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Bad Women Presents Stolen Sister, a special limited series from RTÉ. The story of Elizabeth Plunkett—a 23 year old woman from Dublin who was murdered by Ireland’s first serial killers. On the last weekend of summer in 1976 Elizabeth Plunkett went on a night away with friends, to Brittas Bay in county Wicklow before she was abducted by John Shaw and Geoffrey Evans. Now, almost 50 years later, Elizabeth’s family are finally trying to get their sister some justice. Binge all episodes of Bad Women Presents Stolen Sister early and ad-free with a Pushkin+ subscription. Sign up at pushkin.fm/plus or on the Bad Women Presents Stolen Sister show page on Apple Podcasts.
Bad Women: The Blackout Ripper: The streets of wartime London are pitch black and the darkness offers cover to a murderer every bit as terrible as Jack the Ripper. During one awful week in February 1942 he viciously attacked women night after night. But the victims of the so-called Blackout Ripper are now all but forgotten. Historian Hallie Rubenhold and criminologist Alice Fiennes share new details from the archives to tell the extraordinary and moving stories of the women who died and why their deaths were swept from view.
Bad Women: The Ripper Retold: In the fall of 1888, five women were brutally murdered in the slums of London. But everything you think you know about Jack the Ripper and those murdered women is wrong. Hallie reconstructs the lives of the five victims - revealing the appalling treatment they faced as women in the 1880s, and completely overturning the accepted Ripper story.

Season Finale: Marjorie Cummins is certain that her husband is innocent - he's not the violent Blackout Ripper and he shouldn't hang for murder. She loyally supports him in court - refusing to believe the compelling evidence against him. Will the jury agree with her? In wartime London, it seems, men could murder some women and still escape the hangman. Some juries defied the directions of judges to reach 'not guilty' verdicts if the female murder victims were painted as being promiscuous, immoral or unfaithful. One heavily-pregnant mother - Kathleen Patmore - was fatally stabbed by her soldier husband. Seemingly an open-and-shut case of murder, many instead felt that Kathleen deserved her fate and that her husband was the innocent party. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The murders of The Blackout Ripper - indeed many of the crimes committed against women in World War Two - aren't often spoken about by historians of the conflict. That's changing. The co-host of Bad Women Hallie Rubenhold and regular guest Dr Julia Laite recently appeared on the WW2 podcast We Have Ways of Making You Talk to talk to James Holland about the wartime experiences of women. Here's chance to hear the conversation. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Doris had made her living as "Olga" - a dominatrix alter ego charging men handsomely for sex involving corsets, whips and "unusual methods". But when she married aged businessman (and former client) Henri Jouannet, she'd promised to give it all up. The coming of war put a strain on the couple's finances and their relationship - and Doris secretly returned to selling sex. But the trade had changed - instead of seeing her regular clients, "Olga" now meets strangers on the street... including The Blackout Ripper. Further reading: Billock, Jennifer. ‘Five Hotels That Were Occupied by the Military During World War II’, Smithsonian Magazine, 28 October 2019 Laite, Julia. Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens: Commercial Sex in London, 1885 - 1960 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The story of the Blackout Ripper partly takes place in the wartime bars and clubs of West End London. To recreate their sound, Bad Women's composer and sound designer Pascal Wyse put together a quartet to play jazz tunes of the time. Here Pascal and guitarist Ed Gaughan talk about the history of that music and play some of the numbers in full on this episode on Pushkin Industries' Broken Record show, hosted by Justin Richmond. The band included Ed Gaughan, Ross Hughes, Christian Miller and Marcus Penrose. They were recorded by Nick Taylor at Porcupine Studios, under the direction of Pascal Wyse. Pushkin’s Ben Tolliday mixed the tracks. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Greta Heywood is being strangled in a Piccadilly doorway when a passerby interrupts the Blackout Ripper, who disappears into the night. Greta survives the attack and the killer leaves vital clues as to his identity. The police are now closing in on their man - but can they catch him before he can claim more victims? Further reading: Andrews, Maggie and Lomas, Janis. The Home Front in Britain: Images, Myths and Forgotten Experiences since 1914 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) Laite, Julia. Common Prostitutes And Ordinary Citizens: Commercial Sex in London 1885 - 1960 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) Lewis, Jane. ‘The problem of lone mother families in twentieth century Britain’, The Journal of Social Welfare and Family Law, Vol. 20 No. 3 (1998), pp. 251-283 Reeves, Josephine. ‘The Deviant Mother and Child: The Development of Adoption as an Instrument of Social Control’, Journal of Law and Society, Winter, Vol. 20, No. 4 (Winter 1993), pp. 412—426) Roberts, Elizabeth. A Woman’s Place: An Oral History of Working Class Women, 1890 – 1940 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984) Slater, Stefan. ‘Prostitutes and Popular History: Notes on the ‘Underworld’ 1918 - 1939’, Crime, History and Society, Vol. 13, No. 1 (2009), pp. 25 - 48 Sweet, Matthew. ‘The West End Front' (Faber 2012)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Rachel Dobkin has come to see her psychic advisor, Madam Nerva. After years of bitter disagreements and financial wranglings with her estranged and violent husband, Rachel wants to know what the spirits think she should do next. Through Madam Nerva the spirts tell Rachel not to go near her husband again... but will she heed their warnings? The case of Rachel Dobkin is another face of wartime crime and not the work of the Blackout Ripper - but it reveals a common thread. It shows how some men thought the disruption and chaos of war would help them get away with murder. Further reading: Carroll, Niamh. ‘The History of the Boundary Estate’, Bethnal Green London, 14 May 2021, Cole, Mike. ‘The Battle of Cable Street’, Historic UK. Cowan, Colin. ‘Mental observation wards: an alternative provision for emergency psychiatric care in England in the first half of the twentieth century’, History of Psychiatry, Eilers, Nicole Kvale. ‘Emigrant Trains: Jewish Migration through Prussia and American Remote Control, 1880 - 1914’, in Brinkmann, T. (ed), Points of Passage: Jewish Migrants from Eastern Europe in Scandinavia, Germany, and Britain 1880 - 1914 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013). Lefebure, Molly. Murder on the Home Front (London: Sphere, 2013). Marks, Lara V, Model Mothers: Jewish Mothers and Maternity Provision in East London 1870 - 1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).. Odell, Robin. Medical Detectives: The Lives and Cases of Britain’s Forensic Five (Cheltenham: The History Press, 2013). Roberts, Elizabeth. A Woman’s Place: An Oral History of Working Class Women 1890 - 1940 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995). Summerscale, Kate. The Haunting of Alma Fielding: A True Ghost Story (London: Bloomsbury, 2020).See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Unlike white GIs, it was made virtually impossible for African-American servicemen to marry the women they met and fell in love with in the UK during World War Two. If these couples had children, those so-called "Brown Babies" were stigmatized and scorned - with many ending up in grim children's homes. Pausing the story of the Blackout Ripper - this episode examines the experiences of those Black GIs, their white partners and two "Brown Babies" - Leon Lomax and Terry Harrison - who have both spent decades trying to piece together their family histories. Professor Lucy Bland's work can be seen here: http://www.mixedmuseum.org.uk/brown-babies Further reading: Bland, Lucy. Britain's 'Brown Babies': The stories of children born to black GIs and white women in the Second World War. (Manchester University Press), 2019 Osur, Alan. Blacks in the Army Air Forces During World War II. (Office of Air Force History), 1977 Schindler, David and Westcott, Mark ‘Shocking Racial Attitudes: Black G.I.s in Europe’, The Review of Economic Studies. (University of Oxford), 2021See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.