S1 E1: The Ripper Myth

struck and then disappeared, leaving the police baffled. All that was certain was the awful severity of the wounds inflicted on the women. The poor woman's throat was cut, the inside of her body was lying beside her. She was quite ripped open. The murders were so violent that the killer earned a nickname known the world over, armed down on halls and are shap Quinn ripping them. Even today, his name ranks among the cruelest and most notorious of

serial killers, Jack the Ripper. This podcast isn't about Jack the Ripper, at least, it's not about the Jack the ripboat you've heard of. I can pretty much guarantee that up until now, everything you've been told about The Ripper, that original serial killer, that knife wielding victorian bogeyman is wrong. But don't feel bad about that. I too was none the wiser when I started researching a book about the events in Whitechapel in eighteen eighty eight. My name is

Hallie Rubinholt and I'm a historian. More specifically, I'm a historian of prostitution. In the seventeen and eighteen hundreds, I'd enjoyed some success with a book on the sex trade and Brothels of George in London. It got picked up and made into a TV series called Harlots. So I was casting around for a promising follow up project. And who were the most infamous prostitutes in all of history?

The victims of Jack the Ripper? Of course, can you tell me one fact that you know about Jack the Ripper? They never got caught. Oh God, he's rumored to be a butcher? Was I think he was like quite good at killing people? And who did he kill? Prostitutes? He killed prostitutes. Before I began my research, no author had attempted to really build out the worlds of these women to fully put their lives into context. The last movements on the days they were killed had been painstakingly researched

and rehearsed. But what about the other days and years of their lives? Who were they and how did they cross paths with a killer? Hello? Love? Yeah, you don't like a sport. As I browsed the books and films out there, I noticed that wherever the Ripper's five victims were mentioned, they were usually characterized as society's waste. Yeah so bad, I writ led as filthy, ruined, pitiful, drink sodden whores. You don't fasible pain of Dulia. I'm cutting

the price tonight. Polly Annie, Elizabeth Kate, and Mary Jane were so reduced, so simplified, that they were little more than cartoon characters. You can have it for not believe you want to. I began excavating their lives from start to finish, and what I found out amazed me. So what is the original story the cartoon version of a very real and very awful murders? Brie? Well, it goes something like this. It's August eighteen eighty eight in the vile slums of London's East End. This is a bleak

and squalid warren. Criss crossing thoroughfares are smothered by thick, noxious fog, and the streets swarm with prostitutes, thieves, and drunks. Life here is an endless grind of illness, crime and poverty. It's nighttime and prostitute Polly Nichols is out soliciting. She's been drinking and she just needs one more client to pay for her bed. That night, a gentleman approaches Crown. He's wearing a hat and a cape, a doctor perhaps.

Polly takes him to a quiet side street, which is where he attacks her over and he stabs him, and he cuts her throat, then he vanishes into the night. Over the coming months, four more prostitutes are murdered by the diabolical Whitechapel fiend. Annie Chapman is found with her throat cut, her uterus and part of her bladder excised. Elizabeth Stride and Kate Edo's are murdered on the same night. The ripper carves out and steals away Kate's left kidney

and part of her womb. Finally, in November, he claims the life of pretty Mary Jane Kelly. The youngest of the victims, and he evisceerates her. What remains of Mary Jane is unrecognizable. The city is paralyzed by fear and the police are baffled. Suspects are pursued and then dropped. A taunting letter of confession is sent to the press. The author revels in the crimes, promises more, and signs off as Jack the Ripper. The name sticks and a terrible legend is born. So much has been written about

Jack the Ripper and who he might have been. There are endless books about his crimes. I assume that there would be an agreed narrative running through that catalog, some undisputed hard evidence, like an archeologist I dug and I dug. But instead of a sturdy bedrock of written records, I just met with more sand. Police and court records were

lost or incomplete. The case records that did exist contain things that just didn't add up, and the rest of the story was filled in with reports taken from newspapers which took certain liberties with the truth. To put it mildly, so, the famous Jack the Ripper story that you just heard is built on nothing. It's propped up by hearsay and by the work of true crime enthusiasts and amateur sleuths

who all think they'll crack the case. It's true that Jack was never caught, but fantastical theories about his identity have flourished. Perhaps he was a barber, Maybe he was an abortionist or a surgeon. Perhaps he wasn't Jack at all, but Jill. At one point, Queen Victoria was even implicated. I realized that for generations we've been passing down pure myth,

and someone needed to set the record straight. While I couldn't trust much of what had been written about their killer, I did manage to uncover a wealth of material about the women themselves, and they weren't at all what I was expecting. Each woman was at one time what Victorian society would have regarded as respectable. Almost all of them had been married, All but one of them would mothers. None of them came from London's notorious East End. Each

woman's life was extraordinary and unique. They began life as the daughters and wives of carpenters, gentlemen's valets, coachmen, and soldiers. They glimpsed Queen Victoria and were neighbors of Charles Dickens. They were talented, rebellious, brave, and kind hearted. Their individual journeys threw up all kinds of intriguing questions. But to me, there was also a larger mystery to be solved here. How did these mothers, wives and daughters end up as beggars,

street walkers, addicts, and eventually as murder victims. What was to blame for their fates? That's why this series is called bad Women. The Ripper retold. I strongly disagreed that they were bad women. It wasn't their fault that they ended up poor and vulnerable in Whitechapel, or that they were targeted by a serial killer. And the more I learned about what really led to their deaths, the angrier

I got. But more of that when we return The White Trouble murders might have taken place more than one hundred and thirty years ago, but how we think about them still matters. Getting this story wrong is hurting people even today. We'll start recording Grace. First of all, I want to say, it's just so I'm so pleased that I've got you. Thank you for envirotingment. Oh, it's absolute pleasure. Oh the SNS at the door. This is Grace. Oh God, hang on, somebody's at the door. Do you want to go?

Go get the door. Don't worry. She's a graduate and works for a charity. She loves dogs. She's also a sex worker. Now I think it's next door. Don't worry. Abou sure. Sorry. We've been messaging each other on social media since she read The five, my book about the murdered women. Another sex worker recommended the book and I was like, well, I don't know anything about Jack the Riffer. I remember learning about it when I was at school and it was always the old archaic. Oh, these prostitutes

were murdered, and that's all I knew. I didn't really know anything else, so I thought, well, I probably shouldn't know because I'm a sex worker. It was quite eye opening, but also disheartening. As Grace worked her way through my research, she was struck by the lack of sympathy. The dead women were shown. These women sort of deserved it or did they expect to happen? You know, they were poor, they were prostitutes. But I'm still really shocked by these attitudes.

And I just thought, well, nothing exchanged, nothing has changed. Up until today, the idea that Jack was killing disreputable women has made it easier for us to make light of his violence and even to treat his murders as a source of entertainment, which in turn makes us more callous when women like Grace experienced violence. Today, if you continue to dehumanize the woman, and you'd continue to put them down as the prostitute, it's almost seen as acceptable

to do this because it's perfectly fine. The killer sex worker. Oh, who cares, you know, let's just glorify the murderer, because actually just sex worker, and it's all part of history, it isn't. These things persist and you're basically victim blaming us and saying it's our fault, when actually it's the opposite way around. Men are violent in society, but they choose sex workers because we are the most vulnerable, We are the most visible, and people feel they can get

away with it, so they do it. We've never really faced up to this part of the Jack the Ripper myth. By being so uninterested in their lives, by feeling even to double check the details, we push the murdered women into the background, and given the killer center stage. Jack the Ripper has never left us. Jack the Ripper has seeped into our culture, and we don't really seem to want to get rid of him. That's right, joined historian Matthew Sweet. He also worries that we've sanitized these ghastly

murders and cozied up to the killer. Jack himself is jolly Jack. He's a kind of ghost that we've made sort of friends with. He's a party entertainer. He'll come on and he'll give us a bit of a thrill. Somehow, it's fine for children to consume stories about him. He's a sort of bogey man. And I think that this could only have happened because we have absolutely no idea who he was, and so into that vacuum spills our

fears and our fantasies and our perverse pleasures too. But somehow it's all totally acceptable because it's a parlor game. Jack the Ripper has become the oddest of things, a socially acceptable serial killer. And the more you know about his victims, the more that seems really wrong. Fine, Jack River a commemorative con and Zacano classes Thank you, rush Oh Chapter for Teddy Bear. Even though no one really

knows what he looked like. You can buy Jack the Ripper Halloween costumes, and he's printed on all manner of merchandise too, from mugs to coloring books and T shirts. How much is the T shirt? Okay, right, it's all I can dream quite clear. If you haven't seen it, it really is the worst, big trush on the tour. Every now and again the tour is still happily flock from all over the world to visit the sights of the murders. That's Mary Kelly. He's gotten off face the killer.

I went under cover to join one guided tour and stand at the spots where each of the women bled to death. That is five was as bad as I feared it would be. Blackling in between our At the end of the tour, after more than an hour of gleefully describing the women's wounds, the guide even tried to sell me a book. It detailed his own theory of who the killer was and how he evaded the tection. I politely declined. I currently have over a hundred books

about Jack the Ripper. Rebecca Frost is an expert on true crime literature and specifically on how we talk and write about Jack the Ripper. In most of these books, people are upset that he was never caught. They are not upset that women were murdered. People want to know the killer. They want to understand the killer. They want to know what drove him to it, and people are really fascinated by the fact that he got away with it. Nobody's concerned about the women. That's the problem in the

great game of unmasking the murderer. The victims only add to what we know about Jack. They are bits of evidence that might flesh out his identity. It's that half an hour contact between them and the killer that makes them interesting. They're intertwined with this person who used them for his own devices and his own pleasure in his own way. They had no say in this whatsoever. And that is how you're known for the rest of eternity.

With advances in forensic technology, interest has been rekindled in the women as handy sources of DNA to help identify Jack. I'll tell you about a bizarre and upsetting plan to dig up their corpses another time, but I quickly want to mythbust one of the sillier scientific stunts you might have seen. If you've watched any TV show about the White Chapel murders, you're bound to have noticed people in white lab coats and latex gloves taking swab samples from

a beautiful, dark Paisley shawl. This crops up in nearly every documentary. Scientists at King's College, London are analyzing the material on the chance that the killer's DNA may have transferred to the shawl and survived. This time, it's a show called American Ripper and Jeff mudget is having his

DNA compared to samples from the shawl. Waiting for these results has been really nerve racking, because if the killer's DNA remained on the victim's shawl from the night of her murder, this is the evidence that could prove once and for all that my aunt's sister h Holps was Jack the Ripper. The shawl was supposedly found by a policeman near the body of one of the Ripper's last victims.

The murder of Catherine or Kate Edo's was particularly vicious, and the fabric is said to be covered in her blood. The police officer kept the shawl as a souvenir, and it's been handed down through the generations of his family. This could well be the only piece of physical evidence left that contains the DNA of both a victim and the nameless Ripper. It's said that scientific analysis has already pointed to a suspect, a Whitechapel barber, at long last,

solving the mystery. Where do I start? There's all sorts of issues with this. My friend Professor Tory King as a leading expert on genetics. She's successfully identified human remains dating back centuries and centuries, and she's less than impressed with the shawl. Things to consider, even just at the outset, I think, is the provenance of this shall. Is it even anything to do with Katherine Edo's or Jack the Ripper,

or any of those cases. I can't find any documents saying Katherine was found with a shawl, particularly not one is fine and delicate as the one in question. Did the killer drop it unlikely, and the policeman said to have taken it wasn't even part of the unit investigating Katherine's death. The next thing to think about is contamination. Because this has been in the family for many, many generations,

It's going to have been handled by numerous people. A family heirloom, unfolded and taken out to show friends and relatives and curious journalists and excited TV producers over and over and over again. Isn't exactly a forensic scientist dream fine and the DNA supposedly linking Katherine the all in the murderous barber. It was reported that the sample contained a mutation shared by the suspect and passed down to

his descendants that was unbelievably rare, so case closed. Then the barber did it and left traces of his mitochondrial DNA mutation three one four dot one C, an identifying mark almost as unique as a fingerprint. It's not. It's three one five dot one C, which is very, very very common in the population, something like over ninety percent in Europe. It's very very common. The shoal is just

one blind alley in this case. There are many others I'll share with you in this series, but I've told you about this one because I want you to start questioning what you've been told about Jack the Ripper and the qualifications of the people doing the telling. Jack the Ripper is one of these cases that does seem to bring out certain things in some people. Personally wouldn't have touched this for the barge pole. By the end of this series, I'll have shown you why I think the

case will never be solved. The interesting part that but we can all learn from is why these women died. They weren't killed because they'd engaged in any particular trade or activity. They were in harm's way simply because they were women and because they were poor. Jack the Ripper may have killed these women, but Victorian society was the accomplice. That's the new story I'm going to tell you, and it's the one that's made me a lot of enemies.

The Ripper told will return shortly. It seems I've committed three unforgivable crimes. I've revealed that quite a lot of what we're told about Jack the Ripper is wrong. I've laid out why the case will never be solved, and finally, I've shown a light on the lives of the victims and asked why no one else has really bothered to do so before. That's made a lot of people very angry.

She's ignored sources to present her own theories, and when questioned, has behaved in a very non professional and arrogant way. Just my opinion, of course, quasi feminist claptrap taking those poor women's lives out of context. I think Rubinholt can benefit from growing a thicker skin like the White Chapel victims would have needed. The reason a lot of the Jack the Ripper story that gets served up is wrong

is because of people like that. When it comes to the examination of most other historical events, from the American Revolution to the Great Depression, the people publishing the books and speaking at conferences tend to be qualified historians, economists, or archaeologists. Rightly or wrongly, most professional historians have avoided studying the White Shovel murders, and given the abuse I've suffered,

I can't exactly blame them. That means most of the books and articles have been written by amateurs who are often obsessed with the blood and gore. They call themselves ripparologists. I do believe that if you call yourself a riparologist, you probably should get a real job. This is Ginger Frost, a professor at Samford University in Alabama. That is not a job. Trying to figure out who Jack the Rippery is Number one, You're not going to do at a number two who cares At this point if we put

a name on it, would it change it? Would it make any real difference. The important thing to think about is the position of women and the level of poverty in the East End, and the difficulties of the police in the nineteenth century. Their forensics were terrible. Those are the kinds of things you can learn about this, not endlessly trying to chase some name to put on this guy. He's not that interesting. Believe me, Ginger, I've tried to make these very points in public. It's simple. Have you

got any suspects I don't care. I don't care. Often when I give talks about the five women, I have ripparologists coming along to tell me I'm wrong. There is professional prostitution customer. You need to read mine. On the other hand, some ripparologists confine themselves to being nasty about me and my work and Facebook groups and on Twitter. Threads have appeared on online forums too, attacking me personally and tearing into my research. One of those threads is

now over two hundred pages long. And don't bother trying to amend the Wikipedia page on the murders. Any reference to my work gets deleted straight away. My personal favorite, though, is a podcast rippercast. It compared me to a Holocaust denier. People have course to flawed methodologists, like those adopted by people who thinked deny the Holocaust. We had below the

threshold for historical responsibility at that point. One prominent repparologist, a retired policeman called Trevor Marriott, is particularly upset that in my work I don't describe every cut and slash of the actual murders. It thanks a false picture of the Ripper mystery and the Rapper investigation. In fact, Trevor got very angry on Twitter just before International Women's Day. He was annoyed about what he saw as feminism creeping

into his hobby. I have no flawed view of women, he tweeted, other than you need us men because vibrators can't cut the grass. It was a jokingly comical off the cuff remark, which, in my opinion, has got blown up beyond the proportion. The comment was made that in relation to a man in a that normally in relationships it's the men that cut the grass. Trevor and many other reparologists seem to see themselves as gatekeepers, the owners

of the facts. About Jack the ripper. I trespassed on their territory and dared to talk about the women, and to add insult to injury. I didn't even ask their permission. I think the response she's received is fully justified. Perhaps if Hallie Ha'd have taken the time to speak to somebody like me or somebody else that is fairly knowledgeable about these crimes, it may well have given her a

much wider perspective. Even if you do have the patients to engage with riparology, it can be like banging your head against a brick wall. I think I changed my email, and I also left Facebook. We decided to cut loose and that was it. Neil Sheldon's written about the women too, and his work has been a useful resource for me. He spent twenty eight years in the riparology community before

leaving it. He remembers going to an exhibition about the murders and getting into an argument with another ripparologist about how victims like Kate Edo's were being represented. He said, I'm sorry, but I really cannot see how the victims have been ignored. There are several pages from Edo's inquest

papers on display, including the list of Edo's possessions. Now, as far as I'm concerned, that suggests that what he believes is that Edo's life story can be summed up by the fact that she had a kidney removed and that she was mutilated. That to me sums up a lot of how reparology people feel just unbelievable. I tell you all this not to get even with my critics, but so that you know why the story of the White Couple murders has been so badly told up until now.

The people telling it often don't know what they're doing. They aren't very good at historical research, and they often flunk when they try to involve science. Remember the shawl and the rare not rare DNA very very very common. And also, and it pains me to say it, I get the feeling that a lot of the people who are deeply interested in Jack the Ripper aren't all that keen on women. For me, the worst aspect was just the sort of casual misogyny of it all, the ranking

of the victims. It's just the way they talked about them. Like Neil Melanie Clegg also fled riproology, and yes, you heard her right, She says some rippologists rank the murder victims in order of their physical attractiveness. The reason I left ripprology was actually just someone who made a really disgusting rape joke on Facebook, and that was for me

the final straw. I presume that's why a lot of the story has never been told, right, Why the women and the vital part they play in this fascinating historical event have been misrepresented or forgotten. The only people telling the story wanted it that way. They didn't think the

women were worthy effort. I mean, the public face is all the tours, the conference, the articles, they've all written, books, they really underline the fact that it's an academic thing that they could all be, you know, proper historians, if any of them are gone to school. But the undercurrent

is very prurient and it's just awful. They do talk a lot about, oh, you know, maybe we should have more women in ripparology and staff, but you know, most reasonable women just aren't gonna stick around for that sort of thing. So that's the myth out of the way, and now we'll turn to the real job at hand. I'm going to introduce you to Polly Annie, Elizabeth Kate, and Mary Jane You'll learn how these five very different individuals navigated a world which was inherently hostile to women

and the underclass. They weren't angels, but neither were they the labels that Victorian society and our own culture has hung on them. You'll meet a cast of historians, criminologists, crime writers and more who will help me reveal how laws around wages, health, divorce, and addiction put these women, and in fact all women, at a huge disadvantage. I'll show you where things have changed and where things are

still frustratingly the same. The stories of these women will blow your mind, and I promise you this, after hearing them, you will never see the case of Jack the Ripper in quite the same way again. You can start right away. Episode two is available to download. Now, come with me back to Whitechapel on an August day in eighteen eighty eight, when Jack the Ripper's campaign of terror is about to begin.

Bad Women the Ripper Were Told is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and me Hallie Ribbinhold, and is based on my book The Five. It was produced and co written by Ryan Dilley and Alice Fines, with help from Pete Norton. Pascal Wise sound designed and mixed the show and composed all the original music. You also heard the voice talents of Soul Boyer, Melanie Guttridge, Gemma Saunders, and

rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Mia La Belle, Jacob Weisberg, Gen Guerra, Heather Fane, Carlie Migliori, Maggie Taylor, Nicole Morano and Daniella La Khan were special thanks to my agents Sarah Ballard and Ellie Karn.