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144. Spooky Listen! Jack the Ripper | CLUES Podcast
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When did making plans get this complicated? It's time to streamline with WhatsApp, the secure messaging app that brings the whole group together. Use polls to settle dinner plans, send event invites and pin messages so no one forgets mom 60th and never miss a meme or milestone. All protected with end to end encryption. It's time for WhatsApp message privately with everyone. Learn more@WhatsApp.com.
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This is Crime House in London.
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In 1888, a series of mutilation murders would torment the public. Five women across Whitechapel would be found brutally dismembered. The killer was precise, cruel to the point of inhumanity, and ultimately never caught. And while we don't have a first and last name for him, we do have a moniker that is still as much of a household name today as it was more than 130 years ago. Jack the Ripper.
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We've talked about modern cases with multiple victims, but there's something about these murders that has really shaped serial killer lore. Plus, there's the fact that Jack the Ripper still remains a mystery. Or do they? Numerous people have dedicated their entire lives to unmasking Jack, and we may be closer to solving these cases than we think.
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Foreign.
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Hi guys. Welcome back to Clues, where we sneak past the crime scene tape to explore the key evidence behind some of the most gripping true crime cases.
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I'm Kaylin Moore and I'm going to be digging into the timelines, the backstories and the case files on these cases.
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And I'm your Internet sleuth, Morgan Abshur. I'm the one who's diving into the Reddit forums to talk about everything I can find online and plainly out the threads that just don't add up.
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And at Crime House, we value your support. So please share your thoughts on social media. Remember to rate, review and follow clues to help others discover the show. For bonus episodes, early access and ad free listening, join our Crime House plus community on Apple Podcasts.
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B
More on the case and the clues that defined it right after this quick break. Okay, we are kicking off spooky season with this one and it is a big one. I will warn you guys, I didn't know a lot about this case until prepping and doing the research. Of course we hear about Jack the Ripper all the time and like pop culture media references but wow, this case gets a little gory. So if you're looking for more traditional spooky, maybe wait a couple weeks until we get into Salem.
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Yeah, we're going to be covering the witch Trials, which will also be very spooky and historical and informative.
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Yeah, no, this. This was a lot. I'm like, they didn't talk about this on Bridgerton.
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Like, you're like, if it's not in Bridgerton, I haven't heard of it.
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Gosh. I'm just like. I was really going through the details. I'm like, okay, these clues, like, everything you guys are going to get into today with us, it's. It's pretty crazy.
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It's a gory one. And we're going. We're going to talk about the gore a little bit. So obviously we're not going to show the gore, but if you're watching this episode on YouTube, you are going to see some photos and maps and other assets that will help you kind of put the pieces together as we're telling the story. And if you're not watching, if you're just. Just listening, you can find those same images on our Instagram. That's at Clues Podcast. Well, Morgan, you kind of kicked it off by saying, today's case is massive. And it is. People have been trying to solve this for 137 years. And I also. I can't even stress how many podcasts I've listened to where they're like, we've solved it. We've cracked it. No one has. It's still an ongoing mystery. Which is why today we wanted to really give the full overview. We want to really try to pack in as much stuff as we can on this case. The known facts and the timelines, the clues that are most likely to be authentic, and the suspects and details that we personally found the most interesting, underappreciated, and also the most likely to be true. There's a lot of lore in this case, but we tried to sort through that when we were doing the research. And because of that, for the purposes of this episode, we're going to stick to what's sometimes referred to as the canonical five, the killings that most sources old and new agree were committed by Jack the Ripper. There's several other killings where experts say Jack was responsible. There's several other killings really around the world where people say Jack the Ripper was responsible. We'll talk about those a little bit later in the episode. But for now, what we want to do as we go through the timeline is talk about the canonical Five.
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And one last thing before we dive in. We've said this case is going to be gory. It is a bit of a heavy one. So I really just want to be Clear and warn everyone that there are going to be a lot of graphic descriptions of violence, including discussions of extreme sexual violence and mutilation of the deceased. As always, we'll do our best to talk about victims with compassion and dignity, but these were particularly brutal murders, and there's no way to tell you the basic facts of these cases without also sharing some pretty disturbing stuff. So, with that in mind, let's dive in.
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So to understand how Jack the Ripper got away with some of the most vicious murders ever recorded, we need to understand the area he was killing in a little bit more. So the word slum barely covers Whitechapel. At the time. The East End district on the north bank of the River Thames, just east of the Tower of London, is where Whitechapel is. It's a short walk from grandeur, and it felt like this totally other world inside of London. So London's population was really exploding at the time, but there weren't things like new housing, jobs or social support for any of the people coming into the area. You had Irish families that were fleeing famine. You had Russian Jews who were escaping their circumstances. They were all pouring in through docks. They were crowding the nearby streets. There's also language barriers and desperation that kind of fed sweatshops and turf gangs. Merchants raged at being undercut. Diseases were spreading in rooms that were packed with so many people, and many of these people were in condemned buildings. Also in parts of the East End, more than half of the children died before age 5. Then there was the dark that was happening at the time. Industrial smog and the infamous London fog smothered the alleys. And in Whitechapel, street lamps were really scarce. So after last call at the bars, everywhere in Whitechapel would go pitch black black. Even the police were afraid of some of these alleyways because it was so dark and there was so much violence happening there that they refused to patrol some of the streets that didn't have lights.
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Yeah, I'm scared of the dark. There'd be no chance I'd be walking down those roads.
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Terrifying. And, you know, as all of this is happening, women really bore the brunt of a lot of this violence. So there were a lot of sailors that were coming in and out of the area through the ports, and that really exploded. Kind of like the sex industry at the time. The poorest women in the area often faced this brutal choice. They could either starve or they could enter sex work, not have any protection, but at least be able to feed themselves and sometimes their children. Violence against sex Workers was incredibly common at the time, and it was rarely punished. As journalist Florence Fenwick Miller wrote in 1888, women were routinely brutalized, sometimes killed, and if they survived, the law often called it, quote, common assault. Basically, at this time in London, if you were to scream out murder in the middle of the street, no one would even look twice. Whitechapel didn't just host Jack the Ripper. It made his work easier and his escape night after night far more likely. So that brings us to mother of five, Mary Ann Nichols, who also went by the name of Polly. That's how I'll refer to her. She was born on August 26, 1845. Despite living on the East End in a horrible situation, she had somewhat of a chance at life. Her dad is a blacksmith who was able to support her into early adulthood. At age 19, she marries a man who works for a commercial printing business. But from what we know, Paulie's marriage isn't really a happy one. In part, it's because she is really struggling with alcohol addiction at this time in her life. Now, divorce at the time is incredibly rare. So married couples who didn't get get along usually just stayed together, but they would live apart. So essentially, Polly and her husband William would separate and reunite throughout the years, but often they lived apart from each other. And every time Paulie would move out, her children would stay with William, but he would send her a little bit of money as what he called maintenance for Polly. During this time, too. Both of them have other partners. They're not really considering themselves married to each other. And then in 1882, William catches wind that Polly is probably doing sex work.
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My name's Jack Wagner, host of Otherworld.
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A podcast featuring real people who experience something paranormal, supernatural, or unexplained. I have no idea how I got there.
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I don't think I've ever seen anything.
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That looks like this.
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It felt like electric stars on fire.
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I started Otherworld to take a grounded.
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Approach to the paranormal, help people tell their own stories, and encourage more to come forward.
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I certainly don't have the answers, but maybe one day we will. Join me as we explore our world's greatest mysteries. Listen to Otherworld now for free, wherever.
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You get your podcasts.
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A
And everything changes. At that moment, he just decides that he's not going to support her anymore. He doesn't want to give money to her if this is the life that she's going to live. He ends up contacting the church, and he argues that he shouldn't be expected to raise their Five kids by himself and support Paulie financially. And of course, as everyone listening can imagine, the church sides with him. They're like, yeah, of course you don't need to support your wife anymore. So at this point, Paulie, who's now 37 years old, is penniless. There's not really many options for a woman in her position. She can't necessarily go out and get a job. So there's a little bit of pittance that she makes as a low end sex worker, but that is really all of the money that she's making at this time. Soon she gets confined to the first of many workhouses where she's going to live over the next six years. Or workhouses in London at the time are kind of similar to how the asylum system in America worked in, like the 1900s, but they're a little bit more prisons for the poor. Inmates wear identical uniforms there. They're forced to perform manual labor whenever they're not sleeping or eating sparse meals. And part of this, we have this in the United States too. But like, being that poor is illegal in Victorian London. In America, we called it being a vagrant, where you could just get thrown in jail for being that destitute, essentially. But anyone who needs governmental assistance in London at the time can legally be confined to a workhouse and they can just get free labor from this person and people in these workhouses. I mean, the situation was horrible. People are packed in like sardines. There's little to no medical care. So think of all the weird Victorian illnesses that were spreading at the time. Smallpox, measles, all of those outbreaks are just happening constantly in these workhouses. Also kind of making things worse. Polly can't come and go as she wants. She has to stay there unless she has what they decide is a reasonable notice to leave. And that requires a whole administrative process of getting that approved. So you can't just leave and come as you want to in these workhouses. So obviously Polly hates the system, as we can all imagine. And every time she manages to get out on reasonable notice, she goes back to sex work. She's trying to make some money for herself, but every time she leaves and does this, she gets in trouble with the law, basically, either for the sex work that she's doing or for sleeping on the streets. And they just send her to another workhouse. Occasionally she has these periods of ill health, so she'll get sent to an infirmary instead. But then when she's well enough, they just send her straight back to the workhouse system. It's this horrible, horrible cycle. On May 12, 1888, 42 year old Paulie leaves the workhouse that she's in for what she thought was a really good opportunity. See, the workhouse has procured her a job as a live in domestic servant with a family in Wandsworth, which is this like wealthy area in South London. Wealthier families at the time often asked women's workhouses to match them with potential household servants.
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So wild.
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It's so wild. The Victorian era was just like horrible. Polly writes to her father and tells him the good news. She says, quote, I just write to say, you will be glad to know that I'm settled in my new place and all going right up to now. My people went out yesterday and have not returned, so I'm left in charge. It is a grand place inside with trees and gardens back to front. All has been newly done up. They are teetotalers and religious, so I ought to get on. They're very nice people and I have not too much to do. And what this basically translates to is this was a sober household and Paulie ultimately thinks that this is going to be good for her. Within two months of her working at this place, though, it looks like the situation sours. And in mid July, Paulie takes off from this house. And while she does so, she steals some of her employer's clothing on the way out. And that's when she moves into Wilmot's lodging house in an area that's right next to Whitechapel called Spitalfields. This lodging house is basically a cheap motel that they call a dos house. We're going to use that term a lot in this episode. A dos house. There Polly shares a room with her friend Emily Holland, as well as three other women. And all doss houses charge the same for rent. It's going to be four pence a night. And that is what they call dos money. But even splitting the dos money five ways, it's really hard for Paulie to make enough for her share. She can basically manage her nightly rent, but she has to get food, she has to get other supplies for herself. And also she is struggling with alcohol addiction. And so in order to kind of like keep herself from having withdrawals, she has to support her drinking habit. We were able to find that a glass of gin at the pub that was nearby cost 3 pence. And so she basically needs several drinks a night to stave off these symptoms of alcohol withdrawal, which, you know, can be deadly too. So she's basically forced to spend this Money and on August 24, 1888, Paulie moves into a different boarding house, one where the women can share beds with men. And this is because that allows sex work to happen. And she can make a little bit more money this way. And the one that she moves into is called the White House. Within a week, Paulie wants to leave her situation. She wants to leave the White House for one reason or another. And she wants to return to the shared room that she was sharing with those other girls at Wilmott's. So around 12:30am on Friday, August 31, she leaves a local pub and she heads back to Wilmott's. But she gets kicked out of the house because she hasn't paid her dos money for the night. Drunkenly, she promises that she'll go out, she'll figure out how to get the money, and then she'll be back soon. So hold the room for me. And as she's leaving, she actually tells the people working there that she has this nice new black bonnet on, and she expects that that's going to help her attract some customers. So everyone who's working at the place knows exactly what she's going to go do. She also has on a fairly new dress. Some people have suggested that it was one that she had stolen from her former employer. And now, sex workers like Polly at the time, typically charged 2 to 3 pence for their services, depending on a myriad of things like what the customer requests. So in theory, she only has to find one or two customers so she can make her money and sleep in a room for the night. She leaves around 1:40am and around 2:30 in the morning, she happens to run into her roommate, Emily Holland, who's walking home after watching a fire at the docks. And Paulie tells Emily that she's made her dos money several times over that night, just in the time that she's been gone. But she also confesses that she keeps spending that money on drinking. But now the pubs are closed, so she tells Emily that she's gonna go look for one more client. And if she can't find one, she'll just go back to the White House and she'll share a man's bed for the night and she'll try again the next day, Emily and Paulie part ways. They go in separate directions, and Emily makes a note that Paulie is walking east. And about an hour later, around 3:30 in the morning, Paulie's walking down Bucks Row, which is one of the streets in Whitechapel that's home to working people. Who can afford to rent cottages. And she meets someone while she's there. Now, maybe she thinks this person is paying customer, or maybe it's someone lying in wait. Maybe it's someone following her. We will never know for sure, but I don't even know if she really sees what's happening in the thick London fog. But this man has a knife. And if Polly does see it, she doesn't make a sound. And right underneath the bedroom of a sleeping family, the man quickly cuts her throat twice. The second gash goes all the way down to her vertebrae. It practically decapitates her. And then, not finished with the attack, he slices her abdomen multiple times, inflicting either one or two severe wounds that expose her intestines and her stomach. Then he stabs her twice in the genitals. And moments later, around 3:45 in the morning, a delivery carriage driver named Charles Cross walks down Buck's Row on his way to work. And Charles, as he's walking, practically trips over Paulie's body. And it's. Remember, it's so dark at the time, he doesn't even really know what he stumbled on. And he reaches down and touches her arm and he finds that above the elbow, she's still warm. So if she is dead, which kind of looks like she is, but she hasn't been for very long. Whoever did this, though, is nowhere to be seen. There's no easy way to call for the police at the time. And Charles is on his way to work and he can't really be late, so he ends up pulling down Paulie's skirt to cover her up and give her a little bit of dignity in the situation. And then he hurries on his way, knowing that he'll likely see an officer, a patrolling constable, someone on his route to work. And sure enough, just a few blocks later, Charles runs into an officer and he tells him what he saw. Meanwhile, at the crime scene, a different officer has separately stumbled upon the body. And things very quickly escalate from here. Before 4 in the morning, a doctor arrives on the scene and he officially pronounces Paulie dead. He says that she couldn't have been gone, quote, unquote, but a few minutes. So that basically means when Charles found her, he was mere moments away from seeing who did this. And that very morning, the Star newspaper runs a report on the crime. And the writer, who has remained unnamed all this time having seen the body himself, says, quote, no murder was ever more ferociously and brutally done. And that headline really sets off all of London and it really marks the beginning of the Ripper's reign of terror.
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B
And with that, our trail of clues begins. Starting with clue number one. We have Paulie's wounds. Since all of these murders occurred clearly before modern forensics, similarities in the MO was what was really looked at in these olden crimes. And so looking at the victim's wounds is what really helped all of these officers, constables kind of know that this was a different killer. This is a new killer that they might not have seen before. According to the medical examiner at the time, Jack used a 6 to 8 inch bladed knife, moderately sharp and may have even been left handed. And left handedness was something that was very stigmatized in the Victorian era as it had been throughout much of European history. I feel like, honestly even my uncle growing up like was left handed but they made him switch, so.
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A
Oh yeah, my dad too. No, they literally thought it was like demons. It was evil in Victorian era evil. Comment. If you're watching this video and you would have been thought of as demonic for being left handed in the Victorian.
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B
Era, I would have been stoned. I had like vampire teeth before braces. So I would have been out for sure.
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A
A woman with vampire teeth.
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B
No.
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A
You're done?
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B
Yeah, no, done. And so kind of correlating this ferocious crime with maybe a left handed person. It was really kind of spread around that like this person could have practiced witchcraft or could have habits of a criminal clearly left handed stabbing people. So if Jack was left handed, it would have cut down the suspect pool considerably. Jack also had managed to kill Paulie so quietly that those sleeping families on the street didn't hear anything. No screams, not a peep. Meaning it also must have been pretty quick. No hesitation. And again, maybe lying in wait, maybe in the frame of a door or watching, following her in the fog. And there also were severe abdominal wounds. And Polly was wearing what are called stays, super different than modern bras. It was like this tight boned garment meant to shape the body under the clothing. Similar to a corset, but like made way better and differently. And her killer seemingly didn't undress her or attempt to cut the stays while slicing her abdomen, meaning they were likely maneuvering the stays and getting their hand under. I should also note Paulie's organs were exposed but not removed. And something the medical examiner really finds interesting with Paulie's autopsy. There wasn't any evidence of recent sexual intercourse. So Jack didn't sexually assault her either. And because Paulie was on duty as a sex worker that night and had just told her friend that she had customers, you know, a couple times over to pay for the doss house rent. One possible explanation for this could be that due to the high rates of STDs back in Victorian times and the threat of pregnancy even at the age of 43, it's kind of speculated that Pauly might have been selling other acts besides just, like, vaginal intercourse.
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A
That's interesting. I didn't know about that before we started researching this, but that's. Yeah, obviously they're concerned about pregnancy and STDs at the time.
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B
So it's still this weird juxtaposition for everyone, noting that whoever did this crime stabbed Paulie in the genitals multiple times. And so because of that, a lot of the investigators at this time kind of, like, point to this being pickerism, which is when the killer uses stabbing as a method and they look at the knife as their own sexual organ, and they get off. They get pleasure from performing these stabbings, especially in intimate areas like the genitals.
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A
It's.
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B
It's sex for them.
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A
Yeah. Which we just covered the Idaho case, and that was something that, like, we talked a lot about and people online were talking about a lot.
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B
Is.
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A
Was that something that was motivating him?
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B
And it's so interesting that even throughout time, it just, like, keeps repeating itself. Yeah, it's still present. And so more recently, even in 2005, forensic professionals, including Robert Keppel, a legendary detective specializing in serial killers, published a scholarly analysis of Jack the Ripper's whole M.O. they diagnosed him with certainty as someone displaying pickerism by pointing out that he stabbed all victims far more times than necessary to just kill them. And there's actually a later analysis that says Jack might have been acting out a different but related sexually violent compulsion, which is necro sadism, meaning he was getting sexual gratification, specifically from mutilating the dead. Either way, it seems that Jack was absolutely sexually motivated in some way, and maybe for him, the murder itself was a sex act.
- [24:30]
A
The week after Pauly died, the first week of September in 1888, the murder was all over the papers. And it became such a hot topic around the East End. There was enough interest from the public that Paulie's funeral arrangements were kept secret to prevent gawkers from lining the streets.
- [24:47]
B
Yeah, that was a really interesting thing I've learned about this era is, like, funerals. Like, people would show up and there was, like, windows with the dead in them that people would, like, line up and go view.
- [24:59]
A
Oh, yeah. No, the Victorian era, London especially. Because these people were so obsessed with true crime and they didn't have documentaries, they only got it from the papers. So people would show up to crime scenes.
- [25:08]
B
Yeah. And there were 158 papers at the time. Sherlock Holmes was in its heyday. This was like the best selling series. So people were obsessed. This is like really when true crime was going nuts. The origins of our. Absolutely.
- [25:25]
A
I have, we do a Heart Starts pounding episode on that. If you listen to our who killed Seville Kent episode. It's all about Victorian era true crime obsession and how that affected crime scenes. But yeah, so they can't even publicize her funeral because they know people are just going to show up and try to gawk. So even if the people in Whitechapel didn't really care much about the welfare of sex workers, or I would say women in general or poor people or like anyone but themselves, they were pretty interested in how brutal this particular murder was. And not to mention they were all really freaked out that they could be next people on Buck Row, especially that that was the area where Paulie was killed. They were worried about the killer lurking in the same spot again. So anyone who avoid that area at night did. But not everyone was able to. And one of the women that unfortunately did have to frequent this area was Annie Chapman. She was a 47 year old widow. Now Annie has a lot in common with Polly. She was in her 40s, she was a mother. One of her three children had died and actually another one of them was institutionalized due to disability. So Annie lived at a dos house in nearby Spitalfields where she paid her nightly rent with sex work. After she lost her husband's financial support. Annie and her husband John split up sometime around 1884, 1885. But he kept supporting her until he ultimately died in 1886. And just like Paulie, Annie was forced into a bad situation. She had no other options really for how she could make money. And unfortunately for her as well, she developed this alcohol addiction. And a lot of the money she was supposed to spend on her nightly dos money was going to buying alcohol. And exactly one week after Paulie's murder, Annie's night started off eerily similar to how Paulie's last night started. On the Evening of Friday, September 7, 1881, Annie isn't feeling well. She leaves her new doss house sometime around 5pm she's got to look for customers. Even though she's not feeling well, she has to find customers so she can pay. Now Annie at The time had chronic tuberculosis. She also potentially had syphilis, which both were incurable and potentially lethal at the time if you did not have access to proper care. So she returned home around 11:30pm and had no DOS money, but she was able to get a baked potato, beer and some medicine for herself at 1am she has to leave again. She returns at 1:35am at which point the night watchman is like, listen, you're not getting in here unless you have your money. You keep going out and coming back with food, like, pay me or figure something else out. But she doesn't have the money. So she asks if she can speak to the manager, who at the DOS house is called a deputy. And just like Paulie, she tells this deputy that she plans to go out and earn the DOS money. And she assures them she's going to be back shortly with this money. She asks that they don't give away her usual bed to another lodger before she's able to make it back. And then Annie leaves. Now, around 5:30 in the morning, a local woman named Elizabeth Long sees a woman who she later identified as Annie talking to a man at 29 Hanbury street, which is just a mile from the site of Paulie's murder. Shortly before 6am, a man named John Davis, who's a delivery driver living on the third floor at 29 Hanbury Street street, he leaves his house to go to work. And when he steps outside, he finds Annie's body in the backyard. And the scene is absolutely shocking. Now, not only has Annie been viciously mutilated, but it looks like her body has been posed. Her legs are spread out and they're pushed up towards her chest, just like Polly. Annie died of a knife wound to the throat. There was a cut so deep it nearly decapitated her. And also, like Paulie, her abdomen is sliced open and her organs are exposed. Now, John runs to the police station and he makes a report. And the constables go straight to the scene. And by 6:30 in the morning, a coroner named Dr. George Baxter Phillips arrives, and he guesses that Annie may have died around two hours before they found her. So sometime around 4:30 in the morning. But he later acknowledges that, you know, there's a chance that her body cooled rapidly because it was pretty cold out that morning. So she actually could have been killed even more recently, somewhere between 5:30 and 6:00am which would have also meant that they were just minutes away from seeing who did this. And, you know, the scene is so bad that most people who Come by, can't even really look at it. But Dr. Phillips has to keep examining the body, and he notices more and more strange things about the scene. Now, first of all, her abdomen has not just been sliced open, unlike the previous victim, some of her organs had been removed. Now, I mean, this part is really intense, you guys, but Annie's intestines had been severed and they had been placed on her left shoulder. But what is even more horrific, the more that the doctor looks at her body is he realizes that her uterus, part of her vagina, and part of her bladder are gone.
- [30:52]
B
And these missing organs would seem like a pretty big clue number two. But this has been pretty hotly debated. Most experts agree with the original case reports at the time that the killer did remove organs from the victims himself. But I did find one devoted Ripperologist. And these are people who just really make studying Jack the Ripper their thing. Ripperogists, it's. It's a whole thing. So they think that Jack just mutilated the bodies. And coroners or people working at the mortuaries were the ones actually removing the organs. They think that maybe they sold them to medical schools, which really needed as many human organs as they could get for practice, for surgeries.
- [31:34]
A
Yeah, they were digging up a lot of bodies at graveyards at the time. Yeah, yeah. And selling them to schools.
- [31:41]
B
Grave robbing was a huge thing. And so a lot of people even speculated that most doctors at the time would actually go grave rob themselves. And so.
- [31:50]
A
Oh, yeah, no, in America at the time, like Harvard had like a bring your own body to school policy for new. For the people who were admitted to their program. So you had to go out and get a body from a graveyard and then bring it to dissect it. If you were a freshman at Harvard at the time, wasn't there a modern.
- [32:06]
B
Ivy League school even that like one of their professors.
- [32:10]
A
It was Harvard. It was the guy that worked in the mortuary. We have a hard source pounding episode on it. But yeah, he was. He was selling the organs mostly to this guy Jeremy in Tennessee.
- [32:18]
B
But like, okay, so, like, again, plausible.
- [32:21]
A
Yeah, so.
- [32:22]
B
And again, Victorian times. So, you know, how good is this documentation and things like that? But Ripperologist, that's their theory there. And they do have somewhat of an argument for that theory because they kind of speculate that Jack had to be skilled in removing human organs in order to do it so quickly in the dark outdoors, police bearing down on them in any minute.
- [32:47]
A
Yeah, because we've talked about it. There's a Chance that in this situation, it was like 15 minutes that he had before someone was on the scene. Yeah, so it was fast.
- [32:55]
B
It was super fast. And the coroner himself even said, like, it would have taken me and my expertise at least 15 minutes. So this person had to have been pretty skilled to be this quick and thorough and. No, exactly what they were getting and kind of what they wanted to do. So this brings up a lot of big questions. Did Jack have some sort of specialized training and either surgery, autopsies, butchery maybe? A lot of modern investigators do think so. The coroner's report after Annie's autopsy literally says, quote, obviously the work was that of an expert. There was a 1988 FBI profile, and this was done in an attempt to shed new light on the murders on their 100 year mark. And it actually dismissed the idea that Jack was a doctor or a surgeon. The FBI thought that he might have been either a butcher, a mortuary worker, a hospital aide, or maybe even a medical examiner's assistant. They kind of speculated that because there was actually a wet leather apron, possibly worn during the murder, that was found lying nearby Paulie's body, this causes Jack to receive the nickname leather apron temporarily before Jack the Ripper catches on. And not to mention several of the sex workers who knew Paulie mentioned a man who had been wearing a leather apron tormenting women in the area with threats. The Jack the Butcher idea did have a lot going for it, especially if he specialized in pigs, which are anatomically very similar to humans. I mean, they're. They're actually using pig organs in human transplants nowadays. Mind blowing. So the police at the time also kind of liked this butcher theory. And so they actually ended up going and visiting 76 different butcher and slaughterhouse workers as potential suspects during the course of their investigation. But even if their suspect was a butcherer, why remove the organs? Why take them with you?
- [34:53]
A
I would assume it's trophies.
- [34:55]
B
One would think trophies. Investigators, both olden and modern, kind of look at three different possibilities, which is profit, sexual motivation, cannibalism. I mean, we've got modern serial killers that practice cannibalism. So that's not out of the realm of possibility. And maybe we'll get into that a bit more when we talk about a later clue we have. But for now, we're going to stick to sex and money, Two motivators that come up over and over again in serial killer cases. If Jack was living in poverty, like many in Whitechapel, some experts think he could have been harvesting them to sell and that could have been his entire motivation to even kill. And while he wouldn't have gotten rich selling these organs to medical schools, he did pick organs like the uterus that were in pretty high demand. So at least it would have been substantial. But even that theory, I mean, killing multiple women, even women on the fringes of society that were very looked down upon, not really cared about, It's a pretty big risk to take on killing women just for a little bit of extra money.
- [36:03]
A
I imagine it would have been easier just to find women to dig up and take their organs and sell them.
- [36:08]
B
I know. I mean, grave robbing was a popular thing.
- [36:11]
A
Yeah.
- [36:12]
B
And so that's why the FBI profilers actually thought that Jack wasn't totally jobless, because he killed on the weekends, suggesting that maybe he had a Monday to Friday job that left him with no time or energy to hunt victims on the weekdays. So that kind of leaves the sexual compulsion theory, which is the theory that is favored by the 2005 analysis performed by Robert Keppel. And Keppel really just kind of gets into that pickerism and goes deeper into that rabbit hole. He also kind of goes further that maybe this was also a part of humiliating the victims and the women by posing them and again, mutilating them even further than necessary. And as for stealing the organs, if it was sexually motivated, he probably kept them, as you said, Kaylin, trophies.
- [36:57]
A
Yeah, that's what I would imagine.
- [36:59]
B
Little jars, which we're going to get into with one of our suspects.
- [37:02]
A
Or like an Ed Gein kind of thing of like, I just want to keep this because it makes me feel close to it, or it reminds me of someone, or I think, like, I don't know, it reminds me of the brutality. I don't know.
- [37:17]
B
This is something like, oh, I don't know. I can't. I, like, can't. With this, I'm like, I cannot imagine seeing little organs in a jar. Like, no, no, I agree. Like, as your trophy. No. Okay, let's get into our clue number three, which comes around three weeks after Annie's murder. Maybe. There's no way to be sure it's real, but currently, most ripperologists seem to think so. On September 27, 1888, London Central News Agency gets a handwritten letter, and it's the first document to actually coin the name Jack the Ripper. Now, it was one of hundreds of letters supposedly from the killer that were mailed to police and reporters around this time. Most of them did turn out to be hoaxes. I mean, again, you guys, like, there's 158 newspapers at the time trying to have the best story and sell their papers. And it was super easy to get away with sending anonymous letters to the police or media. So there were a lot of pranks involving fake letters from notorious public figures and things like that. But the September 27th letter, known as the Dear Boss letter does seem to be plausible. It could be real. I'm going to read it for you guys. But I will add the spelling and handwriting are pretty good with this one. So if it is real, it's kind of speculated. Jack was at least somewhat educated. It says quote dear Boss, I keep on hearing the police have caught me but they won't fix me just yet. I have laughed when they look so clever and talk about being on the right track. That joke about leather apron gave me real fits. I am down on whores and I shan't quit ripping them till I do get buckled. Grand work. The last job was I gave the lady no time to squeal. How can they catch me now? I love my work and want to start again. You will soon hear of me with my funny little games. I saved some of the proper red stuff in a ginger beer bottle over the last job to write with, but it went thick like glue and I can't use it. Red ink is fit enough I hope. Haha. The next job I do I shall clip the lady's ear off and send the police officers just for jolly. Wouldn't you? Keep this letter back till I do a bit more work then give it out straight. My knife's so nice and sharp. I want to get to work right away if I get a chance. Good luck. Yours truly, Jack the Ripper. Don't mind me giving the trade name. P.S. wasn't good enough to post this before I got all the red ink off my hands. Curse it. No luck yet. They say I'm a doctor now. Haha. That's the end of the letter. And that's how Jack the Ripper gets his name. Another serial killer. That's a self namer titled what is it with these guys? Unfortunately the Central News Agency assumed it was just another weirdo messing with them trying to get his letter in the papers. And so they don't take it seriously at the time. Although they do forward the letter to police. But again there's a lot of a lot of people, even other journalists from this time period that speculate it was someone just trying to sell papers.
- [40:26]
A
So which we know. I mean, yeah, think about it. At the time, if people are Buying true crime. And you have true crime to put in the newspaper and sell more papers, you're going to do it.
- [40:35]
B
What's better to sell a paper than a letter from the killer himself?
- [40:39]
A
Absolutely.
- [40:40]
B
So that's a tough one for me.
- [40:42]
A
So three days later, they were forced to reconsider the letter because of what happened in just the wee hours of Sunday, September 30th. Elizabeth Stride was a farmer's daughter from Sweden. She began working as a servant girl at the age of 17, and within two years, she'd left that job. And then three years after that, the Swedish police put her on a list of known sex workers. At age 23, Elizabeth moved to London's Swedish parish, maybe with the promise of a servant job, or maybe she was just looking for a fresh start. And for a while, it really worked out for her. She met a coffee shop operator named John Stride in London, and the two got married in 1869. But just like Paulie and Annie, she had a troubled marriage and it ended in permanent separation. And that was in part because she really struggled with alcohol addiction. By the start of the ripper murders in 1888, Elizabeth is 45 years old. She's desperately poor. She's a habitual binge drinker who will sometimes disappear for days at a time. So she supports herself with really just the combination of the only two sources of income that a woman in her position can get. She does sex work and she gets donations from the Swedish church. Now she has a boyfriend of about three years. It's this day laborer named Michael Kidney. But their relationship is tumultuous. It's violent. He even at one point, I read about him trying to padlock her in a room just to keep her from going out to drink, which was kind of ironic because he himself had a police record for drunk and disorderly conduct. On September 26, 1888, two and a half weeks after Annie's murder, Elizabeth shows up at a doss house where she had previously rented a bed. And she said that she had just had this really big blowout fight with Michael and she just needs a place to stay. So on Saturday, September 29, Elizabeth stays in and she cleans rooms at the doss house. The deputy, who's another woman, named Elizabeth, Elizabeth Tanner, pays her six pence for the help. And in the early evening, Elizabeth goes to the pub and she has a drink with the deputy, who the two of them seem to be friends. And she returns to the doss house from the pub, but then leaves again sometime between 7 and 8pm and she has with her the six pence that she received for cleaning. She appears, at least from some witness accounts, to be in a good mood. She was able to pay for her bed the night, and so maybe she just had somewhere else to be that evening and she was going out before coming back to go to sleep. At around 11pm she's seen by two laborers in Whitechapel, and she's tucked into a pub's doorway to avoid the rain. She's also kissing a man. This short, well dressed man is how they described him. The laborers end up teasing her about the pda and they kind of make the nice gesture of inviting the man to join them for a drink. But it appears that he and Elizabeth have already been in the pub and they were actually on their way out. Now, at 11:45, another laborer sees Elizabeth on the next street over and she's still kissing a man. Now, the descriptions of the men's attire does vary between witness accounts. So there's a chance that she was kissing the same man both times. There's a chance she was kissing two different men, but eyewitnesses sometimes describe details like clothing incorrectly. And given that she was kissing this man in both sightings, a lot of people believe that it was probably the same guy and that she maybe knew him, which is kind of an interesting detail. Who was this well dressed guy that she went to go see out in the rain, even though she didn't need to work that night to make her dos money? Was he perhaps a well off client? Was he a regular that she liked well enough to be seen kissing him in doorways? Maybe he was a boyfriend that she had.
- [44:36]
B
Either way, the testimony of the next two people to see Elizabeth that night is our fourth clue because those are potential sightings of the ripper himself. At 12:35am on Sunday, September 30, Police Constable William Smith spots Elizabeth in the company of a man on Berner Street. This is the same street where she was seen less than an hour earlier making out with her mystery man. This again, could be the same or a different guy, we really don't know. But Constable Smith says they were outside the International Working Men's Educational Club, which was a social club for men. And so it's plausible Elizabeth could have picked up a new date by waiting near the exit there. Smith describes the man he saw as about 28 years old, wearing a deerstalker hat and a dark coat and carrying a package wrapped in newspaper. He described the package as being 6 inches tall. And 18 inches long. It makes me wonder if that could have been a knife. But again, Jack's knife was estimated from a corner to be about 6 to 8 inches long, not 18. Eighteen seems like almost like a sword. Yeah.
- [45:40]
A
Really long.
- [45:40]
B
Like, really long. But, hey, maybe he was wrapping in a way to disguise it. But again, we can't be clear, but 10 minutes later, two other men, Israel Schwartz and James Brown, both see Elizabeth, but in different locations. Israel notices Elizabeth standing at the gateway to Dutfield's Yard, a stable yard down the street from the social club. He sees a man approach, speak to her, then throw her to the ground, at which point she screams. But again, Victorian times, they didn't really care for women. And so Israel does nothing, just crosses the street and walks away. But he does notice another man nearby smoking a pipe. The first man who threw Elizabeth down actually apparently calls to the second man, smoking, and says, quote, lipski, which there's.
- [46:32]
A
A lot of debate over what that means. So, I mean, Lipski was a slur for Jewish people at the time. And Lipski was also the name of another murderer at the time.
- [46:44]
B
Yeah. Which is really interesting. Like, that another connection to a murderer.
- [46:49]
A
Some people suggest that the man called to the second man, saying, like, Lipski. As in, like, I'm gonna Lipski her, like he was going to murder her. Some people say that he was calling the other man a slur. So I've even seen someone suggest that they actually heard him wrong. And maybe he was saying Lizzie instead of Lipski, or was saying. There's a. A Polish word that sounds like Lipski that meant something else. And so there's just a lot of confusion over what it meant that he heard.
- [47:18]
B
Yeah. And so Israel, apparently, he wants no smoke, he's not getting involved, so he starts leaving the area on foot, and that's when he realizes he's actually being followed by that second man. This is, like, kind of the only hint we have that maybe Jack the Ripper could have had an accomplice, which I could also kind of see, given, like, how quick and brazen these acts were. Like, maybe someone was on lookout, waiting for a constable or a carriage to roll up. But this is just what Israel said he saw and heard. He described the man with Elizabeth as about 30 years old, with dark brown hair and a mustache, standing 5 5, wearing an overcoat and a wide, brimmed black felt hat. Keep in mind, 55 was the average height of a British man at the time. So we can't assume this was the same person. As the short man Elizabeth was seen making out with earlier. Then we have the witness statement from James Brown, which totally conflicts with Israel's. James says at around 12:45am that night, which is actually the same exact time as Israel, he saw a woman he later confirmed was Elizabeth standing along the wall near a school. She was with a man and she was heard saying, quote, no, not tonight. Some other night. He noticed the man was about 5 7, stout, wearing a long coat and a hat. But that was all he could make out in the dark. Afterwards, James walked to his house close by, and 15 minutes later, he heard a woman yelling, police murder. But when he looked outside, he couldn't see anyone on the street. So it's possible maybe Israel and James got their timing slightly wrong. Maybe James saw Elizabeth first, Israel saw the beginning of the attack, and James heard the end of it. Either way, it seems one of them might have spotted Jack the Ripper that night.
- [49:12]
A
Well, just 15 minutes after that, around 1 in the morning, a local jewelry dealer is driving his pony cart into Dutfield's yard, where he is presumably planning on stabling the pony. And as they enter the pony box and it won't go. And you work with horses, you know that they have this sixth sense for things they do. It is pitch black in the yard, so the dealer ends up using his buggy whip to kind poke around in front of the buggy just to see if there's something there that maybe spooked his animal. And that's when he feels a human body. And it's warm. And because it's warm, the dealer presumes that it's actually just someone sleeping in the stable yard. It wouldn't be the first time that someone had gotten into the that spot to sleep for the night. So he goes to the nearby International Working Men's Educational Club. It's the same club that Elizabeth was seen outside of earlier. And he finds two friends willing to come help wake this sleeping stranger so he can put his pony there. And when the three men return together, they realize that the body belongs to a woman and she is not sleeping. She is dead. And it's most likely from this single deep slash to her throat that she has now, the incision severed her windpipe, making it impossible for her to scream as she was bleeding to death. And when the dealer realizes what he has just stumbled upon, his blood runs absolutely cold because he thinks back to how warm the body was when he first tried to wake this person who he thought was sleeping. So he realizes that this must have just happened. He most likely interrupted Jack the Ripper during the murder. And investigators later confirmed that this is the most likely scenario. That's why Elizabeth wasn't mutilated or posed in any sort of lewd way like the other victims. Jack maybe abandoned the body because he heard the cart turning into the stable yard. So when the dealer was examining the body with his whip, there's a chance that Jack was still in there. I mean, think about how pitch dark it was in there. Maybe that's what the pony was balking at. Then maybe he fled right when the dealer went to go fetch his friends. But then they start worrying that if they did interrupt Jack the Ripper, maybe he was frustrated that he wasn't able to mutilate the body in the way that he had done to the other women. So what if he fled this scene and then just went out into the night to go find another woman so he could basically complete what he set out to do. Catherine eddowes is a 46 year old woman in 1888. But aside from her age, she's pretty different from the other victims that we've talked about thus far. She was born in the West Midlands of England. She was actually the only one in her family sent to school as a child. But she had this brief interruption in her education after she was orphaned, and that's when she was sent to her first workhouse. But her aunt soon took her in and then eventually sent her back to school. At around age 21, she met this Irishman named Thomas Conway and she ran off with him. But they never got married, which soured relations with her aunt, who later refused to let her back into the house when she and Thomas ultimately separated. Thomas was this self published biographer and also a songwriter, and Catherine kind of started a business with him where she would sell his books and also sell these things that he wrote called gallows ballads. This was a way of passing along true crime stories in the Victorian era. So whenever a public execution was planned, these balladeers would essentially write out the confessions from the suspect's point of view. I mean, the ethics of it obviously is super weird, but they would write these songs as if they were the convicted, explaining the crime, talking about their confession, all this stuff, but they would set it to the tune of a well known hymn. They could print these lyrics out and sell copies to the papers, or just sell copies individually leading up to and during the execution itself. And the song Long Black Veil by Johnny Cash, if you guys know that song, is basically one of these ballads. Catherine was so enthusiastic about this form that she once sold a ballad to the audience at her own cousins hanging. He wrote a song about her cousin and she sold it. And they made some money from this. But it wasn't all business for Thomas and Catherine. They also had these three children, even though the two of them never married. In 1881, the couple did split up and Catherine, you know, landed right where any woman without much money in Whitechapel went, a doss house. But initially it doesn't seem like she became a sex worker like the earlier victims that we talked about. She begins dating this fruit seller, this guy named John Kelly, who the two of them were monogamous for the rest of her life. Catherine sometimes worked as a cleaner. The couple did temporary farm work together on the outskirts of town. They were very poor. They often had to scrounge around for a few pence for their nightly bed and meal. But they seemed to be very good natured. They were well liked by everyone else at this doss house. And Catherine maybe didn't know this at the time, but by 1888 she had fairly advanced kidney disease. She knew that she didn't feel well, but she didn't know exactly what was going on at the time. This was called Bright's disease. We talked about this in the Amy Archer episode. Bright's disease was kind of this catch all term for kidney disease and people blamed it on drinking because they didn't really know what caused it at the time. And now we know that Catherine wasn't a heavy drinker. She did drink occasionally, but she wasn't known to be a binge drinker or struggle with alcohol addiction. So most likely that's not how she got Bright's disease. But by Saturday, September 29, Katherine is pretty down on her luck and she is in a lot of pain. She has really bad kidney inflammation that's causing this really, really bad back pain. Her boyfriend, John Kelly, that night pawns a pair of his boots so that he can afford to buy them a meal. But it's getting late and neither of them have the dos money they need to for their bed that night. So Catherine decides that she's going to walk to her married daughter's house in southeast London and see if she can just get a little bit of money from her. We don't really know if she made it there, but it seems like she did not because by 8pm Witnesses say that she fell down drunk on the pavement, which there was a whole crowd that kind of like came around her to gawk at Her. Like I said, she wasn't known for binge drinking, but she did drink from time to time. So it looks like this night she was drunk. And police show up to see what's going on. They see this crowd looking at this woman and they end up taking Catherine to the drunk tank so that she can sober up. And around 1am now it's Sunday, September 30th. She convinces the constable in charge that she's ready to be released. She's sober now. She complains that she'll get a hiding or that is a beating for coming home so late. Though we don't know a ton about if the relationship she had with John Kelly was actually violent or if she meant hiding. More like a scolding. But the constable has very little sympathy for her, and he tells her, you had no right to get drunk. But he still does let her go. She leaves on foot, but she's not heading back to the doss house where her boyfriend is expecting her. She's heading back towards the area where she was found drunk. Maybe she had made arrangements to meet her daughter somewhere near there. Or maybe she didn't want to come home to John too late without money. Or there's a chance, too, that she hoped the pub would still be open and she wanted to talk someone into buying her a drink. But she only makes it as far as Miter Square, which is this tiny plaza almost a mile from where Elizabeth was killed. At about 1:35 in the morning, two men see Catherine on the street corner talking to a man. And they describe this man as being about 5 foot 7. He has a fair complexion, and he also has a mustache. He's wearing a gray hat. He has a red kerchief. They kind of assume that he's maybe a sailor. Obviously, they don't think much of this interaction. They both continue on their way. And just 10 minutes later, at 1:45 in the morning, a policeman patrolling Mitre Square stumbles upon Catherine's mutilated body. But this time, even though it's only been 10 minutes, it does not seem like anyone was interrupted while mutilating Catherine. The killing blow, just like with the other victims, is this deep, deep incision on her throat. Then, like Polly and Annie, she's been cut open with a large cut that ran from her sternum all the way down to her pubic area. And one of her diseased kidneys, as well as part of her uterus, has been removed from her body. And whoever did this, which obviously they believe is Jack the Ripper, Made off with them. Also, like with Annie, the Ripper removed part of her intestines, but did leave them at the scene. They were laid across her body and there was one piece of intestine that was placed carefully between her body and her left arm. But in this situation too, her face was also mutilated. There was part of one ear that was cut off. And the missing piece later fell out of Catherine's clothing when she was undressed at the morgue. So that was something that was also removed but left at the scene. It wasn't taken like a trophy. She's found posed with her right knee drawn up. Her bare thighs were exposed. And also half of her white cloth apron has been cut off, including one of the strings.
- [58:59]
B
And that apron is clue number five for us. That same morning, around 2:55am, a policeman finds the missing piece of Catherine's apron streaked with blood. Three streets away on Goulston street, it's found lying right underneath a fresh chalk graffiti reading, quote, the Jews are the men that will not be blamed for nothing. Or something like that. Anyways, there's a lot of speculation on this graffiti. If you listen to some sources on this graffiti, they say the word is not in reference to Jewish people at all, but it's actually in reference to a word in the Freemasons society that resembles Jews. And so there's a lot of speculation that this could have been a message to other Freemasons and nobody photographed this. And that might have also been intentional. In one of the sources, the constable, like the main police officer in London at the time was speculated to be a Freemason. So he actually wiped this graffiti clean. Wiped it. No photographs before. And they did have photographs at this time, you guys. I did double check. So can we write it as botched? It feels like a botched, even in.
- [60:11]
A
Vintage times, making a mark. And there's. There's a little bit of debate on how this word was spelled too.
- [60:18]
B
Right. A lot of debate on that. A lot of the Ripperologists get into it because some of them say the word was spelled J U W E S, which could have been French. It could have been the French feminine word for Jews, which is J U I V E S. But there's a lot of disagreement on more than just the spelling. Like the clue in general is just pretty controversial for a lot of people.
- [60:43]
A
Yeah, it could have been there before and he just happened to drop it there. Like it could have nothing to do with that.
- [60:48]
B
Yeah. And obviously DNA testing isn't a thing like blood Typing wasn't a thing. This was found so many streets over. Are we trying to fit the peg into the hole? Like, does it even fit? Is it even evidence?
- [61:01]
A
Totally.
- [61:01]
B
So this one's very hotly debated. But if we assume that this bloody apron was really Catherine's, which people do speculate it probably was, it's because the coroner actually matched it with apron remnants found on her body. But it doesn't necessarily mean the person that dropped it there also wrote the graffiti. That could be a coincidence, but he might have. You know, he might have. And so if Jack really did write some of the letters to the police and the media, it was kind of clear with this graffiti that he really liked messing with people through writing. And we have to look back to that Dear Boss letter. This letter hadn't been made public yet when Catherine died because the recipients still thought it was a hoax. But the letter did say they were going to cut off a piece of the next victim's ear and mail it to the police or the recipient or whoever. And then three days later, Catherine is killed and a big piece of her ear was cut off, but it was left behind at the scene. Maybe that was because they ran out of time and interrupted. Yeah, dropped the earlobe. But it's clear that, you know, there's some correlation, especially with it being unpublished and ears hadn't been involved until now. So if the graffiti was Jack's handiwork, maybe he left the piece of an apron as some sort of a signature. I mean, we saw this in our zone zodiac case with one of the victim's clothing getting cut off and then later mailed to police. You know, kind of proving this is me, right? It's taking credit. Yeah.
- [62:32]
A
Liking the credit.
- [62:33]
B
Here's my trophy, but I'm gonna give it back to you, so you know it's me.
- [62:36]
A
Exactly.
- [62:37]
B
So a lot of people do think this apron scrap did come from Jack the Ripper. Some people speculate he was wiping his hands clean and then discarded it. But there is an interesting hole in the timeline because there's a witness who didn't see either the graffiti or apron on Goulston street at 2:20, which is 35 minutes before the graffiti was found. If the witness is accurate, Jack probably didn't take an hour to walk three streets over and wipe his hands. So what was he doing from 1:45 to 2:55? There's a ripperologist named John Smith that thinks this kind of points to Jack living near Miter Square and that he could have used this apron. To actually carry Catherine's stolen organs back to his home before going out again to leave the CLU for police. And if that's true, it would narrow down the suspect pool a lot, but again, there's no way to prove it. But that brings us to clue number six, which is another letter. This time, the addressee is George Lusk, who headed an anti crime group called the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee. Again, everyone was terrified at this time. Papers are blowing this up and they're starting to establish little neighborhood watch, essentially. It's not just a letter that gets mailed to George Lusk, though. It's a small cardboard box, and in it contains a note and half a human kidney, which seemed to have been soaked in wine to preserve it. Again, no DNA, no blood typing, so we can't say for sure if it was Catherine's stolen kidney, but a medical examination found it to be a similar stage of Bright's disease, which, I mean, for ancient Victorian times, it's not that long ago, but like, for those times to be able to match the kidney based on the disease, that they crunch.
- [64:29]
A
Into it, and they were like, this is our best guess, but it is based on a little bit of science. Yeah.
- [64:33]
B
Little bit of a vintage Sherlock moment.
- [64:35]
A
A little bit.
- [64:36]
B
A little bit.
- [64:37]
A
I'll add a little Sherlock box.
- [64:38]
B
There's our Sherlock box down there. And while it's possible that one of the hoaxters pretending to be Jack, was a medical student with access to human kidneys, and maybe they decided to sacrifice one of his practice organs for a prank. But let me read this note for you guys, just so you know what this other note said. And I will say the handwriting and spelling are both way sloppier than the Dear Boss letter, which also could suggest this came from a different author. I mean, hoaxers were running rampant at this time, but it says, quote from hell, Mr. Lusk, sor s o r.
- [65:17]
A
It's supposed to be sore. A lot of stuff is spelled wrong in this letter, unlike the first one.
- [65:21]
B
I know. I send you half the kidney I took from one woman and presarved it for you. T' other 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 will longer. Signed, catch me when you can, Mr. Lusk. End quote. I tried to read it for you guys with the bad spellings.
- [65:44]
A
No, you did a great job with all the bad spelling.
- [65:46]
B
I hope you enjoyed it.
- [65:47]
A
That's exactly what it sounded like in my brain when I read it, Mr. Lesk.
- [65:50]
B
Mr. It doesn't look like the same handwriting as the Dear Boss letter at all. And a lot, a lot of people have gone over this. A lot of people have used these two to say this was definitely a hoaxer and Dear Boss is real, and.
- [66:04]
A
There'S still a hoaxer out there that has a human kidney. Like, let's. Let's be real for a sec. Like, we have to figure out who this person is, too.
- [66:12]
B
Yeah, I mean, people are losing it right now, but there's also some people that speculate it could have actually been the same person and is kind of pulling a little bit of a BTK on us and intentionally writing sloppy, intentionally misspelling words to kind of detract from their education level, which, hey, maybe if this was, you know, was a doctor and Jack was super highly educated and people are getting a little closer to finding out who he is. I better write a little sloppier. I better get them off my trail a bit.
- [66:41]
A
Yeah, that's plausible.
- [66:42]
B
Another theory is that maybe Jack was sober when he wrote the first letter and drunk for the second one. Or maybe wrote one with his right hand and the other with his left. And then, of course, we have to consider the possibility maybe this letter or both letters wasn't sent by Jack at all.
- [66:59]
A
What does your gut say?
- [67:00]
B
I feel like the first Dear Boss one was probably plausible, especially given the detail about the ear, this one, and who it got sent to. Feels a little more hoaxter to me. But the kidney, the kidney in the box really throws me off.
- [67:20]
A
That's scary that someone, even someone else, had a kidney.
- [67:23]
B
I know. I agree. Especially considering the times with poverty and organs were in high demand. I mean, people are robbing graves for them, so it doesn't seem like a medical student would just give up a valuable specimen.
- [67:37]
A
Yeah, that's a good point.
- [67:39]
B
Yeah. So I don't know.
- [67:40]
A
Well, that kind of brings us to our last victim, at least amongst the canonical five. Although, like I mentioned earlier, there's a few other killings that some experts think may be the work of Jack the Ripper, but they're all unconfirmed for the most part. But this fifth woman, Mary Kelly, is. Is very likely one of Jack's victims. But she is a departure from his usual pattern of picking victims in a lot of ways. In November of 1888, she's only 25 years old. She's 20 years younger than the other women that have been found. She was born in Ireland and had lived in Wales before moving to England. So documents related to her birth seem to have been lost in the shuffle. Pretty much everything we know about her is from her boyfriend or people who really only knew her briefly. She apparently had very little or no contact with her family. Everyone describes her as being beautiful. She's taller than Most men, at 5 7, she's got blonde hair, blue eyes, she has a very charming personality, except she does have this tendency to drink until she becomes very rude and loud. That is, according to people who knew her briefly. She married pretty young. She was just 16. That was during her time in Wales. But tragically, she lost her husband in an explosion just a few years later. And like most of the other victims, in order to survive without any male provider, she supported herself through sex work. But her younger age and striking appearance really gave her access to, let's say, a different class of clientele, at least at first. That's what it seems like. She arrives in London in 1884 and she's able to work in pretty high end brothels. She may also have worked for a time with a French madam who procured sex workers for wealthy Frenchmen. Again, this is just what she told her boyfriend. So, you know, it could have been a little bit embellished versus her real life story. But if she was living the high class escort life, either she didn't like it or she was eventually dismissed, maybe potentially because she had what some people described as bad manners. But in 1887, she's fairly poor and she's living at a doss house in the East End. And that's where she meets her boyfriend. And he's the source of most of what we know about her. It's this man named Joe Barnett, and he's a day laborer and porter working around the docks. And according to him, it was love at first sight. They moved in together just a few days after their first date. It's not totally clear why they never got married, but maybe Mary was a traditional Irish Catholic and didn't believe in remarriage, even though her spouse had died. But they both, together, at least according to him, spent way too much money on liquor. And after they moved several times, they managed to scrape together enough coins to rent a single room together in a house off Dorset street in the spitiful slum. They were basically living in cheap lodging that was like one step up from a dos house, but it means that they didn't have to share rooms with strangers, which was nice for them at the time. Then in August or September of 1888, Joe loses his job and that's when things really go downhill for them. Mary has to return to sex work to support them. But she can't exactly move into a brothel while she also lives with her boyfriend. So she takes to walking the streets at night, looking for clientele that way. And while she's there, she actually makes a lot of friends. There's actually a lot of women her age working on the streets and many of them are in a far worse spot than she is. And Mary has this really big heart. She is meeting all these women. She basically doesn't want them to sleep on the street if she can help it. She's also, mind you, like everyone else in London, heard all these stories of Jack the Ripper. So she knows it's not safe out there for women to be living on the streets. So she actually goes to her boyfriend and is like, can all the women stay here? And he kind of like hesitantly agrees. But he finds himself living in a single room on Dorset street with a rotating cast of sex workers that he barely knows. But they all have nowhere to go. She turns her home into this big, like, sleepover, basically, on October 30, 1888. It seems like Joe has enough of this situation, however, and he decides to move out of their room and into a boarding house. The couple doesn't break up, though, and Joe continues to visit her every day leading up until the night of Thursday, November 8th. Joe stops by that evening as usual, but Mary is hanging out with her neighbor who lives at a different lodging house on the same cul de sac, basically. So Joe stays for a few minutes. He ends up leaving around 8:00pm when she's not there. And sometime between 8:00 clock at night and 11:00 clock at night, Mary goes out because at 11:00pm, witnesses see her. She looks like she's drunk. She's at a Spitalfields pub, but she's with a man who is not Joe. This man has a mustache. At 11:45pm, a neighbor and fellow sex worker sees Mary heading for her room on Dorset street in the company of a man. Again, he's described as having a mustache and whiskers. He's described as being about 5 foot 5, he's wearing a threadbare overcoat and a hat. And the other woman follows the two home, mostly because she's going the same way. And when Mary and this man arrive at her room, it seems like Mary begins drunkenly singing very loud, which she continues to do until at least one in the morning. There's multiple reports of this detail including from a neighbor who was annoyed enough that they considered going over and banging on the door because it was late and Mary was being so loud. But then, before they're able to go over and knock on the door, it seems like Mary goes out again sometime between 1 o' clock in the morning and 2 o' clock in the morning. And we know this because there's this local laborer named George Hutchinson who sees her at 2am with what seems to be a different man. And he gets a very good description of this guy. George says that Mary's companion is about in his mid-30s, somewhere between 5 foot 6 and 5 foot 7. So he's an inch or two taller than, like, the first guy. He has pale complexion, a slight mustache and dark hair with bushy eyebrows. He's dressed like he's rich. Also, he has this expensive overcoat on. He has a felt hat. He has a gold chain attached to his waistcoat. He also is carrying a small package, like you mentioned earlier, Morgan package. George is curious enough about this scene to follow Mary and her companion. As they stroll back towards Mary's room. And just outside of the cul de sac where Mary's address is, he hears her say, quote, all right, my dear, come along. You will be comfortable. The two kiss and they go into the cul de sac where Mary's building is, at which point George leaves. And the next morning, around 10:45 in the morning, Mary's landlord sends his employee, Thomas Bauer, to remind Mary that her rent is now overdue. Thomas bangs on the door, but there's no answer. Now, he figures she's probably just ignoring him because he's there to collect rent. He notices her door is locked, though, and he makes a note of it. So after a few attempts to bang on the door and wake her up, he ends up just peering in through her window. And that's when he sees Mary's very mutilated body on her bed. Now, Thomas runs to fetch the landlord and they both go together to alert the police. And eventually the landlord just breaks down the door and lets them in. But it seems like the killer had either a key or he left without using the door because the door was locked from the inside. When the police surgeon arrives, he says that he has never seen anything like this before. Now, like the other victims, the killing wound is the same M.O. it's a slash to the throat that goes all the way down to the bone. Her nose, her cheeks, her eyebrows and her ears are partially cut off, but her body is mostly skinned. Flaps of the skin for her stomach and thighs have been removed and actually placed on a nearby table. And her breasts were also cut off, with one placed under her head and the other by her right foot. Her abdomen, like the other victims, was sliced open, and her organs had been removed and staged around her body. Her intestines are on her right side. Her spleen was found on her left, and her uterus and kidneys are under her head next to one dismembered breast. Her chest has also been cut open, and her heart is gone.
- [76:48]
B
Yeah. This is one image we will not be showing you guys on YouTube, but I did look at this crime scene photo. It was actually, according to one source, like, the very first crime scene photo taken in London.
- [77:02]
A
Wow.
- [77:03]
B
So this wasn't really a thing to photograph victims like this until this victim. And it's, like, almost unrecognizable. Like, it does not even. She does not even look human anymore. Like, I mean, there. It's so hard to even distinguish a face. And, like, as someone that's taken a couple different human anatomy courses, like. Like, just hearing how much was mutilated or dismembered, removed, placed around the room, like, it. Again, kind of goes for me back to someone who's very skilled in this and is very familiar with.
- [77:37]
A
Does it make you think that it's a surgeon? Cause the ability. My first thing hearing that her abdomen's been cut open and all of her organs are out. Feels like a C section in a way. There's, like, a skill that you need to be able to remove everything and pull them out.
- [77:52]
B
Yeah. It is bad. And I think it. I don't know if it's a surgeon, because I feel like a surgeon would have been more precise than what you see in the image. But maybe this is something you guys chime in on if you're gonna look at the picture yourself. I'm not encouraging you to. Again, it is very heavy and gory, but it doesn't seem as precise. It's. It does feel very exploratory to me. Mm.
- [78:19]
A
Which is really. I don't know.
- [78:21]
B
Yeah. But everyone do their own investigation, if you care to do so.
- [78:26]
A
Well, he was able to pull out her heart, and that seems to be the only thing that's missing from the scene, which is also interesting. So even though so many people have gone on record that saw this scene and have said that this was emphatically the worst of the Jack the Ripper crimes, it also, in a way, seems to be the last, according to some sources. I mean, a Lot of people believe that this was the last one. There's a couple other suspicious murders of women in Whitechapel during the rest of 1888 through 1889. And some people believe they could be Jack's work. But most people agree that Mary was the last victim. I mean, we might talk about it a little more, but there's, like, other murders that happen around the world where people think that it was Jack. There's stuff that happens in America where people are like, did he come over here and commit more murders?
- [79:19]
B
Yeah.
- [79:19]
A
Now, if you're listening to this show or you consume true crime in general, you know that a lot of serial killers don't really stop just out of the blue, especially kind of if they're in their prime. Usually they get caught. Sometimes they get too old to physically kill anymore. Sometimes they die. I mean, some people do believe that Jack did die after this. But the FBI profilers who have looked into this case believe that if he did die, it was most likely not suicide, because that wouldn't really fit anything else. We know about his psychology. In 2005, when they were doing that forensic analysis of his M.O. the one that was done by Detective Keppel and his team, they didn't take any position necessarily on why Jack would have stopped killing. But they did point out that his murders were taking more and more time and planning to execute. He was only able to mutilate Mary Kelly so extensively because she had a room to herself, and she took him back to this room. So when he was in there, he wasn't interrupted for hours. So maybe Mary was the final fulfillment in this kind of like, necro sadistic fantasy he had. And, you know, maybe there was a chance that he couldn't figure out how to repeat that experience, because, remember, she had her own room, and most of the women he was killing lived in these dos houses where they shared rooms.
- [80:37]
B
This was a very private experience for him, uninterrupted. Yeah, I'm gonna get into this a bit more when I talk about who the potentials are.
- [80:47]
A
And maybe because of how gruesome this one was, he wasn't interested in going back to having to quickly kill people on the street and only get to mutilate them a little bit. I mean, that's one of the theories. But whatever the reason was, it's believed that he stopped. But the investigation didn't. And everyone in Whitechapel was still terrified, even more so now. And they were demanding answers. Now, the police were under very intense pressure to catch Jack the Ripper. So they put thousands of hours into the case. And one thing I will mention at the time, like the concept of a detective had only been around for about 20 years. It was actually invented in London. And like the history of why detectives exist is really funny. And they just had no training, but basically they had no skills in homicide detection at the time. They had just started the department. So there were. There's just like a lot of botched things that happened throughout the entire investigation. They ended up interviewing over 2, 000 people over the course of this investigation. They arrested at least 80 people in this time too, because they wanted to question them further. But none of them get charged with murder. Every day that Jack the Ripper was at large, the local papers and the Whitechapel residents got more and more pointed in their criticism of the police force. I mean, in some of these newspapers that you go through, you can see cartoons that were published that depict the local constables wandering around with blindfolds while criminals are getting away with murder. Meanwhile, there's also at the same time like this, rise in photography. Cameras are getting better. More people are owning them. And that kind of, combined with the extensive newspaper coverage that was happening and how newspapers would sensationalize crimes, especially on the East End, it really shed a light on just how bad the slums in London were at the time. And so the worst slums in London end up all getting torn down and the land was sold off to developers who start building more modern apartment buildings there instead. And a lot of that population just gets distinct displaced. Some of them were assisted in finding new housing, but a lot of them could not pay rent and just had nowhere to live. The workhouse system also eventually gets abolished, which really helped break that vicious cycle of labor that forced a lot of the poorest people in England from getting a leg up. So in a strange kind of indirect way, Jack the Ripper's hatred for London's most vulnerable women might have seen have made the streets a little bit safer for them. But it didn't do anything to point police in the direction of who he was. And that's why even to this day, people are still trying to figure out who Jack the Ripper really was.
- [83:29]
B
So who do we think he is? We've got a lot of theories on who could be Jack the Ripper. By one count, over 500 suspects have been proposed by modern researchers. And it's possible that none of them are Jack the Ripper. He could have been some butcher who died and was buried in a pauper's grave with no marker. He could have gone a job as a sailor after the last murder and left Europe forever. And sadly, there's probably some stuff the police knew at the time that we don't even know now, because many of the City of London's police files were lost when London was bombarded during World War II's big blitz. Various other files believed to have existed also went missing over the years, possibly taken home in air or stolen as souvenirs. But let's talk about a few suspects whose names we do know. I'll start with some that are probably the least supported by evidence, but are still super interesting. Up first we have James Maybrick. He was a cotton merchant in Whitechapel area who had a violent marriage and died. Likely poisoned by his abused wife, actually. And it was just a few months after Mary Kelly's murder that he died. Now, he was mostly associated with this case because of a diary that surfaced in the 1990s, which was allegedly his handwritten accounts of the murders. And in this diary, he confesses to all of it. However, we have found out now that this was a probable forgery by a scrap metal dealer named Michael Barrett. Michael confessed to faking the diary, then later recanted his confession. But because of technology, we were able to determine that the ink used to pen the diary was found to contain a preservative not yet available in Victorian times. So for us, he's kind of out. I mean, there's fringe theories on Reddit pointing to Gandhi. I don't think that one's.
- [85:18]
A
You hate that theory.
- [85:19]
B
I hate that theory. I mean, there's even theories that the author, Lewis Carroll, author of Alice in Wonderland, could have been Jack the Ripper. I mean, there's a lot of people pulling out strings. But one of my favorite of the bad theories is the Degas theory.
- [85:37]
A
Yeah, this one is the one you always bring up to me.
- [85:39]
B
This one blows my mind. Okay, so for my friends that are maybe on TikTok, you might have come across a video from Scurr Genius. Her name is actually Kiki Skir. Sure. S C H I R R And Kiki has 68 videos breaking down potential theories, potential evidence on how Degas, the famous artist, the painter of ballerinas, could have actually been Jack the Ripper. And this one really fits for me. So Kiki basically proposes this theory and gives all these reasons. Degas had a really problematic relationship with women, often thought of them as animals. He was extremely misogynistic, and around his early 50s, he became a really awful misanthrope and people just, like, did not want to be around him. And something about Degas work. He painted ballerinas. He painted wash women. These were oftentimes women who also doubled as sex workers because those careers didn't pay. Like, ballerinas were like, more higher up sex workers. Same with opera singers. I mean, you kind of see that in Bridgerton a little bit with the opera singer. But, like, that was common for a lot of these careers. And that is who Degas painted. A lot of people also point to his art being the reason he doesn't really paint their faces. He paints them in these awkward poses. I'm going to show you one painting from Degas that almost reminds me how some of the victims were posed. Not showing a face, crouched over, legs pulled up. It's a ballerina bending down to tie her slipper. But a lot of these paintings are also super dark. Another thing that you often see in Degas painting is a dark ribbon around the women's throats. A lot of interesting ties.
- [87:43]
A
I'm not convinced. You're not convinced, If I'm being honest. Just a painter that didn't like women and painted ballerinas.
- [87:50]
B
Common.
- [87:50]
A
I don't know what the. The bigger connection is.
- [87:54]
B
So Degas also had this disease called Stargardt's disease. It's a disease where the area behind the eyes can go black. Like, the gray matter activity in that region stops. And people with this disease do lose their vision over time. But a loss of activity in the gray matter is also associated with a lot of serial killers. Like, if you do brain scans on serial killers, the same area of the brains, like, don't light up. So there's that.
- [88:20]
A
But wasn't he. Because of that he was nearly blind in 1888, when these were happening, he.
- [88:24]
B
Definitely had poorer vision. He was still making art. In 1890, he really transitioned to do sculpture instead of painting.
- [88:32]
A
Because it was easier for his vision. Because it was easier for his vision.
- [88:35]
B
But again, look at how these cases progressed. The last victim he had ample time with in a room. Could have been lit in any way he wanted. Also was a lot sloppier and more gory. I've got other people, I've got other things. I know you're like, if you're not.
- [88:51]
A
Buying this, I don't think I buy. But I appreciate how much of a rabbit hole you have gone down with this.
- [88:56]
B
I mean, I love.
- [88:57]
A
I can appreciate a good rabbit hole.
- [88:58]
B
I have. I mean, there's so much. And like, people are like, Degas lived in France. Well, okay, he could have gone over there. Dega also, like, did not really like people. He would never send letters to his friends. And during all the times of the murders, his friends would get way more letters than usual. Almost like he was setting up an alibi for himself. Dega also was, like, very classically trained, so he likely attended dissections at medical schools to learn about human anatomy. But again, you are absolutely right. A lot of people who disbunk this theory do point to Degas losing, you know, his eyesight and being very visually impaired potentially. But my girl on TikTok, Kiki, she has even gone deeper into murders in Paris. And so a lot of her newer content is breaking down murders in Paris, because people are like, Degas wouldn't start killing people in his 50s around this time. How did he just start as Jack the Ripper in London?
- [89:53]
A
Yeah. I mean, Jack was also described as being around 30, right. And he was in his 50s, but.
- [89:57]
B
5, 5, 5, 5 tall. And guess how tall Dega was.
- [90:01]
A
5, 5, 5, 5, 5. The average height of a man at the time. Hey, I don't know, Morgan, but what was his mustache like?
- [90:11]
B
Terrible. Terrible mustache.
- [90:13]
A
Okay, but he did have a mustache.
- [90:14]
B
Did fit.
- [90:14]
A
Okay, okay.
- [90:15]
B
Did fit. Kiki is now going in a new evidence that, like, breaks down other crimes in Paris. And this is really interesting because Paris Crimes was kind of controlled by the crown and then it shifted. And so she's, like, going through clippings. Kiki will be linked. Really interesting playlist to just watch through. Again, there's 68 posts. Another suspect that is often talked about is Walter Sickerton. And Walter is another artist, actually did work with Degas, was in London around the same time. And Walter has a really interesting set of paintings that have now been dubbed the Camden Town Murder. And this is given to a group of four paintings. And the original title is what Shall we do for Rent? And he had an interesting style. But this painting, the one that's kind of synonymous with the Camden Town murder, is of a woman lying in bed. A man almost, like, with something in his hands or an apron, a leather apron on, sitting at the edge of the bed. Like, it almost looks like what it would look like if he was painting Jack the Ripper with his last victim, like, sitting at the edge of the bed. It's interesting. Walter Sickert also had an insane fascination with Jack the Ripper. Is quoted to have, I stayed in Jack's hotel. Like, he was very, very fascinated by Jack the Ripper. So a lot of people kind of Throw him in. And he worked with Degas, so it's just like this weird connection. A lot of people speculating that Jack the Ripper did not work alone. Maybe they worked together then. But we're. I know you're not. You're not convinced.
- [91:54]
A
So can I throw my two bad theories into the ring?
- [91:57]
B
Let's go.
- [91:57]
A
Okay, so my two bad theory is that I'm gonna nominate for Jack the Ripper. That I know there's not a lot of. Of evidence, but a lot of people do point to these people. H.H. holmes.
- [92:06]
B
Oh, that comes up a lot.
- [92:08]
A
So we're doing an episode on HH Holmes for our monster series on Heartstrush Pounding.
- [92:12]
B
That is a doozy.
- [92:13]
A
And, I mean, you want to talk about someone who was selling people, killing people to sell them to medical institutions, like, specifically someone who was killing women to strip them down to the skeleton and sell those to the local medical colleges. If that's what Jack was doing. That MO Fits. So I lived in Austin last year, and I got so deep into the lore of the Servant Girl Killer, who was a few years before Jack the Ripper, but basically in Austin at the time, similar thing. There weren't any lights. There were no electric lights in the area. So it was, like, very dark in Austin at the time. And what was happening was there was this person that they never caught who was pulling servant girls out of their servant quarters in the back of houses and hatcheting them with a big axe.
- [93:01]
B
This is the axe one.
- [93:02]
A
This is the axe one. And he would pull these girls out when their husbands were in the room with them, when their children were in the room with them. But he had the same MO Every single time. Pull them out into the backyard. It was mostly black servant girls. There were a few white victims, but, yeah, pull them out and would ax them and then would escape. He was never caught. I mean, obviously, it's a very, very different MO From Jack the Ripper, but the author, Skip Hollingsworth of the Midnight Assassin, which is like a great book on the. The subject, if you're interested, does say that, you know, some people think that he left Texas, he left Austin, got on a boat in the Gulf, and went all the way up to London, and that's where he became Jack the Ripper. So those are my two that I'm throwing in the ring for bad suspects. But. Okay, I'm curious what people think, if anyone out there I know has heard those.
- [93:53]
B
Curious about your thoughts on these ones, especially Dig off for myself.
- [93:57]
A
Selfishly, I know put Morgan up in the comments, because I know I'm not doing a good job of it right now.
- [94:03]
B
I'm not selling you guys. But let's get into some of the more plausible theories, because we've got some of those too. So there's been an interesting revelation with DNA evidence. In 2007, a Jack the Ripper tour guide, an amateur Ripperologist named Russell Edwards, won an auction for a bloody silk shawl. And this was said to be taken from the body of Catherine Eddowes at the time of her murder. But there wasn't just blood on it, there was supposedly semen, too, thought to be left by Jack himself. According to a family legend, Sergeant Amos Simpson took the shawl as a morbid gift for his wife, and it had never been washed since. One of Simpson's descendants put it up for sale and Edwards purchased it. Edwards then published a book in 2014 claiming that he had the shawl tested for DNA and it identified the Ripper. His name was supposedly Aaron Kosminsky. He was a barber with a history of serial mental health issues and was a suspect at the time of the murders. The police who interrogated him described him as, quote, hating women and, quote, having strong homicidal tendencies. In childhood. He had reportedly attacked his sister with a knife. He was also eventually confined to an institution with what we might diagnose today as schizophrenia or paranoid psychosis. We don't know much about Aaron's appearance, though. There's no known images of him. But we do have a picture of a brother who does have a similar appearance to a lot of the witnesses descriptions. But again, those descriptions were not even certain that that was Jack the Ripper either. And there's also some big problems with this whole DNA analysis. It used mitochondrial DNA, not nuclear DNA. And as we've talked about in past episodes, mitochondrial DNA is more likely to be extracted from very old evidence, but it's not very specific like nuclear DNA. So it can't pinpoint an individual. It can only pinpoint a family tree from the female line. The mitochondrial DNA side, it can say.
- [96:13]
A
Like, you are related to in some way.
- [96:16]
B
Exactly, but not specific. So all this could really prove was that whoever bled on the shawl shared a female ancestor with Catherine's known descendants. And whoever ejaculated on the shawl shared a female ancestor with Aaron's known relatives, but maybe not specifically him. And there's also problems with Ripperologist Russell Edwards, who was pushing this whole theory after buying the shawl to sell their book.
- [96:41]
A
Yeah, I know this comes up in the headlines like every five years. Yeah, last summer people were talking about this too. I re.
- [96:47]
B
I remember like we were kind of gearing up for the show and we were like, the shawl, the shawl.
- [96:51]
A
I want to know more about the shawl.
- [96:53]
B
So it is interesting. There's also been some other problematic issues with Russell and saying he found missing people and announced it before their family knew. And then when they brought detectives there, there was no body, so.
- [97:07]
A
And he's a tour guide. Was a tour guide and is announcing that he's found missing people. Yeah, that's a little sus.
- [97:13]
B
It's giving problematic, but one of the more interesting theories that I actually, I do think he kind of fits as well. I'm like, I'm like a little. I'm like maybe 30% Degas, 70% this guy who is Francis Tumbletee, he was a self styled doctor with a history of living under false names. Again, had a ridiculous handlebar mustache. A lot of sources actually describe him as a bit of a quack. A snake oil salesman selling a lot of odd herbal remedies to heal people.
- [97:46]
A
Very common in Victorian times.
- [97:48]
B
It sure was. He was also believed to have been gay, so might not have been very sexually motivated. But still, the pickerism was a thing for him. A lot of his acquaintances say he hated women, had violent, explosive rage, and he also had a collection of preserved organs. He had uteruses in glass jars, would often pass them around at dinner parties for people to look at.
- [98:18]
A
Interesting. I don't think I could eat dinner after seeing all of that.
- [98:21]
B
But no, no, the timeline for him matches up really, really well. He traveled to Liverpool in June of 1888 and was in London during the murders. He actually did become a top suspect at the time and was arrested on November 7, 1888 for charges that were actually associated with homosexuality. Which was probably investigators using kind of as a ploy to investigate him further for the Jack the Ripper killings. He did get out in time to have killed Mary Kelly on November 9, then was arrested again on November 12 on the suspicion of committing the Whitechapel murders. Got out on bail on the 16th and by the 24th had fled to France, then later back to the United.
- [99:05]
A
States where he became H.H. holmes maybe. No, no.
- [99:11]
B
But there is something really, really interesting where the American papers, like when he got back, did confront him and he didn't really say anything. Great. He was like, well, I wear coats and I wear hats. Oh, so you do the math. Like he was very weird in all of his explanations to the press. And a lot of people said he was very like the most likely suspect. There is one source I found that upon his death, they found a brass ring in his pocket. And now organs were taken from a lot of the victims, but like, no other personal items were taken except for our second victim, which is Annie Chapman. Annie Chapman was known to have a brass ring, and that was missing after she was killed. So then we have our guy here found with a brass ring in his pocket upon his.
- [100:07]
A
His death.
- [100:09]
B
So there's that.
- [100:10]
A
Always carried one of the trophies with him.
- [100:12]
B
Always carried one of the trophies. Again, the organs. The uterus is in the jars. There's a lot of speculation that he did provide abortions and had one go very, very wrong. And it is interesting that you mentioned with our last victim, Mary Kelly, that it almost looked like an abortion, like pulling out or like a C section.
- [100:34]
A
Like a C section. Yeah. Like you. You understood the anatomy of a woman. So y.
- [100:40]
B
That is an interesting kind of correlation. But yeah, that's. That's the last one I got. That's the one I think. I kind of think fits the most that we know about.
- [100:49]
A
Interesting. There's a lot of evidence that HH Holmes was also providing abortions and that was maybe that he was killing some of the women because he would chloroform them too hard accidentally, because that's what you would do to kind of knock someone out. If you're going to perform surgery, they would die and he'd be like, whoops. And you just take the skeleton and sell it. So, I mean, interesting. It's crazy. Yeah. It was totally different time. Very, very spooky. I will say. If you have another suspect in mind, feel free to write it in the comments. I mean, there's hundreds we could have gone through. Oh, we just simply don't have time. This episode to go through. Everyone, please let us know. I'm so curious what everyone thinks.
- [101:27]
B
I know. And let me know what you think of the ones we do have. I mean, I'm down to go down more rabbit holes and investigate other suspects.
- [101:33]
A
Oh, yeah. I definitely.
- [101:35]
B
I just think this is.
- [101:36]
A
Was.
- [101:37]
B
It's crazy. What really stemmed from Jack the Ripper in terms of how we look at true crime and how the papers treated true crime and killings up until kind of recently. Other copycats that copied similar methods.
- [101:52]
A
Oh, yeah. We were even just talking about how the Black Dahlia. It feels like that was maybe inspired a little bit by Jack the Ripper. Just the way she was posed and the way that she was dismembered. You definitely have. Maybe you can't call them copycat killers, but you have people being inspired by these murders and the sensationalism of it. It's really crazy. But there is part of me that thinks that this will never be solved.
- [102:16]
B
No.
- [102:17]
A
Just because we don't have the DNA evidence.
- [102:20]
B
We're too far from it.
- [102:21]
A
We're too far. Exactly. We're too far away from it to ever truly solve it. Even with the advancing technology that we have, like, DNA. All of the DNA evidence that's untested could technically be tested again, but it's not really gonna tell us anything conclusive.
- [102:36]
B
Yeah. And after so many years, I mean, who knows if the semen wasn't from that constable that I know stole it for his wife.
- [102:44]
A
And even the story of the scarf and how it became in his possession is kind of lore. Like the lore of the story is that the constable stole it and gave it to his wife. We don't know that for certain.
- [102:55]
B
No. Maybe this is. Is truly one of the unsolvable cases. It will never be solved.
- [103:00]
A
Right.
- [103:01]
B
But I do want to note Black Dahlia has come up a lot in the comments, and I know it is a more covered case, but if you guys do want us to get into it, please let us know in the comments. I know there's a lot that has come out recently with one of the sons of maybe the killer that has come forward, have been like, yeah, my dad's the killer. So there's some newer stuff on the case. Case. And so if you guys want to see it from us, let us know in the comments.
- [103:25]
A
Definitely let us know. That one always gets me. Maybe because it's so close to home, because we're in la, but it's right here. Yeah, really spooky. I mean, what we do know about this case is that Jack the Ripper was successful at killing at least five women and mutilating their bodies very badly because he was operating at a place in time where women's lives were definitely not valued. Not poor women, and especially not women with substance abuse disorders or history of sex work. And remember the constable who let Catherine out of the drunk tank when she said that she got a beating for coming home late at night? The police officer's response was that she would have deserved it because she had no right getting drunk. And what about Polly? She was sent to a workhouse to do forced labor for the crime of being poor. The authorities clearly thought that she had no right to decide what to do with her own life, either. Or. What about the witness who admitted he saw a man knock Elizabeth Stride to the ground, and instead of intervening or fetching the police, he just walked away? He decided it was none of his business. I mean, obviously, these women deserved better. And unfortunately, it just looks like we'll never figure out who actually committed these crimes. So justice on this one feels like it'll never be served. But I am curious for everyone listening, what they think. Have we solved it? Are one of these suspects the one that did this, or. I mean, as we kind of mentioned in this episode, this is something that I talked to the researcher of this episode about. Like, was it just a. A pig butcher who's buried in a pauper's grave and we'll never know? I mean, that's a possibility, too. It just.
- [104:55]
B
It's unsolvable.
- [104:56]
A
It's unsolvable. It's one I think about often, though.
- [105:00]
B
Again, let us know your thoughts. But we are moving on to our Missing Person of the Week.
- [105:05]
A
So, first, before we dive into the Missing Person of the Week, we actually have an update on one of the cases. This. This came from a listener who messaged me on Instagram. Oh, my gosh. But Nikki Chang, who we talked about in one of our episodes, her husband has been arrested. They have not found Nikki. She has not been located, but authorities have concluded that she is the victim of homicide.
- [105:29]
B
Wow.
- [105:30]
A
And the listener that sent this to me did say it was as tragic as it is. It was like something the community's been waiting for for a long time. And so, people, it just feels like a little step towards closure, but bit wild, which thank you so much to. It was a few people that reached out to kind of give me that update. So as you're listening, if you hear updates on these cases, definitely let us know because please do. It's really, really important stuff. I know.
- [105:55]
B
That's why we're doing this.
- [105:56]
A
Yes.
- [105:56]
B
Trying to get the word out.
- [105:57]
A
But our Missing Person of the Week today is Summer Wells. So she was age 5 at the time she disappeared. She was reported missing on June 15, 2021, from her home in Rogersville, Hawkins County, Tennessee. Parents say that she was helping her mother and grandmother plant flowers, but then she went inside to play with her toys. And shortly after, her mother says that she could not locate her. The mom said that she called downstairs to Summer, but there was no response, which was unusual. She checked, and she saw that her daughter was gone. Now, endangered Child Alert and then an AMBER Alert were both deployed. Extensive searches of the home and surrounding area, including the nearby woods, were looked into. There was also a report of a red or maroon Toyota pickup with ladders on the back that was seen in the area around the time, but we don't know if there's any connection. A bit after the disappearance, a neighbor did come forward and say that she and her children heard a scream about an hour before Summer disappeared, But that didn't really lead police to any sort of breakthrough. Her parents, Candace and Dom Wells, believe that there has been an abduction, possibly from or behind the base basement, and maybe she was taken down the hill to the vehicle that was seen in the area. But as of today, there's been no arrests, no one has been named a suspect, and parents have passed polygraphs. So the sheriff has said that everyone remains a person of interest in this case and that there's no evidence to determine abduction versus walkaway, slash lost. The case remains active, and Summer was described at the time of her disappearance as being 3ft tall, 40 pounds, blue eyes, blonde hair, and she was last seen in a pink shirt and gray pants. If you have any information, you can call TBI at 1-800-TBI-IND or 1-800-824-3463. That is all we have for this episode of Clues. I hope you guys enjoyed getting into this one with us.
- [107:55]
B
I hope you hung in there, guys.
- [107:57]
A
Hope you hung in there. If I did, I know this one's gonna be long. Well, yeah, this. This is a long one. There's a lot to this one. And if we didn't talk about your favorite ripper suspect, please get on social media and let us know why you think this person is it. We wanna hear from you guys, your thoughts, your theories, your feedback. All of that is what makes this community so special.
- [108:15]
B
At Crime House, we value your support. So again, share your thoughts on social media and remember to rate, review, and follow clues to help others discover our show.
- [108:22]
A
All right, we'll see you next time.
- [108:24]
B
Bye. Bye, guys.