626. Jack The Ripper: The Killer Strikes Again (Part 3)

Summary

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The Rest Is History, Episode 626

Jack The Ripper: The Killer Strikes Again (Part 3)

Hosts: Tom Holland & Dominic Sandbrook
Original Release Date: December 15, 2025

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Main Theme

This episode continues Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook’s immersive exploration of the Jack the Ripper murders, zeroing in on the double event of September 30, 1888—when two women, Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes, were killed within hours of each other. The hosts blend storytelling, source analysis, and cultural context to unravel the crimes themselves, public fear, contemporary investigations, and the beginning of the Ripper’s transformation into a cultural and literary phenomenon.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Setting the Scene: Atmosphere and Public Hysteria

• The episode opens with Tom reading a vivid contemporary report from a Whitechapel lodging house, illustrating the paranoia and dark humor that rippled through Victorian London as the murders continued.
  • “So that, Dominic, was the Evening News, published on 5th October, 1888... describing the atmosphere in Cooney's lodging house ... in Spitalfields, in Whitechapel.” (Tom Holland, 02:22)
• The notoriety of Jack the Ripper is explored as both a source of terror and grim fascination, both then and now:
  • “It remains the case to this day. ... The case seems to embody so many anxieties of late Victorian London, but also the inherent fascination—so savage, so horrific, and also that mystery.” (Dominic Sandbrook, 05:00)

The Double Event: Two Murders, Two Jurisdictions

• Recap of the series of killings: Martha Tabram, Mary Ann (Polly) Nicholls, Annie Chapman, and the events of the night of 29–30 September 1888.
• Details of the “double event”:
  • Elizabeth Stride: Found at Dutfield’s Yard, just outside a club for Russian and Polish Jewish immigrants.
  • Catherine Eddowes: Discovered by PC Edward Watkins in Mitre Square, City of London, less than an hour after Stride.

Jurisdictional Divide

• The investigations occur under two police forces: The Metropolitan Police (Whitechapel) and City of London Police (Mitre Square).
  • “They are under different police jurisdictions because the City of London has its own police force...” (Tom Holland, 08:57)

Details of the Crimes

Elizabeth Stride

• Stride’s murder bears Ripper hallmarks (throat cut, East End location) but crucially, her body isn’t mutilated.
• Theorizing why:
  • “The Ripper was disturbed in the process… Louis Diemschutz came into the yard, actually disturbed the Ripper.” (Dominic Sandbrook, 13:00)
  • “That would then explain perhaps why he goes on to commit a second murder, because ... he hasn't had the opportunity to do what he wants to do, namely get ripping.” (Tom Holland, 13:00)
• Witness sightings: PC William Smith spots a man with a woman (red rose) about 12:30 AM; several witnesses describe a short man in a dark coat, peaked cap/deerstalker.
• The enigmatic “Lipski!” shout: Explored as an anti-Semitic taunt, with Inspector Abberline suggesting it was shouted at a Jewish witness, Israel Schwartz, rather than being a clue to accomplices or a conspiracy.

Catherine Eddowes

• Victim identified through personal effects and partner John Kelly.
• The most mutilated victim so far: throat cut, face and abdomen slashed, organs (kidney, womb) removed and arranged beside her.
• Discussion of whether the killer had anatomical skill:
  • “The killer must have had a degree of expertise... not necessarily a doctor—perhaps a butcher, slaughterman, or a very talented amateur.” (Tom Holland, 24:39)
• Witnesses: Joseph Lavender and Joseph Levy see a man (deerstalker cap, moustache) talking with a woman at 1:30 AM.

The Goulston Street Graffito

• Eddowes’ bloodied apron found near graffiti: “the Jews are the men that will not be blamed for nothing” (J U W E S).
  • Explored as possible coincidence, deliberate taunt, or red herring.
  • “Sir Charles Warren had to have it erased swiftly to prevent anti-Semitic riots.” (Dominic Sandbrook, 26:26)

Panic, Public Response, and the Press

• The East End gripped by fear; streets deserted at night and women arming themselves or seeking safer neighborhoods.
  • “There’s a massive sense of panic... streets are deserted at night... women are huddling together...” (Dominic Sandbrook, 34:21)
• Immediate commercialization and myth-making: printed ballads, “Ripper tours,” and sensationalist press coverage.
• Foreigners and minorities scapegoated:
  • "Some say it was Old Nick himself, or else a Russian Jew. Some say it was a cannibal from the Isle of Kickaboo…" (Tom Holland, reading 37:27)

Police Investigation and Challenges

• Disagreement over offering rewards; Home Office and Met Commissioner at odds.
• Chief of CID, Robert Anderson, is in Switzerland during the height of the investigation, provoking media outrage.
• Failed police tactics: bloodhound experiments, lack of undercover policewomen, and male officers unsuccessfully disguised (and sometimes assaulted).
  • “There are no police women in the Met so they can't entrap the Ripper.” (Dominic Sandbrook, 44:39)
• Vigilante patrols surge—organized and supported by local Jewish tradesmen, possibly delaying further murders.

Letters, Hoaxes, and Ripper Mythos Begins

• The "Dear Boss" letter and "Saucy Jack" postcard: Likely hoaxes sent to the press/news agency; introduce the name “Jack the Ripper.”
  • “It's also someone who can come up with the brilliant name of Jack the Ripper... Almost certainly a reporter or someone like that.” (Dominic Sandbrook, 49:34)
• The “From Hell” letter to George Lusk: Arrived with half a human kidney. Handwriting and style contrast previous letters; the possibility of an Irish connection is discussed.
  • “I sent you half the kidney I took from one woman, preserved it for you. Tell the peace I fried and ate it... From Hell.” (Tom Holland, 50:37)
• Flood of hoax and confessional letters overwhelms the investigation.

Public & Cultural Impact

• The Ripper crimes spark debate about the failures of urban society and Victorian values:
  • “People didn’t just say it’s a foreign menace... there is something deeply buried in us that has now come out.” (Dominic Sandbrook, 39:36)
  • “There is a darkness... lurking in the soul, perhaps even of the most outwardly respectable figure walking the streets...” (Tom Holland, 40:13)
• The first hints at Jack the Ripper becoming a legend and literary figure—a motif that will endure.
  • “All these letters suggest Jack the Ripper is already becoming a literary figure ... people writing words for him, composing actions for him...” (Tom Holland, 53:47)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Witness Perception and Hysteria:

  • “I mean, just to think... a deer stalker, you wear it because you're stalking deer, and when you capture a deer, you rip it open and disembowel it.” (Tom Holland, 14:18)

• On Policing and Press Sensationalism:

  • “Dr. Anderson, the chief official responsible... is as invisible to Londoners as the murderer himself. Dr. Anderson is taking a pleasant holiday in Switzerland. ... Newspapers don't change, right?” (Dominic Sandbrook, 41:33)

• On Police Blunders:

  • “The press have been pestering the Home Office, use bloodhounds... but comically, this doesn't happen in Sherlock Holmes. There's a massive disagreement about who's going to pay for the dog's insurance.” (Dominic Sandbrook, 44:36)
  • “He dressed up and stood around ... they shouted at him, you're cats and dogs, aren't you? And then they stabbed him in the face.” (Dominic Sandbrook, 45:29)

• On the Goulston Street Graffiti:

  • “Some of the people say, should we wait for a photographer to photograph the graffiti? And [Commissioner Warren] says, no ... we cannot risk people seeing it. ... The chalk is wiped away. And so ... we have no photo of it.” (Dominic Sandbrook, 26:26)

• Regarding Letters and Public Engagement:

  • “The result of the police publicizing this is a flood of hoax letters... deluged with false leads.” (Dominic Sandbrook, 49:34)
  • “Jack the Ripper is already becoming a literary figure ... people are writing words for him... and this is something that will be repeated decade after decade.” (Tom Holland, 53:47)

• On the Ripper as Cultural Symbol:

  • “That's part of the Ripper mystique... the idea that there is a darkness, a murderousness, a savagery lurking ... even in the most outwardly respectable figure walking the streets of the West End.” (Tom Holland, 40:13)

Closing Cliffhanger

• The episode concludes with the discovery of Mary Jane Kelly’s mutilated body—setting up the next episode’s deep dive:
  • “When my eyes had become accustomed to the dim light, I saw a sight which I shall never forget to my dying day.” (PC Walter Dew, recalled by Dominic Sandbrook, 56:53)
  • “Next time we will reveal what he saw through the window... and how Jack the Ripper came to be enshrined as history's first serial killer.” (Tom Holland, 57:10)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 02:22 — Reading from 1888 Evening News: Atmosphere in a lodging house.
• 05:00 — Why the case fascinates to this day.
• 08:57 — Complicating jurisdiction: City vs. Metropolitan Police.
• 13:00 — Discussion of why Stride’s murder lacked mutilations.
• 15:21 — The eyewitness accounts and the "Lipski!" incident.
• 24:39 — Eddowes murder, discussion of killer’s anatomical skill.
• 26:20 — The Goulston Street apron and graffiti.
• 34:21 — Public panic, myth-making, and ballads.
• 41:33 — CID chief on holiday, media outrage.
• 44:36 — Failed investigation methods: bloodhounds and undercover blunders.
• 48:39 — The "Saucy Jack" postcard is read.
• 50:37 — The “From Hell” letter and the half-kidney.
• 53:47 — Literary afterlife of the Ripper character.
• 56:53 — Discovery of Mary Jane Kelly’s body (cliffhanger for next episode).

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Conclusion

This episode masterfully walks listeners through the escalation of the Ripper murders, interweaving forensic detail, Victorian social context, and the birth of a modern urban myth. It ends with both a chilling cliffhanger—the scene witnessed through Mary Jane Kelly’s window—and reflections on the Ripper’s enduring grip on cultural imagination.

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Transcript

[Tom Holland]

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[Dominic Sandbrook]

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Of power, Hive helps you finally know yours. Head to hivehome.com to find out more. Subject to survey and suitability, Hive app compatible with selected technology Paid for surplus requires SEG Tariff. An old woman who is known by the sobriquet of Mother Kracker rather startled me by rushing up as I stood at the fireplace and demanding to know if I was Jack the Ripper. The awkwardness of answering this question I was happily relieved of by the old dame herself assuring me that she did not think I was. I know you ain't him, she said. You wouldn't rip me up, would you? Now, by and by the proceedings in the kitchen became more lively, girls commenced singing songs, and the poet of the company entertained the room with the chorus of his latest composition. Has anyone seen him? Can you tell us where he is? If you meet him, you must take away his knife Then give him to the women they'll spoil his pretty fizz and I wouldn't give him tuppence for his life. Now at night, when you're undressed and about to go to rest, just see that he ain't underneath the bed. If he is, you mustn't shout, but politely drag him out and with your poker, tap him on the head. So that, Dominic, was the Evening News, published on 5th October, 1888 by a top investigative journalist describing the atmosphere in Cooney's lodging house on the notorious Flower and Dean street, which was the lodging house that had been used by Jack the Ripper's latest victim. And we are, of course, in Spitalfields, in Whitechapel in the East End of London. It's the autumn of 1888, and we are deep into the story of the most notorious murderer of all time, Jack the Ripper.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yes, and the lodging house, judging by.

[Tom Holland]

That reading full of Australians, Tom, wasn't Australians just cockneys? Lovable Cockneys.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

That sounds like Russell Crowe to me. So.

[Tom Holland]

Well, the Australian accent does derive from cockney.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Of course it does.

[Tom Holland]

Couldn't be more cockney. And it's. It's a kind of. It's a reminder of just how obsessed, by this point, everybody is with the. With the story of Jack the Ripper, not just in London, not just across Britain, but across the whole world.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Tom Holland]

And I guess the reason for that is that no one knows who he is. And that, of course, remains the case to this day.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

So why are people so fascinated? Partly because the case seems to embody so many of the anxieties of late Victorian London, but also the inherent fascination of the case. It's so savage and so horrific, but also that mystery. Right, that he's the thief in the night, the ghost in the shadows who's escaping. And that's, of course, why we're still so fascinated and why, almost uniquely among serial killer stories, this one has an extraordinary hold on the world's imagination. Yeah.

[Tom Holland]

And I think also what we shouldn't overlook is the sheer terror that he is inspiring, because those. Those songs, you know, you sing them to keep your spirits up, but they're expressive of an absolute dread.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

People are terrified, of course, and with good reason. So we ended last time on a cliffhanger so let's remind ourselves where we've got to. I mean, the reason people are terrified is that there have been a series of horrific crimes. The death, first of all of Martha Tabram on 7 August, then Mary Ann or Polly Nicholls on 31 August, her body literally ripped apart, ripped open, and then another body ripped open, that of Annie Chapman on 8 September in a backyard at Hanbury Street, Spitalfields. And we entered last time on the night of Saturday the 29th and Sunday the 30th of September, when the killer has struck again, not once but twice. So, first of all, we had the discovery of the body of Elizabeth Stride just inside Dutfield's Yard, which is just outside a socialist club for Russian and Polish Jewish immigrants. And then 45 minutes later, as we described last time, PC Edward Watkins is patrolling Mitre Square, just off Aldgate. So that's just inside the boundary of the City of London. So to the west of the other, the other crimes. And he flashes his lantern, he finds something huddled on the ground, and then he's rushing across the square where we ended last time to a watchman. For God's sake, mate, come to my assistance. There's another woman cut to pieces. So let's pick up the story. So within about a quarter of an hour, a group of policemen had gathered around the body, and they're joined at about 2:20 by the city police surgeon, Dr. Frederick Gordon Brown. And it's from him that we get the again, gruesome details of the crime scene. So to reiterate, if you are driving along with very small children in the back, listening to a podcast about the Jack the Ripper, you will be unsurprised to hear that there are some gruesome details to come. So rethink your choices. The victim says Dr. Frederick Gordon Brown is lying on her back with her throat cut, her body horribly mutilated. Quote him. The abdomen was all exposed, the intestines were drawn out to a large extent and placed over the right shoulder. A piece of about two feet was quite detached from the body and placed between the body and the left arm, apparently by design. So this is a really unsettling, you know, unbelievably unsettling and strange scene, almost kind of ritualistic, you know, what kind of killer places the victim's innards around the body?

[Tom Holland]

Maybe I'm a sonic one.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Well, maybe we should be coming to this in our fifth episode. And once again, of course, the Ripper has struck extremely efficiently and quickly before vanishing into the night. So to quote Philip Sugden, whose book on the Jack the Ripper case is the Defin, he says, you know, this probably took less than 15 minutes. In that period of time, the killer must have got his victim into Mitre Square, assuming she's not there already, killed her, mutilated her, done all his sort of operations on the body, and then got away. And he has taken with him her womb and her left kidney. And once again, he has done this almost completely unseen and undetected. So we're still in the small hours of Sunday 30th September, and we now have two murder investigations going on simultaneously. So there's the Elizabeth Stride one in Whitechapel and this other one now in the City of London.

[Tom Holland]

And they are under different police jurisdictions because the City of London has its own police force.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Exactly.

[Tom Holland]

So not part of the Metropolitan Police.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

So let's begin with the one in Whitechapel, the first one, the one we discussed last time, Dutfield's Yard, Elizabeth Stride. So, as we heard about her last time, she's Swedish, she's born in Gothenburg, she's come to England, she probably worked as an occasional prostitute. And if you want to find out more about her, club members can do so in our bonus. And if you want to join them, just head to therestishistory.com. so she had been seen in a cheap lodging house in Florendine street just before 7 o'. Clock. We don't know when she went out exactly. We don't know where she was going. We don't know whether she was going out to try to solicit, to get money for a bed. All of this is very unclear. We know that at some time that evening she ate some bread and cheese and she possibly had some drinks. And she also got hold of some hard sweets, kind of breath fresheners. I think they're called cashew or something, aren't they? And she's holding them in her hand. And she's also got hold of a red rose which she has fixed to her bodice. And then somehow she's ended up in Duckfield's Yard, outside this sort of socialist club where she has been murdered.

[Tom Holland]

Do you know the site of it now? It's school playground.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Oh, my God. Really? Yeah.

[Tom Holland]

I went and investigated all the places where it happened.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Right.

[Tom Holland]

And I mean, that's probably the least appropriate place.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah. And is there a plaque or anything?

[Tom Holland]

No, because obviously the school doesn't want to draw attention to the place where all the little children are playing.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

I think there should be a plaque. First of all, the kids would love it. And secondly, I think you should mark where she. Her last moments. I think. Anyway, I'll take that up with the school. So, obvious question. How did she die? As with the other victims, her throat was cut and it seems like there were bruises on her neck and shoulders. The doctors who examined her body, there were two different doctors. One of them is the guy who had done the autopsy on Annie Chapman, Dr. George Baxter Phillips.

[Tom Holland]

The Bagster.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

The Bagster, yeah. That's surely what his friends from school call him. And they think she had been seized on the shoulders and then pushed to the ground and killed on the ground. Now, Hallie Rubenhold, in her book the Five, which is brilliant on the lives of the victims, has a thesis that the victims were all killed as they slept, that they were homeless and the Ripper just simply came across them and killed them. I'm not sure about that here, because Sugden points out that the ground was very muddy and it had been raining, and therefore, it seems unlikely that you would lie down to sleep in the mud.

[Tom Holland]

Wasn't there? The policeman or the doctor or somebody said that she seemed to have been laid down in the mud.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Being laid down, exactly. Rather than you wouldn't choose to lie down in the mud, surely. I mean, so many baffling things about it. Why is she still holding the hard sweets in one hand? Why did nobody hear her cry out? She's very close to this club. Why are there no signs of any struggle at all? And most bewildering of all, why, uniquely, is Elizabeth Stride's body not mutilated in any way? There's no ripping. You know, her body, her throat has been cut, but nothing else. So there are a couple of theories. One theory is she's actually killed by a different person, and this is an unrelated murder. So Dr. Phillips, the bagster, he thought that the killer had used a different knife from the one used to kill Annie Chapman and that the wound was very different. On the other hand, a lot of Ripper sort of scholars say, you know, the modus operandi is similar. A victim killed while lying on the ground in a dark corner of the East End, the throat cut from left to right. So the balance of probability, I think, is that this was a Jack the Ripper crime. And in that case, the explanation for why the body isn't mutilated is that actually when that guy and his cart that we talked about last time Louis Diemschutz came into the yard, he Actually disturbed the Ripper in the process of his, you know, his nefarious work.

[Tom Holland]

Yeah. And I guess that would then also explain perhaps why he goes on to commit a second murder, because his, you know, he hasn't had the opportunity to do what he wants to do, namely get ripping.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Exactly that. I think that makes complete psychological sense. Right. The Ripper has been cheated of the thing that he really, you know, the killing is now not enough to give him the high that he wants. It is actually the process of ripping, which is becoming more and more extreme and more horrific every time. And that's why he feels the need to strike again. Now, this first crime, there are a couple of really intriguing witnesses. So, first of all, there's a guy called PC William Smith. He was patrolling near Berners street at about 12:30 on the night of the murder, and he saw a man and a woman with a red rose talking across the street from where the body was discovered. And he described the man as about 28 years old, dark complexion, a small, dark moustache, wearing a black cutaway coat, wearing a hard felt deerstalker hat and carrying a parcel in newspaper.

[Tom Holland]

Because the man seen talking to Annie Chapman had been wearing a deerstalker hat, hadn't he?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Exactly. So deer stalker hats have, you know, they're not uncommon. Of course, Sherlock Holmes is famously portrayed with one. So, you know, it could be a different man. But it's telling that the hat keeps reappearing in all the witness statements.

[Tom Holland]

I mean, just. Just to think. I mean, a deer stalker, you stalk. You wear it because you. You're stalking deer. And when you capture a deer, you rip it open and disembowel it. I just wondering if perhaps there's a maybe.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

I mean, maybe. I hadn't thought of that, Tom. I don't know. So there's another witness. See what you think of this one. This guy is called Israel Schwartz. Now, he is a Jewish immigrant, and he's probably from Galicia in Austria, hungary. At about 12:45, he is walking past Dutfield's Yard when, as Chief Inspector Swanson describes in his notes, he saw a man stop and speak to a woman who was standing in the gateway. The man tried to pull the woman into the street, but he turned around and threw her down on the footway. And the woman screamed three times, but not very loudly. On crossing to the opposite side of the street, he saw a second man standing, lighting his pipe. The man who threw the woman down called out, apparently to the man on the opposite side of the Road Lipski. And then Schwartz walked away, but finding that he was followed by the second man, he ran as far as the railway arch, but the man did not follow so far.

[Tom Holland]

Tantalizing.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

It is. It's mysterious, Tom. It's intriguing. Anyway, the police take this bloke Schwartz to the mortuary and he says, this is the woman. Elizabeth Stride is the woman I saw. And they say, well, what do the men look like? And he says, basically, the men were in their early 30s. They had mustaches and they wore dark coats. And the first man, he Sundays, was about 5 foot 5 and wore a kind of peaked cap, a little bit like a deer stalker. That tallies with a third witness who's a laborer called William Marshall. He also says he saw a woman and a man talking and joking. The man, about 5 foot 6 in a black cutaway coat, a peaked cap, decently dressed and mild, speaking like a clerk. So this is looking like the same man in all of these. You know, peaked cap, 5 foot 5, 5 foot 6, and so on and so forth. What about the second man, though? What about this other man? So some people who look into the Ripper story think that the Ripper had an accomplice. Great Scott Holmes, yes. If this was a conspiracy, Israel Schwartz, his account makes it sound like these two men know each other. And the one man shouts to the other man, Lipski. But the police report is clear that he can't be sure about that. He's only kind of guessing.

[Tom Holland]

And Holmes, what is this Lipski? What do you make of that?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

You know, I'm enjoying this new vibe to the podcast with being cast as Holmes for once. Brilliant. So this is a really fascinating puzzle, and this is a really good example of how the Ripper story is a window into the anxieties of 1880s London. Lipski is a really well known name in the east end because in 1887, a bloke who made umbrellas called Israel Lipski, who was originally another Polish Jew, had been hanged for murdering a young woman who was pregnant, called Miriam angel, because he'd forced her to drink nitric acid. Very unpleasant.

[Tom Holland]

That is so penny dreadful.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

This is a really, really controversial case at the time because a lot of people said Lipski had not done it, that this was antisemitism. Lipski confessed to his rabbi just before he was executed. But some people believed at the time that he had done so either because he'd been kind of brutalized and broken and he was just confessing to get it over with, or because the rabbi had Persuaded him that it would be better for everybody if he confessed and better for the Jewish community.

[Tom Holland]

That seems implausible that they could then.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Kind of ostracize him as a bad. As a bad egg, rather than. It look as though they were trying to cover up for one of their co religionists. Queen Victoria was very agitated about this and was very worried that Lipski had been framed, as was the Pall Mall Gazette, a newspaper we've heard a bit about already. Campaigning newspaper we're hearing more from. So anyway, Lipski is a sort of well known sort of taunt in Whitechapel in 1887, 1888. People will say, oh, you're a regular Lipski and all this kind of thing.

[Tom Holland]

Yeah. So kind of like you're Harold Shipman or you're whatever.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Did you ever move in circles where people compared you to Harold Shipman?

[Tom Holland]

No, but you could you. I mean, it becomes a kind of a standard name for a killer or something.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah. Like the Ripper, right? Like Jack the Ripper. Yeah. There are a couple of possibilities. So one is this bloke was genuinely called Lipski. The two men are working together and Lipski is a confederate in the Ripper's crimes. I think no one really believes that. Philip Sugden suggests that the two men. This is a bizarre suggestion, I think, from him, that the two men are working together, possibly. But that one of them shouts Lipski as a trick to throw Schwartz off the scent and incriminate the local Jews. I don't think that's very likely.

[Tom Holland]

I mean, unless it's Queen Victoria's personal surgeon and they're desperate to muddy the waters. But again, we will come to this in due course.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

And then Inspector Abberline. Great to have him back. Inspector Abberline's thesis, he basically said to his superiors, look, in the East End, people are shouting the word Lipski as a kind of anti Semitic taunt. And Schwartz has a strong Jewish appearance. So I am of opinion it was addressed to him as he stopped to look at the man he saw apparently ill, using the deceased woman. So that the second man is just a complete bystander and a red herring. The second man has nothing to do with anything. And actually, basically the Ripper shouted, you know, he's basically shouting, go away, you, Lipski. At Israel Schwartz. And that seemed to kind of make sense to me, actually.

[Tom Holland]

Yeah.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Now, there are two implications of Abberline's thesis. That would mean the killer is probably from the East End because he's familiar with the slang of the East End, the Lipski taunt, which is a kind of East End thing. Secondly, it also implies the killer is not Jewish, because you won't use an anti Semitic taunt if you're Jewish yourself. Right.

[Tom Holland]

Unless that's part of his fiendish cunning.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

It is, but he'd have to.

[Tom Holland]

No, no, I agree. I agree, Holmes. I agree, Holmes. I'm just trying to keep you on your toes.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Okay, very good. Thank you. All right, so that's the first crime of the night. That's Elizabeth Stride murder. Let's do the second crime now. So this is the. The hideously mutilated body found in Mitre Square in the city. At first, the police found it very hard to identify her. She. She's clearly a very poor woman. She's wearing very old and dirty clothes. She's got a couple of clay pipes and a handkerchief, and she's got two pawnbrokers tickets, but they're under false names. That's very common for people who are kind of on the underclass, as it were. And eventually her partner comes forward, a laborer called John Kelly. He has been living with her in this doss house, Cooney's Lodgings house, which is a really rundown place. And he says, this is my partner, this is my. Basically my girlfriend, Kate Conway. Actually, her name is not Kate Conway. She's Catherine Eddowes and she was 46 years old. Philip Sugden describes her as the most likable of all the victims, which is not surprising, Tom, because she's from Wolverhampton. So I'll just give you a very quick sketch of Catherine Eddowes's life because, again, because we want to sort of let the victim stories breathe, as it were. We'll be doing her in the bonus episode. She was born in Wolverhampton in 1842 to very young parents who came from tin plate working backgrounds. They moved to London and they die young. She ends up as an orphan. She goes sort of back and forth, but she to Birmingham, Wolverhampton, London. She ends up with a soldier called Thomas Conway. She lives with him for almost 20 years. They have three children. The classic pattern. She drinks. He's probably violent. They separate.

[Tom Holland]

I think he definitely is violent, isn't he? Because she's always got kind of black eyes and things.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Exactly. They're into the downward spiral. She ends up with John Kelly. She works as a char woman doing odd jobs, but she's almost certainly involved with casual prostitution as well, though it's unclear. They've just been hot picking in Kent, her and this guy Kelly, because Hot.

[Tom Holland]

Picking is kind of almost the nearest to a holiday that you have if you're kind of on the streets.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Exactly. And tens of thousands of people would go picking in Kent and so on. They've gone off, they've come back, she's got drunk. She's actually picked up earlier on the Saturday for being drunk by the police. She's put in a cell. The police let her out at one o' clock on the Sunday morning. Her last words, recorded words to the constable who lets her out, she says to him, all right, good night, old cock. And then about 40 minutes later, she is dead. So the Ripper struck very quickly after she was let out. Now, as we've already heard, her fate is by far the most horrific so far. Her throat has been cut for 7 inches from left to right. Her face and body have been horribly mutilated. Her torso has been ripped open, her insides removed and put by her shoulder. And the killer has left with her left kidney and part of her uterus.

[Tom Holland]

He has also cut off the lobe of one of her ears, hasn't he?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Right.

[Tom Holland]

And this kind of resonates because in the notorious letter where Jack the Ripper introduces himself, he'd said that he would cut off the ears of his next victim. And so there's debate as to whether cutting off one lobe counts or not.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

That is right. What the killer does not do is to cut off her ears, though, which the letter had said that he would. And cutting off the lobe in the context of the general mutilations is only a small thing. It doesn't seem like a deliberate thing that you've done to justify a boast in a letter beforehand. Anyway, the surgeon who looked at the body, Dr. Frederick Gordon Brown, was sure that the killer had done this on the spot within moments. So later on, when we get to the mad conspiracy theories, the idea that the victims bodies were mutilated in a carriage by, you know, a royal doctor and then dumped on the spot. This is not what people thought at the time when they inspected the bodice. Dr. Gordon Brown also thought the killer must have had a degree of expertise. He told the Daily News the left kidney had been carefully taken out in such a manner as to show that it had been done by somebody who not only knew its anatomical position, but knew how to remove it. Now, again, does this mean that it's a doctor or a surgeon? No, not necessarily. It could be, as we've said, a butcher or a slaughterman or a medical student or indeed a very talented amateur who studied anatomy. But somebody who basically knows what they're doing?

[Tom Holland]

I guess someone who's used to stalking deer. On the Highlands, perhaps.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Maybe. So, as with Elizabeth Stride's murder, there is one interesting witness account. There are two friends, they're both Jewish. A guy called Joseph Lavender, a commercial traveler, and Joseph Levy, a butcher. And they were leaving a local social club at half past one or thereabouts when they saw a man and woman standing at the entrance to a nearby alley. And Lavender saw them most clearly? Well, he didn't see the woman's face, so he couldn't be sure that it was Catherine Eddowes. But he said the man was about 30, about 5 foot 7, with a moustache, medium build and a peaked deerstalker's cap. But he thought the man looked rough and shabby. So we've had slightly different accounts of how the man looks, but there are a few common features, aren't there?

[Tom Holland]

There are. And also it's the middle of the night, flickering of the gas lamps.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah. And this time there is another clue, a very strange and disturbing clue. So, within minutes of Catherine Edwards's murder, the police were scouring this kind of warren of streets around Mitre Square. And as we've described, once again, the killer slipped through their fingers like a ghost. Five minutes away, a guy called Alfred Long, police constable, is patrolling Goulston street, which is on the sort of boundary between the city and Whitechapel. And at 2:55, he spotted something in a tenement doorway and it was a woman's apron, wet with blood. And it turns out that this is Catherine Eddowes's apron. And he looks around for other signs of blood or any of the other clues. And then he sees something else. To the right of the doorway, written in white chalk on the black bricks are the words, the Jews are the men that will not be blamed for nothing.

[Tom Holland]

And the word Jews is spelt J U W E S. Yes.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

So PC Long takes the apron to the nearest police station. Soon, lots of other policemen are swarming around these buildings. They don't find anything. Meanwhile, the police Superintendent, Thomas Arnold, briefs the Met Commissioner, Sir Charles Warren, about this graffiti. And the Superintendent says, I want to get rid of this as quickly as possible. If we leave it up on the wall by dawn, there will be a riot against the Jews of the East End. And you can completely see why he says this. Passions are running high because of the tide of immigration in the 1880s. And as we saw after Annie Chapman's murder, there are a lot of people who are very Keen to blame the Jews of the East End. So Charles Warren goes personally to Goulston street and he looks at the writing and the graffiti. Some of the people say, should we wait for a photographer to photograph the graffiti? And he says, no, it's. It's getting light. We cannot risk people seeing it. And so at 5:30, as dawn is breaking, the chalk is wiped away. And so, you know, we have no photo of it. So the enduring mystery. Who left it? What does it mean? There are three possibilities. Number one, it's a complete coincidence. The Ripper just threw the apron away and there was some anti Semitic graffiti on the wall. The police themselves didn't agree whether some people said it was fresh, some people said it was faded, so it could be old anti Semitic graffiti. Of course, there is a fair bit of anti Semitic graffiti in the East End. However, Philip Sugden points out this was a building that had a lot of Jewish residents. Is it really plausible that they wouldn't have wiped that away?

[Tom Holland]

I mean, if it had been someone who'd put it up half an hour before?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Perfectly plausible, I suppose, Tom. But that really is a coincidence, isn't it?

[Tom Holland]

Yeah, it is a coincidence. But I assume that this kind of graffiti is going up all the time.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

In the middle of the night.

[Tom Holland]

Yeah.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Well, I'm not sure.

[Tom Holland]

That seems to me, I have to say the likeliest explanation.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Explanation two. Well, listeners can. Listeners can make up their own minds, Tom. We don't know how to preach. That's the last thing we do. On the rest is history.

[Tom Holland]

Just offering my own conclusions.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Well, that. Everyone's grateful for that and everyone enjoys it. No one more than me, to be honest. So the next thing, the Ripper left the message to taunt the police because he was Jewish. So he's euphoric from his killings, he's in a state of ecstasy. He's putting two fingers up to the world and saying, ha, ha, the Jews have got their own bag. And number three, the Ripper left the message, but it's a trick to throw the police off the scent. This is what Sir Charles Warren thought. Sir Charles Warren told the Home Office. He said it was evidently written with the intention of inflaming the public mind against the Jews. And that's why I had to get rid of it.

[Tom Holland]

I mean, that is clearly the case. But it doesn't have to be the Ripper who's written it. I mean, no one would put that up and not want that. I think it's a better story if.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

It'S the Ripper though, isn't it?

[Tom Holland]

Yeah, of course it is. But you know, I'm applying my razor sharp powers of deduction and logic here.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Well, listen, amaze us now with your razor sharp powers of deduction and logic because is there not an exciting conspiracy theory attached to this that you will very much enjoy? Yes.

[Tom Holland]

So there's a very notorious, I think, mad. Well, I think basically everyone thinks mad book about Jack the Ripper called Jack the Ripper the Final Solution. And I honestly think that any book with the word final solution in the. In the title is probably best left alone. And it was written by a guy called Stephen Knight. And we will be talking about this in. In our final episode. But it's a theory about a member of the Royal family being involved and various Masons. And remember that Sir Charles Warren, the head of the Met, is himself a Mason and he says that the misspelling of Jews. So J U W E S is a clue. And it refers to three legendary Masonic figures. Jubela, Jubelo and Jubalum. And it has to be said that this is. I mean, can I say bollocks on. On this podcast?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

I mean, yeah, I guess you can.

[Tom Holland]

So these figures had apparently not been part of Masonic ritual in Britain for almost a century. And British masons never used the. The term J U W E S to describe them. And there is no link with. With the Masons at all.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Well, we should explore this in greater detail, shouldn't we, in our final episode where we solve the crime and we should be digging into the Masonic conspiracy theory, which, spoiler alert, I actually do agree with you and I think it is completely bonkers.

[Tom Holland]

But do remember Sir Charles Warren had dug. Had excavated on the site of the temple. And Masons are obsessed with the temple, so who knows, maybe there is something there.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

That was a tantalizing clue there, Tom. So let's take a break and then we'll come back and we will plunge back into the stricken streets of Whitechapel as the story races towards the next terrible crime. This episode is brought to you by Uber. Now, do you know that feeling when someone shows up for you when you need it most?

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[Tom Holland]

Hello, welcome back to the Rest Is History. And we are in Whitechapel in the heart of the East End. And it is the morning of Sunday the 30th of September, 1888. And news is spreading across the East End and beyond of the double killing overnight of Elizabeth Stride in Whitechapel, Catherine Eddowes in Mitre Square in the City of London. And the police have cordoned off the murder sites. But already thousands of people are gathering outside Mitre Square and Duckfield's Yard where Elizabeth Stride had been murdered. And there are newspapers are starting to appear, people hawking them. The news is spreading virally.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah, and there's a massive sense of panic actually for the next week or so. So the streets are deserted at night. There are reports that lots of poor homeless women have gone west to the city or to the West End because the streets are better lit there. There are reports of people, kind of those people who don't. The women are huddling together for protection in the East End. Some women are carrying knives. The local shopkeepers complain officially to the government that people are staying away, especially cause in mid October, there's one of London Victorian London's perennial fogs. Pea super. A pea super. A regular pea super descends. And they actually petition the Home Secretary and they say basically the government, you know, you've lost control of law and order in East London. Clearly respectable people are not going shopping and we're losing our livelihoods. And in the meantime, there are loads of mad theories about the killer. You know, there are sort of letters to the Times from old India hands and things saying, you know, we recognize this, this is a lascar at work.

[Tom Holland]

I mean, that, that is, that is what it would be in a Sherlock Holmes story. That idea that the kind of opium crazed foreigners who've landed on a ship, that kind of. It's exactly what you get in a Victorian crime thriller.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

It's the sort of the Empire coming home. Right, Or Wilkie Collins or something. There's a diamond involved, almost certainly.

[Tom Holland]

Yeah.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

But a lot of people I know we've got lots of American listeners and they'll be pleased to hear that a lot of people assume it must be an American because they know that Americans get up to extreme behavior. But also there's been rumours that a man in a soft felt American hat was talking to Elizabeth Stride. And there's even suspicion that may have been done by cowboys, isn't there?

[Tom Holland]

Well, I mean, this is actually, I think, a kind of very interesting angle on the panic because it's not just cowboys, but also Indians are much on the public mind because the previous year was when Buffalo Bill had come with his Wild west show to coincide with Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee. And it's really notable when you look at the press coverage, how regularly comparisons are made with the mutilations and murders in the East End, with the supposed mutilations inflicted by Native Americans. So we actually read one, didn't we, a piece from the Evening Standard that compared the mutilations to those done by a Pawnee Indian and WT Steady. So the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, in the wake of Annie Chapman's murder, he had pointed out that a Londoner is quite as capable of bathing his hands in blood as any Sioux who ever scalped a foe. And of course, Sitting Bull had been part of Buffalo Bill's Wild west show. So I just feel it's clearly part of the kind of the climate of the times that journalists are instinctively reaching for those kind of comparisons.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah, and I think there's a case that the Ripper story almost immediately becomes absorbed into the kind of popular culture of London in 1888, doesn't it? And it becomes it becomes sort of confused with lots of other different things. And actually, people immediately rush to make money from it. I mean, people are, you know, selling, you know, special editions of the newspapers. And there are some tremendously tasteful ballads, aren't there? Would you like to. Are you going to sing this ballad or would you like to read it?

[Tom Holland]

I mean, I think it's interesting because actually, Catherine Eddowes and Thomas Conway had spent much of their time hawking exactly these kind of ballads. So they would go to places, say, where people were being hanged and compose these kind of songs and sell them. And now songs are being composed about the murder of Kate Eddowes and the other victims. So this is an example. In famous London city in 1888, four beastly, cruel murders have been done. Some say it was Old Nick himself, or else a Russian Jew. Some say it was a cannibal from the Isle of Kickaboo. Some say it must be Bashy Bazooks. Or else it's the Chinese come over to Whitechapel to commit such crimes as these.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Something slightly Gilbert and Sullivan about music hall, about that, isn't there?

[Tom Holland]

It's certainly not Tennyson, but it's also that the blame is being put on foreigners. Again, there's this idea that no Englishman.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Could possibly do this, right? And there's that. I mean, you can completely see how that's part of the same world as Sherlock Holmes, because in Sherlock Holmes, it would be Bashy Bazooks or the Chinese or something, wouldn't it? So any people are cashing in, they're opening the houses to sightseers. So even that. That socialist club where Elizabeth Stride's body was found, they're making money out of it by charging tourists.

[Tom Holland]

Socialists.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah, that's a. That's a lesson for you, Theo. Now, that makes it sound as though people didn't care, but they absolutely did care. And the whole business was a spur, particularly to political radicals. So loads of letters in the newspapers saying, you know, this is a reminder that it's a disgrace that the East End is like this. We should clean up the streets. We should do something for the poor. We shouldn't have an underclass in the heart of the imperial city. You know, people feel guilty about it.

[Tom Holland]

And again, that's part of the kind of imperial dimension to it, isn't it, that people in London, the capital of the world's greatest empire, justify their empire in terms of a kind of civilizing mission. The idea that other parts of the world are savage compared, say, to Britain. But what these Murders show is that savagery lurks in the streets of the imperial capital as well.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

And I know we'll talk about this in the next episode when you're going to be talking about Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and so on, but it's really striking to me, reading a lot of the newspaper commentary, how often people would say things like, you know, that there are people walking around in the East End whose eyes have been opened to the horror that has been lurking among us all this time, that there is something deeply buried in us that has now come out. You know, that people didn't just say it's a foreign menace. There's a lot of commentary that says this is something that has almost been bubbling away in the sewers of our. Of our souls all this time.

[Tom Holland]

I mean, I think it works in two dimensions. There's the. The imperial dimension, the idea that the savagery that is conventionally identified with primitive peoples in distant climes is a part of the savagery of the imperial capital. But it's also this idea that there is a darkness, a murderousness, a savagery lurking in the soul, perhaps of even the most outwardly respectable figure walking the streets, say, of the West End. And yeah, we will be coming to this in our next episode.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

That's a huge part of the Ripper mystique, isn't it? As it were. So to go back to the investigation, there are lots of calls in the press for a publicly funded bounty or reward. Now, as we described last time, the Home Office hate the thought of rewards because they say a reward is basically invitation to hoaxers. And there's a big disagreement between the Home Secretary, Henry Matthews, and the Commissioner of the Met, Sir Charles Warren, about this. Their relations are terrible already, pretty much, and they're bickering furiously basically by early November for unrelated reasons. But this is definitely a factor.

[Tom Holland]

It's compounded, isn't it?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah, it's compounded. Sir Charles Warren has decided to resign. So the head of the Met is going to step down now. Meanwhile, the incoming head of the guy who's going to be running CID Criminal Investigation Department, Dr. Robert Anderson, has been away on holiday.

[Tom Holland]

Oh, in Switzerland.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

And the newspapers notice this and they start to get very outraged. At the Pall Mall Gazette says that Dr. Anderson, the chief official responsible for the detection of the murderer, is as invisible to Londoners as the murderer himself. Dr. Anderson is taking a pleasant holiday in Switzerland. I mean, newspapers don't change, right? And Dr. Anderson then returns with an absolutely mad idea. He says we should Arrest every prostitute in London or tell them that the police will not protect them. And everyone says, oh, this is mad. First of all, the police's own estimates, and don't forget the definition of prostitution is incredibly vague. They reckon at least a thousand, 1,200 women would fall under this category and would end up being arrested. They had got nowhere to put them. And secondly, people point out to Anderson, they say, you know, these women are soliciting in order to pay for their lodging. They have literally nowhere to go. If we stop them plying their trade, they will just be lying in the streets, what are we going to do? So they ditch that idea. They do launch a house to house search and actually this is interesting because, you know, you might assume that everybody in the East End hates the police.

[Tom Holland]

Well, I think they do, don't they? In Spitalfields there's all this stuff that you can only go in as a policeman in pairs. But obviously times change and now, yes, the police are your allies in the hunting out the killer.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

So to do this search, right, this house to house search, the police have to ask the permission of every single householder and almost everybody grants permission. There's virtually no resistance at all. The press are really surprised by this and struck by it that the, you know, the East End welcomes the police, says, come on, yes, have do the search. So they do the search, they don't find anything. There's also another Sherlock Holmes parallel, actually an experiment with bloodhounds which does not work out well, does it? No. So in the Sign of the Four, where it's a very good example of the crimes in that Sherlock Holmes story have been committed by. It's the violence of the Empire coming back home, there's a bloodhound called Toby who's the most brilliant bloodhound in London and Holmes and Watson follow him across town in search of whatever the guy is called. Jonathan Small, is it, who's the killer? Or certainly involved with the killer, I can't remember. Anyway, the press have been pestering the Home Office, use bloodhounds and eventually they get two dogs called Barnaby and Burgo and they do experiments in Regent's park and Hyde Park. But comically, this doesn't happen in Sherlock Holmes. There's a massive disagreement and falling out about who's going to pay for the dog's insurance. So eventually the dog breeder loses patience with the police and he takes them to a dog show instead. And so the police lose the cooperation of Barnaby and Burgo. But as Sir Charles Warren said, this is a mad experiment, because we don't have any. We don't have the killer's blood or any of his clothes or anything like that. So what are they supposed to be tracing?

[Tom Holland]

Yeah, I mean, Warren's got his finger on the pulse there.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Well, I've got an even better wheeze for you. So there are no police women in the Met, so they can't entrap the Ripper. They can't send police women out to kind of lure him.

[Tom Holland]

Do they, however, have any young lads who could plausibly pass?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Well, so the press have been pestering the Met and saying, could you not, you know, send out people dressed as women to lure him? And the Mets point out, they say all our recruits by law, have to be more than 5 foot 7. So at an age when people are slightly shorter than they are today, they. They will stand out, be very conspicuously not women. But one bloke did try this. He was Detective Sergeant Robinson of G Division, and he went and sort of. He dressed up and he stood around. He was accosted by some cab washers, so people washing down, you know, hackney carriages.

[Tom Holland]

Was this because they felt that he wasn't really plausible?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

I don't know. They basically saw this bloke, one of them shouted at him. Now, this is some form of slang that I don't really understand, but they shouted at him, you're cats and dogs, aren't you? And then they stabbed him in the face.

[Tom Holland]

Oh, my God.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

So it was quite a big altercation. He had to be rescued by other policemen. So that's a lesson to you, Tom, if you go on one of your walks in the East End, be careful how you dress, because I don't want you to be accused of being cats and dogs and stabbed in the face. Anyway, the various police wheezes don't really work and not surprisingly, you start to get genuine vigilantes. So last time we mentioned the Mile End Vigilance Committee, which was dominated by local Jewish tradesmen, and they would meet at the Crown Pub on Mile End Road and they would organise patrol. They would get unemployed locals to do patrol and they would give them a little bit of money and they'd give them a whistle, a stout stick and some galoshes. I don't know why particularly they'd give them these galoshes, but basically, this doesn't act. You know, there are two different schools of thought on this. Number one is the police didn't really like these vigilante patrols, for obvious reasons, and it also made their Job more difficult because now there are lots of strange men kind of lurking around the streets with galoshes and upsetting the locals and stuff. But there is an argument there is now a delay of six weeks before the Ripper strikes again. And this may be because the patrols are a bit of a deterrent. There are a lot more people out on the streets, like with stout sticks and galoshes. And this may explain why the next crime happens indoors rather than outside because of all these patrols. So meanwhile, the press are getting more and more critical of the police. So they call them rotten, they say they're incompetent. Even the Conservative papers, so the Daily Telegraph, it mentioned a few times, it slams what it calls the notorious and shameful shortcomings of the detective department, or rather of the botched up makeshift which does duty for a detective department. Scotland Yard, they call the TORY Home Secretary, Mr. Matthews, they call him a helpless, heedless, useless figure, which I think is actually a little bit harsh. The police are doing all they can. They're trying lots of different things, but this is a really, really hard crime to solve. And now we come back to this issue of the Ripper taunting the police. We already mentioned the Dear Boss letter, you know, the letter in which he had said he would cut a victim's if he, if this is the Ripper, which we actually don't think it is, that he would cut the victim's ears off and then of course he doesn't do it. But then on Monday 1st October, the Central News Agency got a second message. And this was a blood stained postcard with a London east postmark dated 1 October. So it could have been posted after the Catherine Eddowes murder made the newspapers. In other words, the person, it could be a hoaxer who's read about the murder. And most handwriting experts think it's written by the same person who had written the previous Dear Boss letter. Tom, do you want to give us the, in your excellent Australian accent, the text of this postcard.

[Tom Holland]

I wasn't coding Dear old boss when I gave you the tip. You'll hear about Saucy Jack's work tomorrow. Double event this time. Number one squealed a bit, couldn't finish straight off, did not. Time to get ears off for police. Thanks for keeping last letter back till I got to work again. Jack the Ripper.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

So copies of this were published on posters outside every police station and then they were published in the newspapers on the 4th of October because the police were desperate to basically, you know, say, do you know this man. The general consensus, I think, is that these are not real. Neither this or the Dear Boss, to repeat, there are no spelling mistakes at all, although the punctuation is very. All over the shop. There are capital letters, as there should be. There are full stops, however, as there should be. And it feels a little bit like somebody is trying to pretend to be less educated than he is.

[Tom Holland]

It's also somebody who can come up with the brilliant name of Jack the Ripper.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Jack the Ripper, exactly. Almost certainly, I think a young reporter or somebody like that who's covering the case. And the result of the police publicizing this is a flood of hoax letters. They are deluged with false leads. And it reminds me very much of what happened in the 1970s with the Yorkshire Ripper case, when there was the. The police publicized the work of another hoaxer who was called Weirside Jack. And then they were absolutely deluged with false information and it made almost impossible for them to sift through it all. So that's the postcard. And then just over two weeks later, comes the most infamous letter of all. So this was addressed to the new chairman of the Mile End Vigilance Committee, the kind of vigilante group, Mr. George Lusk. And it arrived at his house in Mile End on the evening of Tuesday 16th October. So he gets a small parcel wrapped in brown paper with a letter, and he opens the box and it contains what is clearly half a kidney, a human kidney. And the letter. Do you want to give us the letter? Yeah.

[Tom Holland]

It has the most chilling opening, doesn't it? Which has often been rehearsed from hell. And it's Mr. Lust, sir, I sent you half the kidney I took from one woman, preserved it for you. Tell the peace I fried and ate. It was very nice. I may send you the bloody knife that took it out if you only wait a while longer. Signed, catch me when you can, Mr. Lusk.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

The bit at the beginning. From hell. Very famous because that inspires the enormous graphic novel by Alan Moore, which we might talk about in our final episode. For those people who you can't tell from Tom's reading, a lot of that is misspelt, isn't it? So presarved or saw.

[Tom Holland]

Yeah, kind of faintly Irish, perhaps?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yes, exactly. Which we will come to. Lusk took the kidney to a pathologist who examined it with a microscope and said he thought it was human. There are some claims, you see them often repeated in Ripper books, that he identified it as the kidney of a 45 year old woman who was a heavy drinker. But actually the pathologist said that was completely invented and made up by the newspapers. The city police surgeon agreed it was a human kidney, but there's no evidence that it came from Catherine Eddowes. It could have come from any recent autopsy and it could have been sent in by medical students. For example, the handwriting analysis of this letter is that this is not somebody disguising their writing. There are lots of mistakes and it is very clearly written quickly and smoothly, you know, not by somebody painstakingly trying to disguise their hand. But it's clearly not the same person as the Dear Boss person. Yeah.

[Tom Holland]

And also the postcard. So those two Jack the Ripper messages.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

And Tom, as you said, the spelling looks like it could be Irish. So presarved, for example, which is a more kind of Irish formula, apparently. Sor. Sor, exactly. Writing S O R SOR So there are people who think there is a link to, as we will come to in the final episode, an Irish American suspect, Dr. Tumblety, who is a very, very peculiar person in the. Indeed. It's harder to dismiss this, I think, than the other letters. We don't know who the kidney is. You know, could this be a letter from the Ripper? We just don't know. Now, the police, as we've said, are deluged with. I mean, these are not the only hoax letters they get. They're the most famous ones. But there are others. If you read the memoirs of the policemen or interviews with them, they basically say, we were totally overwhelmed. So Chief Inspector Donald Swanson, who was leading the investigation at Scotland Yard, he said that on just the Elizabeth Stride murder alone, his men detained 80 different people. They followed up leads on more than 300 other people and they had 994 different files open at once. Inspector Abberline, who's in charge of the investigation in Whitechapel, remembered later that his team had 1,600 different files and he himself was patrolling the streets to set an example to his men. Very Nelsonian, till 4 o' clock in the morning. Then he'd often come home and then he'd immediately get a telegram saying, come back to Whitechapel, we've got a new suspect. So they are exhausted and they are getting nowhere near finding the killer.

[Tom Holland]

And what all these letters suggest is that Jack the Ripper is already becoming a literary figure. Yes, there are people who are writing words for him or writing, composing actions for him that are filling in the gaps. And this of course, is something that will be repeated decade after decade after decade.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

So we come towards the end of October. The police have really got no clues at all. Robert Anderson writes a report saying that CID has not got the slightest clue of any kind. And on the 24th of October, Sir Charles Warren reports to the Home Office. He says despite numerous and searching inquiries, they've produced no tangible result. The vigilante patrols are starting to dry up now because the weeks have passed and the Ripper is not killed again. The Mile End Vigilance Committee runs out of money and has to appeal for public subscriptions. One of the constables on the case, a guy called Walter Dew, notes in his memoirs many years later. He says, at this point, the prostitutes of the East End, who had previously sort of vanished from the streets, start to come back. And when he passes them, they will sometimes shout out to him jovially, I'm the next for Jack, you know. They're making light of it now, yeah.

[Tom Holland]

Making a joke to cheer themselves up.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Now, one of the women he sees calls herself Mary Jane Kelly. We know that she used to read about the killings because she used to ask her partner, who's a guy called Joe Barnett, who lives with her in a little kind of court called Miller's Court off Dorset street, and he would read her stories about them. But it didn't deter her from going out on the streets, because PC Dew, as he then was, says, often I had seen her parading along Commercial street, between Flower and Dean street and Aldgate, or along Whitechapel Road. She was usually in the company of two or three of her kind, fairly neatly dressed and invariably wearing a clean white apron. But no hat. No hat. Not respectable. So we come to the morning of the 9th of November. It's the day of the Lord Mayor's show, and like a lot of people, Mary Jane Kelly has been looking forward to it. Now, that morning, her landlord, who is a shopkeeper called John McCarthy, has been checking his books. He notices that she is 29 shillings behind with the rent, and he sends his young assistant, Thomas Bowyer, to see if she has some of the money. And at 10:45, Bowyer Gosney knocks on the door of 13 Millers Court and there's no answer. And he knocks again and there's still no answer. He goes round the corner where there's a broken window and he pulls aside the curtain. And when he pulls aside the curtain, he reels backwards. In absolute shock and horror, he goes and gets his boss. They end up going to the police station and they fetch two officers, Inspector Walter Beck and this guy Walter Dew I've already mentioned. And Beck, the inspector peers through the window first, and then he staggers back, we're told, his face as white as a sheet. And he says, for God's sake, Jude, don't look. But Jude cannot stop himself. He puts his face to the window. And then he says, when my eyes had become accustomed to the dim light, I saw a sight which I shall never forget to my dying day.

[Tom Holland]

So next time we will reveal what he saw through the window of 13 Millers Court. We will tell the story of Mary Jane Kelly and her terrible fate. And we'll also be looking at the cultural hinterland of the Ripper murders. We'll be looking at Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. We'll be looking at Sherlock Holmes. And we will be asking how it was that Jack the Ripper came to be enshrined as history's first serial killer. And then our final episode, our fifth episode in the series, we will be examining the various suspects and for the first time ever, unveiling the definitive killer. And if you're not a member of the Rest Is History Club and you would like to hear them, then you can sign [e-mail] but for now, goodbye.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Bye. Bye.

[Walton Goggins]

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[Tom Holland]

Hey, Ryan Reynolds here wishing you a very happy half off holiday because right now Mint Mobile is offering you the gift of 50% off unlimited. To be clear, that's half price, not half the service. Mint is still premium unlimited wireless for a great price.

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[Tom Holland]

Yeah. Give it a [e-mail] Switch upfront payment.

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[Hannah Fry]

Hello, I'm Professor Hannah Fry.

[Tom Holland]

And I'm Michael Stevens, creator of Vsauce. We thought we would join you for.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

A moment completely uninvited.

[Hannah Fry]

We are not going to stay too long. Unless you want us to. Of course.

[Tom Holland]

We're here to tell you about our brand new show. The rest is science.

[Hannah Fry]

Every episode is going to start with something that feels initially familiar, and then we're going to unpick it and tear it apart until you no longer recognize it at all. You know our banana flavor doesn't taste like bananas.

[Tom Holland]

Yeah, what is that about?

[Hannah Fry]

So it is supposed to taste like an old species of banana that was wiped out in a bananapocalypse, and now you will only find it in botanical collections in the gardens of billionaires.

[Sponsor Voice]

Wow.

[Tom Holland]

Banana candy is actually the ghost of.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

A long extinct banana.

[Hannah Fry]

So if you like scratching the surface.

[Tom Holland]

Thinking a little bit deeper or weirder.

[Hannah Fry]

Yes, definitely.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

That too.

[Hannah Fry]

You can join Michael and I every Tuesday and Thursday wherever you get your podcasts.