627. Jack The Ripper: From Hell (Part 4)

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Some of the reported clues must be received with caution. No end of stories are rife in the neighborhood, told with an air of circumstantiality which on examination proves to be utterly baseless.

Almost the sole testimony which seems to have any bearing on the affair is that given by a young woman named Pannier who sells roasted chestnuts at the corner of Widegate Street, a narrow thoroughfare about two minutes walk from the crime.

Mrs. Pannier is reported to have stated that shortly after noon yesterday, a man dressed like a gentleman said to her, I suppose you've heard about the murder in Dorset Street?

And when she replied that she was aware of it, he said, I know more about it than you.

He then proceeded down Sandy's Row, a narrow thoroughfare which cuts across Widegate Street, looking back as if to see whether he was watched. Mrs.

Pannier described this person as a man about five foot six inches high, with a black moustache and wearing a black silk hat, dark coat, and speckled trousers.

He carried a black shiny bag, about eighteen inches long and a foot deep.

It will be remembered that this description agrees fairly well with a personage previously described, and that the black bag has more than once figured in the evidence given.

So that was the Daily Telegraph on the tenth of november, eighteen eighty eight.

It was following up its reports on a hideous discovery made the day before in Miller's Court, which was a small paved yard off Dorset Street in Spitalfields.

Now we finished our previous episode in Miller's Court, number 13, with a terrible discovery.

But just before we get into that discovery, let's talk a bit about Miller's Court and Dorset Street, Tom, because Dorset Street was notorious, wasn't it, as probably the worst street in London.

Yes, that is its reputation. And Miller's Court was one of a number of yards that kind of stretched off Dorset Street that had helped to give it that reputation.

And since the layout of Millers Court is quite important to understanding

the episodes that we're going to be describing in the next 20 or so minutes, let's give a description of it.

So Miller's Court is accessed by a narrow covered alley that leads off Dorset Street into what had once been a garden, but has since been lined on either side of the walls of the garden with dilapidated two-storey buildings.

So is very claustrophobic, it's very airless and even by day it is shrouded in a kind of stygian gloom.

There are three privies that are set against the back wall so you probably don't want to be caught short in the middle of the night.

There is also a single gas lamp. next to where the covered passageway from Dorset Street joins the yard.

So if you come out from that covered passageway by night, it will be dark, but you will step out into a kind of flickering light from the gas lamp.

And that means that anyone who is emerging from the passageway, you know, people who are looking out from one of the windows, you know, the upper windows

around the garden, they would be able to see whoever was stepping out of the passageway. If that person has stepped out of the passageway and he then turns sharp right,

he will then be confronted by a locked door.

And this door in turn leads into number 13 Miller's Court and it is a converted parlour so just a single room and it's 10 feet by 12 feet so not large at all. It's very sparsely furnished.

There's a bed, there's a table, there's a chair, there's a washstand, there's a cupboard,

there is also a fireplace and hung over the fireplace there is a cheap print, The Fisherman's Widow. Now the person renting this room is a young woman, probably around 25 years old.

And Dominic, you introduced us to her at the end of the last episode. She is called Mary Jane Kelly, and she owes her landlord 29 shillings, which is equivalent to six weeks' rent.
So she owes a lot.

She's badly in arrears.

And we heard in our previous episode how on the morning of the 9th of November 1888, her her landlord, a shopkeeper called John McCarthy, whose shop directly abuts the passageway that leads into Miller's Court.

So his shop is looking out onto Dorset Street and then the side wall is part of what forms the passageway that leads into Miller's Court.

He's decided that, you know, six weeks back rent, he needs the money. It's time that she coughed up.

And as you mentioned again in the previous episode, it's the day of the Lord's Mayor's show, and McCarthy is clearly anxious that Mary Jane might be going off to see the show.

She talked about how she was looking forward to it and he wants to get the money out of her before she can go off and spend it on all the kind of festivities.

But obviously Mary Jane is never going to get to the Lord Mayor's show

and in fact a shadow is going to be cast over the Lord Mayor's show.

This day will not be remembered for the Lord Mayor parading through the streets of the city of London. It will be remembered for unspeakable scene of horror.

John McCarthy, the shopkeeper, had sent his young assistant Thomas Boyer to knock on Mary Jane's locked door and as you described in the previous episode he had seen something horrific

and by the late morning this is bringing police personnel crowding into Miller's Court.

So they're coming into Dorset Street, they're crowding down that narrow alleyway and they're filling this kind of squalid, cramped space. They're joined by the local police surgeon, Dr.

Phillips, the Bagster, who we've been meeting periodically

throughout this series. He has got there by 11.15 and 15 minutes later he is joined by Inspector Abilene.

Now the door is locked and you might think that there was a certain degree of urgency about breaking into the room. However

Phillips advises Abilene to wait for the bloodhounds to arrive. Dominic, you were talking about the bloodhounds.
Barnaby and Burgo or whatever they're called. Yeah.
Yeah.

And he's saying, well, you know, we don't want to go in and have human contact disturb it. The dogs will be able to track down the killer if we leave it shut.
And so Abilene does as advised.

But as you said, this plan for using the bloodhounds has kind of fallen through and their owner has decided to take them to a dog show instead.

So the bloodhounds never turn up. And finally, by half past one in the afternoon, Abilene has had enough of waiting.
And so he orders the door to be forced.

And John McCarthy, he gets a pickaxe and he smashes the door in. Now, what do they find inside?

They find that Mary Jane's clothes are neatly folded on the chair. In the fireplace, there are the remains still of a fire that had clearly been so hot.

that it had burnt off the handle and spout of a tin kettle that had been placed next to the fireplace.

And lying on the bed is a body

so hideously, so grotesquely mutilated that Dr. Phillips, when he spoke at the subsequent inquest, opted to suppress the full horror of the details.

And it's only in 1987 that a set of notes came to light that had been compiled by a second doctor, Thomas Bond, who also attended the murder scene that morning.

He'd arrived shortly after

the door had been forced. And he was very experienced in conducting post-mortems and he recorded details in very kind of spare clinical prose.

And I will read from it now, but we've been issuing the warnings throughout this series that the details of the mutilations are horrific.

And one of the things that people who've listened to them may have noticed is that the mutilations become more and more hideous as each murder is committed.

And this is the culminating display of horror. There's clearly a sense that Mary Jane has been the victim of a kind of frenzied series of mutilations.

So with that warning, I will give you the details. The whole of the surface of the abdomen and thighs was removed and the abdominal cavity emptied of its viscera.

The breasts were cut off, the arms mutilated by several jagged wounds, and the face hacked beyond recognition of the features, and the tissues of the neck were severed all round, down to the bone.

The uterus, the kidneys, one of the dismembered breasts had been placed under the head.

Then, to quote Bond again, the other breast by the right foot, liver between the feet, the intestines by the right side and the spleen by the left side of the body.

Blood, unsurprisingly, had soaked into the bedlinen and into the mattress, and there was a still wet pool of blood that had spilled onto the floor.

The heart had clearly been cut out and was nowhere to be found.

And again, to quote Bond, the wall by the right side of the bed and in a line with the neck was marked by blood which had struck it in a number of separate splashes.

So Mary Jane Kelly is the first of the Ripper's victims to be murdered not out in the streets or in a yard or something, but in a in a secluded private room. And that's what's allowed the Ripper to

take his time. Yes, take his time and to

indulge himself, I suppose, by going to the absolute extreme.

An extreme such that when the guy we mentioned last time, Joseph Barnett, a guy who's basically been Mary Jane Kelly's companion, who's been living with her, and had lived with her until 10 days before the murder, when he was brought to identify her, she's no longer a

a recognisable human being. It's a butcher's shambles.
Yeah. He can identify by the hair and by the eyes, but nothing else.
Yeah, that's all that is left that enables him to identify her.

So we should put not just a face but a life to Mary Jane Kelly. Who was she?

You've said how um her murder is kind of different to other ones because it's the only one that takes place in a private room. Yeah.

She's also significantly different to previous victims in that she is much younger. So we've said she's twenty-five.
Um she's also reputedly very pretty.

And we have no way of knowing because when you look at the photograph, you know, there's no trace of a human face there, really. You know, as we said,

the ripper had spared her eyes and had spared her hair. And these were the two physical attributes for which Mary Jane was particularly noted.

So someone described her as having blue eyes and a very fine head of hair, which reached nearly to her waist. Now, what colour was her hair? Some said it was blonde, others said it was chestnut.

One of her nicknames was Black Mary. Another was Ginger.

And it may seem odd to be speculating about the colour of her hair, but I do so because the confusion is typical of almost everything that we know about her life.

Well, we know nothing effectively, do we? I mean, we know very, very little. It's just a sort of hall of mirrors.
So we don't even know.

I mean, it's often said that she was Irish, but we don't even know that she was. She might have been Welsh, right? So she claimed to have come from Ireland.
She claimed to have come from Wales.

The story that she most regularly said was that her parents were Irish but had moved to Wales when she was very young. But it's striking that she had neither an Irish nor a Welsh accent.

And so it's possible that perhaps she had elocution lessons

or perhaps she was never Irish or Welsh in the first place.

And in fact, we can't even be sure that Mary Jane Kelly was her real name because it's exactly the kind of name that someone pretending to be Irish would come up with. Exactly.

And to quote Hallie Rubenhold in whose book The Five, you know, she gives very detailed accounts of the lives of the other victims, all of them expertly sourced, kind of drawing on all kinds of written material.

But she says of Mary Jane Kelly, not a single statement made by her about her life prior to her arrival in London has ever been verified. You know, people have crawled over the records.

They've never found anything. So we don't know, for example, what class she's from, what her social status is, do we?

Because Joseph Barnett would read her stories about the Rippers' crimes, which suggests that she's illiterate. But other people who knew her said,

and I quote, an excellent scholar and an artist of no mean degree. Yeah.
So are people making stuff up or is she

herself not telling people the truth about her life? So, for example, she says, doesn't she, that her father had been a Welsh steelworks foreman. She says she's got a brother in the Scots Guards.

But there's no evidence that either of those things are true at all. And she wouldn't be the only person.

Elizabeth Stride made up stories about herself as well. I mean, it's not an uncommon thing to do if you've fallen down to the bottom that you take refuge in fantasies.

Yeah, but there are kind of substantiating records in Sweden that enable researchers to work out what her early years might have been like. We don't have those

with Mary Jane. For instance, Mary Jane claims that she had married.
Again, there's no record of this whatsoever.

As for her career, so those who knew her were agreed, and again, this is a point of difference between her and the previous victims. She was what the police termed a common prostitute, i.e.

someone who self-identified as such, whose career had always involved prostitution.

The early stories that she tells of her life as a prostitute in London are actually quite reminiscent of Emma Hamilton.

There's a kind of the quality of the country girl who comes to London and leads the high life effectively by being a courtesan for very wealthy men.

Like Zola's character Nana, which a lot of people would have been familiar with at the time. Yes, or Skittles,

with her very tight riding habit.

And so Mary Jane tells stories about how she had made a great success for herself in a very, very upmarket brothel in Knightsbridge, which is one of the kind of the classiest areas of the West End, that she had had beautiful dresses, that she'd ridden around in a carriage, that she'd eaten oysters in fashionable restaurants, all this kind of thing.

In her own words, she had led the life of a lady.

And perhaps a marker of that is that Mary Jane, she seems to have decided, wasn't good enough for her. And so she starts referring to herself as Marie Jeannette.

And the hint of the French is telling, because she also told a story about how she had been taken to Paris by, quote unquote, a gentleman, but she had only stayed there, she said, a fortnight and then returned to London.

But when she comes back to London, she doesn't go back to the West End. She doesn't go back to her life of carriages and beautiful dresses and oysters.
She goes to the East End. And that's puzzling.

What had changed in those two weeks? And the stories that she tells are kind of full of melodrama.

She strongly implies that she's in the East End because she's hiding from people who are out to get her, but who?

She launches an abortive attempt to liberate a chest full of dresses that she says is in a house in Knightsbridge, but nothing really comes of it.

And she also says that a man has appeared near to where she's living, claiming to be her father, but wasn't hunting her down. There's no real evidence.

for any of this beyond what she herself is reporting. Well, I made the comparison with Zola's novel Nana about a courtesan in Paris, and this does all feel too literary doesn't it? A little bit.

It feels like the kind of story that you would make up about kind of you know mysterious gentlemen kind of rakes taking you to Paris.

The newspapers in the 1880s are full of stories about so-called white slavery, you know, girls who've been kidnapped and used as sex slaves.

I think that she's making this stuff up because it's a good story. It makes her feel important.
It makes her customers feel that she is important.

You know, it's better than the truth, which is that... She's a nobody.
Yeah. I mean, it makes her seem glamorous.
And of course, she is selling herself.

And if you can make yourself seem glamorous, then, you know, you're likely to create a market for yourself. But obviously, Miller's court, which he'd moved into by March 1888, I mean,

it is the opposite of glamorous. But I think she moves in there.

and into Whitechapel more generally because by this point she's found herself a steady partner and seems to to have given up on the prostitution. She's stopped the soliciting.

And this partner, we've already mentioned him, he's Joseph Barnett. This is the guy who will identify her in due course by her eyes and her hair.
And he was a porter at Billingsgate Fish Market.

And like Mary Jane, he had blue eyes and he was of Irish extraction, if Mary Jane really was of Irish extraction.

And Barnett was very, very keen on her, very fond of her, and clearly wanted to make a go of things. He treated her as his wife.

That's why she gives up soliciting. They're essentially living as a married couple.

But by the autumn of 1888, their relationship is getting slightly rocky.

In July, Barnett had lost his job in the fish market, and he gets kind of occasional work as a labourer, but not a regular income. And so there's a need to pay the rent.

And so Mary Jane returns to soliciting on the streets. And adding to the strain that I think this obviously places on their relationship is the fact that she is famously warm-hearted.

She's terribly popular among her fellow workers on the street. And I think more generally, very kind-hearted.

And she's always inviting fellow prostitutes if it's cold or wet or whatever to come back and share the room. Barnett's not terribly happy about this, is he? He finds it very annoying.

And actually, he ends up moving out of Miller's court.

So not that long before the what about 10 days before the murder he's moved out they have a massive row and he kind of stalks off but he can't bear to to go too far so he finds a room very close to her and um over the the week that follows he comes back and he's clearly trying to patch things up with her he clearly wants to to get back with her And he comes back to her to see her on the evening of the 8th of November.

He does this kind of in the early evening. And a neighbour of Mary Jane's, so in Miller's court, reported later that they seemed to be on the best of terms.

And Barnett himself, when he was interviewed by the police, he said, I told her that I had no work and that I had nothing to give her, for which I was very sorry. He then left around 7.45.
Right.

And he's sorry, why? Because she needs money. Well, of course, we know she needs money because we know that she's behind on the rent by six weeks, right?

So if Barnett doesn't have the money to give her, where's she going to get the money to pay the landlord there are various kind of interpretations of mccarthy's character so hallie in uh in the five is very down on him calls him a bully um and implies that he's always trying to extort money out of him others say that he was quite fond of mary jane and i guess that you know six weeks back rent is quite a lot because all the all the other women that we've been describing almost invariably They're being turfed out of their bed because they don't have money to pay for a single night.

Yeah. Whereas Mary Jane is in her room and is there for six weeks.
So

you can see why he, you know, maybe he's running out of patience, maybe he's trying to turn the screws.

And I think that that is clearly why that evening, despite the fact that the rain is very, very torrential, Mary Jane seems to have been desperate to solicit clients.

After Joseph Bennett has gone, she clearly leaves her room and goes out into the streets and is trying to attract custom.

And we have two witnesses who would subsequently claim to have seen her with men that night.

And the first of these is a man who is seen accompanying her into her room by someone who is looking down from one of the top stories around Miller's court.

So he is lit by that gas lamp that we mentioned. And he's described as having a thick carroty moustache.
He's dressed in shabby dark clothes. He's got a dark overcoat.
He's got a black felt hat.

And he is seen just before midnight. He's going into the room with Mary Jane.
Yeah. And Mary Jane at the time was reportedly quite drunk.
She was in a mood for an Irish ballad.

And we know it. And the lyrics, I find, incredibly sad, kind of

so full of pathos. So she sang, scenes of my childhood arise before my gaze, bringing recollections of bygone happy days.
When down in the meadow in childhood, I would roam.

No one's left to cheer me now within that good old home. So whoever she was,

she'd clearly left a home behind and she had no family that she would acknowledge or who would acknowledge her or maybe even knew where she was.

So there is a kind, I find an incredible pathos about that. And what about the second witness? So the second witness is an unemployed labourer called George Hutchinson.

He had a kind of a bit of a crush on Mary Jane, didn't he? Yeah, so he'd seen her before and would periodically give her money. Yeah.
He doesn't have a job at the time. So

when he runs into

Mary Jane walking down Thrall Street around 2 a.m. and she asks him for money and he says, sorry, I'm skinned, haven't got anything, can't help.

And Hutchinson then says after this exchange that Mary Jane had had with him, he had watched her be approached by a second man.

And this is a person who's pale-faced, according to Hutchinson, and very well-dressed. He's wearing an Astrakhan coat.

And the two of them haggle.

Terms are agreed, and Hutchinson then watches the two of them disappear off Dorset Street down the dark alleyway that leads into Miller's Court. Well, he gives a very detailed description, doesn't he?

So I'll just read it. Light waistcoat, dark trousers, and a dark felt hat turned down in the middle.
Button boots and gaiters with white buttons. Wore a very thick gold chain, white linen collar.

Black tie with horseshoe pin. Respectable appearance.
Walked very sharp. Jewish appearance.
Yes, and he will then go on to give another even more detailed description of this man.

And

people may wonder,

it's dark,

they're standing in shadows, how plausible is it that he would have seen every detail? And we will come to this in due course.

But just to finish detailing Hutchinson's evidence, he said that he'd waited by the entrance of Miller's court for just under an hour and that neither Mary Jane nor her client reappeared.

If he can be trusted, they had disappeared into her room around two o'clock.

And he, again, if he's to be trusted, is the last witness to see her alive, but not perhaps the last to hear Mary Jane's voice, because there are two separate women.

And one of them is a woman called Elizabeth Prater, who is the lodger in the rooms directly above Mary Jane's room.

And the other is a laundress called Sarah Lewis, who has been made homeless and is taking refuge with a couple on the room opposite 13 Miller Court across the courtyard.

And both these women reported hearing screams of murder at around 4 a.m.

and

listeners may be wondering, well, why didn't they do something about it? And in fact, the police asked exactly this question. And Mrs.

Prater said, she told the police, I did not take much notice of the cries as I frequently hear such cries right and it is worth adding that the the autopsy with the doctors who did that the surgeons

they suggested that the likeliest time of death was around 4 a.m.

Although if that's true and George Hutchinson's story is true then that means there's been a two-hour interval between the killer going into the room and then the murder actually happening, which would be odd given that in every previous case the ripper has killed very quickly and efficiently now i can understand the ripper might want to be alone with the body to do his mutilations for hours you know what have they been doing for two hours right which is never done before before this killing right so those two suspects who are seen with mary jane on the evening of her death both of them have been identified as very strong candidates to have been the ripper But I think actually neither of them necessarily are.

I think the guy with the carotid moustache, I mean, clearly, you know, he's going in at just after midnight. Yeah.
Mary Jane is desperate for large numbers of clients.

It's perfectly possible that she did go out and maybe get this guy in the Astrakhan coat. And it's perfectly possible after that that she went out and got someone else who might be the ripper.

So it's not definitive. But

whoever

it was that ended up in that room with Mary Jane at around four o'clock in the morning, we know the upshot because we have described it in all its hideous detail.

And of course, it takes time for the examining surgeons to make sense of the horror.

And it's not until four o'clock in the afternoon that you can't really call it a body, that kind of the remains, the mangled remains of Mary Jane Kelly is removed from her room.

And by this point, a cart with a tarpaulin cover has arrived and is waiting outside the dark passageway that leads out into Dorset Street.

And by now, as is becoming commonplace with a Jack the Ripper murder, huge numbers of people are gathering outside the scene of the crime.

And they are swelled by the fact that it's the Lord Mayor's show.

And as the news of the murder has swept the crowds in the city of London, so huge numbers have left the route of the procession and started flocking into Whitechapel in a kind of state of mass hysteria.

And when Mary Jane's body is brought out by the police and laid onto the cart, the police who are keeping order in Dorset Street have to form a cordon to hold the crowds back.

And a journalist from the Times the next morning reported on this. The crowd was of the humblest class, but the demeanour of the poor people was all that could be desired.
Ragged caps were doffed.

and slatternly looking women shed tears as the shell covered with a ragged looking cloth was placed in the the van.

And then the inquests are held and ten days later, when Mary Kelly's funeral is held at Shoreditch Church,

no family member could be found to attend the funeral. So she remains a mystery.

Instead, riding in the two mourning carriages that are accompanying the hearse to the Catholic cemetery in Leightonstone are six women who had known her and these include Elizabeth Prater and Sarah Lewis, the two women who had heard the cry of murder at 4 a.m., a mourner representing John McCarthy, her landlord, and Joseph Barnett.

And it was Barnett who had insisted that she should be buried as a Catholic.

So I think clearly he believed that she was Irish, because obviously, you know, if she'd been Welsh, he would have directed her to a Methodist chapel or something. Yeah, of course.

And it's also Barnett who insists that her name on both the kind of the brass coffin plate and on her gravestone should read Marie Jeannette Kelly.

So the glamorous French sophisticated name that she would have always wanted, right? Yes. She was clearly a woman who enjoyed attention

and

she certainly gets attention at her funeral because huge crowds gather to watch the procession. and women sob and again men are doffing their caps as the open hearse passes by.

And as you suggest, Dominic,

in death, she's become what I think she had always dreamed of being, which is essentially the heroine of a melodrama, no matter how dark and terrible the melodrama has actually turned out to be. And

bystanders weep at the thought of the fate that has befallen her. And they pray to God to forgive her.

and they are, I think,

hailing her, enshrining her as a symbol of their collective defiance

of the fiend who had brought her to her terrible doom. Well, you call him a fiend, but

of course, Jack the Ripper was all too human.

And after the break, we will come back to look at what people make of the Ripper now that he has struck again and the impact that it it has on popular culture because of course this is the age of sherlock holes of dr jekyll and mr hyde and people are very much interpreting the ripper's crimes against that backdrop so we'll be digging into all this after the break this episode is brought to you by ancestry hello james holland here joined by al murray from goal hangers world war ii podcast we have ways of making you talk these are those odd days between christmas and new year the house buzzing with laughter leftovers piled high festive films murmuring in the background and trivial pursuit debates still raging round the table.

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Welcome back everybody to the Restis History. Now, two months before the murder of Mary Jane Kelly on the 8th of September, the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, W.T.

Stead, William Thomas Stead, he had written an absolutely ferocious attack on the police. And the headline was, Another murder and more to follow.

And Stead said, The triumphant success with which the Metropolitan Police have suppressed all political meetings in Trafalgar Square contrasts strangely with their absolute failure to prevent the most brutal kind of murder in Whitechapel.

And this is a question that people are asking more and more, isn't it?

Why have the police, who have been so effective at doing the government's bidding, at clearing homeless people out of Trafalgar Square on Bloody Sunday in 1887 and beating up demonstrators and whatnot, they're so good at this, but they cannot solve the murders of Polly Nichols and Annie Chapman and of course the subsequent Ripper victims.

And we're focusing on Stead, aren't we, In the Pall Mall Gazette, because this is a man whose career is at its absolute zenith at the time of the Ripper murders and he has established in many ways the context in which the Ripper murders are understood.

Yeah, so he's been kind of appearing throughout our series so far but I think it's good to kind of dive and have a closer look at him because

He has an absolute genius for campaigning journalism. He's the effective inventor of Britain's tabloid press.
And he is, I think,

in a sense, the most interesting contemporary commentator on the series of murders that are taking place. And he's been the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette since 1883.

And over the course of his term in the editor's chair, he has repeatedly impacted on government policy that in turn has had a knock-on effect on the material circumstances of the people living in Whitechapel.

So his first campaign, which he launched in 1883, it drew on a Congregationalist pamphlet titled The Bitter Cry of Outcast London.

He pushed this very, very hard to highlight the squalor and indignity and horror of London's slums.

And it played a massive role in encouraging the government to embark on the programme of slum clearance that by 1888 was kind of lapping at the borders of Spittlefields and ironically had served to make lots of people homeless, to displace people from their homes and had added to the overcrowding in Whitechapel.

So that's one way in which Stead has impacted on events in

Flarendine Street and Thrall Street and Dorset Street and so on.

Then in 1885, he'd launched his most famous campaign, which we've already briefly mentioned.

And this was a series of four articles headlined The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon and it detailed how members of the British elite were preying on young working-class girls, how these girls were, and I quote, snared, trapped, and outraged.

Instead, it was

kind of ramped up the horror of this in brilliantly melodramatic terms. So here he is.
Do the girls cry out? Of course they do. But what avails screaming in a quiet bedroom?

And his most spectacular, his most notorious stunt was literally to buy a 13-year-old girl for five pounds from her mother. Eliza Armstrong, her name was.
Yeah, a massive scandal that he did this.

And he took her, didn't he? To,

what did he take her to? I can't remember where he took her. But he didn't do anything to her, but the whole point of it was to demonstrate that it could be done.

And he actually ends up being prosecuted for it, which just kind of compounds the publicity effect of the whole campaign. And the impact of this is both immense and immediate.

And it leads directly in the same year of 1885 to the Criminal Law Amendment Act, which is a very momentous piece of legislation. So it raises the age of consent for girls from 13 to 16.

But it is also the act which led to the closure of brothels, which we mentioned in the first episode, which had seen prostitutes evicted from their rooms. and sent again out into Whitechapel.

So this again is part of what is making Whitechapel even more of a hotbed of overcrowding and vice than it had been before.

And just to add one other impact that it has, it makes gross indecency between male adults illegal. Yeah, that's the so-called laboucher amendment under which Oscar Wilde was convicted later on.

Yeah, and which I think will stay on the statute book until the 1960s. Yeah, until 1967.

So it has a huge effect on the kind of the law governing sexual crimes in Britain, but it also has a massive influence on the cultural climate. And

it whips up a sense that aristocratic predators are everywhere, stalking working-class girls.

And there's a slight, I think, in terms of the obsession with it, there's perhaps a slight hint of kind of Jeffrey Epstein.

The kind of fascination of that case for people is the fact that his clients are all seen as being members of the elite. princes and presidents and

so on.

And

it's massively amplified by reports in the Pall Mall Gazette in the years that follow of sex crimes that focus very, very precisely on

the iniquity of aristocrats and baronets and people like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

These are crimes carried out by people in top hats with kind of expensive suitcases who are whisking girls off to Paris and then outraging them. I mean, that's the formula, isn't it?

So these crimes, Stead is not interested, and the Pall Mall Gazette is not interested in crimes of abuse or exploitation that are committed by people lower down the social spectrum, particularly.

Right. So again, I mean, people are much more interested in what Prince Andrew did than, say,

groomers and predators from,

you know, in Britain who were not princes. Right.
And Stead is not interested, basically, in the grooming of working-class girls by working-class men.

And I think that had Stead come across a story of the upper class rape taking Mary Jane Kelly to Paris, he would have been all over it.

And it may be that, you know, there was an aristocrat who had groomed and trafficked her. I mean, we don't know.
Stead is reporting things that did actually happen.

But as you suggested, I think it's equally possible that Mary Jane, who's clearly very interested in newspaper reports and melodrama and stories of crime and so on, that she might have picked it up and kind of cast herself as the heroine of such a drama.

And she's clearly not the only person picking this up, right?

Because I would argue that so much of the mystique of Jack the so-called mystique, I mean, it's a terrible thing to say about somebody who committed such horrendous crimes, that so much of the mystique and the ill-gotten glamour of Jack the Ripper comes from this idea that he's a bloke in a top hat in a carriage rattling down the streets of Whitechapel through the fog, seducing these young women and then, you know, venting his awful kind of passions on them.

We're basically in W.T. Stead's mental universe, right? We are.
And, you know, we've had a couple of descriptions that exactly match that image. So there's the one with which we opened this episode.

And then, of course, the most famous is the description that Hutchinson gave, the very detailed account of the man that he'd seen talking to Mary Jane Kelly.

Oh, yeah, the Astracon coat or whatever it is. Yeah, a couple of hours before her murder.
And it's a report that is taken very seriously by students of Jack the Ripper.

So as Philip Sugden puts it, Hutchinson has been widely described by students of the case as the witness most likely to have met Jack the Ripper.

And this was certainly what Inspector Abilene seems briefly to have hoped.

Because in the report that Hutchinson gave of the man that he had seen, there was this phrase, can be identified, right at the end. And you can imagine Abilene's hopes soaring when he read that.

It is evident that Abilene had very quickly lost confidence in Hutchinson. And so people may wonder why.
So I think there are two possible theories.

So the first is given by Donald Rumbelow in his book, The Complete Jack the Ripper.

And Rumbelow wrote, Hutchinson said the suspect lived in the area and thought that he had seen him in Petticoat Lane Market, so very close to

the murder site, on a Sunday morning.

Possibly he did, and I suspect that the man was probably a street trader, somebody Hutchinson knew by sight, if not by name, and giving his description was an act of spiteful resentment or jealousy on his part at the man's sexual friendship with Kelly.

This suspect seems to have been identified and both he and Hutchinson are quickly dropped from the investigation.

So that's one possibility, isn't it, that Hutchinson is just jealous and he's pinning this on somebody, a rival.

But another is that Hutchinson has been reading the same newspapers or absorbing the same sort of pop cultural stereotypes and that basically his very very detailed too detailed you might say description of the man who could the ripper is actually drawn from melodrama, and he's basically just making stuff up.

So he is projecting onto the man that he saw talking to Mary Jane, if he saw anyone at all, his sense of what the ripper should have looked like.

And just to quote Judith Valkowitz, who wrote a wonderful book on all this called City of Dreadful Delight, which I highly recommend.

She says that Hutchinson's description carefully replicated the costume and stance of the classic stage villain, sinister, black-moustached, bejeweled and arrogant, who manipulated his privilege and wealth to despoil the vulnerable daughters of the people.

So in other words, even before the Ripper's reign of terror has ended, he's already well on his way to becoming something more than just a figure of flesh and blood.

He's becoming essentially a kind of a myth. Yeah.
And even before

the Miller's Court murder, so the murder of Mary Jane Kelly,

there are suspicions, aren't there?

There are hints in the newspaper coverage that people are already conflating the actual concrete accounts of what's been happening in Whitechapel with the stuff that they've been reading, not just in Penny Dreadfuls, but also in relatively high literature.

So Stead had written an editorial, hadn't he? Another murder and more to follow, two months before the Millers Court murder, in which he had said, This is a massive shock to us.

It's a reminder of the potential of revolting barbarity that lies latent in in men. And

we have deluded ourselves into thinking that civilization has kept the Mr. Hyde of humanity from assuming visible shape among us.

There certainly seems to be a tolerably realistic impersonification of Mr. Hyde at large in Whitechapel.
Yes. And this is an allusion.

to the great literary sensation of the 1880s, which was the strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.

Hyde by robert louis stevenson still an incredibly famous novella um it had been published two years earlier in in 1886 and it told the story of a london doctor dr henry jekyll who is outwardly you know a model of respectability but we are told he has a yearning for unnamed pleasures that fill him and i quote with an almost morbid sense of shame And so he creates a potion that transforms him into the embodiment of everything within his character that is evil and hidden away, repressed.

And this character takes the name of Mr. Edward Hyde.
And as Mr. Hyde, Jekyll is free to roam London as he pleases, indulging all his basest, cruelest instincts.
And ultimately, he commits murder.

And Jekyll finds that Mr. Hyde is starting to take him over, that he is involuntarily turning into Hyde.

So to quote the novella, the powers of Hyde seem to have grown with the sickliness of Jekyll and ultimately Jekyll is so appalled by what he's become that he kills himself and when his friends burst into his laboratory they find in the clothes of Jekyll the shrunken deformed hideous form of Hyde.

It's a massive bestseller and it's so successful that they decide to make a stage version of it.

And this appears on the West End stage in the summer of 1888 so exactly around the time that jack the ripper is starting his reign of terror the actor playing mr hyde is the kind of the theatre manager a very famous actor called richard manfield and he's so convincing in the part of mr hyde that numerous people who attend the play accuse him in letters to the police of actually being the ripper and ultimately The staging of the play comes to seem so offensive to the victims and to the terror that is sweeping the capital that it gets closed down.

and um the last performance is held to raise money for night refuges for homeless women wow so i mean it's kind of an amazing example of the way in which the great fictional archetypes of the late victorian period are directly intersecting with the horror and the drama of the jack the ripper murders so you can see why with the sort of jekyl and hyde enthusiasm of the day that lots of people might think yeah they might jump to the conclusion the whitechapel murders it's not just that they're exposing the horror at the heart of the imperial capital, a capital of world finance and trade or whatever, but they're exposing the dark passions and sadistic urges that lie within the most respectable people in Britain.

And I think there's a political context to this, which is, I mentioned a couple of times that Britain in the 1870s and 1880s is quite a troubled place. The economy barely grows at all after 1873.

And there's a sense of impending kind of class conflict. So So we've already described the Bloody Sunday thing.
You get the first socialist MP in 1888, the year of the Jack the Ripper crimes.

A guy called Robert Cunningham Graham. And actually in January 1889, a radical coalition wins control of London County Council.

So a sense of the widening gap between rich and poor, a sense of polarisation.

And against that background, obviously a lot of people are going to say, well, of course the murderer is from the upper class elite. This is what they do.

And I mean, it's really striking that towards the end of 1888, the assumption that the ripper is a toff is becoming so universal that, for instance, to quote Welcovitz, a gentleman making his way along High Hoburn in the city was pounced upon by a man of the labouring class yelling, Jack the Ripper.

Yeah, people are starting to take it for granted. And if it's not a TOF,

then people are starting to think it must be a doctor.

And if the iconic image of the Ripper, you know, has him dressed dressed in opera cloak and top hat, then it also invariably shows him carrying a black bag, which comes to be seen as being a medical bag.

And there are all kinds of reasons why people would be buying into this, which I think listeners to this series will already have picked up on.

So there's the fact that the London hospital is very close to the scenes of the murders, so there are lots of surgeons equipped with knives working there.

There's the fact that you have the mutilations and the organ organ thefts that many of the people conducting the inquests are saying displays a kind of detailed anatomical knowledge.

At Annie Chapman's inquest, Dr. Phillips had proposed that the removal of her uterus, that it's not about, you know, a mania or anything like that, that it's about someone wanting to sell the organ.

It is not necessary to assume lunacy, he said. There was a market for that missing organ.

And so you start to get all kinds of theories advancing medical men as the likelier suspect.

So in October, there's a very distinguished journalist on the daily news, Archibald Forbes, who proposed that the murderer was a medical student who'd caught syphilis and was out to revenge himself on prostitutes.

And that becomes a very, very popular theory.

And there are others who suggest that the Ripper is a vivisectionist. So there's lots of

you know, fear and anxiety about people operating on bodies and that he has been driven mad by his researches into, and I quote, the mysteries of the female sex.

And so theories like these are obviously filling the vacuum left by the failure of the police to capture the Whitechapel murderer.

And I guess you could also say, more precisely, their failure to utilize the most up-to-date tools of detection.

Because again, we've been talking about this, that, you know, there are people saying you should be using, for instance, fingerprinting, which is just coming in at this time.

and the police won't you know they won't make that part of formal investigative procedure until the early 20th century and then there are others like bloodhounds that they completely you know they make an absolute hauls of

and I think that

we've talked about how Sir Charles Warren the the head of the Met resigns and he actually resigns on on the 8th of November which is one day before the murder of of Mary Jane Kelly that even though this resignation is not directly linked to the Ripper murders, it does seem to critics of Scotland Yard to set the seal on the failure of the police.

And I think also it encourages amateur detectives to feel that they can do a much better job.

Well, the amateur detectives are clearly reflecting a climate in which people are distrustful of the police anyway for political reasons, but they also see the police as incompetent, don't they?

And there's a sort of flood of amateur detectives, would-be have-go heroes into Whitechapel.

Yeah, so there's a director of the Bank of England who disguised himself as a day laborer and kind of roamed the streets.

There are detectives who emulate the policeman who dressed up as a woman and they go around Whitechapel in drag.

The most notorious amateur detective who investigates the case is a prominent alienist, so someone who deals with mental health problems called Littleton Forbes Winslow. And he ran

private asylums and was widely seen as a kind of leading expert on mental health. And he was convinced that the Ripper was, in the technical language of the time, a lunatic.

And in fact, Winslow said that he knew who the Ripper was, but would never reveal it.

And it has to be said that Winslow and all the other amateur detectives are treated with complete contempt by the police.

They clearly see them as clowns. Yeah.

Of course, there is one amateur detective who is not seen as a clown, and this is a fictional amateur detective, the most famous amateur detective of all time,

who had made his debut in 1887 in a story called A Study in Scarlet, and that was Sherlock Holmes. And the title of that book derives from

the notion of a scarlet thread of murder. So running through the colourless scheme of life.
And our duty is to unravel it and isolate it and expose every inch of it.

And I think in saying that Holmes is speaking for the times because he is articulating a sense that crime has become susceptible to solutions that were simply undreamed of by earlier ages.

And it's really telling that part of the glamour of Sherlock Holmes, the reason that contemporary readers take him seriously as the genius that Conan Doyle is presenting him as, is because he is an enthusiast for scientific methods that are ahead of police procedure.

So fingerprints. He has an ambivalent relationship to that, but he's interested in it.
He analyses bloodstains. He famously writes a monograph on the 150 types of tobacco ash.

You know, he's interested in ballistics.

And I think that it's an absolutely enduring fantasy of fiction and films that Sherlock Holmes would have solved the Jack the Ripper case if only he'd been unleashed on it.

I think we've got about five different books in this house in which Sherlock Holmes battles Jack the Ripper or

that Sherlock Holmes perhaps is more closely associated with the Ripper's crimes as Michael Dibdin suggests in The Last Sherlock Holmes Mystery or whatever it's called.

It's a brilliant book and there is a massive twist which Tom has begged me not to give away but is pretty obvious by the way in which I'm describing it.

Well, as Holmes would put it, when you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

And that is his, you know, his most famous maxim, which appears in the sign of four, which was published in 1890, so the year after the murder of Mary Jane Kelly.

And by that time, it's starting to seem Jack the Ripper may have pulled off one final compounding stunt. by vanishing into thin air.
So this takes us back to the story.

And I guess this is, to use another Sherlock Holmes aphorism, this is the curious incident of the dog in the nighttime, right?

Because, you know, the dog does nothing in the nighttime famously, and you're waiting and waiting and waiting for the next Jack the Ripper murder. And it seems never to come.

So there are patrols all winter, and everybody is waiting. The newspapers are saying, you know, who will be next? How can it get worse after Mary Jane Kelly?

But then there's nothing. Or is there? Because there are one or two crimes, aren't there, that possibly could be the Ripper.
Yeah, so in the summer of 1889,

a 40-year-old woman called Alice Mackenzie is found in spittle fields with her throat cut and slashes to her abdomen and although dr phillips says no this isn't the ripper dr bond um who gave the description of mary jane kelly's mutilations that i read out yeah he thinks yeah it might be though i think if you look into it alice mackenzie people think might have been killed by somebody who's left-handed rather than right-handed smaller knife And the stab wounds are much shallower and they're different and the whole murder supporandi is different.

Yeah, and then there's February 1891, there's one final Ripper scare when a young woman called Frances Coles is found with her throat cut, although there are no mutilations to her body at all.

And so I think

the overwhelming balance of experts today, as it was at the time, is that neither Alice Mackenzie nor Frances Coles were victims of Jack the Ripper, which means that the murder of Mary Jane Kelly was the kind of climactic horror and then he vanishes.

That's the thing, I think, that people find so baffling because, you know, serial killers normally continue. Why does he stop? Why does it never go anywhere after this?

Well, I mean, it's fair to say that the police files, you know, they remain open. They're still open.

And of course, the ambition of people to solve the murders, to put it mildly, has never abated.

And I think that in 2025, as in 1888, Jack the Ripper is this kind of nightmarish figure of legend still kind of stalking people's fantasies and fears. But he also remains,

you know, a standing temptation to amateur detectives to play homes and finally crack the case. Yeah, and of course

we'll be doing that ourselves actually, so that will put that industry to bed because we'll be doing that in our next episode next week.

If you're a Restus History Club member, of course, you can discover who Jack the Ripper was right now.

So the notoriety, I mean, it's obviously partly because he's not caught. But then there have been lots of unsolved murders before.
Sure. It's partly because,

as with so many of these stories, the figure of Jack the Ripper becomes the embodiment of something bigger, of the anxieties about class and poverty and migration and crime in...

the great metropolis, right? The world's greatest metropolis at this point. Yeah.
And you've got the press. And the press is a huge part of this, isn't it?

He's a media creation from the very beginning.

You know, if that letter was a hoax and if it was written by a journalist, then basically Jack the Ripper as a character is invented by the media to sell newspapers.

Yeah, and I think there's one final explanation. He is the first modern serial killer.
Presumably, there must have been figures like him before, but they just weren't recognized as such.

And it's telling, I think, that even in the Sherlock Holmes stories, he's operating

in a world where crimes are readily explicable, where there are

discrete clues which you investigate and you find and you put them together and they reveal to you the motivation of the murderer and then you go and arrest the murderer. Yeah.

And this is how crime had been understood basically forever.

So all the penny dreadfuls, you know, there are women being murdered by their jealous lovers in red barns and things like that.

Or there are highwaymen who are holding people up or footpaths or whatever. You know, sexual jealousy or

greed or whatever. These are explicable motivations.
The thing that people find so frightening about Jack the Ripper is there seems no motive to the crimes. And the police struggle with this.

The press struggle with this.

The general public struggle with this. Why is Jack the Ripper doing what he is doing?

And it has to be said that

there are a few people in London, those who are abreast of the latest scientific thinking that is emerging at this time in Germany, who are aware of perhaps a possible explanation for what Jack the Ripper is doing.

And this is the fruit of a revolutionary development in the study of psychopathology, as it is called. The study of psychopaths, if you want to call it like that.
And so that brings us back to W.T.

Stead, because he is one of the people who is aware of all this, isn't he yeah and has basically said i see the ripper as being in a tradition of people going back to actually somebody we've done on the rest of his history before the marquis de sard correct and by mentioning the marquis de sard which he does in that same article where he also mentioned um the ripper as being a kind of mr hyde figure he's drawing on the work of uh one of the most distinguished representatives of this kind of new generation of pioneering psychiatrists that's emerged in germany this is a guy we talked about in relation to Oscar Wilde and the notion of homosexuality and heterosexuality.

And it's a German called Richard von Kraft Ebbing.

And Kraft Ebbing and his colleagues in Germany have begun to look at human sexuality as an expression of evolution. and to explore it as a subject of scientific study.

So rather than being something that should be judged in moral terms, you look and try and explain it in medical terms, in psychiatric terms.

And Kraft Ebbing's own specialization was what he called pathological fetishism. So essentially kind of deviancies from what he defined as the sexual norm.

And in 1886, so only two years before Jack the Ripper, he'd published a vast compendium of basically sexual deviancies, sexual morbidities, he called it. psychopathia sexualis.
And, you know,

people are very titillated by this. It becomes very, very famous, which is presumably how Stead would have come across it even before it ends up being translated into English in 1892.

And it gives to the English language all kinds of words that we today, I think, take for granted. So homosexuality is one, heterosexuality is another.

There's also bisexuality, Kraft Ebbing coins that. Necrophilia, masochism.

And psychopathia sexualis also introduces to Victorian Britain the concept of the counterpart of masochism, which is what Kraft Ebbing termed sadism.

So from the Marquis de Sard. And it was framed by Kraft Ebbing as an instinct, a sexual pathology that had always existed.

So he wrote, that lust and cruelty frequently occur together is a fact that has long been recognised and not infrequently observed.

And he defines the most sinister expression of this morbidity as being what he called lust murder and he defined it as lust potentiated as cruelty.

And it's not surprising, I think, that he ends up obsessed by Jack the Ripper. And every time he revises the Psychopathia Sexualis, he includes ever more expansive descriptions of Jack the Ripper.

And the Ripper ends up listed in the chapter on lust murder as case 17.

And Kraft Ebbing writes about him, he does not seem to have had sexual intercourse with his victims, but very likely the murderous act and subsequent mutilation of the corpse were equivalents for the sexual act.

So in other words, he's providing a motivation there.

And it may be true or not, but it is the kind of motivation that I think people in the 21st century listening to true crime podcasts or whatever would recognize as something plausible in a way that I think most people in the 1880s wouldn't.

I agree with that completely.

And I would say it seems to me as a product of the late 20th and 21st centuries extremely implausible that there is no sexual dimension, even if it's unconscious, in Jack the Ripper's crimes.

The sort of frenzy of it, and also the attention given to the sexual organs of the victims, suggests that there's something definitely going on there.

Yeah, I think that this ultimately is why Jack the Ripper is commemorated as the first serial killer in history, because it's not because he is the first person to commit kind of crimes like this.

I can't believe that. It's because it's only in the 1880s that the motivations of murderers like Jack the Ripper first come to seem explicable by science, by psychiatry, by psychopathology.

Or indeed by top historians, Tom. Or by top historians, yes.
That sets us up nicely for our final episode,

Dominic, where we will be going through all the various lists of suspects that have been proposed and we will be revealing the truth, won't we?

So, Tom, do you genuinely think you'll succeed where Inspector Abilene failed? I think I will. Wow.
Well, that is exciting. I have a top theory.

I imagine listening to this, a lot of people cannot wait to hear that episode because there's been a lot of build-up, but finally, next time, we shall be revealing the identity of the Ripper.

So, if you are a member of the Rest is History Club, you can hear it right now. If you can't wait and you'd like to join, then sign up at the RestisHistory.com.

And with Christmas on the way, you can give that same delight to the history lover in your life. You can give them a full year's membership of the Rest is History Club.

Theo tells me it's the perfect gift for any history lover, or you can always drop a few hints and ask for it yourself. And this year, it comes with an exclusive Rest is History t-shirt.

designed in collaboration with our very own Theo Young Smith, who describes himself in the copy he's written as a very stylish man. Not incorrectly, I think.

So go to therestishistory.com and click on gifts. Obviously, terms and conditions apply, but nothing too medieval, it says here.
So that's great banter.

Well, on that bombshell, we shall be back next time with the solution to a mystery that has perplexed people for more than a century. Who was Jack the Ripper? Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.

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