S1 E4: Polly the "Prostitute"

I found loose threads. And the more I pulled at those threads, the more the Jack the ripper myth unraveled. I'm Halley Rubert, hold, you're listening to Bad Women. The Ripper retold a series about the real lives of the women killed by Jack the Ripper and how we got their stories so wrong. One side, money plenty and friends too by the score. Then fortune smiled upon me. Now one pass my time, Aloney and not well Harf sees

to lone me. I'm come free, walkout. So far we've traced Polly's humble beginnings in the printing district, her failed marriage to William Nicholls, and their separation. We followed her to the workhouse and working as a maid for a well to do couple, the Cowdrey's, a position she left abruptly. Polly absconded from the Cowdrey's home with good she could pawn. This pocketful of change lightly kept her out of the workhouse.

By this point it was July eighteen eighty eight. She landed in Whitechapel, spending a few weeks at Wilmot's, a women only doss house, which would have been the safest lodgings available to her. Here she shared a room with three others, including one Ellen Holland. Polly and Ellen would occasionally split the price of a double bed. Ellen was the only person who appears to have formed anything like a friendship with Polly, and what we know of her

in the final week, it's largely thanks to Ellen's testimony. Polly, she said, was melancholic. At this time. She was drinking, but she also kept herself to herself, as though some great trouble was weighing on her mind. In the woman who slept beside her, Ellen observed a personality folding in on itself, private, alienated and grieving. On the night of August thirty first, Ellen bumped into Polly on a dark Whitechapel thoroughfare. It was around twelve thirty am, and Polly

was intoxicated. She'd spent the evening at a nearby pub, The Frying Pan, and she'd drunk away any money for a bed at the Doss house. She tried her luck, all the same, She'd told Ellen, but the deputy lodging housekeeper wasn't in the habit of handing up beds to penniless drunks. She had sent her on her way, not in shouts. Be off with you, Polly laughed and issued a sharp retort, also get my doss money. See what Johnny Barney I've got now. Those fourteen words would soon

take on a life of their own. They would be translated into a tacit admission that she was a prostitute looking for a paying client. Two hours elapsed and Ellen encountered Polly again, this time slumped against a wall. Polly, is that you. Ellen tried to convince Polly to return with her to Wilmot's comeback with me, but she would not be persuaded. Polly stated she had made and then spent her lodging money three times over that day. It's

likely she begged for this money. The clock on Whitechapel Church was striking half past two when the pair parted. Ellen watched her friend sway off into the darkness, unsteady on her feet. Perhaps Polly felt her way through the night, leaning on walls in an effort to balance herself. Fingers outstretched, she groped for a place that might become bed. She passed flat fronted brick cottages, which offered no convenient nooks or porches. Then the curb dipped and the wall became

a gait set slightly back from the road. Perhaps Polly slid down to rest. Perhaps her heavy head slumped and her eyes eventually shut asleep took over. William Nichols was to see his estranged wife one last time. He had quickly assembled an outfit for the occasion, a black coat, tie and hat. It had been three years since he last encountered Polly, and police inspector Frederick Aberleine warned William

that he might struggle to recognize her. The color visibly drained from William's face as the coffin lid was removed. The fatal gash across Polly's throat had been stitch closed, but her body was still mutilated by the long and terrible cuts and flicked did in the moments after her death. I forgive you as you are, said William to the body of the woman who, at eighteen had once been his girlish bride, who had borne six of his children. I forgive you an account of what you've been to me.

The authorities investigating this strange and disturbing killing showed Polly less compassion in death than her estranged husband. In their notes, the first detectives on the scene wrote definitively that Polly was living the life of a prostitute. This baseless assumption warped the investigation from that moment on. Initially, just two possibilities were put forward. The first, this murder had been

committed by a gang storting money from prostitutes. The second, a lone and crazed prostitute killer was behind this crime. Either way, the authorities in the press were convinced of one thing. Polly Nichols was selling sex that night. They thought that Whitechapel was full of women like Polly, and her involvement in this sordid and illegal trade had got her killed. This supposition then colored how the evidence was viewed and how the witnesses were questioned. It also seemed

into the press reports on this crime. It is still the bedrock of the familiar Jack the Ripper murder story and the basis for endless theories about the identity of the killer. Trevor Marriott, for instance, believes that a visiting German sailor named Carl Fagenbaum is behind these crimes. You heard from Trevor in episode one. He's a retired detective

used to working murder cases and a ripparologist. The London docks were very close to Whitechapel, and where you've got docks, you've got merchant salman who go ashore while the boat's in dark. And merchant seman are always matched with looking for prostitutes, and of course Whitechapel was rife with prostitutes. Faginborn had apparently confessed to having issues with women. Every so often, he had this urge to kill and mutilate women. Trevor isn't an expert on Victorian prostitution, but to his

detective's brain, the pieces fall into place. Faginbonn wanted to find a woman to kill. Prostitutes made convenient victims. Prostitutes throng the streets of Whitechapel, and Polly was also in Whitechapel. Prostitution is the oldest occupation, isn't it. He's been around for many, many years, since time immemorial. And obviously you

read between the lines. Obviously, when you've got someone like Polly Nichols that's wandering around at nighttime, drunk in an area that is known for prostitution, you know you can draw your own conclusions. Here's where I hit a snag. As far as Polly Nichols is concerned. There really is no proof of her selling sex. And if this part of the familiar Jack the Ripper story is inaccurate, is any of it? I get so deeply uncomfortable when people

try to say, you know, these women were prostitutes. Julia Late is a historian at Birkbeck University of London and an expert on the city's sex trade. She says the evidence that Polly Nichols was a prostitute is flimsy at best. Given the evidence we have. We're just so reliant on the voices of male police officers to tell us who women were, and that fundamentally rankles me. I think just because a police officer wrote something down doesn't make it true.

One of the things that always made me think this Jack the prostitution narrative doesn't quite add up is that the geography is slightly wrong. Julia says the vast majority of women who made their living selling sex would have been working not endowned Heel Whitechapel, but in the richer west end of London, which is where all the good

customers were. It's where most of the nightlife was. But also, even if they were selling sex in the East End, they would have been working on busy thoroughfares, not in back alleys. And I know that the argument is, oh, they took the customer to this back alley, but it's just too flimsy. It's the very very wee hours of the night. Most women who were selling sex would have been home by that point. The main night crowd would

have dissipated. There wouldn't have been much work, There wouldn't have been much reason to hang around continuing to solicit. What's more, women who were regularly selling sex would have had more money than Polly Nichols. They wouldn't be scrounging. They turned to sex works so that they didn't need to scrounge. The amount of money that even a very quote unquote low class prostitute, and I'm using the parlance of the time, there the amount of money that they

could make dwarfed any other occupation they could perform. It's very suspicious to me that Polly is having such difficulty making ends meet if she's also supposed to be selling sex because she just have more money. What about the document that Polly was a so called casual prostitute selling sex just occasionally to make ends meet or put a roof over her own head in hard times. Well, this

was a concern of police at the time. In mixed sex lodging houses, unmarried couples would rent rooms together, a phenomenon that the authorities regarded to be unconditionally a form of prostitution. What women might do is solicit a client. Perhaps I should keep my language more formal, because they may not have seen it as soliciting a client. They were probably far more likely to have seen it as meeting a man who will pay for the double room.

You just need to have sex with them, and then you get a nice warm bed to sleep in at no cost to yourself. But the thing is, on the night she died, Polly Nichols wasn't in a nice, warm bed in a lodging house with a man. And if this kind of casual prostitution was the norm for her, why did she prefer the single sex accommodation at Wilmot's. Polly nichols staying at an all female lodging house is already a very clear sign that she almost certainly was

not engaging in selling sex. Because women who are selling sex in the East End used those lodging houses as spaces to perform sex acts, that was their workspace. The ripper retold will return shortly. Determining who exactly was and who exactly wasn't selling sex in the eighteen eighties can be tricky. The term prostitute was applied so broadly so as to make any precise assessment of their numbers impossible. It was a sweeping label, often used interchangeably with homeless

or vagrant. Society assumed that women who lived without male protection or a roof over their heads would do anything for food, drink, or a bed, especially sell sex. The eighteen twenty four Vagrancy Act further muddied the Waters. It was an Armnibus Act that was used to give police powers to control what they thought was proper behavior or improper behavior on the street. The law included an ill defined clause that brought any prostitute behaving in a riotous

and disorderly manner within its remit. The police used this phrase indiscriminately against any woman on the streets whom they wished to move on or arrest. Police case files sometimes record disorderly prostitutes without actually describing behavior that might have warranted such a description. The burden of evidence is completely negated.

It's basically saying we had her name in a notebook, and she was on the street, and we decided that she was disorderly, so we used this really quite loose law to either arrest her or find her or move her on. The law was also open to abuse. Women did sell sex in Whitechapel in eighteen eighty eight, but we also know that the Whitechapel police inflated the scale of the trade to enhance their own reputation for tackling crime each division. Whitechapel was considered the most corrupt police

division in London at the time. They were using prostitution arrests all the time to kind of up their numbers, as we would say in the present day. The arrest of Elizabeth Cass offers a great example of this. Cass was a dressmaker in London's wealthy West End. One evening, after leaving work, she was window shopping and she paused

to admire a pair of gloves. She came to the attention of police Constable Endicott, who claimed he had seen her soliciting on the street several times before that evening and had written her description down in his handy little police notebook. Under general practice at the time, policeman arrested a soliciting prostitute on the third occasion that they saw her, providing that she was annoying passers by. According to Endicott,

he had already seen cast twice. No matter what Elizabeth Cass was doing, no matter how she had been labeled, accurately or inaccurately, she certainly wasn't annoying anybody. She was just standing on the street. So Endicott arrested her. And this could have played out the way that it played out for hundreds of other women, which is that they accepted their fate understood they didn't really have any ground to stand on, paid a fine and got out of

the police court as quickly as possible. But Elizabeth Cass played it differently, not least because she had a really supportive employer. Cass's employer, a well known dressmaker and female business owner, came to her defense. She stormed into the police station, claiming that her employee had been wrongfully arrested and threatening to call for an investigation into the matter.

In fact, an investigation was called, and it was found that PC Endicott had no grounds on which to arrest Elizabeth Cass, that he in fact was going to be brought up on perjury charges, which she was. He was found not guilty of perjury, but he was dismissed from the police, which is just an incredible moment, I think. And in this case, you just see just how fragile

the definition of prostitute is. You see how thin the evidence is, because it's not that the evidence against Elizabeth Cass was any thinner than any other woman who had been arrested. It wasn't that she was annoying people less. It was simply that she called them on it, and other women who didn't have the same access to support, didn't.

They just pled guilty. So the vast majority of arrests for prostitution proceed and end in a finer imprisonment, not because the women are proven to be prostitutes, are proven to be soliciting to the annoyance of other people, but because they plead guilty because it's the easiest way for them to get out of the police court as quickly as possible. In the months between the exoneration of Elizabeth Cass and the White Chapel murders, arrests of women as

common prostitutes plummeted. Constables were told not to use the word unless a woman willingly identified herself as a prostitute, an order officers clearly ignored when they wrote their reports over the corpse of Polly Nichols. But it was a lull, not a change of heart. London's Police commissioner soon said even sterner instructions for his officers to arrest women, and the courts no longer asked for any corroborating evidence that

a suspect had caused an annoyance. The policeman's would was now enough to convict, And it turns the legislation against quote unquote common prostitutes into you're on a police register as being a prostitute and you were on the street, that's the heart of the offense. After eighteen eighty eight and so now nothing would protect a stigmatized woman from that kind of police attention. The police were also enforcing

a code of social and moral norms. A woman without a house and a family, a woman who lived with a man outside of marriage, and a woman who was a victim of rape were considered one and the same. Any woman who had sex outside of marriage under any circumstances could be called a whore and a prostitute. And I think that's something that's really easy to forget from our late twentieth early twenty first century perspective. Anybody who stepped out of line, any woman who stepped out of line,

was liable to be labeled a prostitute. So when the Jack the Ripper murders or what were then called the Whitechapel murders started happening, it was very easy to impose that narrative they were prostitutes and therefore they were killed because that's what happens to unrespectable women. That's their trajectory. That's their story. This is what you expect to happen

to a woman who behaves this way. Reading the newspaper reports of the coroner's inquest a legal proceeding to determine the cause of death, it seems that the police and the authorities had a dim view of Paully Nichol's character. In open court, Polly's grieving father was asked, was she fast? To be fast implies promiscuity or debauchery. No, I never heard of anything of that sort. She used to go with some young women and men that she knew, but

I never heard of anything improper. During her testimony, Ellen Holland was asked if she knew what her former roommate did for a living. Ellen claimed she did not. Did you consider she was very clean in her habits? Oh? Yes, she was a very clean woman. The idea that Polly was both fast and unclean seemed to be confirmed by her defiant parting words after she had been denied a bed at the lodging house. I'll so get my doss money.

See what Johnny Barney I've got now. These words have been used sometimes to hint, sometimes to assert that Polly Nichols made money by selling sex. Some interpret her remark as a boast that her head gear would make her more attractive to potential clients. The police reference to her jolly bonnet is opaque if indeed she even uttered those words, and there is no guarantee that she did. She could

have meant any number of things. I think the most likely thing she meant is that she was going to beg because while society thought there were eighty thousand prostitutes, the police estimated there are about eight thousand in London, and if you look at the estimated number of beggars, it's way higher. So just statistically speaking, it's more likely she was referring to panhandling or begging than mercenary sex. Polly may equally have been indicating a plan to palm

the bonnet. We know that the Cowdreyes, the couple for whom she briefly worked, had given her a bonnet, and that when she absconded from their home, she took this

with her. For women who had chaotic or unstable living situations like Polly Nichols, you wore your credit and so, and she said, look what a jolly bonnet I have she may have been intending to pawnet so that she could get toss money, or she may have been referring to the fact that she obtains the bonnet through begging for it or trading for it, or pawning for it

on another day. Like so many other details surrounding Polly's final hours, the truth behind the fabled Jolly bonnet remark is now unknowable, but one hundred and thirty years on, it is still cited as proof that Polly was a prostitute and killed by a man who bought her time

and body for a few pennies. The sworn evidence of her father and of her friend is totally ignored, But julia Our tendency to label women like Polly prostitutes speaks volumes like why has the testimony of somebody who knew Polly quite well been disregarded in favor of policemen who had never seen her before except as a dead body. I mean, the only explanation is that we're more comfortable with this narrative, the narrative of the fallen woman. She steps out of line, she has sex out of wedlock,

perhaps she has a baby out of wedlock. She has a difficult relationship with a man, she's abandoned or she abandons him, and the narrative is that she's supposed to die, either throwing herself in the Thames because she's so distraught at how far she's fallen, or she's supposed to die of disease, or her body's supposed to be racked by syphilis, or she's supposed to be a victim of violence, because

that's what happens to women like that. Before I delved into the archive, I'd assume that the case for Polly being a prostitute was iron clad, But as I look deeper and deeper, firm evidence failed to materialize. In fact, other more likely interpretations of her murder presented themselves. But sharing my findings with the world put me into conflict with people who have made careers and staked their reputations

on the Ripper being a killer of Wolls. Documentary makers, to her guides, authors and self styled ripparologists all start from the same point. Jack the Ripper posed as a john who took as prostitute victims to a quiet place to slaughter them. My research has picked away at the foundation of that myth, undermining the whole edifice, and many riparologists aren't happy. Some think I'm a liar, some compare me to a Holocaust denier, and almost all simply refuse

to listen. I don't think she's dishonest. I'm not going to say she's dishonest. All I'm saying is that what she has written and why she wrote it as a matter for her to live with us. That why she has written misleading facts in the book, The Ripper Retold will return shortly. Retired police detective Trevor Merritt still thinks

I'm wrong when we talk about prostitutes. There is overwhelming evidence from both official police files and sworn in quest testimony from witnesses that these women were prostitutes and it's recorded, but she won't accept that fact. I'm the she in question here. Trevor's ebook, The Real Truth includes a section that states I've deliberately misinformed my readers and omitted vital facts.

As Trevor has repeatedly told me on social media. I didn't want to engage with him in person, so my producer, Alice spoke with him. Holly Nichols, there is still in existence in police files details that shows her being recorded as a prostitute. So that's the first thing that she readily doesn't accept. Now matter how much you fudge it up, these women were recorded as being prostitutes, and there was enough evidence produced from witnesses to show that they engaged

in prostitution, albeit perhaps just to survive. But if you're selling your body for money, you are by clear definition prostituting yourself. So do you think police records can ever be wrong? Well, I suppose there is always that argument. But why would they record somebody as being a prostitute as being wrong? Why would somebody stand up and give swan testimony in a court that these women were prostitutes

and that's how they live from day to day. For Trevor, my work in the archives, which I've cross referenced with what we actually know a Victorian prostitution and police attitudes towards it, is invalid Online. He's accused me of playing

the feminist card. Her book has seemed to attracted a large proportion of female readers, and you know, I think it's sad that those female readers, no matter what cause they want to take up, they've been misled by some of the things that Hallie has published in her book some of the things which she will not readily acknowledge as being misleading, and unfortunately these female readers have placed

her high on a pedestal. In effect, do you have a sense of why women might identify with Halle's work or hear things in it that seem valuable. Well, Obviously, as I've said, she's attracted a host of feminist followers who constantly thrive on the police that all females have been subjected to oppression, hardship, and abuse both past and present. So I can only assume that the bookers hit a

nerve with them and that's what they want to go with. Really, from their perspective, Trevor, who remember conducted murder investigations as a serving detective, has very little sympathy for poly Nichols, a woman living a hard life with society stacking the odds against her at every turn. For Trevor, poly Nichols

was the architect of her own demise. They'd fallen on hard times a lot of time because of their own doing, not because anybody had made them homeless, not because anybody had made them poor, not because anybody had made them walk the streets at night it was of their own doing, because clearly these women in the past, many of them had husbands, many of them had partners, and they themselves chose to lead the lives that they were living at

the time. Women like Polly were victims of unfair divorce laws, impossible barriers to securing jobs and housing, and subject to extreme prejudice if they failed to remain within the tight boundaries of what was expected of a wife and mother. Trevor boards no truck with any of this. They were the ones that chose to leave their husbands, or their husbands chose to leave them because of their behavior. There

are two sides to all of this. And Howe seems to want to portray the picture of these poor, unfortunate women. But they're poor unfortunate because a lot of the time they brought it on themselves, you know, And is there any excuse for that. Trevor would really prefer that I restricted myself to the subject he thinks is most important

the identity and motives of Jack the Ripper. Bringing up the lives of the women rather annoys him, especially if it calls into question his pet theory about the murders. You know, I think it's all getting blown up out of all proportion. To be fair, I've found that many people heartily agree with Trevor. I find their lack of interest and their lack of curiosity both puzzling and troubling. It's not just that they haven't learned from the injustices

of the past. It's as if they don't want to learn from them, and they don't even want to hear about them. Trying to get my head around this, I came across the work of the New York Times best selling author Gillian Lauren. Gillian's writing introduced me to a term that has helped me fathom the hostility I faced for trying to tell the real stories of the Whitechapel women. That term is the less dead victims who don't attract the ssidies, interest or sympathy. So less dead is actually

not my invention. It was by a criminalist, Stephen Egger, and what it means is that essentially there's priority given to human beings. For instance, in the eighties, there were seven serial killers in South la and women were turning up in dumpsters every morning. The cops would call in a homicide as one eighty seven. No humans involved. We found her in a dumpster. It's a nobody. We found somebody under tires, no humans involved, And we're very often

categorized as overdoses. I don't think a lot of people go and decide to overdose with their skirts over their head under a pile of tires. The less Dead applies to poll Nichols and the other White Chapel victims, just as it applies to some people killed today. The deaths may be divided by many decades, but all these victims united by society's indifference to their plight. It's so easy to sort of dismiss women and also assume that you

know everything about them by saying their prostitutes. Someone's a prostitute, you know everything about them already. Someone's a drug addict, you know everything about them already. You know if somebody's poor, you know everything about them already. And the truth is that you don't. Jillie and I are doing something very similar with our research. In her book and documentary series, She's explored the lives of the women murdered by Samuel Little.

Little claimed to have murdered as many as ninety three people in towns and cities all across the United States, women of color, marginalized women, prostitutes, addicts, sometimes not. They all had such different stories. These women were very much the less dead. Their disappearances dating back to the nineteen seventies were often barely investigated, let alone investigated as murders. Years later, in prison, Little drue haunting pictures of the

individuals he said he had killed. The FBI is still seeking information to help connect victims with these confessions. Little was convicted in twenty fourteen, at the age of seventy four, for the murders of three women in the nineteen eighties, but throughout his life he was repeatedly charged with theft, fraud, rape, and assault. Repeatedly the authorities let him go. They didn't

try hard, they didn't care. And at the same time there were prosecutors and defense attorneys who were putting notes in the files saying, I believe this guy is good for many murmurs in this So why do you think there was this hesitation. I mean, this guy was killing and killing and killing, and you know he was caught

and let go and caught and let go. So is it because we believe that, for example, homeless people are expendable, that sex workers are expendable, is that it is that the reason the white Yale College student who is murdered on spring break is the most dead, or the governor's daughter is the most dead. It's easy to say, like, we have these baton institutional biases against prostitutes, women of color, drug addicts, and I can say that all day long,

and really I think it's about power. They didn't have any they didn't have any money, they didn't have any power. There are obvious parallels between Little's crimes and the White Chapel murders, but talking to Julian, I was struck by one detail a court hearing that reminded me of the treatment women like Polly would have received an eighteen eighty eight when dealing with those in authority. Laylah McClain and Hilda Nelson and pascuagal And, Mississippi were both attacked by

Samuel Little. Eight years after Layla and Hilda escaped his clutches, they attended court to testify against him. Hilda was eight months pregnant. She took one look sam and she yearnated on the floor and they made her clean it up, and then they asked them to leave. They didn't even testify. Following his conviction, Gillian interviewed Little about his crimes extensively. She even elicited new confessions from him. Her focus was never on little psychology or motivations, but on the people

that he harmed and killed. Gillian, herself, as a survivor of sexual assault and a violent partner, once attempted to strangle her. Now she feels she has a responsibility to tell victim's stories. The responsibility is a universal one and a larger one, and I will continue to feel a responsibility to these victims and a relationship with them for the rest of my life. Little's murder victims, overlooked, ignored, ridiculed, and religned by society, were raced before they died. Gillian

tells me, like they were dead already. Small wonder then, that when they came to harm at Little's hands, society looked the other way. It's an idea that resonates with me. Society had killed Polly Nichols before her actual death too. Over a hundred years later, we continue to dismiss vulnerable people, to treat them as disposable, insisting that Polly Nichols was a prostitute is part of this process. It overlooks and so erases the complexity of her existence. It effaces her humanity,

and so makes her vicious murder slightly more palatable. The notion that the victims were only prostitutes and so deserving of their fate seeks to perpetuate the belief that there are good women and bad women, madonnas and whores. It suggests that there is an acceptable standard of female behavior, and that those who deviate from the standard are fit

to be punished and unworthy to be mourned. Whenever a woman steps out of line and contravenes the feminine norm, whether today social media or on the Victorian street, there is a task understanding that someone must put her back in her place. Will return to this idea again and again, as we unpicked the threads that hold the jack the

Ripper lift together. Only by bringing his victims back to life, by permitting them to speak and attempting to understand their experiences, can we silence the ripper and what he represents 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 the voice talents of Soul Boyer, Melanie Gutridge, Gemma Saunders, and rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of mil LaBelle, Jacob Weisberg, Jen Guera, Heather Fane, Carlie Migliori, Maggie Taylor, Nicole Morano and Daniella Lacan were special thanks to my agents Sarah Ballard and Ellie Karen