Jack the Ripper with Jim McKenna: The Canonical Murders

[00:00:00] Content Warning

[00:00:02] This episode contains discussion of murder and graphic violence against women.

[00:00:07] Jack the Ripper is one of the most notorious serial killers in history.

[00:00:12] He stopped the streets of London's impoverished Whitechapel district in 1888.

[00:00:17] He had five canonical victims, who popular culture has uniformly labeled as sex workers.

[00:00:24] He brutally murdered these women, mutilating their bodies.

[00:00:28] He was never caught, but his heinous crimes are known the world over.

[00:00:33] We all think we know this story so well, but there's actually much about it that we've heard that's untrue.

[00:00:41] To help sort out the mythologies and the misinformation, we spoke with Ripperologist Jim McKenna.

[00:00:47] Okay, so Jim is awesome. He's been researching the Ripper for years.

[00:00:52] This guy is a font of knowledge, but he's able to break down what he knows in an accessible and intriguing way.

[00:00:58] He's also recently come out with a book, Penny Black, a collection of mysterious stories that draw on Jim's fascination with horror.

[00:01:06] Please check it out. We're linking to it in our show notes.

[00:01:22] We're going to talk about some of the most interesting things about this infamous case.

[00:01:27] We'll continue this conversation tomorrow, getting into Jim's own theory of the case.

[00:01:33] My name is Anya Kane. I'm a journalist.

[00:01:36] And I'm Kevin Greenlee. I'm an attorney.

[00:01:38] And this is The Murder Sheet.

[00:01:40] We're a true crime podcast focused on original reporting, interviews, and deep dives into murder cases.

[00:01:47] I'm with Ripper with Jim McKenna, The Canonical Murders.

[00:02:35] Both of us have always been interested in the Jack the Ripper case, but we cannot claim any level of expertise in it.

[00:02:42] Just one of those things that it's certainly interesting and some sort of from an interesting period of history.

[00:02:49] So we're really excited. You're our first Ripperologist on the program.

[00:02:53] Yeah.

[00:02:54] Well, that's...

[00:02:55] Oh, sure.

[00:02:56] I guess to start off with, tell us a bit about yourself and how you became a Ripperologist.

[00:03:03] All right. Well, first there's that title, Ripperology, right?

[00:03:08] We all use it. It's very common.

[00:03:11] And it is the most smug, most self-important area of true crime fandom.

[00:03:18] And we are the vegans of the true crime world.

[00:03:25] And I am very, very guilty of being exactly one of those people.

[00:03:30] My interest in the Ripper case started when I was in eighth grade back in 1978.

[00:03:36] I was helping and I know the moment.

[00:03:38] I was helping the library annex put a bunch of discarded booktops for sale at like a swap meet that they were having for a fundraiser.

[00:03:48] And I've put all these books up on the shelves and the librarian very reluctantly let me take one book like listed as 10 cents as payment for helping them.

[00:03:58] And I found Donald Rumbleau's The Complete Jack the Ripper and I took it home with me.

[00:04:05] And that book was a transformative event in my life in a couple of very key ways.

[00:04:13] First off, it terrified me. It grabbed my attention.

[00:04:17] The first couple of chapters of that book have to do with the conditions of White Chapel, which was the city right outside of London at the time and the unbelievable levels of rural poverty that was going on there with the people at that time.

[00:04:39] And it had in there, in that book excerpts from a book written by Jack London called The People of the Abit where he had actually gone to London.

[00:04:52] He left all the things in the hotel, went and bought old clothes, left all his money behind and he went and lived among the people for about a month until he could not take it anymore.

[00:05:04] And he cataloged what he had experienced, how he was treated and what society was like in addressing this horrific issue.

[00:05:13] And I think that that has been formed by sociopolitical belief systems to this day.

[00:05:20] And then as far as the murders themselves, the book has photographs in it.

[00:05:26] And the Ripper case has the first instance of a crime scene photographed in Britain.

[00:05:35] And that was the murder of Mary Jane Kelly in her rooms on Dorset Street.

[00:05:41] I'm not going to suggest that anybody actually look at this thing, but you can.

[00:05:46] And if you do, it remains to this day one of the most horrifying things I have ever seen.

[00:05:52] There's also photos in there of other victims, usually just like headshots in their coffins.

[00:05:59] There are several photographs in there of the fourth victim.

[00:06:03] Her name was Catherine Edo.

[00:06:06] And those photos, and especially one, really affected me.

[00:06:16] The photo is taken of her kind of cropped up like she's standing up and it was after they had stitched up the wounds post autopsy.

[00:06:25] And there is this look, it's just a dead body of course, but there is this look of defeat and humiliation and despair that I could not accept.

[00:06:38] And to this day, I still cannot accept it has been with me this wave of empathy went out from me with this woman who has been stay there to this day.

[00:06:48] And there was a lot of anger and outrage about it too.

[00:06:51] And that's how I became involved.

[00:06:53] After that, I started I read every or a Ripper book I could find even then there was a lot of them.

[00:07:00] I lived on the outskirts of Phoenix, Arizona and every once in a while I would hitchhike into Phoenix and go to book stores and record stores.

[00:07:08] And there was always books and records, I got a list that I had.

[00:07:13] And then that list was always Jack the Ripper books and I ended up buying and absorbing as many of them as I could.

[00:07:19] I think I was about a junior maybe in high school and I wrote a letter to one of the authors of the book through his publishing company.

[00:07:28] About a month later, he wrote back.

[00:07:30] And the reason I had written this because I thought that I had found something that no one else has seen before.

[00:07:36] I had my ah moment that I was going to crack the case that young high schooler in Litchfield turns out not so much, but he was very nice about it.

[00:07:46] But then even a bigger surprise a couple months later, a big package arrived from New Zealand and he forwarded the letter on to an associate.

[00:07:56] And then another one of the authors who also replied to my thoughts on it included a photocopy of an article or an essay that he had written that was very close to that subject.

[00:08:09] And he put in a whole bunch of other stuff too, monographed by different people and a copy of a newsletter that in 1995 would become Ripperologist magazine.

[00:08:20] So that's how I began on my journey.

[00:08:23] Wow. You mentioned, you know, your own experience with this but also just the sheer volume of works on this case.

[00:08:30] Also to interject my own two cents.

[00:08:33] I remember when they had those crime scene photos from the Ripper case on Wikipedia and I saw I mean nobody should look the one you referenced up.

[00:08:42] It's awful.

[00:08:43] Yeah.

[00:08:44] Yeah.

[00:08:45] It's really, yeah.

[00:08:47] But back to the kind of the scope of this Ripper case and how it's affected people over the years.

[00:08:53] Why do you think it endures to the extent that it has among people and sparked so much interest to this day?

[00:09:02] Well, that is a really good question.

[00:09:05] And of course it's one that over the last 45 years and I kind of flinched a little bit when I think 45 years.

[00:09:11] I think the reason the first one is the name, Jack the Ripper.

[00:09:16] Now, I think there are two words that are very overused in popular culture right now.

[00:09:23] One of them is amazing and the other one is iconic.

[00:09:27] However, Jack the Ripper is an iconic name.

[00:09:32] It is, it is stark.

[00:09:34] It is harsh and everyone knows it.

[00:09:37] And the name, which a lot of people believe he did not name himself.

[00:09:42] It was in a letter to the police.

[00:09:45] A lot of people think that a journalist by the name of Tom Bulling forged the letter and we should test Tom forged letters because boy, that's a thing.

[00:09:54] But Jack the Ripper name is part of it.

[00:09:57] But also, you know, there is iconic graphic associated with the case.

[00:10:03] When you think Jack the Ripper, you know, different ideas kind of come into your mind.

[00:10:09] Victorian streets, right? Gaslight, fog, shiny silk top hats, evening dress, Gladstone bag, a bodice wearing woman, you know, seducing a man on the street and a big long night glittering in the dark.

[00:10:25] It evokes an idea.

[00:10:29] Now, a lot of those are not factually accurate, but that doesn't really matter, does it?

[00:10:36] And I think there's something else too.

[00:10:39] And I've given this a lot of thought over the years because I follow true crime.

[00:10:44] Jack the Ripper has always been my forte, but I researched into other cases.

[00:10:50] I listen to podcasts as you know.

[00:10:53] Some chillers, you know, not all of them, but some of them.

[00:10:57] They have a round them an aura of what I call singular evil.

[00:11:03] You know, there's a kind of a gené de quoi and I don't know what that inspires real fear.

[00:11:13] Ted Bundy comes to mind.

[00:11:16] Okay? Richard Ramirez, another one.

[00:11:19] Very much so.

[00:11:21] Jack the Ripper is certainly that way.

[00:11:23] There is something about what he did that is authentically evil, authentically terrifying.

[00:11:32] And people are drawn to that because there's real terror and this is kind of a horror story.

[00:11:40] Now, think about other things that came out of that era, right?

[00:11:44] You have a few years later, Brand Stoker would release Dracula.

[00:11:49] Dracula was thought to be partially inspired by the mysteries surrounding the Whitechapel murders and Jack the Ripper.

[00:11:58] There is another early draft of Dracula that was published in Iceland called Powers of Darkness.

[00:12:07] That even more is used to that.

[00:12:09] Robert Louis Stevenson wrote Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and it was a popular stage play at the time.

[00:12:16] And just a few years later, Igman Freud would start developing his theories about psychosexual motivations for different things.

[00:12:27] So all of this is kind of whirling and bubbling at the same time.

[00:12:30] And so there's a lot of horror elements to this story.

[00:12:35] And I think that's another reason that it has endured for so long.

[00:12:40] He's a monster of sorts.

[00:12:42] He's a Halloween costume.

[00:12:44] And I want to, there's a couple of things that I'm very cautious about not doing and that's identifying these people as monsters.

[00:12:53] Regardless of who they are and what they do because that is a separation that I think leads to something that is disingenuous.

[00:13:03] Sadly, but accurately what the killers have done is exactly within the wheelhouse of a human being.

[00:13:14] They are not monsters.

[00:13:16] And to say that puts a barrier of woolly safety between us and them.

[00:13:25] Yeah, I think that's very well said.

[00:13:27] That's an excellent point.

[00:13:29] I've read a bit about the case.

[00:13:31] My first book was also that Rumbolo book.

[00:13:34] It strikes me it's a very complicated case because obviously we don't know who the perpetrator is.

[00:13:39] We don't even know how many victims he definitely may have had.

[00:13:43] We don't know if he wrote the letters.

[00:13:45] I'd like to go into all of that, but first can you set the scene and tell us about Whitechapel in that time era?

[00:13:53] Of course, again, let me kind of preface this by saying that there's different people are our Ripperologists for different reasons.

[00:14:01] Some people have a very who done it approach.

[00:14:04] They want to identify suspects.

[00:14:06] They're very good at breaking down the history and the backstory of different people.

[00:14:11] Very useful.

[00:14:12] Others take a very forensic psychological approach, the criminal profiling sort of thing.

[00:14:18] His name is escaping me just in the moment that's a mindhunter guy.

[00:14:22] He and his book, The Cases That Still Hanta, his first chapter is Hantjack the Ripper.

[00:14:29] There are some people who are in Ripperology because of the social history.

[00:14:37] I think I mostly fall into that category.

[00:14:40] I definitely play on all the piles.

[00:14:43] Don't get me wrong, but it's the social history that fascinates me because I think very clearly that the murderer, whoever he or let's say it or she was,

[00:14:58] was from that area and was affected by that area.

[00:15:01] And that area was the east end of London, which is Whitechapel.

[00:15:05] It was right outside of the city limits proper.

[00:15:08] It had had an enormous explosion of population because of the changing economic demographic in England at the time, England and Ireland and Wales.

[00:15:19] There were no farming agricultural jobs anymore.

[00:15:25] The textile mills had changed their manufacturing processes and they needed less workers.

[00:15:31] A lot of people unemployed ended up drifting into the city in order to find a living.

[00:15:39] And Whitechapel had became a very densely populated area.

[00:15:47] There were row houses, what are called doft houses which are like rooming houses.

[00:15:54] And then there were workhouses there too.

[00:15:56] The industry around the area, there was manufacturing.

[00:16:01] It was tailors, there was slaughterhouses, a lot of them.

[00:16:05] There was a lot of manufacturing work.

[00:16:09] It was right to the north of the dock on the James River.

[00:16:15] So there was a lot of longshoremen activity.

[00:16:18] But there were way more people there than there were jobs.

[00:16:23] The people who did live indoors, who were the poor, lived in very squalid conditions,

[00:16:30] packed into small rooms, eight or nine people in one small space.

[00:16:35] It was very common for someone to have a room that they rented for their family of four

[00:16:44] but then they would rent space on the floor for people to sleep in.

[00:16:48] Those less fortunate who were in fact homeless, they had to rely on the doft houses.

[00:16:54] Where for a couple pennies a night, they may be able to get a very narrow bed in a communal room.

[00:17:02] They were called penny coffins or two penny coffins and it was basically a box with some straw that they could sleep in.

[00:17:11] If you couldn't afford that, you could get a penny rope where they would sit on a bench,

[00:17:16] kind of passed in with each other with a rope tied across your chest.

[00:17:20] Maybe you could sleep, maybe you couldn't.

[00:17:23] And for half a penny, you could at least be indoors.

[00:17:27] So it's no real surprise that a lot of these people who were suffering through incredible despair at this time,

[00:17:35] they turned for solace to alcohol.

[00:17:39] And drinking was very common there and drinking became an escape from the sorrow and misery that was all around them all the time.

[00:17:47] And I cannot overemphasize how truly terrible this place was.

[00:17:51] The infant mortality rate was was ghastly.

[00:17:55] Young people, children at the age of 10 were very common turned out of their home saying,

[00:18:01] okay, you're an adult now. We cannot see you anymore.

[00:18:04] You need to find your own way in the world.

[00:18:07] There were workhouses there.

[00:18:10] They were terrifying places in most that respect and people were very reluctant to enter into these workhouses.

[00:18:18] Yes, you were fed.

[00:18:20] Yes, you had a place to sleep but you were also a prisoner and you had to do very brutal, demeaning work and you could not leave.

[00:18:30] So these workhouses were notorious.

[00:18:34] Some of the victims were in and out of there.

[00:18:37] And just like every other time in history, women bore the brunt of the cruelty far worse than the men did.

[00:18:46] They were limited in the sort of jobs that they could get and they could do.

[00:18:52] They often had children they needed to support.

[00:18:55] If there was a man in their life, either a common law husband or an actual husband, if he was abusive, there was very little they could do.

[00:19:04] And frankly, oftentimes they didn't want it to happen.

[00:19:08] There's a very sad section in People of the Abyss where Jack London described a wife pleading to a magistrate not to send her husband to prison for violently beating her in the street.

[00:19:22] Because if he left, their descent into misery would go even farther.

[00:19:27] And that's a horrible thing to contemplate.

[00:19:30] And that was Whitechapel.

[00:19:32] In addition to this, you had an influx of migrants escaping the pogroms in Poland.

[00:19:40] So a large Polish Jew population was coming into the city.

[00:19:44] They were trying to find their way.

[00:19:47] They were trying to acclimate or to make an identity there.

[00:19:51] And big jocks, anti-Semitism rose up and it became a factor in the investigations of the Ripper murder.

[00:20:02] And right in the center of all of this, there in the summer of 1888 started some sculpts on women in the street.

[00:20:13] And they were associated with gangs who were trying to use pressure tactics, apparently to coerce these women into prostitution or whatever, whatever was happening.

[00:20:27] And one of them ended up dead, beaten at the hands of people in the street, of a group of men.

[00:20:36] Her name was Emma Smith.

[00:20:38] Then another one happened and police initially thought it was sort of the same thing.

[00:20:47] Except this woman was killed alone in the darkness and something else started to emerge out of the shadows of Whitechapel.

[00:20:55] If you're listening to the murder sheet, you love true crime.

[00:20:58] That means you're willing to stare into the darkest places in order to seek the truth.

[00:21:03] There's a truth in fictional darkness too, namely horror and thriller stories that tap into our morbid sides.

[00:21:10] Well if that sounds interesting to you, we'd encourage you to pick up a copy of Penny Black, a collection of stories from Ripperologist and fiction author Jim McKenna.

[00:21:18] I'm a big fan of collections of short stories.

[00:21:20] I love the punch that a short story can pack, the brief chili immersion into new worlds.

[00:21:25] My favorite stories here are probably The Space Between the Stars, a haunting tale about a sheriff investigating a back country murder who stumbles onto something much, much worse.

[00:21:35] Along with Penny and the Wolf, a story about ranchers facing supernatural terror.

[00:21:39] I just love the way Jim blends horror and action in this book.

[00:21:43] We bought the book and we've really enjoyed it.

[00:21:45] We just tore through the stories and it's a welcome addition to our admittedly already too large library.

[00:21:51] If it sounds interesting, we'd strongly recommend it to you.

[00:21:54] We think Jim is great and we love supporting talented independent fiction writers.

[00:21:58] It's the perfect gift for the horror lover in your life, or you can treat yourself to it if you'd like to experience spooky, spine-tingling terror and dread, but like in a cozy way, reading on your couch on a dark rainy day.

[00:22:11] We'll link to the Amazon page in our show notes.

[00:22:14] Yeah, I mean it's an utterly chilling picture, the desperation and poverty that you're describing here.

[00:22:19] And I think that's so important for people when they have maybe some of these iconic images of this case in their mind to remember that it's not happening in a vacuum, in a place where things are just normal.

[00:22:33] This is the backdrop.

[00:22:36] Can you tell us about, I know there's so many avenues we could go down with this because there's the canonical victims and then there's other possible links to this.

[00:22:47] Yeah, the woman that I just mentioned her name was Martha Tabram and she was killed 7th of August.

[00:22:55] This is all happening in 1888 by the way.

[00:22:58] She was killed in a place called Georgiard.

[00:23:00] There's a lot of question whether or not she was a ripper victim.

[00:23:05] Now if you have looked into true crime and the emergence of serial killers, you may have heard the idea that sometimes the killer doesn't get it right the first go round.

[00:23:19] You've probably heard that.

[00:23:21] There was no mutilation of the body but the body was certainly, the woman was taken to a private location.

[00:23:29] We know that she was intoxicated at the time and she was left for dead in a passageway at the foot of some stair.

[00:23:37] And by the way, before we step into that I wanted to step back for just a moment.

[00:23:43] Something that I think is important to note.

[00:23:45] I was talking earlier about women taking the brunt of the social ills that were around them.

[00:23:53] And you know what? I think that that still happens a lot to this day with this case.

[00:23:58] Because the one thing that I can tell you in the last 45 years and everything that I've written and done, and I got curious about it so I even look.

[00:24:09] I have never started a conversation about this case by saying he murdered prostitutes.

[00:24:15] I always said he murdered women.

[00:24:19] I looked at some of my library and the four books that I pulled down on the fly leaf, it would say a killer murdered prostitutes in the street.

[00:24:35] Let's be clear.

[00:24:37] It is entirely possible that these women in order to survive did something they did not want to do.

[00:24:45] However, there is no direct evidence that at least three of these victims ever engaged in prostitution.

[00:24:53] They did have commonalities.

[00:24:57] All of the canonical victims and the other ones as well.

[00:25:00] They were all badly plagued with alcoholism.

[00:25:04] Now I don't know how much experience you have with that but there's a difference between heavy drinking and alcoholism.

[00:25:09] If you look down at their history, you can see that alcoholism was what caused their dissent.

[00:25:16] The prostitution, that's guesswork.

[00:25:19] There's a woman, her name is Hallie Rubinolt.

[00:25:23] She wrote a book a few years ago called The Five.

[00:25:26] She's a historian in England and she did a deep dive research into each of the victims.

[00:25:32] She posits that there is no authentic evidence to say that these women came to their death due to sex work.

[00:25:45] Now that's something that I think bears important consideration.

[00:25:50] Yeah, it's something that doesn't because I think everybody has it in their minds that they were sex workers and therefore that's why this happened.

[00:25:57] It is almost a bit of a blaming, victim-blaming attitude towards it.

[00:26:03] That is absolutely what it is.

[00:26:06] Police have a bad history with sex workers.

[00:26:09] They still do to this day.

[00:26:12] And if you can put somebody into a silo and you can think of them as a certain way, then you start looking at what may have happened to them in a certain way.

[00:26:23] But that's not necessarily the case.

[00:26:26] As I'll go on, I'll point out a couple of things and I'm not going to dwell really heavy into each of the victims and what happened to them.

[00:26:35] But you'll see that it's entirely possible that they were exhausted on the street and vulnerable and alone.

[00:26:41] And that was the reason that they were selected as victims, not because they solicited or accepted solicitation for a sexual favor.

[00:26:51] And then that made them vulnerable. They were vulnerable already.

[00:26:55] The first canonical victim, her name is Marianne Nichols, Polly Nichols, 43 years old.

[00:27:01] She was killed August 31 on Buck's Row, which was a dark, long street in of course White Chapel.

[00:27:09] The murders happened either in White Chapel, Spittlefields, which is right next door, and then one, the city of London itself.

[00:27:18] Her body was found by two men on their way to work, not going with each other.

[00:27:23] One man came upon another man looking at something in the street.

[00:27:28] It turned out that a woman was laying on the ground. She was bleeding from her throat and she was dead.

[00:27:34] They walked on, found the first available policeman who went to investigate.

[00:27:40] When that policeman got there, another policeman had already found the body.

[00:27:44] They did a preliminary investigation around the site.

[00:27:49] The doctor was called and the body was taken off to the morgue.

[00:27:53] When the morgue, by the way, was nothing more than a wooden shed in a back building of a place not too far away.

[00:28:02] When the body was stripped, they saw something much worse that happened.

[00:28:08] The torso had been torn open and it shocked everyone.

[00:28:17] In the subsequent inquest, it was determined that she had her throat cut and she died of ex-anguination,

[00:28:31] but she was still, if not conscious, at least a little bit alive when those wounds to her stomach were made.

[00:28:39] The next one happened September the 8th.

[00:28:43] Annie Chapman. She was found in a yard behind a building on Hanbury Street.

[00:28:52] She had come out to use the privy in the back and very early in the morning and found her laying up against the fence.

[00:29:02] Again, there were a lot of similarities to the murder of Holly Nichols,

[00:29:09] the same kind of mutilation that happened to the body.

[00:29:14] This time her uterus had been removed, cut out.

[00:29:19] Now remember that at least three people prior to Holly Nichols had been attacked in the street.

[00:29:28] Two of the women had died and now there was another one and everyone was freaking out.

[00:29:37] The press was all over this thing already and it really sent the entire city into a panic.

[00:29:45] Also, it sent the entire nation and a lot of the world into a panic because wire services picked up on the stories and were following them.

[00:29:55] I've seen newspaper accounts of the river murders in San Jose, New Mexico, Los Angeles, California, Chirney, Nebraska.

[00:30:05] Shortly after Annie Chapman was murdered, an editorial appeared in The New York Times that was saying what is happening in White Chapel

[00:30:14] and it even says that in that editorial that the London police must be the stupidest detective ever.

[00:30:23] That's a quote.

[00:30:24] Oh man.

[00:30:26] Yeah.

[00:30:28] About two weeks later, again, another murder happened.

[00:30:33] This was on shortly after midnight, September 30th, 1888, on a place called Burner Street next to a working man's club.

[00:30:42] This was a place where trade unionists and socialists would have meetings.

[00:30:49] Right outside of there, a woman named Elizabeth Stride, a Swedish immigrant, was found dead in a little alley coming off the street.

[00:31:00] A merchant was coming home and was leaving a pony cart and something was in his way.

[00:31:06] He got down from the cart and he struck a match and he saw her laying on the ground.

[00:31:14] An interesting little thing about this is that shortly after he struck the match, the pony sighed away from the opposite side of the alley

[00:31:23] and a lot of people think the killer may have still been standing there in the darkness.

[00:31:28] The idea of gas-wise, murder by gas-wise is not entirely accurate in this case.

[00:31:34] The west end of London was very well lit.

[00:31:38] The east end, hardly at all.

[00:31:40] It was incredibly dark where we're talking.

[00:31:44] This was very dark and also narrow streets with two and three story building.

[00:31:51] So we are talking real dark.

[00:31:54] Elizabeth Stride originally was from Sweden.

[00:31:58] She was at one time in her life a sex worker.

[00:32:01] We know this because even before she was married, she was registered as a prostitute in Stockholm, which is how they handle things then.

[00:32:11] They had sort of a hygiene program.

[00:32:13] It sounds progressive.

[00:32:15] It was very demeaning and very abusive and even involved having these women standing naked in a square for several hours for inspection every month.

[00:32:25] So that's pretty awful.

[00:32:27] But the thing about Elizabeth Stride is there were no mutilations to her body.

[00:32:34] She was actually still bleeding out when Dimsher was his name founder.

[00:32:39] And a lot of people don't believe that she is a Jack the Ripper victim.

[00:32:48] Now, a lot of people will say that he was interrupted in what he was doing by Dimsher.

[00:32:54] That makes sense.

[00:32:55] That's very possible.

[00:32:57] But there was some indication during the autopsy that the kind of knife that was used to cut her throat was different than the ones that were used in the other murder.

[00:33:12] So that's a big question mark.

[00:33:14] And it's a question mark that has legs when it comes later to identifying a suspect.

[00:33:20] Whatever happened, people were getting stirred up around this.

[00:33:24] And then about an hour and a half later, and almost due wet of that murder site, a policeman found a body.

[00:33:36] And this was the body of Catherine Edo.

[00:33:39] Catherine, she had a remarkable life.

[00:33:42] It was a difficult life, but it was a remarkable one.

[00:33:45] She was a very free spirited woman.

[00:33:47] She traveled around England for a long time with a man, Thomas Conway, a poet and a former soldier.

[00:33:56] And they existed.

[00:33:57] They eaked out a living writing songs about murders.

[00:34:02] And they would get them printed on little sheets of paper and they would sell them for a half penny each at hanging.

[00:34:10] That's quite a business.

[00:34:12] Isn't that something?

[00:34:13] I had no idea that is so bizarre, but fascinating.

[00:34:18] Yeah, true crime is not new.

[00:34:20] The fascination with criminal acts is nothing new.

[00:34:24] They had parted company since then.

[00:34:26] She had ended up in White Sabbath.

[00:34:28] She was with another man, a man by the name of John Telly at the time.

[00:34:32] They had just come back to London after they had walked into the country to do something called hop picking, you know, hops for beer.

[00:34:42] It was a common thing to get workers out into the fields at certain times of the year and they would pick hops as a harvest.

[00:34:50] A lot of people treated it as a vacation.

[00:34:52] They could get out in some fresh air, they could do some work and come back to London with some money.

[00:34:57] That's what they had done.

[00:34:58] They ended up coming back early and remember they walked.

[00:35:01] So we're talking probably about 90, 100 miles or so.

[00:35:04] And they got back to London.

[00:35:07] They were right back in the mess of things again.

[00:35:10] They parted company early in the morning of September 29.

[00:35:14] Capernaut said she would be back.

[00:35:16] Something must have happened because in the midday, she turned up drunk and disorderly on a city street in London, attracting all kinds of attention.

[00:35:27] And the police came and carried her away and they put her in jail just to sleep it off.

[00:35:33] She was let out at about 1 a.m., about 12 30 to 1 a.m.

[00:35:37] They figured she was sober enough.

[00:35:39] They heard her sitting in herself singing and they came in and they let her go.

[00:35:44] A sad little thing, had she been across the border into the metropolitan area and not the city of London,

[00:35:51] she would have been mandatory held overnight.

[00:35:54] But because it was City of London, their policy was if she was sober, she could go.

[00:35:59] And sadly she went.

[00:36:02] She had given her name in a weird bit of coincidence that other people took up and ran with.

[00:36:08] Trust me, she'd identified herself as Mary Kelly and she gave her address as Dorset Street.

[00:36:16] Dorset Street being a very notorious street in these slums.

[00:36:21] The next murder victim was Mary Kelly who lived on Dorset Street.

[00:36:25] Oh my God.

[00:36:26] Yeah.

[00:36:27] Yeah.

[00:36:28] It's very bizarre.

[00:36:30] She was found in Micersquare.

[00:36:32] What today is known as Ripper Square, there's a plaque and memorial to her at the site.

[00:36:39] Her body was found in the darkness in a corner.

[00:36:43] She had been terribly mutilated.

[00:36:46] Her kidney had been removed and taken away.

[00:36:50] And vicious cuts had been ripped into her face.

[00:36:56] Her face had been mutilated, her nose had been cut off and part of one ear.

[00:37:01] She was also displayed.

[00:37:04] You look at the drawings were made of how they found the body.

[00:37:09] And it is pretty obvious he was staged that way.

[00:37:13] A call went out and people and police started searching.

[00:37:17] They were looking everywhere.

[00:37:18] They found nothing.

[00:37:19] However, to the north and east kind of up heading towards Dorset Street, towards Spittlefield,

[00:37:26] a piece of Mary or sorry of Catherine Eddow's apron was found in a, in front of a apartment

[00:37:33] house called the Wentworth Model Dwelling.

[00:37:36] It was on Goulston Street.

[00:37:39] Written on the wall in chalk above where the apron, where the swatch of bloody

[00:37:46] apron was found, was a message.

[00:37:49] And the message was the Jews are the men who will not be blamed for nothing.

[00:37:57] That's what it, J-U-W-E-F.

[00:38:01] Now you think that, okay, there's a lot that can be read into that.

[00:38:07] There have been whole books written about this.

[00:38:10] People think that this is, was a ripper that he did that.

[00:38:15] That he wrote that there.

[00:38:17] Now people have talked about it being a talk me double negative, you know?

[00:38:21] The Jews are the men and not the blame for nothing, that sort of thing.

[00:38:25] There's other connections to free masonry.

[00:38:29] Okay.

[00:38:30] And the Royal Conspiracy Theory and a bunch of other things.

[00:38:33] And I think it's a coincidence.

[00:38:37] I love that because that might be the boring answer.

[00:38:41] What makes you think it's a coincidence?

[00:38:44] Well, I'll tell you exactly why.

[00:38:47] Kevin, the thing is, is that Goulston Street was a popular marketplace,

[00:38:52] especially where Jewish merchants sold shoes.

[00:38:56] And shoes, problem was a very lucrative business for Jewish immigrants.

[00:39:02] It was something that the Jewish immigrants who were escaping the pogroms,

[00:39:06] a lot of times they didn't have a lot of skills that were readily translatable,

[00:39:10] but you could teach them how to sew a shoe.

[00:39:12] So they would take these kind of sweatshop factory jobs.

[00:39:15] And there was all of these clothing manufacturers that were right outside there,

[00:39:19] right down the block in Goulston Street.

[00:39:21] And what I personally think is somebody got ripped off on a pair of shoes he didn't like.

[00:39:26] Okay.

[00:39:27] And he got mad about it.

[00:39:30] He didn't get his satisfaction.

[00:39:32] And so, well, you know, you buy this, well, they'll just, and of course they're Jews.

[00:39:37] So he's going to go after that.

[00:39:38] And he doesn't know how to sell Jews.

[00:39:40] And he says these people aren't going to be blamed for anything they do.

[00:39:44] The Jews are going to have a men and not be blamed for nothing.

[00:39:47] They can do whatever they want.

[00:39:49] So it may have been like an old timey Victorian anti-Semitic Yelp review, essentially.

[00:39:54] Yeah.

[00:39:55] Oh, and there were lots of those.

[00:39:57] Yeah.

[00:39:58] Yeah.

[00:39:59] This case did not exist in a vacuum.

[00:40:03] All right.

[00:40:04] And I'll get to that in just a second here.

[00:40:06] The reason I think it has entered the broader structure of the Jack the Ripper crime is

[00:40:14] because when the police superintendent arrived on the scene,

[00:40:18] he ordered the graffiti to be walked off before too many people thought

[00:40:24] because there was already a lot of anti-Semitic angst associated with the violence and the murder.

[00:40:31] And they were being blamed for things.

[00:40:34] And he did not want to risk inflaming people by associating where a clue was found to anything having to do with you.

[00:40:42] That's the reason that he walked it off.

[00:40:46] So right before, by the way, right before the two murders which are known in Ripper parlance as the double event.

[00:40:56] And they're called that because of a letter.

[00:40:59] But probably the most famous of the Jack the Ripper letters arrived on the scene.

[00:41:04] I want to say that it was sent to a news agency, but this one may have been sent to the police.

[00:41:08] This one is called the Dear Boss letter.

[00:41:11] This is the one that most people know.

[00:41:14] It is the one that famously is signed yours truly Jack the Ripper.

[00:41:19] In there, he taunts to the police.

[00:41:25] He says in this letter that if he can remember, he will quote,

[00:41:31] flip the lady's ears off and send them to you.

[00:41:35] And clip is such a creepy word, isn't it?

[00:41:38] Mm-hmm. Oh my gosh, chilling.

[00:41:40] Yeah. So that was just a few days before the murder.

[00:41:46] Then on the day, on October 1st, a postcard arrived where he says that he had a bit of a mess with the last one's double event this time.

[00:41:58] Okay? And so he seems to be referencing that two women were killed in one night.

[00:42:04] Yeah.

[00:42:05] And that's creepy.

[00:42:08] And those were not the only letters, by the way, that were regularly coming in to news agencies and police departments.

[00:42:18] People all over England were writing crank ripper letters to each other.

[00:42:24] All right. It was, I have a book called The From Hell Letters.

[00:42:29] And it has some existing photocop or photographs of these letters that people were writing to each other,

[00:42:36] seemingly to scare people or to threaten, you know, I Jack the Ripper, I'm going to get you.

[00:42:41] And this is sort of thing to fake letters to the police.

[00:42:46] This was, it was kind of like what you see today in social media.

[00:42:50] I was just going to say that. I was just going to say this, like nothing changes.

[00:42:55] Nothing changes.

[00:42:56] Nothing changes. Okay.

[00:42:58] And all of these things, the people were egged on by aggressively competitive print media happening in London at the time.

[00:43:08] And there was a lot of sensationalism that went around.

[00:43:11] There was fantastic stories and theories that were happening.

[00:43:16] And people really got involved in it.

[00:43:19] A lot of amateur detectives were creeping around Whitechapel at this time trying to get, you know, trying to find out what was happening with this case.

[00:43:28] To say that it was tense is an understatement.

[00:43:32] Well, then quite a bit of time went past and nothing seemed to happen.

[00:43:36] The last murders were September 30th.

[00:43:39] Nothing happened all the way through October.

[00:43:42] And the country seemed to be holding its breath.

[00:43:45] The police had changed their tactics a little bit.

[00:43:47] We know now that they had completely abandoned the idea that this was kind of a gang activity.

[00:43:53] They believed that this was one solitary person for some reason.

[00:43:58] They had also liberated themselves from the idea that they had to intentionally stay away from the immigrant idea.

[00:44:07] And so they started beginning to talk to people in the emergent Jewish quarter.

[00:44:15] And I think that things started to get a little, the investigation started to get a little closer than was comfortable for whoever was doing it.

[00:44:24] Now that's a personal theory of mine.

[00:44:27] But then that changed.

[00:44:29] On November the 9th, 1888 in Miller's Court, a man, a rent collector named Indian Joe, India as in like the Raj India came to knock on the door of a woman by the name of Mary Jane Kelly.

[00:44:45] Because her rent was due. She didn't answer.

[00:44:48] There was a broken window next to the door.

[00:44:51] He reached through and he pushed the curtain aside.

[00:44:54] And what he saw on the bed was one of the most horrifying things anyone has ever seen on a bed.

[00:45:01] And that was the murder body of Mary Jane Kelly.

[00:45:05] We know that she was in her early 20s, 23 perhaps 25.

[00:45:11] We know that she was a sex worker who had worked at a West End brothel, not East End, but West End brothel, whether a high end went for a while.

[00:45:20] And it even gone to France to Paris and had in some kind of trafficking sex exchange program or something to work there.

[00:45:29] But she came back.

[00:45:31] She fell out of favor with the madam who ran the brothel and her plus her alcoholism began her descent.

[00:45:40] She had been heard. She lived there with a man named Barnett, Joseph Barnett.

[00:45:46] He was there and for a while there she was not doing any kind of sex work because he was making a decent living.

[00:45:56] He was a fish porter and then he got fired.

[00:46:01] And they began fighting.

[00:46:03] He had moved out.

[00:46:05] There was a lot of different problems and difficulties.

[00:46:08] And suddenly she was back trying to solicit clients.

[00:46:11] She is one of the ones that we know was in fact working as prostitutes.

[00:46:17] Witnesses who lived around her in this dense tightly compact place called Miller's Court, they heard her moving around up until like 2 a.m. that night.

[00:46:26] They at one point they heard her singing and they even remember that she was singing an Irish song called A Rose from Mother's Grave.

[00:46:35] And when she drank she liked to sing.

[00:46:38] Sometimes it's indeterminate exactly when but maybe about 4 o'clock in the morning one of her neighbors was awoke to the scream of old murder and she didn't do anything.

[00:46:49] She rolled back from like to sleep and sometime during the night very, very bad things happened in that room.

[00:46:56] She was mutilated beyond description but she was torn apart.

[00:47:00] Her face is completely unrecognizable.

[00:47:03] A lot of body parts were completely removed and set on a table next to her.

[00:47:07] Her legs were stripped with a bone and the killer left with her heart.

[00:47:13] So that one is the last of what we call the canonical murder.

[00:47:18] That one, do you think it's the last, do you think it's the actual last murder in your opinion?

[00:47:26] In my opinion, yes.

[00:47:28] There were other murders afterwards on 20th November.

[00:47:33] Annie Farmer was murdered in George Street.

[00:47:36] There was a woman, I think her name was Rose Mylet.

[00:47:39] She was killed in December in Clark's Yard.

[00:47:43] However, those seem to be instances of domestic violence.

[00:47:48] There's no real evidence that by this time, especially due to some very forward-thinking work by a man named Dr. Vaughn,

[00:47:57] he had been able to identify certain traits in the killer that he was demonstrating in the death,

[00:48:04] in the way he was killing these people.

[00:48:06] Now, based on what we know now, that's some pretty forward-thinking stuff.

[00:48:10] And others came.

[00:48:12] There was five more, most notably Alice McKenzie and Francis Cole.

[00:48:19] Francis Cole was murdered in 1891, so several years later.

[00:48:25] A lot of people really insist on Francis Cole's and I just don't see it at all for a couple of different reasons.

[00:48:33] It does seem to me that with the orgy of violence that was inflicted upon Mary Jane Kelly,

[00:48:42] the Ripper stopped.

[00:48:44] Now, whether he did that voluntarily, which I doubt or involuntarily, that lost into the shadows of time.

[00:48:54] We want to thank Jim for his knowledge and his time.

[00:49:03] Thanks so much for listening to the Murder Sheet.

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