murder lines up with the others in terms of signature throat, genital targeting, overkill, posings, timing.
Speaker A:Makes sense.
Speaker A:She was killed just weeks before Nichols, making her a logical first victim in an escalating spree.
Speaker A:Third, spatial logic is undeniable.
Speaker A:She wasn't the work of someone roaming aimlessly.
Speaker A:This was a man who moved with familiarity through London.
Speaker A:And also, all of the patterns kind of line up.
Speaker A:She was also killed at night when all the other ones were also killed at night.
Speaker A:She was like she was stabbed on the front.
Speaker A:But there's an estimation that the Ripper could have learned from this.
Speaker A:It was the first one.
Speaker A:Okay, well, don't stab him from the front, because then you get covered in blood.
Speaker A:So, yeah.
Speaker A:Now, Jack the Ripper, he didn't just stalk the alleyways of Whitechapel.
Speaker A:Carved his way into the very fabric of modern culture.
Speaker A:Before his rampage, newspapers might have reported crime, sure, but they rarely had flair.
Speaker A:You know, that kind of changed overnight.
Speaker A:The press didn't just cover the Ripper story.
Speaker A:They crafted, you know, crafted a lot of chunks of it.
Speaker A:Competing papers published increasingly graphic details, hyperbolic headlines, and grotesque illustrations to outdo one another.
Speaker A:Some journalists even wrote fake letters, including the now infamous Dear Boss, one that we talked about just to sell more copies.
Speaker A:And it worked.
Speaker A:The Ripper was not just a murderer anymore.
Speaker A:It was kind of a brand, a myth, a headline in human form.
Speaker A:His crimes also shattered any illusion that the police had, that they had it all figured out.
Speaker A:Press published details that interfered with active investigations.
Speaker A:Public confidence in law enforcement eroded.
Speaker A:In response, the police had to evolve.
Speaker A:They began employing different searching techniques, posting descriptions of persons of interest, learning to better preserve crime scenes.
Speaker A:And, you know, they all sound basic now, but this was foundational shift in how that happened.
Speaker A:Detective work in the modern era learned a lot from the mistakes of these investigators.
Speaker A:And they didn't really have fingerprinting, obviously, no DNA, like all of the techniques that you would use now.
Speaker A:Can't use those back then.
Speaker A:Now, the impact didn't stop at the police tape.
Speaker A:Jack the Ripper's influence blend bled into literature, art, entertainment.
Speaker A:He became phantom haunting stages.
Speaker A:Novels, comics, even video games.
Speaker A:The East End became dangerous, synonymous with danger and mystery, a character in its own right.
Speaker A: By the early: Speaker A:And by the late 20th century, graphic novel novels like From Hell and games like Assassin's Creed Syndicate actually made him a fixture in Fictional storytelling.
Speaker A:And let's not forget the litter the literary world.
Speaker A:While Jack was never mentioned in A Study in Scarlet or the Sign of Four, the public's hunger for a figure who could outsmart evil spiked.
Speaker A:Right after the Ripper murders.
Speaker A:Sherlock Holmes, already born on the page, suddenly became a hero that the public needed.
Speaker A:Cold, calculating, brilliant.
Speaker A:He's like the exact opposite of the chaotic reality that the Ripper investigation had.
Speaker A:Holmes gave people closure, comfort that evil could be caught.
Speaker A:That cultural desire helped launch not just a franchise, but entire genre.
Speaker A:And then came the copycats.
Speaker A:The lured press coverage didn't just thrill readers, it inspired or others.
Speaker A:Some later assaults and murders mirrored the Ripper style so closely the that police believe they were deliberately imitating it.
Speaker A:The so called copycat effect shows just how contagious crime stories can become.
Speaker A: example, a century later, in: Speaker A:The Yorkshire Ripper.
Speaker A:He terrified England all over again.
Speaker A:Once again, police and media fed into public panic.
Speaker A:Once again, sensationalism outpaced sense.
Speaker A: e of the Letters published in: Speaker A:He would like quote them.
Speaker A:The myth of Jack had become a cultural virus stick, still infecting the public imagination.
Speaker A:Yet oddly, one of the most constructive legacies the Ripper left behind was social reform ethic conditions of Whitechapel.
Speaker A:His squalor, overcrowding and neglect were laid bare for the public.
Speaker A:And for once, the elite couldn't look away.
Speaker A:Politicians and social reformers used the horror of the murder to push change.
Speaker A:London began clearing slums, investing in housing and re evaluating how it cared for the poorest citizens.
Speaker A:The murders didn't solve poverty, but they definitely helped expose it to the right people.
Speaker A:Jack the Ripper left a legacy that's bigger than the sum of his crimes.
Speaker A:He reshaped journalism, rewrote the rules of police work, inspired, you know, reform, and haunted fiction for over a century.
Speaker A:His murders were real, his myth was constructed.
Speaker A:And his shadow still lingers in every unsolved case, every true crime podcast, every detective story that dares to ask, what if we never find out who did it?
Speaker A:In the fog choked streets of Whitechapel, what began as a series of brutal murders became something far bigger.
Speaker A:A myth, a cautionary tale cultural obsession.
Speaker A:Jack the Ripper is a name that echoes like a ghost.
Speaker A:But behind that name were five very real women, maybe six.
Speaker A:Maryanne Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, Mary Jane Kelly, and maybe Martha Tabam.
Speaker A:Each of them lived lives of hardship, poverty and invisibility until they were made visible by death.
Speaker A:Their stories, however, are often lost in the shadow of the myth.
Speaker A:The tabloids of the time turned them into props of a larger narrative of horror and fear and mystery.
Speaker A:Their humanity was buried beneath headlines and speculation behind salacious thrill of faceless killer on the loose.
Speaker A:But they were not symbols or statistics.
Speaker A:They were mothers, daughters, friends and and co workers doing what they had to do to survive in a city that had already failed them long before the knife was ever drawn.
Speaker A:And yet, despite all of the efforts to uncover the truth, the case was never solved.
Speaker A:And the open wound and absence of resolution has given the Ripper case a longevity no other crime can match.
Speaker A:Over 130 years later, we still debate it, still write about it, still chase the shadow.
Speaker A:And in doing so, we have created something new.
Speaker A:An entire genre of storytelling built not just on the crime, but on the space it left behind.
Speaker A:True crime.
Speaker A:Crime today, I've stated many times, owes a great deal to the Jack Ripper.
Speaker A:Jack the Ripper story.
Speaker A:The idea behind every unsolved murder.
Speaker A:There is a trail of clues to dissect, a mystery to unravel, and perhaps even justice to be served, however, posthumously finds its roots here.
Speaker A:Podcasts, documentaries, best selling books, late night Reddit threads, all tap into the same compulsion to make sense of senseless violence.
Speaker A:But we should never forget what fuels these stories are real people, real tragedy and real consequences.
Speaker A:And today, we remember him not just because of what he did, but because of what followed.
Speaker A:The upheaval, the fear, the change in the story that refuses to fade.
Speaker A:Because deep down, Ripper story isn't just about who did it.
Speaker A:It's about what kind of world let it happen.
Speaker A:A world that preferred sensationalize the crime rather than fix the conditions that led to it.
Speaker A:So as we look back on the story, we must do so with clarity.
Speaker A:Not just about the killer, but at the system that enabled him.
Speaker A:And not just at the myth, but the women who paid the price for being poor and forgotten.
Speaker A:In a city that was prided itself on progress.
Speaker A:There's a quote that I found, it says, in a city that prided itself on order, Jack the Ripper carved out a scar that remains to this day, not just on the bodies of five women, but on the psyche of the modern world.
Speaker A:And it is a scar that throbs every time we consume a story like this.
Speaker A:And if we're going to keep telling it, we should remember why it hurts.
Speaker A:Thank you for joining me on this long winded episode.
Speaker A:I hope you learned something More.
Speaker A:More than you already knew.
Speaker A:I hope that all of the research I did on this was worth it and that the details didn't scare you, because that was not my intention.
Speaker A:I wanted to ground this story in reality.
Speaker A:This is, you know, this really happened.
Speaker A:These women, they existed.
Speaker A:Their lives had tragedy.
Speaker A:And maybe that tragedy is something you might be familiar with.
Speaker A:You know, somebody who struggled in that way.
Speaker A:And I feel like this is what gets lost in a lot of true crime stuff.
Speaker A:You know, we glorify the gore and.
Speaker A:And the.
Speaker A:The outsmarting criminal who gets away.
Speaker A:And it's like, but how hot is it?
Speaker A:You know what?
Speaker A:I think that what I was trying to do is portraying the women as human as we possibly could have.
Speaker A:And instead of just being a sideline to the killer themselves, I wanted to focus more on the women.
Speaker A:And then also I didn't want to shy away from the brutality because that's like an integral part of the story.
Speaker A:If you whitewash what happened to them.
Speaker A:I feel like I don't want to.
Speaker A:What's the word?
Speaker A:I don't want to celebrate it or make it seem super anti.
Speaker A:Interesting.
Speaker A:I want it to be disturbing because it was.
Speaker A:Because it is.
Speaker A:So anyway, you know, I like.
Speaker A:I just wanted their legacy to be more than the stains on the knife of a crazy guy.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:Or girl.
Speaker A:But that's all I have for you today.
Speaker A:That.
Speaker A:Just a quick couple hours.
Speaker A:Be sure to check out the links in the description.
Speaker A:The friends of the show in the same place.
Speaker A:Review us wherever possible.
Speaker A:Like subscribe.
Speaker A:And remember, keep questioning the past.
Speaker A:The future will thank you.
Speaker A:See you next time.
