Pushkin. The other residents of nine Gosfield Street are growing accustomed to crushes and cries in the dead of night. Commotion can be heard at Margaret Lowe's flat quite regularly. This particular altercation has spilled out into the street. The man who smashed through Margaret's door thinks better of lingering and flees into the night. She puts up a spirited pursuit.
HeLa helay look at this. The next morning, when a bruised, embattered Margaret shows neighbors for shattered door and bransacked apartment, look at it the lamp broken. She explains that a young Canadian soldier, Plead Stranger, was responsible for the braaken Look at my war? Would she report the peculiar home invasion to the police. Her neighbors asked, what's the good of that? Margaret is a refined and rather proud woman. The other residents don't know her well, but they note
she keeps rather odd hours, staying out late. When she does return home, she is often accompanied by men, some of whom turn violent. Another man will soon visit. Though he won't make enough noise to disturb the neighbors, he will subject Margaret to a truly horrifying ordeal. This is the seldom told story of women in World War Two who were killed not by the enemy but my husband, lovers,
and strangers, wearing the uniform of their own side. It's also the tale of a particular string of murder victims that history has swept from view. I'm Hallie Rubinhold, and I'm Alice Fines, and you're listening to bad women. The Blackout River. The ship rolled and pitched in the school. Howling winds sang through the masts, and angry, white crested waves lashed at the railings far below. Decked huddled passengers hung on as cups and plates slid from tables and
crashed the floor. The children wailed, and the adults whispered. Prayers and blessed is the food of boy. Will Jesus, Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for amen. But next morning the skies clear, and in the distance a welcome sight the rocky coastline of Africa's southern tip. Soon they would be docking at Cape Town to refuel, and then traveling on east alone. On the wide ocean. They might
by day glimpse whales breaching the water's surface. By night the stars of the Southern Cross would guide their progress, glittering in the inky heavens. It would have been on a voyage like this one that Margaret Florence Campbell Burchett traveled to New Zealand as a toddler. By one account, she was born in Britain in eighteen ninety nine and her family emigrated soon afterwards. New Zealand had seen a
great migration in the eighteen seventies. The authorities there gave away free tickets and heavily subsidized assisted passage to certain types of workers, encouraging over a quarter of a million people to flock to the remote land, three quarters of whom came from the United Kingdom. This enthusiasm, however, was dampened when the new arrivals began writing home about tough winters and other hardships. New Zealand wasn't quite the paradise
many had hoped for. But by the early nineteen hundreds, when Margaret's family were said to have made this epic journey, interest in the colony had been rekindled. The new marvel of refrigeration meant that meat and dairy could now be transported over vast distances New Zealand butter and lamb would become staples on British dining tables. Trade boomed, and there were plenty of jobs to go round, so New Zealand once again offered assisted passage to tempt migrants who might
fill these gaps. Experienced farm hands, shepherds and men to build the new roads and railways that would fuel growth. The other side of the world now seemed closer than ever, thanks to new technologies that seemed to compress space and time. The telegraph and telephone have made the Earth such a
very little place, used one journalist this morning. As we write, we know what happened this afternoon on the Adelaide cricket craft wonderful, indeed, but hardly more wonderful than the fact that the egg you consumed at breakfast really came from an Australian poultry yard. The antipodies also seemed to offer a different kind of life in the old world. New
Zealand enjoyed a reputation as a kind of utopia. Here, the rigid and unpopular class distinctions so entrenched in Europe were deemed antiquated and alien, and servants were said to converse with their superiors in an easy and familiar manner. New Zealand had also been the first country in the world to grant women the vote in eighteen ninety three.
In large numbers, they availed themselves of their new power and privilege, and no revolution has occurred as yet, nor dreadful consequences seemed to be impending in other nations, one seething with social unrest. There was great interest in how this radical political experiment would unfold, and contrary to the fears of some, it did not prove to be a grave mistake. They had conducted themselves with the utmost propriety and are doing the washing, cooking, and rocking the cradle
the same as before. There were welfare payments like pensions for the elderly, and legislation to protect workers for the white settlers. At least, New Zealand was a place of optimism and equity, and had attracted not just those who wanted a fair paying job, but also people who rejected the obscene inequalities of the old country. This nation, said its admirers, suffered neither from restive strikers nor from exploitative millionaires.
Perhaps this was what drew Margaret's parents to New Zealand, and perhaps they also instilled in their daughter this yearning for more, this sense of her own worth and dignity. The steamship cruised towards Wellington Harbor, the site of the capital city. Buildings clustered around the bay with their backdrop of steep green hills, must surely have been a relea leaf to the weary travelers. It's so green. I never knew it could be so green. Young Margaret and her
family disembarked and joined the human traffic on key. Her father, William, was soon working as a farmer for Goodland was plentiful, but at knockdown prices from the island's original settlers, the Maori people. Margaret grew up and was educated two hundred miles from Wellington in Hawke's Bay. Schooling for European children was improving, with free places allowing even working class children to stay on for high school, though in practice girls
were still likely to be removed by poorer parents. At the earliest opportunity, she would have studied the basics of mathematics, reading and writing, and received instruction in good manners, cooking, and in preparation for domestic service or to one day run a household of her own. At least this was the immigrant story that Margaret told about herself, the one she wanted everyone to know. In truth, the early part
of her life is a mystery. Scores of Margaret Florence's, Margaret Campbell's and Margaret Burchett's were born in England and New Zealand around the turn of the century, but no one with the full name of Margaret Florence Campbell Burchard appears in New Zealand's historical records or on the British census. We've been working with expert genealogist Kate Healey on this series,
who's been helping us piece together the women's lives. It's very exciting when you start researching a new person because you really never know where it's going to take you, what you're going to find. Kate has over thirty years of experience with this kind of historical detective work, but Margaret's life still presented challengers, gaps she simply couldn't fill. Women's lives are often harder to trace than those of men, the discrimination they faced, meaning they are frequently ignored and
archival documents. After all, if you're denied the vote, you won't feature on the electoral rules. But with Margaret, this problem is compounded since she also seems to have deliberately concealed her identity. Obviously, in Margaret's case, it was fairly
disappointing that we couldn't find more about her. Particularly with a name Margaret Florence Campbell Burchett, you would think that that would be quite easy to find, and had she actually recorded herself as that throughout, she would probably be the only one that shows up in search results on the documents we can link her to. She uses different variations of her name and different ages, muddying the waters and making it impossible for us to be sure about
her birth and parentage. Such changes aren't necessarily sinister, though, thinks Kate. It's certainly not uncommon for people to be less than truthful on documents, particularly on marriage certificates. Women would often be economical with the truth with their age might either make themselves younger or older to be closer in age to their intended spouse. Also, if they are giving the details of their father, they might make his profession a bit more interesting than what it actually is.
So in Margaret's case, she put her father as a farmer, where he could have actually just been an agricultural laborer. Occasionally, though, people overwrote their own histories because they found themselves in unfortunate circumstances. Sometimes they falsified records to escape stigma, such
as the onerous burden of being labeled a prostitute. In another instance, radical socialist Grace Oakshot sailed to New Zealand under a false name, Joan Reeve, so that she could end her marriage and begin a new life without being known as a divorcee and denounced as a fallen woman. New Zealand was remote, which made it the perfect place
for such reinvention. Whether you truly journeyed to the other side of the world or simply claimed you had, it was often too much trouble for anyone to check your story. The world was smaller, yes, but it wasn't yet that small. When she reached school leaving age, Margaret could easily have entered domestic service. There was a dearth of servants in New Zealand. Just like male migrants with farming skills, young British women suitable to serve as domestics were courted by
the authorities. The government promised to reimburse women for their steamship fairs, and pledged that a government matron would accompany and protect them during the voyage. Relations between household staff and their employers may indeed have been more cordial and equitable in New Zealand. Even so, it seems that cooking and cleaning at the beck and call of a master and mistress were not for Margaret. She appears to have wanted more. It's terribly paid work, it's really long hours.
Here's Professor Julia lat a historian. There's also a huge risk of sexual harassment and abuse within these workplaces, which are often private homes. There's no freedom, and so women are leaving that occupation in droves. Margaret chose broader horizons and a passage across the oceans from the furthest reaches of the British Empire back to its beating heart. By her own account, she made this trip in her late
teens during the First World War. This would have been a hazardous undertaking, with the threat of German warships and submarines compounding the danger of storms, but it wasn't unheard of. If money was tight, she may have crowded into the cramped her class space below the main deck, subsisting on porridge and potatoes and dirt crusted jackets. Margaret claimed to have been accompanied on this journey by a twin brother, Sydney,
but no record of his existence can be found. After weeks on board and over ten thousand nautical miles, the ship would likely have berthed at Tilbury Dock on London's eastern fringes. Margaret may have felt apprehension in this unfamiliar land that turned the seasons on their head. May have experienced a chill as she gazed at the gray homes and tangle of industry stretching west to the distant, smoky capital. But if she yearned for the wooden houses and green
hills of New Zealand, well looks too late to turn back. Now. Margaret would have joined the surging mass of itinerant souls on the keyside, among them soldiers returning from the war across the English Channel. Someone leave others wounded and maimed, and the fighting with her head no doubt held high. She plowed on through this crowd, heading along the River Thames to the heart of the capitol and a new life, but perhaps not one she'd imagined. Name please Peggy Burkett.
The police constable who arrested Margaret in nineteen twenty had probably seen her approaching men on the streets before and scrawled her name down in his notebook. The young woman, perhaps aged just twenty one, was taken to Mulborough Street Police Court in Soho. She gave the alias Peggy Burkett, but it did not matter. The authorities knew that this was the same woman they had prosecuted the previous summer for soliciting prostitution. Only then she had called herself Peggy Campbell.
They may have been certain about her identity because they had her fingerprints on record. This practice had been applied to women convicted of prostitution offenses since nineteen seventeen. Those in the sex trade often moved around and changed their names to avoid a criminal record, so the police embraced any tool that might help them definitively fix the identities of these indecent and unrespectable women. How do you plead, the magistrate would have asked Margaret guilty, She likely replied
from the dock. For most women pleaded guilty, though there were occasional sentences of hard labor the punishment was usually a fine of forty shillings. It was preferable to swallow this punishment rather than fight the charges and risk aggravating the police. Further, if Margaret had the money on her or could enlist a friend to bring the sum to the police court, she would be free to go. If not, she would go to a cell. One way or another,
Margaret was permitted to leave. She crossed the mosaic floor of the courthouse entrance hall and passed through its heavy wooden doors back out into the district of Soho. It's unclear how she escaped the endless cycle of arrest and release that ensnared so many women, a vicious circle of fines and then working to recoup the money lost through fines, But somehow, nine months later she was living in Southend
on Sea, coastal town close to London. Here she called herself Margaret F. Campbell, and she boarded at the house of George Gallop, a warehouseman, and his wife Ellen, a homemaker attractive of East Coast resorts. This London by the Sea in winter as well as summer, is one of the greatest ornaments of the country. South end the newspapers said was booming. Just as Blackpool attracted Northern workers on vacation, South End, with its waterfront promenade, bandstands, theaters and vast
ball rooms, was a magnet for Londoners. Margaret appears to have answered an advert for a respectable young lady wanted to assist customers at the Beach Bazaar, a fancy goods
emporium by Southend Pier. Since the nineteenth century, it had become customary for trips to the seaside to include the purchase of trinkets or souvenirs, small mementos of a person's visit, such as boxes, cameos, engraved shells, and china figurines, which were often given to friends and loved ones, an indicator that a middle or working class person had a bit of disposable income. Fancy goods shops like the Beach Bazaar sprang up along promenades and piers and did a roaring
trade during the tourist season. As a shop girl, Margaret would have been expected to comport herself in a genteel fashion under compliment, even be an extension of the charming objects she was selling. Envelopes Thanka jeeves, great bargains to be had. Margaret would have concealed her past in her day to day work, such a fuge that probably came
easy to her by now. She was quite used to altering the details of her identity, and besides, her naturally polished and refined bearing would have made shop work a comfortable fit. Frederick George Lowe, a widower, owned the Beach Bazaar in Margaret, a self possessed and dignified young woman, thirty nine year old Frederick perhaps saw an opportunity for a fresh start. Within months, the pair had quietly married
at a local register office. No family was present, and curiously, Frederick's brother William wasn't certain that the pair actually had wed. She was introduced to me as his wife, and I was told her name was Peggy. Margaret did tell William of a bohemian past in London. I have heard Peggy talk about having been in the chorus at the Gayety
Theater prior to her supposed marriage to my brother. Was this just another story, an attempt perhaps to explain her time in London and disguise her work in the sex trade. Or had Margaret really been on the stage. Had she told anyone the truth about her past. Julia Late has studied the married lives of women who, like Margaret, left the sex trade. There is a narrative about fallen women in this period and in fact in any period, that once they fall into a life of prostitution, that's it.
They're quote on quote ruined, no man will have them, and that absolutely doesn't bear out. They definitely marry, they definitely go on to have children and full lives, just like anybody else. But I think the other question is whether Frederick knew people kept a lot of secrets. Of course at this period, in any period, but it was easier to keep secrets in this period. On the one hand, there were a lot of women who were very, very willing to say, I want to live this life in London,
this is my decision. But we mustn't discount the amount of shame and stigma that surrounded selling sex at this time. So I think there would be real reasons why Margaret would have kept it from Frederick, but it would have been fairly easy for her to do that. Margaret and Frederick lived together in the terraced house they owned on Surbiton Road in South End. They went on excursions in their motor car from time to time, calling on William.
Life was comfortable. In nineteen twenty seven, the couple adopted a one year old baby girl, Red Joan Lowe, perhaps after trying and failing to conceive a child together. Adoption had only been legally possible for a year. Many countries past adoption laws in the wake of World War One to allow the war orphans to be adopted into good families. Doctor Gingerfrost is a research professor of history at Stamford University.
And largely, I would say probably eighty percent of adopted children, maybe more or illegitimate, as most people will keep a child if they're married. There had long been concerns that formal legal adoption would encourage bad women to have babies out of wedlock and invite the working classes to shirk their parental responsibilities, something they were only too ready to do.
The middle class is suspected it's like they were afraid that the minute you don't treat illegitimate children poorly, the floodgates for vice will open and everyone will have orgies in the street. And in fact that's not the reason. Children or illegitimate most of the time it's usually interrupted courtship. In many cases, adoption was extremely successful. The people right back to these agencies and they would say, it's like she's ours, or I couldn't love her more if I'd
give them birth. These kinds of statements where it became obvious that the love and care that you give to a child, you're going to love that child. That's just how it works. But turned out that the nurture part of it mattered more than the nature part in the end, and people who want babies badly enough to go through adoption, they want that child. It seems that the Lows raised their child to think that she had been born to them,
and Margaret clearly adored her daughter. Even acquaintances remarked that she would talk about Barbara often. For a time, life was uneventful and the family appeared to be content, but a change in Fourtunes was coming. In nineteen thirty two, when Barbara was five, the Lows downsized from their terraced house to a small or apartment. Frederick's business was apparently in trouble. A heart condition also rendered him increasingly breathless, weak and gasping for air. Then one day he was
seized by palpitations, lost consciousness and died. He was fifty one. Margaret, still in her early thirties, was now destitute. My mother did not receive any financial assistance, as my father was made a bankrupt just prior to his death. Barbara explained the business was sold, along with the car and the household furniture. The trappings of Margaret's middle class life, a world away from police courts in the streets of Piccadilly,
were now gone. She took a post as a housekeeper in a home above a Penny Arcade, but this lasted a mere two weeks. The drudgery of service was still not for Margaret, and it was surely even harder to bear working a mere stones throw away from her old, more comfortable life. She and her five year old daughter
moved around for a time. Her brother in law thought that she leased an apartment and took in boarders for the summer season, but relations between Margaret and William grew frosty, and after nineteen thirty four they had no further direct communication. Peggy dealt with all my brother's affairs and resented me writing to her about them. He also suspected that Margaret had returned to sex work. My only reason for thinking this was because she often came to London alone. I've
been told by people who knew her by sight. William, like so many others, were suspicious of a woman who went out in the city on her own, But in this case his suspicions may have been accurate. Margaret decided to move back to London. Here she jumped between different addresses, rooms, flats and friends apartments too. Barbara, meanwhile, had been placed
in a small boarding school in South End. It must have been painful to part with her beloved daughter, but Margaret would have known that the school would make for a more stable and peaceful home than she was able to provide, and also that a good education would be key to her daughter's prospects. Barbara thought her mother was working as a receptionist at an establishment called the Burlington Club. Others believed it was named the Burlington Lounge or the
Burlington Garden Club. None of these seemed to have existed. Was this another story spun by Margaret in an effort to hide her true occupation. In nineteen thirty eight, she was again arrested for soliciting prostitution, and she found herself back at Marlborough Street Police Court, eighteen years after her last arrest, Margaret once again stood before the magistrate in a wood paneled chamber and accepted the punishment of a fine.
Must have been with a heavy heart that she again crossed the mosaic floor of the courthouse and went out into the street. This time, no job selling fancy goods awaited Margaret. No new life in a bustling seaside town, no quiet evenings with Frederick ahead. There was only disappointment, danger and violence. The residence of one eighteen Cavendish Street had had enough of their new neighbor, enough of the frequent and unsettling comings and goings at Margaret Lowe's flat.
They complained that she brought strange men at night to her rooms. Said her landlord. I was surprised at this. I thought missus Lowe was a decent type of woman. He was perplexed. Missus Lowe's demeanor suggested respectability, and he noted that her nice young daughter would visit her too, But he evicted Margaret all the same, All right, sweet are so clad? Hello, Darlie. Margaret distanced herself from other women in the sex trade Kathleen Clark didn't know her name,
but certainly knew her by sight. For years, she had seen her again and again, trudging the same soliciting route, continually moving to reduce the chance for rest. Often drunk, Margaret would walk along, singing to herself, and she seemed to Kathleen to be a gentle soul. Record her the
lady because she seemed very refined. I'm really drawn to the fact that other people refer to her as the lady Julia Late again, because in one way it denotes, but it's also a kind of commentary that she didn't really fit in and that potentially other women around her thought that she thought she was better than them. Margaret seems to have chosen to be closest to women outside the sex trait, but even these friends only ever saw
one of her various faces. Mabel Jones, who got to know Margaret as a neighbor and would go to the pub with her, and soho believed she was a receptionist and had previously been a nurse. She knew that her husband had died and that I used to sell souvenirs from her small shop on the seafront. Rachel Barkeley and embroiderous at a factory. Also thought that Margaret was a receptionist, but at two different clubs, neither friend knew that Margaret
sold sex. It must have been with great effort and intention that Margaret marshaled these different identities, and it was surely lonely to keep secrets and be so very guarded. She was drinking hea around this time, perhaps as a salve for her isolation. The local store owners saw her as regular as clockwise how can I help you to die, buying in her supply of Hamilton's oatmeal stout and bringing back the empties. Over the years, Margaret may have had
romantic attachments. At one point she lived with a driver named Cecil Casewell, and she kept a picture of an airman on the mantelpiece in her living room. Her daughter Barbara knew him as Jimmy Smith and thought that he rescued her mother one evening in his car when she was stranded. It seems unlikely that Margaret would hold on to his photograph after a single chance encounter, but if it was a romantic relationship, it appears not to have lasted.
In nineteen forty, Margaret tried again to turn her life around. She'd saved enough money to lise a house near South End, to make a living by renting out rooms, and to have her daughter lived with her once more. Her friend Mabel Jones, who now worked helping to save lives during air raids, visited Margaret's new home. She showed me snapshots of herself and her husband. Margaret appears to have been nostalgic for her former life, and perhaps she wistfully hoped
to regain something that resembled it. But the boarding house failed. It would have been with great reluctance that she returned to blacked out London and selling sex because the trade was becoming ever more unsafe. The war had brought a churning flow of soldiers into the capitol looking for sex. It was riskier to deal with this clientele than with a circle of trusted regulus. Compounding these greater risks, police action to close brothels had robbed women of the relative
safety such establishments provided, says Late. Women tried to mitigate that as best they could by trying to work together, by keeping an eye out for each other, even informally by hiring maids. But as more and more criminalization takes hold. As police are put under more and more pressure to push women off the streets and out of these brothels where they could work alongside other women, women start turning
to what the police call furnished drums or flats. You're living on your own, You're often living with a population of people who are moving all the time, so they don't necessarily get to know you, and they're just incredibly isolated working alone. Women kept makeshift weapons with an easy reach, rolling pins and pouches of pepper in their handbags, so I think probably the most common form of violence would
have been from dodgy clients. This is a time when women are probably not seeing as many regular clients as they would ordinarily do because there's so many new faces in London, and so clients aren't as vetted as they would have been in earlier periods. So there's a lot of just random violence, punching, hitting, kicking. There's also a lot of experiences of rape and other kinds of sexual assault.
At a time when the police and pretty much all of society maintain that women who sell sex cannot be raped, there were definitely women experiencing that being forced to do things that they hadn't agreed to being forced to do things and then not being paid. That happened a lot. Obviously, They're going with a lot of drunk clients. They're going with a lot of soldiers who have been inculcated into a culture of violence and trauma, who are going to
be more likely to be violent towards women. As While Margaret shunned other sex workers, so lacked the meager protection such friendships could bring the whispered warnings, perhaps about a client's ill temper. From late nineteen forty one, shortly after she'd moved alone into a flat on Gossfield Street, she faced a string of assaults, all witnessed by her new neighbors. Margaret told the Gosfield Street residence that she had a relief job, perhaps referring to the kind of nighttime work
her friend Mabel Jones did helping the victims of air raids. This, she said, was why she would return home in the early hours, but other goings on in her flat were harder to explain away. Taylor Maurice Wiseman grew accustomed to hearing his neighbor's screams pierced the night air Fellow resident Ralph Stevens recalled another incident. At about one o'clock in the morning, I heard sounds of a fight. I picked up a stick and went outside to see what it
was all about. I saw a woman lying on the stairs. She was conscious and kept crying, get him, get him. At the same time I saw a man in soldier's uniform running through the street door. Ralph chased after the soldier, and the police eventually took charge of the situation. When Ralph returned to the apartment building, Margaret was apparently drunk, told him, I am glad you got him. He was trying to do me in. Another terrifying ordeal occurred in
January nineteen forty two. I was in bed and I heard debut boots going up the stairs, and then I heard a sound like the breaking of a door cleaner. Florence Bartolini lived in the basement of the building. She knew its creaks and groans and was familiar with the rhythm of its inhabitants. Margaret Lowe lived just above her. That night, along with smashing glass, she also heard a man's voice. Then I heard the sound of a second door being broken. A struggle was going on, and I
heard a woman scream in place murder el. No one came when Margaret called for aid, and so she rushed to the window, but her attacker caught up with her and struck her on the head. The next morning, missus Lowe, who had purple bruises on her chest and jaw, was explaining these events. A Canadian soldier broke into my flat last night and almost murdered me. She insisted that he was a complete stranger. Florence Bartolini peered into Margaret's apartment and saw the damage he had wrought. It was in
complete disorder in the front room. The standard lamp was broken and the lock of the inner door was forced. Missus Lowe said that he had bowed the connecting tube from the gas fire and left the gas escape in. Margaret paid for the repairs and didn't involve the police. This was the norm. The law wasn't there to protect women like Margaret, says Julia Late In terms of the exceptionally quoteedion violence that they experienced from clients on a day to day basis, they would never call the carps.
In not least because the vast majority of women who are selling sex full time in London have warrants out for their arrest because they were soliciting and didn't pay the fine, or they were soliciting and charged it, but they never showed up to court, so they're not going to willingly walk into a police station. Margaret had said, what's the good in that when it was suggested she seek to have one of her attackers a serviceman charged,
it would indeed probably have done a little good. The police tended to wash their hands of the whole situation because they did not want to be in a position where they were arresting soldiers That never tended to work out well for the beat cop getting in the way of a soldier's good time, and so they mostly wanted to just kind of lass a fair situation. After one attack, Margaret spelled out why she hadn't pressed for a prosecution. I wasn't able to charge him for my daughter's sake,
and I am a respectable married woman. I think it speaks to the fact that she knew that if she went and reported this, that the police would automatically presume she was a prostitute, that they would pursue the case as an assault against a prostitute, and that if it got to the press, or if it got out, that her daughter would know and that she'd lose her respectability.
So it's that stigma again. Women wouldn't go to the police, either because they knew that the police wouldn't take them seriously, or because they knew that if the police did take them seriously, that they'd be outed. Barbara visited Margaret every few weekends, and Margaret would have been keen that she and her teenage daughter didn't attract the attention of the authorities.
From the eighteen eighties on, there'd been various ways in which the courts could take a child from a mother who was found to be selling sex, and it's very likely that Margaret knew that and wanted to protect Barbara
from that. The law applied to all children, but there absolutely would have been more concern and therefore more potential legal attention paid to an adolescent girl living with a woman who was suspected of selling sex, because there was a very strong idea that she would be encouraged to selsax herself. On Tuesday, February tenth, nineteen forty two, Margaret Lowe was preparing for the arrival of her daughter, Barbara
who would visit that weekend. She called in at the butcher's shop on a neighboring street and asked the woman behind the counter to keep some bones and fat back, telling her that she wanted to cook Barbara a special meal. When she arrived, it was late morning. A couple of hours previously, the mutilated body of Evelyn Oatley had been discovered in the darkened room of her Soho apartment, just
a short walk from Margaret's own home. Margaret seems to have gone about her usual business that day, and that night she went out soliciting, dressed in a belted black cloth coat and a dark hat. She was also likely to be in pain. To add to her woes. The forty three year old was suffering from a large uterine tumor, and she may well have moved slowly when the lines and the flackrane shadows. So at about half past midnight, Kathleen Clark saw the lady coming down Shaftesbury Avenue towards
Piccadilly Circus. You'll go with a captain, but not with an ordinary soldier. I see her. A pair of soldiers, Scott's guardsman Kathleen was talking to, had turned nasty. I wouldn't go with you anyway, who knows what you got. And as Margaret passed, she offered some words of encouragement to her fellow sex worker, telling her to stick up for herself against the torrent of abuse. I a poks ridden. So Kathleen watched her go, a lone figure slipping down
one of the dark thoroughfairs behind Regent Street. She didn't stop and talk to anyone else, but at some point Margaret must have crossed path with an airman. Must have looked into his pale eyes, scrutinized his sharp features, noted his upper class accent. I have plenty of, and decided to take him home with her. When Florence Bartolini was woken from slumber that night, it was two sets of footsteps she heard through the ceiling, one heavier than the other.
She switched on her flashlight and shot it at the clock one fifteen am. The building was quiet, and she rolled over and dozed back off to sleep. Sometime later, Florence was again disturbed by those heavy footsteps, A man's, she thought, coming down the steps from the direction of missus Lowe's landing. I heared him open and closed the door of the common entrance and walk away, and then
all was quiet and still once more. On Wednesday morning, when Maurice Wiseman left Gosfield Street, he noticed a brown paper parcel of groceries on missus Lowe's doorstep. It was there the following day when Florence Bartolini returned from her job as a cleaner, and it was still there on Friday afternoon, when fifteen year old Barbara Lowe arrived from school to spend the weekend with her mother. Barbara, not receiving no answer, she went to search for Margaret in
the local market. Her mother was expecting her, after all, and she wouldn't have gone far when she bumped into Maurice Wiseman, who was worried about his neighbor and had already summoned two police officers. The teenager must have felt a cold wave of alarm. No one had seen or heard from her mother for three days. The police unlocked Margaret's flat. Inside, the windows were blacked out and it was dark. The bedroom door was locked too, with no
key in sight. The officers forced it open and switched on the electric light. There in the bed, with Margaret Lowe's cold body a quilt drawn carefully up to her chin. The sheets were stained with blood, and stockings had been tied tightly about her neck. Behind closed doors. The killer had spent time abusing and violating her body, using any objects he could find around the house. He seemed to have broken a metal fire poker in the process, and when he finally left, he took with him a trophy,
Margaret's small silver cigarette case. The police report of this crime scene includes a strikingly callous line the position in which the body lay is a position which a woman of Lowe's type would assume in the horse of her calling. Margaret Lowe was attacked several times in the weeks leading up to her murder, belittled and bludgeoned by men who believed she deserved little in the way of respect and rightly surmised that their violence would go unchallenged and unpunished.
Her neighbors complained about the nighttime callers and the loud gramophone music she played during their visits. They grumbled about the occasional violent altercations, but with the exception of Ralph Stephens, none of them ever intervened when they heard her crying out for help. Women like Margaret, had been made easy targets for violent men, and as one a cadet had discovered, you could pick them up, torment them, and murder them at your leisure, and then walk off into the night
to hunt for your next victim. Bad Women. The Blackout Ripper is hosted by me Hallie Rubinhold and me Alice Fines. It was written and produced by Alice Fines and Ryan Dilley, with additional support from Courtney Guerino and Arthur Gomperts. Kate Heay of Oakwood Family Trees aided us with geneological research. Pascal Wise Sound designed and mixed the show and composed all the original music. The show was recorded at Wardoor
Studios by David Smith and Tom Berry. You also heard the voice talents of Ben Crow, David Glover, Melanie Gutridge, Stella Harford, Gemma Saunders and Rufus Wright. Much of the music You Had was performed by Edgarchan, Ross Hughes, Christian Miller and Marcus Penrose. They were recorded by Nick Taylor at Porcupine Studios. Pushkin's Ben Tolliday mixed the tracks and you heard additional piano playing by the Great Berry Wise
Hi Berry. The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fane, Carlie Migliori, Maggie Taylor, Nicole Morano, Eric Sandler, and Daniella Lucan. We'd also like to thank Michael Buchanan Dunn of the Murder Mile podcast, Lizzie McCarroll, Catherine Walker at the Royal Pharmaceutical Society and the Earb Historical Society. Bad Women is a production of
Pushkin Industries. Please rate and review the show and spread the word about what we do, and thanks for listening. M