Pushkin. Gretta Heywood has come to London's Nightclumb district to meet her boyfriend, but as cross paths with another man, a trainee fighter pilot. He's lewd, persistent, and menacing. Are you a naughty girl? She's found herself alone with him on a side street in total darkness. This is winter nineteen forty two, in the middle of the Second World War, and London is blacked out for fear that any light will attract Hitler's bombers. The man pushes Gretta into a doorway,
pressing closely up against her and kissing her. Come on, you've got to let me make love to you. He raises her skirt. Gretta protests, but the man's hands knit around her throat. She tries to break free. You won't. Gretta struggles to release the man's grip. You won't, but his fingers only tighten around her neck, cutting off the flow of air to her lungs and blood to her brain.
You walk. You are very an art. It is a full fifty years after the Whitechapel murders gripped this city, but a killer every bit as brutal, as twisted, and as terrifying as Jack the Ripper is again stalking at streets over the course of just a few days in this chilly wartime February. He will strike night after night. His cruelty and depravity are so shocking. His victims have so brutalized that he will be dubbed the Blackout Ripper. My reaction when I read the case file was sod
the Blackout Ripper. He's an asshole. I hate him. He's arrogant, he doesn't deserved to live, and I hate to say that about anyone. Whereas the women, I fell in love with them, every single one of them. But just like Jack's victims, many thought the women who were attacked by the Blackout Ripper had it coming. They were asking for trouble. They were particularly targeted. They were seen as both deserving victims and also easy pickings. This is the most shocking
murders bury you've never heard of. So we've delved into the archives and retrieved police reports, witness statements, and photos to explain who the victims were and reconstruct what happened over that bloody wartime week. You learn about all the quirks in their life. You learn about the sadness, you learn about the joy. It makes them real and whole
and you kind of want to meet them. I'm Hallie Rubinhold, and with the help of fellow historians, I'll introduce you to those women and reveal a dark side to World War Two that's seldom taught in schools. Men had to dodge advancing bullets and women had to dodge advancing men. It was kind of pretty dark staff that's going on at its worst. The world of the Blackout Ripper may seem distant and long gone, but there are still women
alive to tell us what they went through. There was a man that there's appalling creature I had ever seen in the whole of my life, who reached out as I came in, turned round my rich right back, and luckily nobody killed me, but I might have done if I'd gone down those steps. So come back with us to the dive bars, jazz joints, and raucous nightclubs of London's West End, where young women try to forget the
falling bombs. When you add the excitement and the fear, you get a kind of hedonism where people are just desperate for entertainment, for sex, for alcohol and those sorts of things. You are a very nice girl. Are you waiting for somebody? Step into the dark with me? For Bad Women The Blackout Ripper starting October eleventh, wherever you get your podcasts,