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An old woman who was known by the soubriquet of Mother Crackham rather startled me by rushing up as I stood at the fireplace and demanded to know if I was Jack the Ripper.
The awkwardness of answering this question I was happily relieved of by the old dame herself assuring me that she did not think I was.
I know you ain't him, she said.
You wouldn't rip me up, would you now?
By and by, the proceedings in the kitchen became more lively.
Girls commenced singing songs, and the poet of the company entertained the room with the chorus of his latest composition.
Has anyone seen him?
Can you tell us where he is?
If you meet him, you must take away his knife.
Then give him to the women.
They'll spoil his pretty fizz.
And I wouldn't give him tuppence for his life.
Now at night, when you're undressed and about to go to rest, just see that he ain't underneath the bed.
If he is, you mustn't shout, but politely drag him out.
And with your poker, tap him on the head.
So that Dominic was the evening news published on the 5th of October 1888 by a top investigative journalist describing the atmosphere in Cooney's lodging house on the notorious Flower and Dean Street, which was the lodging house that had been used by Jack the Ripper's latest victim.
And we are, of course...
In Spitalfields, in Whitechapel, in the East End of London, it's the autumn of 1888.
And we're deep into the story of the most notorious murderer of all time, Jack the Ripper.
Yes.
And the lodging house, judging by that reading, full of Australians, Tom.
It wasn't Australians.
It was Cockneys.
Lovable Cockneys.
That sounds like Russell Crowe to me.
Well, the Australian accent does derive from Cockney.
Of course it does.
Couldn't be more Cockney.
And it's a reminder of just how obsessed by this point everybody is with the story of Jack the Ripper.
Not just in London, not just across Britain, but across the whole world.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I guess the reason for that is that no one knows who he is.
And that, of course, remains the case to this day.
So why are people so fascinated?
Partly because the case seems to embody some of the anxieties of late Victorian London, but also the inherent fascination of the case.
It's so savage and so horrific, but also that mystery, right?
That he's the thief in the night, the ghost in the shadows who's escaping death.
And that's, of course, why we're still so fascinated and why almost uniquely among serial killer stories, this one has an extraordinary hold on the world's imagination.
Yeah.
And I think also what we shouldn't overlook is the sheer terror that he is inspiring, because those songs
You know, you sing them to keep your spirits up, but they're expressive of an absolute dread.
People are terrified.
Of course, and with good reason.
So we ended last time on a cliffhanger, so let's remind ourselves where we've got to.
I mean, the reason people are terrified is that there have been a series of horrific crimes.
The death, first of all, of Martha Tabram on the 7th of August.
Then Marianne or Polly Nichols on the 31st of August.
Her body literally ripped apart, ripped open.
And then another body ripped open, that of Annie Chapman, on the 8th of September in a backyard at Hanbury Street, Spitalfields.
And we entered last time on the night of Saturday, the 29th and Sunday, the 30th of September, when the killer has struck again, not once, but twice.
So first of all we had the discovery of the body of Elizabeth Stride just inside Dutfield's yard, which is just outside a socialist club for Russian and Polish Jewish immigrants.
And then 45 minutes later, as we described last time, PC Edward Watkins is patrolling Mitre Square just off Aldgate.
So that's just inside the boundary of the city of London.
So to the west of the other crimes.
And he flashes his lantern.
He finds something huddled on the ground.
And then he's rushing across the square where we ended last time to a watchman.
For God's sake, mate, come to my assistance.
There's another woman cut to pieces.
So let's pick up the story.
So within about a quarter of an hour, a group of policemen had gathered around the body.
And they're joined at about 2.20 by the city police surgeon, Dr. Frederick Gordon Brown.
And it's from him that we get the, again, gruesome details of the crime scene.
So, to reiterate, if you are driving along with very small children in the back listening to a podcast about the Jack the Ripper, You will be unsurprised to hear that there are some gruesome details to come.
So rethink your choices.
The victim says Dr Frederick Gordon Brown is lying on her back with her throat cut, her body horribly mutilated.
To quote him, the abdomen was all exposed.
The intestines were drawn out to a large extent and placed over the right shoulder.
A piece of about two feet was quite detached from the body and placed between the body and the left arm, apparently by design.
So this is a really unsettling, unbelievably unsettling and strange scene, almost kind of ritualistic.
What kind of killer places the victim's innards around the body?
Maybe a Masonic one?
Well, maybe.
We shall be coming to this in our fifth episode.
And once again, of course...
The Ripper has struck extremely efficiently and quickly before vanishing into the night.
So, to quote Philip Sugden, whose book on the Jack the Ripper case is the definitive history, he says you know this probably took less than 15 minutes.
In that period of time the killer must have got his victim into Mitre Square assuming she's not there already killed her, mutilated her, done all his sort of operations on the body and then got away.
And he has taken with him her womb and her left kidney.
And once again, he has done this almost completely unseen and undetected.
So we're still in the small hours of sunday, the 30th of september.
We now have two murder investigations going on simultaneously, so there's the elizabeth stride one in whitechapel And there's this other one now in the City of London.
And they are under different police jurisdictions because the City of London has its own police force.
Exactly.
So not part of the Metropolitan Police.
So let's begin with the one in Whitechapel.
The first one, the one we discussed last time Duffield's Yard Elizabeth Stride.
So as we heard about her last time, she's Swedish.
She's born in Gothenburg.
She's come to England.
She probably worked as an occasional prostitute.
And if you want to find out more about her, Club members can do so in our bonus.
And if you want to join them, just head to therestishistory.com.
So she had been seen in a cheap lodging house in Flarendine Street just before seven o'clock.
We don't know when she went out exactly.
We don't know where she was going.
We don't know whether she was going out to try to solicit to get money for a bed.
All of this is very unclear.
We know that at some time that evening she had some bread and cheese and she possibly had some drinks.
And she also got hold of some hard sweets, kind of breath fresheners.
I think they're called cashew or something, aren't they?
And she's holding them in her hand.
And she's also got hold of a red rose, which she has fixed to her bodice.
And then somehow she's ended up in Dutfield's yard, outside this sort of socialist club, where she has been murdered.
Do you know the site of it now?
It's a school playground.
Oh, my God.
Really?
Yeah.
I went and investigated all the places where it happened.
Right.
And I mean, that's probably the least appropriate place.
Yeah.
And is there a plaque or anything?
No, because obviously the school doesn't want to draw attention to the place where all the little children are playing.
I think there should be a plaque.
First of all, the kids would love it.
And secondly, I think you should mark her last moments, I think.
Anyway, I'll take that up with the school.
So obvious question, how did she die?
As with the other victims, her throat was cut and it seems like there were bruises on her neck and shoulders.
The doctors who examined her body, there were two different doctors.
One of them is the guy who had done the autopsy on Annie Chapman, Dr. George Baxter Phillips.
The Baxter.
The Baxter.
Yeah, that's surely what his friends from school call him.
And they think she had been seized on the shoulders and then pushed to the ground and killed on the ground.
Now Hallie Rubenhold, in her book The Five, which is brilliant on the lives of the victims, has a thesis that the victims were all killed as they slept, that they were homeless and the ripper just simply came across them and killed them.
I'm not sure about that here, because Sugden points out that the ground was very muddy and it had been raining constantly.
And therefore, it seems unlikely that you would lie down to sleep in the mud.
Wasn't there the policeman or the doctor or somebody said that she seemed to have been laid down in the mud.
Been laid down, exactly.
You wouldn't choose to lie down in the mud, surely.
I mean, so many baffling things about it.
Why is she still holding the hard sweets in one hand?
Why did nobody hear her cry out?
She's very close to this club.
Why are there no signs of any struggle at all?
And most bewildering of all, Why uniquely is Elizabeth Stride's body not mutilated in any way?
There's no ripping.
Her throat has been cut, but nothing else.
So there are a couple of theories.
One theory is she's actually killed by a different person, and this is an unrelated murder.
So, Dr Phillips the bagster?
He thought that the killer had used a different knife from the one used to kill Annie Chapman and that the wound was very different.
On the other hand, a lot of Ripper sort of scholars say, you know, the modus operandi is similar.
A victim killed while lying on the ground in a dark corner of the East End.
The throat cut from left to right.
So the balance of probability, I think, is that this was a Jack the Ripper crime.
And in that case, the explanation for why the body isn't mutilated is that actually, when that guy and his cart that we talked about last time, Louis Diemschutz, came into the yard, he actually disturbed the Ripper in the process of his nefarious work.
Yeah.
And I guess that would then also explain, perhaps, why he goes on to commit a second murder.
Exactly.
Because he hasn't had the opportunity to do what he wants to do, namely murder.
Get ripping, exactly that.
I think that makes complete psychological sense right.
The ripper has been cheated of the thing that he really you know.
The killing is now not enough to give him the high that he wants.
It is actually the process of ripping which is becoming more and more extreme and more horrific every time, and that's why he feels the need to strike again.
Now, this first crime.
There are a couple of really intriguing witnesses.
So first of all, there's a guy called pc william smith.
He was patrolling near burner street about 12 30 on the night of the murder And he saw a man and a woman with a red rose talking across the street from where the body was discovered.
And he described the man as about 28 years old, dark complexion, a small, dark moustache, wearing a black cutaway coat, wearing a hard felt deerstalker hat and carrying a parcel in newspaper.
Because the man seen talking to Annie Chapman had been wearing a deerstalker hat, hadn't he?
Exactly.
So deer stalker hats, they're not uncommon.
Of course, Sherlock Holmes is famously portrayed with one.
So you know it could be a different man, but it's telling that the hat keeps reappearing in all the witness statements.
I mean, just to think, I mean, a deer stalker, you wear it because you're stalking deer.
And when you capture a deer, you rip it open and disembowel it.
I'm just wondering if perhaps there's a... Maybe.
Maybe.
Maybe I hadn't thought of that, Tom.
I don't know.
So there's another way in this.
See what you think of this one.
This guy is called Israel Schwartz.
And now he is a Jewish immigrant, and he's probably from Galicia in Austria-Hungary.
He is walking past Duffield's yard when, as Chief Inspector Swanson describes in his notes, he saw a man stop and speak to a woman who was standing in the gateway.
The man tried to pull the woman into the street, but he turned around and threw her down on the footway and the woman screamed three times, but not very loudly.
On crossing to the opposite side of the street, he saw a second man standing lighting his pipe.
The man who threw the woman down called out apparently to the man on the opposite side of the road Lipski, and then Schwartz walked away.
But finding that he was followed by the second man.
He ran as far as the railway arch, but the man did not follow so far.
Tantalizing.
It is.
It's mysterious, Tom.
It's intriguing.
Anyway, the police take this bloke, Schwartz, to the mortuary, and he says, this is the woman.
Elizabeth Stride is the woman I saw.
And they say, well, what do the men look like?
And he says...
Basically, the men were in their early 30s.
They had moustaches and they wore dark coats.
And the first man, he says was about five foot five and wore a kind of peaked cap a little bit like a deerstalker.
That tallies with a third witness who's a labourer called William Marshall.
He also says he saw a woman and a man talking and joking.
The man about five foot six and a black cutaway coat, a peaked cap, decently dressed and mild speaking like a clerk.
So this is looking like the same man in all of these, you know peaked cap, five foot five, five foot six, and so on and so forth.
What about the second man, though?
What about this other man?
So some people who look into the Ripper story think that the Ripper had an accomplice.
Great Scott Holmes.
Yes, if this was a conspiracy.
Israel Schwartz.
His account makes it sound like these two men know each other, and the one man shouts to the other man Lipsky.
But the police report is clear that he can't be sure about that.
He's only kind of guessing.
And Holmes, what is this Lipski?
What do you make of that?
I'm enjoying this new vibe to the podcast with being cast as Holmes for once.
Brilliant.
So this is a really fascinating puzzle.
And this is a really good example of how the Ripper stories a window into the anxieties of 1880s London.
Lipski is a really well-known name in the East End because in 1887 A bloke who made umbrellas called Israel Lipski, who was originally another Polish Jew, had been hanged for murdering a young woman who was pregnant, called Miriam Angel, because he'd forced her to drink nitric acid.
Very unpleasant.
That is so penny dreadful.
This is a really, really controversial case at the time because a lot of people said Lipski had not done it, that this was anti-Semitism.
Lipsky confessed to his rabbi just before he was executed.
But some people believed at the time that he had done so either because he'd been kind of brutalized and broken and he was just confessing to get it over with, or because the rabbi had persuaded him that it would be better for everybody if he confessed and better for the Jewish community.
That seems implausible.
That they could then kind of ostracize him as a bad egg.
Rather than it look as though they were trying to cover up for one of their co-religionists.
Queen Victoria was very agitated about this and was very worried that Lipski had been framed, as was the Pall Mall Gazette, a newspaper we've heard a bit about already campaigning newspaper we're hearing more from.
So anyway, Lipski is a sort of well-known sort of taunt in Whitechapel in 1887, 1888.
People will say, oh, you're a regular Lipski and all this kind of thing.
Yeah, so kind of like you're Harold Shipman or you're whatever.
Did you ever move in circles where people compared you to harold shipman?
No, but you could, you.
I mean it becomes a kind of a standard name for a killer or something.
Yeah, like the ripper right, like jack the ripper.
Yeah, there are a couple of possibilities.
So one is, this bloke was genuinely called lipsky.
The two men are working together and lipsky is a confederate in the ripper's crimes.
I think no one really believes that.
Philip sugden suggests that the two men this is a bizarre suggestion, i think, from him that the two men are working together possibly, and But that one of them shouts Lipski as a trick to throw Schwartz off the scent and incriminate the local Jews.
I don't think that's very likely.
I mean, unless it's Queen Victoria's personal surgeon and they're desperate to muddy the waters.
But again, we will come to this in due course.
And then Inspector Abberline, great to have him back.
Inspector Abberline's thesis.
He basically said to his superiors look, in the East End people are shouting the word Lipski as a kind of anti-Semitic taunt.
And Schwartz has a strong Jewish appearance.
So I am of opinion it was addressed to him as he stopped to look at the man he saw, apparently ill using the deceased woman.
So that the second man is just a complete bystander and a red herring.
The second man has nothing to do with anything.
And actually basically the ripper shouted.
You know he's basically shouting.
Go away, you lipski at Israel Schwartz.
And that's that seemed to kind of make sense to me, actually.
Yeah.
Now there are two implications here of abeline's thesis.
That would mean the killer is probably from the east end, because he's familiar with the slang of the east end, the lipsky taunt, which is a kind of east end thing.
Secondly, it also implies the killer is not jewish, because you won't use an anti-semitic taunt if you're jewish yourself right, unless that's part of his fiendish cunning.
It is, but he'd have to.
No no, i agree, i agree, holmes.
I agree, holmes.
I'm just trying to keep you on your toes.
Okay, very good, thank you.
All right, so that's the first crime of the night.
That's Elizabeth Stride murder.
Let's do the second crime now.
So this is the hideously mutilated body found in Mitre Square in the city.
At first, the police found it very hard to identify her.
She's clearly a very poor woman.
She's wearing very old and dirty clothes.
She's got a couple of clay pipes and a handkerchief and she's got two pawnbroker's tickets, but they're under false names.
That's very common for people who are kind of in the underclass, as it were.
And eventually, her partner comes forward, a labourer called John Kelly.
He has been living with her in this Doss house, Cooney's Lodgings house, which is a really run-down place.
And he says, this is my partner.
This is basically my girlfriend, Kate Conway.
Actually, her name is not Kate Conway.
She's Catherine Eddowes, and she was 46 years old.
Philip Sugden describes her as the most likeable of all the victims, which is not surprising Tom, because she's from Wolverhampton.
So I'll just give you a very quick sketch of Catherine Eddowes' life because again, because we want to sort of let the victim's stories breathe, as it were, we'll be doing her in the bonus episode.
She's born in Wolverhampton in 1842 to very young parents who came from tinplate working backgrounds.
They move to London and they die young.
She ends up as an orphan.
She goes sort of back and forth to Birmingham, Wolverhampton, London.
She ends up with a soldier called Thomas Conway.
She lives with him for almost 20 years.
They have three children.
The classic pattern.
She drinks.
He's probably violent.
They separate.
I think he definitely is violent, isn't he?
Because she's always got kind of black eyes and things.
Exactly.
They're into the downward spiral.
She ends up with John Kelly.
She works as a charwoman doing odd jobs, but she's almost certainly involved with casual prostitution as well.
So it's unclear.
They've just been hot picking in Kent, her and this guy Kelly.
Because hot picking is kind of almost the nearest to a holiday that you have if you're kind of on the streets.
Exactly.
And tens of thousands of people would go hot picking in Kent and so on.
They've gone off.
They've come back.
She's got drunk.
She's actually picked up earlier on the Saturday for being drunk by the police.
She's put in a cell.
The police let her out at one o'clock on the Sunday morning.
Her last words, recorded words, are to the constable who lets her out.
She says to him, all right, good night, old cock.
And then about 40 minutes later, she is dead.
So the Ripper struck very quickly after she was let out.
Now, as I've already heard, her fate is by far more you know, the most horrific so far.
Her throat has been cut for seven inches from left to right.
Her face and body have been horribly mutilated.
Her torso has been ripped open, her insides removed and put by her shoulder.
And the killer has left with her left kidney and part of her uterus.
He has also cut off the lobe of one of her ears, hasn't he?
And this kind of resonates because in the notorious letter where Jack the Ripper introduces himself, he'd said that he would cut off the ears of his next victim.
And so this debate as to whether cutting off one lobe counts or not.
That is right.
What the killer does not do is to cut off her ears, though, which the letter had said that he would.
And cutting off the lobe in the context of the general mutilations is only a small thing.
It doesn't seem like a deliberate thing that you've done to justify a boast in a letter beforehand.
Anyway.
The surgeon who looked at the body, Dr Frederick Gordon Brown, was sure that the killer had done this on the spot within moments.
So later on, when we get to the mad conspiracy theories, the idea that the victim's bodies were mutilated in a carriage by, you know, a royal doctor and then dumped on the spot this is not what people thought at the time when they inspected the bodies.
Dr gordon brown also thought the killer must have had a degree of expertise.
He told the daily news the left kidney had been carefully taken out in such a manner as to show that it had been done by somebody who not only knew its anatomical position but knew how to remove it.
Now again, Does this mean that it's a doctor or a surgeon?
No, not necessarily.
It could be, as we've said, a butcher or a slaughterman, or a medical student, or indeed a very talented amateur who studied anatomy.
Somebody who basically knows what they're doing, I guess.
Someone who's used to stalking deer on the highlands, perhaps.
Maybe.
So as with Elizabeth Stride's murder, there is one interesting witness account.
There were two friends, they're both Jewish a guy called Joseph Lavender, a commercial traveller, and Joseph Levy, a butcher.
And they were leaving a local social club at half past one or thereabouts when they saw a man and woman standing at the entrance to a nearby alley.
And Lavender saw them most clearly.
Well, he didn't see the woman's face, so he couldn't be sure that it was Catherine Eddowes.
But he said the man was about 30, about five foot seven, with a moustache, medium build and a peaked deerstalkers cap.
But he thought the man looked rough and shabby.
So we've had slightly different accounts of how the man looks, but there are a few common features, aren't there?
There are.
And also, it's the middle of the night, flickering of the gas lamps.
Yeah.
And this time there is another clue, a very strange and disturbing clue.
So within minutes of Catherine Edwards' murder, the police were scouring this kind of warren of streets around Mitre Square.
And as we've described, once again, the killer slipped through their fingers like a ghost.
Five minutes away, a guy called Alfred Long, police constable, is patrolling Galston Street, which is on the sort of boundary between the city and Whitechapel.
And at 2.55, he spotted something in a tenement doorway, and it was a woman's apron wet with blood.
And it turns out that this is Catherine Eddowes' apron.
And he looks around for other signs of blood or any of the other clues, and then he sees something else.
To the right of the doorway...
Written in white chalk on the black bricks are the words The Jews are the men that will not be blamed for nothing.
And the word Jews is spelt J-U-W-E-S.
Yes.
Sir PC Long takes the apron to the nearest police station.
Soon, lots of other policemen are swarming around these buildings.
They don't find anything.
Meanwhile, the police superintendent, Thomas Arnold, briefs the Met Commissioner, Sir Charles Warren, about this graffiti.
And the superintendent says, I want to get rid of this as quickly as possible.
If we leave it up on the wall, by dawn there will be a riot against the Jews of the East End.
And you can completely see why he says this.
Passions are running high because of the tide of immigration in the 1880s.
And, as we saw after Annie Chapman's murder, there are a lot of people who are very keen to blame the Jews of the East End.
So Charles Warren goes personally to Galston Street and he looks at the writing and the graffiti.
Some of the people say, should we wait for a photographer to photograph the graffiti?
And he says, no, it's getting light.
We cannot risk people seeing it.
And so at 5.30, as dawn is breaking, the chalk is wiped away.
And so we have no photo of it.
So the enduring mystery, who left it?
What does it mean?
There are three possibilities.
Number one, it's a complete coincidence.
The ripper just threw the apron away and there was some anti-Semitic graffiti on the wall.
The police themselves didn't agree with it.
Some people said it was fresh.
Some people said it was faded.
So it could be old anti-Semitic graffiti.
Of course, there is a fair bit of anti-Semitic graffiti in the East End.
However, Philip Sugden points out, this was a building that had a lot of Jewish residents.
Is it really plausible that they wouldn't have wiped it away?
I mean, if it had been someone who'd put it up half an hour before, perfectly plausible.
I suppose, Tom, but that really is a coincidence, isn't it?
Yeah, it is a coincidence, but I assume that this kind of graffiti is going up all the time.
In the middle of the night?
Yeah.
Well, I'm not sure.
That seems to me, I have to say, the likeliest explanation.
Explanation two.
Listeners can make up their own minds, Tom.
We don't know how to preach.
That's the last thing we do in the rest of history.
Just offering my own conclusions.
Well, everyone's grateful for that and everyone enjoys it.
No one more than me, to be honest.
So the next thing, the Ripper left the message to taunt the police because he was Jewish.
So he's euphoric from his killings.
He's in a state of ecstasy.
He's putting two fingers up to the world and saying, ha ha, the Jews have got their own bag.
And number three, the Ripper left the message, but it's a trick to throw the police off the scent.
This is what Sir Charles Warren thought.
Sir Charles Warren told the Home Office.
He said it was evidently written with the intention of inflaming the public mind against the Jews and that's why I had to get rid of it.
I mean, that is clearly the case, but it doesn't have to be the Ripper who's written it.
I mean, no one would put that up and not want that, I think.
It's a better story if it's the Ripper, though, isn't it?
Yeah, of course it is.
But, you know, I'm applying my razor-sharp powers of deduction and logic here.
Well listen, amaze us now with your razor-sharp powers of deduction and logic, because is there not an exciting conspiracy theory attached to this that you will very much enjoy?
Yes.
So there's a very notorious...
I think mad.
Well, I think basically everyone thinks mad book about Jack the Ripper, called Jack the Ripper The Final Solution.
And I honestly think that any book with the word final solution in the title is probably best left alone.
And it was written by a guy called Stephen Knight.
Mm-hmm.
And we will be talking about this in our final episode.
But it's a theory about a member of the royal family being involved and various masons.
And remember that Sir Charles Warren, the head of the Met, is himself a mason.
And he says that the misspelling of Jew, so J-U-W-E-S, is a clue.
And it refers to three legendary Masonic figures, Jubela, Jubelo and Jubalum.
And it has to be said that this is I mean, can I say bollocks on this podcast?
I mean, yeah, I guess you can.
So these figures had apparently not been part of Masonic ritual in Britain for almost a century.
And British Masons never used the term J-U-W-E-S to describe them.
And there is no link with with the masons at all.
Well, we should explore this in greater detail, shouldn't we in our final episode where we solve the crime, and we should be digging into the masonic conspiracy theory which, spoiler alert, i actually do agree with you and i think it is completely bonkers.
But do remember, sir charles warren had doug, had excavated on the site of the temple and masons are obsessed with the temple.
So who knows, maybe there is something there.
That was a tantalizing clue there, Tom.
So let's take a break and then we'll come back and we will plunge back into the stricken streets of Whitechapel as the story races towards the next terrible crime.
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Hello, I'm Professor Hannah Fry.
And I'm Michael Stevens, creator of Vsauce.
We thought we would join you for a moment completely uninvited.
We are not going to stay too long, unless you want us to, of course.
We're here to tell you about our brand new show, The Rest is Science.
Every episode is going to start with something that feels initially familiar, and then we're going to unpick it and tear it apart until you no longer recognise it at all.
Yeah, banana flavour doesn't taste like bananas.
Yeah, what is that about?
So it is supposed to taste Like an old species of banana that was wiped out in a banana apocalypse.
And now you will only find it in botanical collections in the gardens of billionaires.
Wow.
Banana candy is actually the ghost of a long extinct banana.
So if you like scratching the surface, thinking a little bit deeper.
Or weirder.
Yes, definitely that too.
You can join Michael and I every Tuesday and Thursday wherever you get your podcasts.
Hello, welcome back to The Rest is History.
And we are in Whitechapel in the heart of the East End.
And it is the morning of Sunday, the 30th of September, 1888.
And news is spreading across the East End and beyond of the double killing overnight of Elizabeth Stride in Whitechapel, Catherine Eddowes in Mitre Square in the City of London.
And the police have cordoned off the murder sites, but already thousands of people are gathering outside Mitre Square and Duckfields Yard, where Elizabeth Stride had been murdered.
And there are newspapers are starting to appear, people hawking them.
The news is spreading virally.
Yeah.
And there's a massive sense of panic, actually, for the next week or so.
So the streets are deserted at night.
There are reports that lots of poor, homeless women have gone west to the city or to the West End because the streets are better lit there.
There are reports that people kind of those people who don't, the women are huddling together for protection in the East End.
Some women are carrying knives.
The local shopkeepers complain officially to the government that people are staying away, especially because in mid-October there's one of London, Victorian London's perennial fogs.
Pea super.
A pea super, a regular pea super descends.
And they actually petitioned the Home Secretary and they say basically you know you've lost control of law and order in East London.
Clearly,
Respectable people are not going shopping and we're losing our livelihoods.
And in the meantime, there are loads of mad theories about the killer.
You know there are sort of letters to the Times from old India hands and things saying you know, we recognise this.
This is a Lascar at work.
I mean, that is what it would be in a Sherlock Holmes story.
That idea that the kind of opium crazed foreigners who've landed on a ship, that kind of it's exactly what you get in a Victorian crime thriller.
It's a sort of the empire coming home, right?
Or Wilkie Collins or something.
There's a diamond involved almost certainly.
Yeah.
But a lot of people.
I know we've got lots of American listeners and they'll be pleased to hear that a lot of people assume it must be an American because they know that Americans get up to extreme behaviour.
But also there's been rumours that a man in a soft felt American hat is was talking to elizabeth stride and there's even suspicion that may have been done by cowboys, isn't there?
Well, i mean here, this is actually, i think, a kind of very interesting angle on on the panic, because it's not just cowboys but also indians are much on the public mind, because the previous year was when buffalo bill had come with his wild west show to coincide with Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee.
And it's really notable when you look at the press coverage how regularly comparisons are made with the mutilations and murders in the East End, with the supposed mutilations inflicted by Native Americans.
So we actually read one, didn't we?
A piece from the Evening Standard that compared the mutilations to those done by a Pawnee Indian.
And W.T.
Stead said So, the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette.
In the wake of Annie Chapman's murder, he had pointed out that a Londoner is quite as capable of bathing his hands in blood as any Sioux who ever scalped a foe.
Of course, Sitting Bull had been part of Buffalo Bill's Wild West show.
So I just feel it's clearly part of the kind of the climate of the times that journalists are instinctively reaching for those kind of comparisons.
Yeah, and I think there's a case that the Ripper story almost immediately becomes absorbed into the kind of popular culture of London in 1888, doesn't it?
And it becomes sort of confused with lots of other different things.
And actually, people immediately rush to make money from it.
I mean, people are selling special editions of the newspapers, and there are some tremendously tasteful ballads, aren't there?
Are you going to sing this ballad, or would you like to read it?
I mean, I think it's interesting because actually Catherine Eddowes and Thomas Conway had spent much of their time hawking exactly these kind of ballads.
So they would go to places say, where people were being hanged, and compose these kind of songs and sell them.
And now songs are being composed about the murder of Kate Eddowes and the other victims.
So this is an example.
In famous London city in 1888, four beastly cruel murders have been done.
Some say it was old Nick himself or else a Russian Jew.
Some say it was a cannibal from the Isle of Kickaboo.
Some say it must be Bashy Bazooks or else it's the Chinese.
Come over to Whitechapel to commit murder, such crimes as these.
Something slightly gilbert and sullivan about music hall, about that, isn't it?
It's certainly not tennyson um, but it's also interesting that the blame is being put on foreigners.
Again, there's this idea that no englishman could possibly do this right, and there's that.
I mean you can completely see how that's part of the same world as sherlock holmes, because in sherlock holmes it would be bashy bazooks or the chinese or or something, wouldn't it?
So anyway, people are cashing in.
They're opening their houses to sightseers.
So even that socialist club where Elizabeth Stride's body was found.
They're making money out of it by charging tourists.
Socialists.
Yeah, that's a lesson for you, Theo.
Now, that makes it sound as though people didn't care, but they absolutely did care.
And the whole business was a spur, particularly to political radicals.
So loads of letters in the newspapers saying –
This is a reminder that it's a disgrace that the East End is like this.
We should clean up the streets.
We should do something for the poor.
We shouldn't have an underclass in the heart of the imperial city.
People feel guilty about it.
And again, that's part of the kind of imperial dimension to it, isn't it?
That people in London, the capital of the world's greatest empire, justify their empire in terms of a kind of civilizing mission.
The idea that other parts of the world are savage compared, say, to Britain.
But what these murders show is that savagery lurks in the streets of the imperial capital as well.
And I know we'll talk about this in the next episode, when you're going to be talking about Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and so on.
But it's really striking to me, reading a lot of the newspaper commentary, how often people would say things like that.
There are people walking around in the East End whose eyes have been opened to the horror that has been lurking among us all this time that there is something deeply buried in us that has now come out.
You know that people didn't just say it's a foreign menace.
There's a lot of commentary that says this is something that has almost been bubbling away in the sewers of our souls all this time.
I mean, I think it works in two dimensions.
There's the imperial dimension the idea that The savagery that is conventionally identified with primitive peoples in distant climes is a part of the savagery of the imperial capital.
But it's also this idea that there is a darkness, a murderousness, a savagery lurking in the soul perhaps, of even the most outwardly respectable figure walking the streets say, of the West End.
And yeah, we will be coming to this in our next episode.
That's a huge part of the Ripper mystique, isn't it, as it were?
So to go back to the investigation, there are lots of calls in the press for a publicly funded bounty or reward.
Now, as we described last time, the Home Office hate the thought of rewards because they say a reward is basically an invitation to hoaxes.
And there's a big disagreement between the Home Secretary, Henry Matthews, and the Commissioner of the Met, Sir Charles Warren, about this.
Their relations are terrible already, pretty much.
And they're bickering furiously.
Basically, by early November...
For unrelated reasons, but this is definitely a factor.
It's compounded, isn't it?
Yeah, it's compounded.
So Charles Warren has decided to resign.
So the head of the Met is going to step down.
Now meanwhile, the incoming head of – the guy who's going to be running CID, Criminal Investigation Department, Dr Robert Anderson, has been away on holiday.
Oh, in Switzerland.
And the newspapers have noticed this, and they start to get very outraged.
So the Pall Mall Gazette – says that Dr Anderson, the chief official responsible for the detection of the murderer, is as invisible to Londoners as the murderer himself.
Dr. Anderson is taking a pleasant holiday in Switzerland.
I mean, newspapers don't change, right?
And Dr. Anderson then returns with an absolutely mad idea.
He says we should arrest every prostitute in London or tell them that the police will not protect them.
And everyone says, ah, this is mad.
First of all, the police's own estimates and don't forget the definition of prostitution is incredibly vague.
They reckon at least 1200 women would fall under this category and would end up being arrested.
They had got nowhere to put them.
And secondly, people point out to Anderson.
They say these women are soliciting in order to pay for their lodging.
They have literally nowhere to go.
If we stop them plying their trade, they will just be lying in the streets.
What are we going to do?
So they ditched that idea.
They do launch a house-to-house search.
And actually this is interesting because you might assume that everybody in the East End hates the police.
Well, I think they do, don't they?
In Spitalfields, there's all this stuff that you can only go in as a policeman in pairs.
But obviously, times change, and now the police...
Are your allies in hunting out the killer?
So to do this search right, this house-to-house search, the police have to ask the permission of every single householder.
And almost everybody grants permission.
There's virtually no resistance at all.
The press are really surprised by this and struck by it that the East End welcomes the police, says come on yes, do the search.
So they do the search.
They don't find anything.
There's also another Sherlock Holmes parallel, actually, an experiment with bloodhounds.
Which does not work out well, does it?
No.
So in The Sign of the Four, where it's a very good example of the crimes in that Sherlock Holmes story have been committed by the violence of the Empire.
Coming back home,
There's a bloodhound called Toby, who's the most brilliant bloodhound in London.
And Holmes and Watson follow him across town in search of whatever the guy is called.
Jonathan Small, is it?
Who's the killer or something involved with the killer?
I can't remember.
Anyway, the press have been pestering the Home Office, you know, news bloodhounds.
And eventually they get two dogs called Barnaby and Burgo.
And they do experiments in Regent's Park and Hyde Park.
But comically, this doesn't happen in Sherlock Holmes.
There's a massive disagreement and falling out about who's going to pay for the dog's insurance.
So eventually the dog breeder loses patience with the police and he takes them to a dog show instead.
And so the police lose the cooperation of Barnaby and Burgo.
But as Charles Warren said, this is a mad experiment because we don't have any evidence.
We don't have the killer's blood or any of his clothes or anything like that.
So what are they supposed to be tracing?
Yeah.
I mean, Warren's got his finger on the pulse there.
Well, I've got an even better wheeze for you.
So there were no police women in the Met.
So they can't entrap the Ripper.
They can't send police women out to kind of lure him.
Do they, however, have any young lads who could plausibly pass?
Well, so the press have been pestering the Met and saying could you not, you know, send out people dressed as women to lure him?
And the Met points out, they say all our recruits by law have to be more than five foot seven.
So, at an age when people are slightly shorter than they are today, they will stand out and be very conspicuously not women.
But one bloke did try this.
He was Detective Sergeant Robinson of G Division.
And he went and sort of, he dressed up and he stood around.
He was accosted by some cab washers, so people washing down hackneyed carriages.
Was this because they felt that he wasn't really...
I don't know.
They basically saw this bloke.
One of them shouted at him.
Now, this is some form of slang that I don't really understand.
But they shouted at him, you're cats and dogs, aren't you?
And then they stabbed him in the face.
Oh, my God.
So it was quite a big altercation.
He had to be rescued by other policemen.
So that's a lesson to you, Tom.
If you go on one of your walks in the East End, be careful how you dress, because I don't want you to be accused of being cats and dogs and stabbed in the face.
Anyway, the various police wheezes don't really work.
And not surprisingly, you start to get genuine vigilantes.
So last time we mentioned the Mile End Vigilance Committee, which was dominated by local Jewish tradesmen.
And they would meet at the Crown Pub on Mile End Road. and they would organize patrol.
They would get unemployed locals to do patrols and they would give them a little bit of money and they'd give them a whistle, a stout stick and some galoshes.
I don't know why, particularly they'd give them these galoshes.
But basically this doesn't act.
You know, there are two different schools of thought on this.
Number one is the police didn't really like these vigilante patrols, for obvious reasons, and it also made their job more difficult because now there are lots of strange men kind of lurking around the streets with galoshes and upsetting the locals and stuff.
But there is an argument.
There is now a delay of six weeks before the ripper strikes again, and this may be because the patrols are a bit of a deterrent.
There are a lot more people out on the streets like with stout sticks and galoshes, and this may explain why the next crime happens indoors rather than outside because of all these patrols.
So meanwhile the press are getting more and more critical of the police.
So they call them rotten, they say they're incompetent.
Even the conservative papers, so the daily telegraph we mentioned a few times.
It slams what it calls the notorious and shameful shortcomings of the detective department, or rather of the botched up makeshift which does duty for a detective department, Scotland Yard.
They call the Tory Home Secretary Mr Matthews.
They call him a helpless heedless, useless figure, which I think is actually a little bit harsh.
The police are doing all they can.
They're trying lots of different things, but this is a really, really hard crime to solve.
And now we come back to this issue of the Ripper taunting the police.
We already mentioned the Dear Boss letter, the letter in which he had said he would cut a victim's.
If this is the Ripper which we actually don't think it is that he would cut the victim's ears off.
And then, of course, he doesn't do it.
But then on Monday, the 1st of October, the Central News Agency got a second message.
And this was a bloodstained postcard. with a London East postmark dated the 1st of October.
So it could have been posted after the Catherine Eddowes murder made the newspapers.
In other words, the person, it could be a hoaxer who's read about the murder.
And most handwriting experts think it's written by the same person who had written the previous Dear Boss letter.
Tom, do you want to give us the, in your excellent Australian accent, the text of this postcard?
I wasn't codding dear old boss when I gave you the tip.
You'll hear about saucy Jack's work tomorrow.
Double event this time.
Number one squealed a bit.
Couldn't finish straight off.
It's not time to get ears off for police.
Thanks for keeping last letter back till I got to work again.
Jack the Ripper.
So copies of this were published on posters outside every police station.
And then they were published in the newspapers on the 4th of October because the police were desperate to basically, you know, say do you know this man?
The general consensus, I think, is that these are not real.
Neither this or The Dear Boss.
To repeat, there are no spelling mistakes at all, although the punctuation is very all over the shop.
There are capital letters, as there should be.
There are full stops, however, as there should be.
And it feels a little bit like somebody is trying to pretend to be less educated than he is.
It's also somebody who can come up with the brilliant name of Jack the Ripper.
Jack the Ripper, exactly.
Exactly.
Almost certainly, I think, a young reporter or somebody like that who's covering the case.
And the result of the police publicising this is a flood of hoax letters.
They are deluged with false leads.
And it reminds me very much of what happened in the 1970s with the Yorkshire Ripper case, when the police publicised the work of another hoaxer who was called Wearside Jack.
And then they were absolutely deluged with false information, and it made it almost impossible for them to sift through it all.
So that's the postcard.
And then just over two weeks later comes the most infamous letter of all.
So this was addressed to the new chairman of the Mile End Vigilance Committee, the kind of vigilante group, Mr George Lusk.
And it arrived at his house in Mile End on the evening of Tuesday, the 16th of October.
So he gets a small parcel wrapped in brown paper with a letter, and he opens the box and it contains what is clearly half a kidney, a human kidney.
And the letter, do you want to give us the letter?
Yeah, it has the most chilling opening, doesn't it?
Which has often been rehearsed from hell on.
And it's Mr. Lusk.
I send you half the kidney I took from one woman, preserved it for you.
Tell the piece I fried and ate.
It was very nice.
I may send you the bloody knife that took it out.
If you only wait a while longer.
Signed.
Catch me when you can.
Mr. Lusk.
The bit at the beginning from help.
Very famous because that inspires the enormous graphic novel by Alan Moore which we might talk about in our final episode.
For those people who you can't tell from Tom's reading, a lot of that is misspelt, isn't it?
So preserved or saw.
Yeah, kind of faintly Irish, perhaps.
Yes, exactly, which we will come to.
Lusk took the kidney to a pathologist to examine it with a microscope and said he thought it was human.
There are some claims you see them often repeated in Ripper books that he identified it as the kidney of a 45-year-old woman who was a heavy drinker.
But actually the pathologist said that was completely invented and made up by the newspapers.
The city police surgeon agreed it was a human kidney, but there's no evidence that it came from Catherine Eddowes.
It could have come from any recent autopsy and it could have been sent in by medical students, for example.
The handwriting analysis of this letter is that this is not somebody disguising their writing.
There are lots of mistakes and it is very clearly written quickly and smoothly, not by somebody painstakingly trying to disguise their hand.
But it's clearly not the same person as the Dear Boss person.
And also the postcard, so those two Jack the Ripper messages.
And Tom, as you said...
The spelling looks like it could be Irish.
So preserved, for example, which is a more kind of Irish formula, apparently.
Sor.
Sor, exactly.
Writing S-O-R, sor.
So there are people who think there is a link to, as we will come to in the final episode, an Irish-American suspect, Dr Tumblety, who is a very, very peculiar person indeed.
It's harder to dismiss this, I think, than the other letters.
We don't know who the kidney is. you know, could this be a letter from the Ripper?
We just don't know.
Now the police, as we've said, are deluged with.
I mean, these are not the only hoax letters they get.
They're the most famous ones, but there are others.
If you read the memoirs of the policemen or interviews with them, they basically say we were totally overwhelmed.
So Chief Inspector Donald Swanson, who was leading the investigation at Scotland Yard.
He said that on just the Elizabeth Stride murder alone, His men detained 80 different people.
They followed up leads on more than 300 other people and they had 994 different files open at once.
Inspector Abberline, who's in charge of the investigation in Whitechapel, remembered later that his team had 1600 different files and he himself was patrolling the streets to set an example to his men very Nelsonian till four o'clock in the morning.
Then he'd often come home and then he'd immediately get a telegram saying come back to Whitechapel, we've got a new suspect.
So they are exhausted and they are getting nowhere near finding the killer.
And what all these letters suggest is that...
Jack the Ripper is already becoming a literary figure.
There are people who are writing words for him or writing composing actions for him that are filling in the gaps.
And this, of course, is something that will be repeated decade after decade after decade.
So we come towards the end of October.
The police have really got no clues at all.
Robert Anderson writes a report saying that CID has not got the slightest clue of any kind.
And on 24th of October Sir Charles Warren reports to the Home Office.
He says despite numerous and searching inquiries, they've produced no tangible result.
The vigilante patrols are starting to dry up now, because the weeks have passed and the Ripper is not killed again.
The Mile End Vigilance Committee runs out of money and has to appeal for public subscriptions.
One of the constables on the case, Walter Dew, notes in his memoirs many years later.
He says at this point the prostitutes of the East End, who had previously sort of vanished from the streets, start to come back.
And when he passes them, they will sometimes shout out to him jovially, I'm the next for Jack.
You know, they're making light of it now.
Yeah, making a joke to cheer themselves up.
Now, one of the women he sees calls herself Mary Jane Kelly.
We know that she used to read about the killings because she used to ask her partner, who's a guy called Joe Barnett, who lives with her in a little kind of court called Miller's Court off Dorset Street, and he would read her stories about them.
But it didn't deter her from going out on the streets, because P.C.
Dew, as he then was, says.
Often I had seen her parading along Commercial Street between Flower and Dean Street and Allgate, or along Whitechapel Road.
She was usually in the company of two or three of her kind, fairly neatly dressed and invariably wearing a clean white apron, but no hat.
No hat.
Not respectable.
So we come to the morning of the 9th of November.
It's the day of the Lord Mayor's show.
And like a lot of people, Mary Jane Kelly has been looking forward to it.
Now that morning her landlord, who is a shopkeeper called John McCarthy, has been checking his books.
He notices that she is 29 shillings behind with the rent and he sends his young assistant, Thomas Bowyer, to see if she has some of the money.
And at 10.45, Bowyer goes and he knocks on the door of 13 Millers Court and there's no answer.
And he knocks again.
And there's still no answer.
He goes around the corner where there's a broken window and he pulls aside the curtain.
And when he pulls aside the curtain, he reels backwards in absolute shock and horror.
He goes and gets his boss.
They end up going to the police station and they fetch two officers Inspector Walter Beck and this guy, Walter Dew I've already mentioned.
And Beck, the inspector, says, peers through the window first, and then he staggers back.
We're told his face as white as a sheet.
And he says, for God's sake, Jew, don't look.
But Jew cannot stop himself.
He puts his face to the window.
And then he says when my eyes had become accustomed to the dim light, I saw a sight which I shall never forget to my dying day.
So next time we will reveal what he saw through the window of 13 Millers Court.
We will tell the story of Mary Jane Kelly and her terrible fate.
And we'll also be looking at the cultural hinterland of the Ripper murders.
We'll be looking at Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
We'll be looking at Sherlock Holmes.
And we will be asking how it was that Jack the Ripper came to be enshrined as history's first serial killer.
And then our final episode, our fifth episode in the series.
We will be examining the various suspects and, for the first time ever, unveiling the definitive killer.
And if you're not a member of the rest is history club and uh, you would like to hear them then you can sign up at the rest is historycom.
But for now goodbye, bye.
