S3 – 3: Stardom

the doctor would conduct Polly's full autopsy. The horror and sensation caused by Martha Tabram's death had just begun to calm when, in the words of the paper, another discovery is made, and one even more shocking. The paper had no qualms about blasting out the details of her murder either, Like other sensationalist stories of the day had meant to draw in readers by horrifying them by provoking outrage. The Star didn't publish the author's name, but the choice of

words would leave a terrible legacy. It described the cut of Polly Nichol's throat, It described the bruises on her hands, It described the bruises on her body, and the missing teeth, but most significantly of all, the lower part of her abdomen, it wrote, was completely ripped open. There was so much more to who she was, but to the journalist, the important thing was that the story reached print as soon

as possible. No one who examined the body had ever learned the woman's name, yet all they had to go on was her clothes. The article in the Star described what she was wearing, including her bonnet faced with black velvet, and her petticoat marked with Lambeth Workhouse on it. But it was the cuts that were described at length and in the most lurid terms. To the journalist, it was more important to turn the stomachs of middle class readers in Westminster than to tell the story of the woman

who lived in Whitechapel. And if there was anything that could chill the spirits of London readers more than one horrible murder, it was three easy enough to draw a line from one to another. After all, the article declares such a terrible murder and a quote could only be the deed of a maniac. Same for the thirty nine stabs that killed Martha Tabram. What about the other woman, Emma Smith, who had been killed in Whitechapel that April,

just two streets over from where Martha's body had been found. Yes, indeed, all this leads to the conclusion. The article ends that there is a maniac haunting Whitechapel and that the three women were all victims of his murderous frenzy. It was a terrifying claim, and it did its work too. From this moment forward, fear would ripple out to newsreaders around London and beyond. Everywhere that had been reached by sensationalist articles like Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon would find itself

visited by the story of Polly nichols murder. The story would travel and fast. So it's probably worth noting that even from the very beginning, the truth of the story was mixed with dramatic lies. For instance, lies about Emma Smith. It was true that she was a woman who had been murdered in White Chapel in April, but the article published in The Star connecting her killing to the deaths of Martha Tabram and Polly Nichols by saying that Emma and I quote died without being able to tell anything

of her murderer In fact, this was patently false. Emma had suffered a brutal attack in the street. Afterwards, she was able to make her way back to the lodging house where she was staying. There, she told other lodgers what had happened to her. They helped her to the hospital. Along the way, she told the women helping her that she was attacked by three men and one of them was only nineteen years old. Emma even pointed out the place where she was attacked as they passed by, and

she talked with the doctors who treated her wounds. All of this had reached the papers within a week of her death, after the inquest held by coroner Win Baxter, was reported in major newspapers like The Times of London and the front page of Lloyd's Weekly News. Of course, almost five months later, it was more profitable for The Star to leave out those details and replace them with the suggestion of a mysterious killer who had already taken three lives. It conjured up the image of a figure

haunting White Chapel who would never really leave. It didn't hurt the paper if it brought in some cash in the process of spinning up a false narrative of events. The thing is, though Emma's murder was horrible enough, there's no question that her death, along with Martha Tabraham's and now the murder of Polly Nichols, were a terrible sign of life in East London. No price can be put on any human life, but an evening issue of the Star, well that was just one halfpenny. This is unobscured. I'm

Aaron manky Wind. Baxter looked refreshed. He was newly back home from his Scandinavian holiday when he walked into the large library of the Working Lads Institute of Whitechapel on September one, and it was certainly time to get to work. There was an inquest to supervise, after all, but he couldn't do that with thout a dash of style. The East London Observer reported the Baxter stroll to the inquest in a pair of black and white checked trousers, dazzling

white waistcoat, a crimson scarf and a dark overcoat. It was one of the moments that would lead to the Corners slowly building a reputation for being something of a showman, something of a personality. After all, if you remember when Baxter from his role in solving the Brighton railway murder. His family had a history in the news business. If anyone could have known the power of the press to lift a Sussex corner to even greater heights, it would have been Win Baxter. But the family at issue in

the inquest wasn't Baxter's. The doctor who had examined the body of Polly Nichols gave testimony at the inquest, so did the first constable who found her. But it was a man named Edward Walker who spoke first because he was Polly's father. Edward viewed her body and confirmed her identity with immense grief. He was a gray headed, gray bearded man, according to the papers, with his head lowered and his hands behind his back. He entered his testimony

into Win Baxter's inquest records. Later that day, after the official statements, Detective Frederick Aberline brought Polly's husband to do the same. We can only imagine the weight of shock and grief that hung over both of them. Together, the two men began to provide Win Baxter and the Scotland Yard detectives with the outlines of Polly's life. Here's historian Paul Beg. Maryanne Nick was born in eighteen forty five near Fleet Street, which is where lots of newspapers were

located until relatively recently. She was the middle of three children. The others were brothers, one older and the other younger, and she married a man called William Nichols in eighteen sixty four. He was a printer, and they would have five children, and they lived quite comfortably in a block are flats or apartments as you might call them, known

as peabody buildings, which just was somewhat upmarket place. You had to have certain qualifications to be allowed to live there, and they had shared toilet facilities, they were cooking facilities, There was a close washing area. You could even book and have a hot bath every day if you liked so. There were facilities for personal hygiene, and most of those things were things that people in the surrounding houses didn't

necessarily endure. So you can see that they were a little bit upmarket, paying a modest rent for this kind of establishment. But about the couple separated, the precise circumstances aren't properly understood, but William Nichols said that Mary Ann began drinking heavily, and had left him on several occasions. Then she left him for good. It was a picture of life that in some ways was very different from

Polly's East End neighbors. When Polly moved into a Peabody building with her husband and five children, it was a sign that they were doing well, at least financially. He was a printer as machinist like the young man killed in the Regent's Park murder. And if he was employed by any of the newspapers whose presses were running day at night, well he probably had regular work. But money isn't everything. At the inquest on her death, Polly's husband

emphasized that she was a hard drinker. In a counterpoint, Polly's father emphasized that her husband left her, took another woman to live with, he said, and turned nasty when the marriage fell apart. Polly lived with her father for a while, but things weren't happy in his home either, and Polly continued to drink. The four youngest children stayed with Polly's husband, the oldest went to live with her father. In the following years rather than live with either man,

Polly was in and out of London workhouses. For a few years, she lived with the widower and his three children in Walworth, a bit south of the River Thames. But even if she saw the potential of starting a new family with this man beyond the reach of London central streets and East End alleyways, well, tragedy followed her anyway. Polly's brother died horribly in six On an ordinary evening. As he was talking with his wife and getting ready for bed, his paraffin lamp exploded as he tried to

put it out. He was covered in severe burns and never recovered. If Polly was as devastated by her brother's death as we can imagine, then it's easy to see why things might have fallen apart again. She left her new partner within a year. At the beginning of eight Polly Nichols had a placement as a servant, but that

didn't last long. In July and August, in the days leading up toward death, she was in the East End, scratching out what money she could and taking shelter in any place that would give her a bed for just a few pence. But on the night of her murder she didn't even have that. The Deputy keeper of a lodging house on Thrall Street found her in the kitchen an hour after midnight. He asked her for fourpence to pay for a bed, and when she told him she didn't have the money, he put her out on the street.

He said, she looked at him and laughed. She pointed at her bonnet faced with black velvet, and said, I'll soon get my doss money. See what a jolly bonnet I've got now. The last time she was seen alive was at two thirty that morning. A friend ran into her in the streets and tried to get her to come back to a lodging house for the night, but Polly refused. I have my lodging money three times today, she told the friend, and I have spent it. It left her with nowhere to go, nowhere but the streets

of Whitechapel. Let's be honest, true crime cells. It was as true then as it is today. But the publishers of London's papers weren't the only ones who saw the news of Polly's murder in terms of pennies and pounds. There were other east Enders who spent their time thinking about the bottom line as well. That included the clothing manufacturers L. M. P. Walter and Son. Their shop was on Church Street in spittle Fields and they were part of the industry that had been at the center of

Britain's industrial expansion. In five they build themselves as the largest manufacturer of juvenile clothing in the Kingdom. They were selling clothes across Britain, but especially for every foreign and colonial market. They said they were hoping to sell their check trousers and white waistcoats to the wind baxters of Canada, Australia, India and South Africa. Now they saw all of that under threat because three women had just been murdered in

their neighborhood. Tucked in the government records is a letter from those manufacturers that reached the Home Office on the day after Polly nichols murder. It begged for the government to take action. They explained how terrified they were. They had just hired a night watchman to protect their shops and their workers. After all, if a killer roamed the streets,

their employees might not show up to work. They urged the Home Secretary to follow the same course that had led to the capture of the Brighton Railway murderer to issue a reward. They seemed to say that enough incentive could bring the hidden aspects of the mystery to light. After all, who better to know how far money could go in Whitechapel than the owners of its powerful and profitable businesses. People, that is, like the American businessman George Peabody.

He had begun like the Bryant family, whose grocery business had turned into a successful match factory. George Peabody, though was actually from Massachusetts. His career started when he opened a dry goods store with his uncle in Washington, d c. By the eighteen eighties, though, he followed the Bryants on a path to power, from merchant to broker to international banker. And if you were an international banker, there was no

better home than London. In the decades after he founded his London firm, George invested in all sorts of endeavors. He invested in American railroads. He gave thousands to a young explorer named Elisha Kent Kane, who set off in search of the lost Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin. George Peabody even served as the director of the Atlantic cable company that connected the United States and the United Kingdom

in eighteen fifty eight. But George Peabody read the papers too, so he was confronted on a daily basis with the failures of a growing London to provide for its poorest citizens, and he started to think of ways to offer what he thought the city lacked. But his idea arrived at something of a bad time. You see, he wanted to

make a charitable gift to London. In eighteen sixty two, during the American Civil War, and despite Britain's official declaration of neutrality, most British merchants and officials supported the Confederacy. They didn't care how cotton was produced, as long as it was cheap and reached British ports in high stacks suppressed bales. After all, clothing manufacturers like L. M. P. Walter and Son wanted to keep their British mills running.

So George Peabody tiptoed carefully through the political minefield. He talked with his friends about the project and eventually abandoned his first plan to build public water fountains throughout the city. Then he thought of funding schools, but on the advice of the Seventh Earl of Shaftsbury. He landed on exactly what the poor needed most better. How's in Throughout the eighteen sixties, George Peabody poured millions into the model housing

that would first be built in London's East End. It was supposed to create a kind of lifestyle for east Enders that would trim embarrassing situations from the national landscape. For his gift, George Peabody was celebrated in the London papers for unprecedented munificence. Queen Victoria even sent him a personal portrait in gratitude. But as Polly's life details show us, if the idea was to help the very poorest Londoners, that got lost somewhere along the way. Here's historian Dr

Drew Gray. This is part philanthropy, but obviously you're making profit, hopefully but a small profit out of this. So there's the Rothschild Buildings in Florendine Stream which built but many of these places, whilst the emphasis is on rehousing the pool, they only really accommodate the working class who could guarantee to pay the rent, the check that the men are in work. They're checking that the children at school, that

the rooms are clean and tidy. And if you fail in any of these areas or you can't pay your rent, then you're going to be evicted. So and that, and that's very difficult to guarantee for people at the very bottom end of society, people who are the casual poor, who don't have regular jobs, who are alive, for example, on work at the docks, on picking up work on

a daily or a weekly basis. Now you can't guarantee that you can pay your rent, so you're not going to get into a models ready, and they are actually the people that really need is decent housing. And it was on the steps of a model dwelling in George Yard Whitechapel where Martha Tabram's body was found at the beginning of August. But if you'll remember, it wasn't because

she lived there. Just like Polly Nichols, Martha Tabram was killed at a time in her life when even the buildings meant to help London's poor were still a class above her own. In response to their fears, the clothing manufacturers L. M. P. Walter and Son received a nice

note back from the Home Secretary's office. It described in gentle terms that the practice of offering rewards had been discontinued, and in what would increasingly appear to be a deep misunderstanding of the situation, the Home Secretary said that the murders of women in the East End did not disclose any special ground for departure from the usual custom, as if there was anything usual about the murders. Of course, for some the killings in Whitechapel weren't just a threat

to business or a minor administrative irritant. They were deeply personal. Polly's father and former husband both received some brief notoriety and some deeply galling attention when Baxter and Scotland Yard called them into the Inquest to come terribly face to face with Polly one last time, and that was where

they divulged the details of their personal pain. Journalists ran back and forth between Polly's husband and father, collecting contradictory statements about the greatest griefs and losses of their lives. They were picked over and passed for anything useful, first by the corner, then by the police, and then by the papers, with the neighborhood gossips left to pick at the scraps. And that's how it was for most east Enders.

Their contact with government officials didn't result in courteous correspondence. Not everyone in Whitechapel found their way into a Peabody building. The Peabody buildings helped the reputations of men who got their names put on city blocks and helped many of their bank accounts too. They did help the people who could already afford them, but for the truly desperate it was just one more example of a better life that

was out of reach. Here's Dr Gray once again. The model dwelling movement is definitely a good thing, and you can see many of the model dwellings people of the buildings are still existent in London today. They built them very well, the beautiful examples of Victorian engineering building, but

they weren't pace here. So many other people in the East End will have been forced into you know, poor crowded housing, and we see terrible examples of people living all the way down to two sellers where they're living in sort of stigen conditions in dark, unlit, damp basements, all the way up to living in attic spaces, whole families in one room and no sanitation. You know, you might have shared pilate facilities in the yard at the back, so very poor, very cold in winter, very hot in summer.

So you see lots of images of white chapel, of people outside, people being outside, because you wouldn't want to be inside. Because also your inside space is also probably your workshop space. So people who are working piece workers and cobbling or building matchboxes are going to do that at home. So you've kind of got to get the kids out from under your feet in order to turn them your space into a into a workspace during the day,

Families sharing beds. These these conditions were shocked the middle classes when they came to investigate. That shock was strong enough to launch the whole model dwelling movement. But the Model Dwellings were just one of the major efforts by well to do Londoners to reshape the East End and to change the people there in the process. But others took a very different approach to reforming life in the East End. They chose to send an army. Things hadn't

exactly gotten better. Yes, Charles Warren had been a hero of the British Empire when he was selected in eight six to become the new Commissioner of London's Metropolitan Police and that wasn't just because of his excavations on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. The engineer had also proved himself

to be a warrior and an investigator too. As an engineer and a surveyor, he had been sent to South Africa to draw the lines of the British crowns claim to the land and of course the diamonds that had been discovered there in eighteen sixty eight, and then to keep both. The people who resisted English control were killed. For some of that fighting, Warren commanded a regiment of

volunteers aptly named the Diamond Fields Horse. One historian writing about the period put it in stark terms, white man's dreams, black man's blood, and Warren spilled some of his own blood too. After that, Warren was appointed Special Commissioner to investigate what they called native questions. It was the first inkling of that future period when he would become the

Police Commissioner of London in his own native land. His greatest achievements in crime solving, though, came when he was sent to the Sinai Peninsula in search of a lost professor. The man who had disappeared was an archaeologist who has served with the Palestine Exploration Fund, just like Warren had, making him an agent of the Crown. Warren was able to pick up the man's trail and find his bones too. They were just covered in a gully, along with the

remains of five others. Then Warren criss crossed the desert until he had built a case against a group of Bedouin men, getting them convicted for murder. Five were executed and eight more were imprisoned. Warren was heralded as a hero detective. Along his way to his post with the London Police, Warren was made a Fellow of the Knight Society, a Night Grand Cross of the Order of St Michael and St George, and a Knight of Justice of the

Order of St John of Jerusalem. A mouthful, I know, but if a police career could be built on imperial titles and accolades, while Warren had them in spades. Of course, when he stepped into the role of London's Police Commissioner,

he found himself handling a delicate situation. After the previous commissioner had failed to stop those West London riots in eighteen eighties six, Warren knew that he was expected to bring something different his military style, his military discipline, and his ability to beat down rebellious people and bring them under control. Here's historian at would when Warren was appointed, immediately brought an increased drill training to get the Bobbies

in the Beating better shape. He wrote to the government asking for better uniform and boots because he realized from his military pass that the men needed to be equipped as best as possible. So Warren increased of fitness and the efficiency of the uniformed officers an effectively molded them into a kind of army. He left the detective department to his assistant commissioners and his appointment was where received

at first. But the problems began when Childers lost his post as Home Secretary following a general election and a man named Henry Matthews was appointed. And whereas Warren and he joined Shilders backing right from the start, the commissioner would be unsure whether he could rely on Matthews for support. Yes, it seems that in eight eight Charles Warren found that he was often treated like the clothing manufacturers of Whitechappel.

The new Home Secretary developed a habit when it came to Warren and the London Police polately yet firmly telling the military man that he could not have his own way. It wasn't like he was alone, though there were plenty of officers in the Metropolitan Police who wrote Imperial military

experience to their posts. The senior post in the right from the start were usually filled by the military or legal men who had never served in the police, and the first commissioners actually were Charles Rowan, who had fought in the Napoleonic Wars and at Waterloo, and Richard Maine,

who was a barrister. Mains eventual replacement, Edmund Henderson, who we just spoke about, was lieutenant colonel in the British Army, and all the assistant commissioners were also military men, because it was generally believed that this was required to maintain

discipline over the rank and file police officers. And of course Warren knew exactly why he was picked the hands off approach of the last police commissioner in eighteen eighty six, so Warren determined that he would not make the same mistake. London under his watchful gaze would be different, and in eighteen eighties seven he had a chance to show exactly what he meant because despite model dwellings and more, there were still throngs of Londoners left to starve. Here's Dr

Louise Rath. As somebody said on observing the dockers at work. There's this huge contradiction because they're unloading the wealth and the riches and the silks and the spices and the teas and all this wonderful, luxurious stuff, and they're touching all things and tasting none. They're dealing in these goods they can never ever afford them. Their unloading tea that they will never taste. They're unpacking spices that they will never be able to enjoy, silks that their wives will

never be able to wear. So there's this immense it seems to modernize, immensely hypocritical division. Here we are this incredibly rich, I mean mostly because we stole and stuff from other people around the world. But you know, that is how the British do things. It's a little tradition of ours to do that. But we have become incredibly rich off the backs of other people, including our own poor people. So they are the engine of our prosperity, and they're not getting to share in it whatsoever. We

treat them almost like machinery. You can process things, you can produce our wealth, but it's nothing to do with you. You don't get a share in it whatsoever. London's poor and working people had made it clear that this arrangement wasn't up to snuff, but that message hadn't gotten through, so they had to send it again and again. Socialists, trade unionists and Irish workers advocating for Home rule, all

of them marched regularly through London streets. But when Charles Warren arrived, the Home Secretary was quick to set expectations. He declared, I think you have seen the worst of the socialist meetings. Warren was determined to live up to that promise. For months, he sent his newly drilled troops to arrest public speakers, cracked down on homeless Londoners, and

break up meetings. Think about that for a moment, a community crying out for justice and dialogue with its leaders, only to have the police sent in like troops in a military campaign. Although the government could have responded by listening and making changes, they chose to defend their flaws with force, and in November of eighteen eighties seven, Charles Warren put an all out ban on public meetings in Trafalgar Square. The thing is these arrests and the band

that followed were explicitly illegal. British law protected the rights to assembly and public speech. After the eighteen eighties six meetings, the government had tried to prosecute the public speakers at the park rallies, but they had failed and the protesters had been vindicated in arrest after arrest, the cases against public speakers and organizers were dismissed in court, which made sense,

after all, nothing they had done was illegal. But Charles Warren was determined to put a stop to these meetings anyway, the law be damned, and he had the authority and the forces to do it. So when a group of demonstrators rallied at Trafalgar Square on November thirte of eighteen

eighties seven, they met a fearsome sight. One thousand, five hundred troops of the London Metropolitan Police already occupied the square, and as the marchers came near, they realized that there were also another two thousand constables in the nearby neighborhoods and three hundred horsemen to Warren was there, of course, once again he was on horseback and ready for bloodshed. So when the march arrived at the square, the police

were ordered to charge. They lead with their batons, beating and battling the marchers as they arrived, and as the ten thousand demonstrators scattered, they were met in the surrounding streets by more waiting police. They were beaten there as well, in Piccadilly, Covent Garden, Bloomsbury and beyond. Hundreds were badly injured, some of them trampled by police horses. By the end of that night, fifty had been arrested, seventy five had been admitted to the hospital, and three of the marchers

were dead. And with so many killed and wounded, the day would take on an infamous name, Bloody Sunday. The radical press condemned the police violence. For instance, W. T. Stead turned his pen from the conditions of the Maiden Tribute to the predatory violence of the powerful, and under his direction, the pall Mall Gazette targeted Charles Warren and

the Home Secretary for an all outlashing. After all, they had been willing to del uge London with blood in an illegal act of militant assault on the city citizens at least that was how instead put it, and they published eyewitness accounts of mounted police running down people on the streets without provocation. But papers like The Times, which circulated among upper class readers, were happy to cheer lead the bloodshed. They praised Warren for using a firm hand.

The Daily News called the mounted police gallant. The wounded and dead were simply the price to pay for a little more quiet between the city's grandest buildings. Warren marked it down as a military victory. Others did the same. In the spring of eighteen eighty eight, he was honored with admittance to an elite London club, the Athenaeum. He was also admitted to another order of Knighthood. All in all, he was generally praised and petted by those with power,

at least for a while. That's why when the Regent's Park murder sent a chill across London, it wasn't enough to shake Warren's reputation. But then came Martha Tabram's murder, and then Polly Nichols. Things were becoming unsettling. Many readers were happy enough for Warren's police to kill poor demonstrators when they stepped out of their place. That idea came from the general belief that London would be all right

if the poor just stayed where they belonged. All of these dead women were telling a different story, though, and radical papers like The Star were happy to speculate about what that story was. But their guests relied less on the evidence that the coroner and detectives would uncover and more on something else, London's oldest and deepest prejudice. The

inquest wasn't over after the first few days. Much of Polly Nichols's life had become clear to Win Baxter, and it was clear that she had been viciously murdered, but the question of who had done it and why hadn't comment to focus after interviews with women who had known her in the London workhouses and lodging houses, so Baxter

postponed the inquest for two weeks. When Polly's coffin rolled down the street, followed by coaches carrying her father, her ex husband, and her children, thousands lined up to watch them pass. A tight police escort was commanded to make sure that no one in the crowd got too close. The reporting in the newspaper and the talk in the

streets had already put all eyes on Whitechapel. If Win Baxter thought that a couple of weeks would give time for Scotland Yard to do more digging and come back with all the questions answered, his hopes were set too high even for someone like Detective Inspector Frederick Eberlin, and those weeks when the inquest wasn't in session were also

eventful ones. While Baxter wasn't at work putting together the official account of what happened to Polly Nichols, the writers publishing stories in The Star were only too happy to start filling in the gaps with some investigating of their own. And this is the point where things start to get really dark, because of course the writers at the Star already had an operating theory the maniac at large in Whitechapel.

The London Coroner might have wanted more investigation to be done, but the journalists from the Star went out through the neighborhoods in Whitechapel and started collecting their own reports the rumors and anxieties of the people they met there. So on September fifth and sixth they published a series of stories about a man they called Leather apron and the

story was chilling. They said he was a strange character who prowls Whitechapel after midnight, a more ghoulish and devilish brute than can be found in all the pages of shocking fiction. Here's historian Paul Beg once again. He was portrayed in The Star as a Jewish criminal, almost sort of in the in the tradition of Dickens Fagin. The Star reported that he moved through the streets at night.

He was strangely silent, very menacing and threatening the prostitutes with a sharp leather knife as a knife to cut leather, not a knife made out of leather, as the Star reported his uh It said, his expression is sinister and seems to be full of terror for the women who described it. His eyes are small and glittering. His lips are usually parted in a grin which is not only

not reassuring, but excessively repellent. I mean, so that they're really going overboard in their description of this sort of nightmare creation. And they also described features which are ster up stereotypically Jewish, so it was quite obvious what they

were aiming at. It's obvious to us now that the star was claiming the maniac killer was Jewish, but it would have been even more obvious to readers at the time because these vicious racist lies have a dark history in England, reaching back hundreds of years well into the Middle Ages, like in eleven eighty nine, when rumors of Jewish counterfeiting led to a wave of massacres in which British Christians killed ten percent of their Jewish neighbors, or

in twelve seventy eight, when rumors that Jewish money changers were cheating on the weight of their pennies led to a mass execution. Nearly three hundred Jewish Londoners were drawn, hanged and burned, men and women alike. Another six hundred were imprisoned. In some places, these attacks were led by angry peasants, while others, like an assault on the Jewish

community in York, were led by the Yorkshire gentry. And all of that violence was in a context in which English Jews were the subjects of a royal charter that made them the property of a king. A twelve seventy five law even required every Jew in England to wear a large, yellow felt badge. Sounds familiar, right, The thing is this government racism was based on popular racism against

English Jews. There were plenty of medieval Christian stories that marked Jews as less than human, tales that made their Jewish neighbors out to be devils, animals, vampires, exactly the kind of descriptions being published about Leather Apron in The Star. The worst of these stories said that English Jews were taking young Christian boys and re enacting the torture of Christ on them. It was a lie, of course, but such a popular one that historians today have even given

it a name, the ritual murder libel. When a Christian boy was found dead in a well and twelve fifty five nine English Jews were arrested and nineteen of them were executed in retribution. In twelve ninety, when there were fewer than two thousand Jews in England, the hate was so deep that Parliament and the King got together and wrote a law expelling all of them. That's a dark, dark history of fear and violence. And for some reason, it was that racist history of anti Semitic fear that

The Star decided to print on its pages. It was all too easy for English Christians to believe that a Satanic cabal of monsters and vampires was murdering English women and children. And yes, Charles Dickens had revisited those fears in the eighteen thirties when he made his predatory ringleader of child thieves a Jewish fence named Fagin. It was just a new twist on an old prejudice. So deep seated racist hatred was turning the press again in the

eighteen eighties. It was a medieval fantasy of Christian martyrdom, fueled by new sensationalist stories and mutating into the shape of a modern day conspiracy theory. Here's Dr Drew Gray to add some context. English people weren'tess You're associated with knowledge. You associated foreigners with knives, Portuguese sailors, um Jewish barber's shoemakers, Native Americans escaping from buffalo bills, Well West traveling show.

So it was easier for people in London in the nineteenth century to believe that Jack the Ripper was a foreigner. He was a crazed immigrant, someone identified as other, rather than an indigenous resident of White Chapel. I think those are all things which it's the presence of large numbers of Jews in that area, and the prejudice and the anti Semitism which is definitely rife in Victorian London, which helps to concentrate, which helps to allow someone like the

Style to point the finger at another ape. And as we've seen, there were plenty of Londoners who were just fine with the police treating the East End like military forces occupying a foreign country. That was at least partly because the East End was the Jewish side of town. The story is flogged by the Star were nothing more than shous gossip based on rumors collected in the neighborhood.

It was nothing the police could go on. And in the middle of all of that, on September seven, the day after Polly Nichols was buried, two detectives wrote a report on the state of the police investigation and their assessment. Yes, they wrote, they knew about the rumors against a man named leather Apron, and yes they were working to find someone who used that nickname, But they continued, at present

there is no evidence whatsoever against him. In fact, no evidence had been found to connect the crime to any suspect. But even though they were left without leads, their report offers a glimmer of hope, almost as if to say, don't worry. The report concludes that Inspector Frederick Aberline from Scotland Yard Central Office was on the case. He would assist the White Chapel detectives and sorting things out. It

was true that they hadn't found evidence yet. The rest assured that the best minds were already at work and that would satisfy people for a while. But if the lack of ev was a concern to those Whitechapel detectives on September seven, it was only the shadow of things to come. Soon enough, it would snowball into an overwhelming crisis because the murders were far from over. He was already on Hanbury Street. It was in the cold morning hours of September eight, just as daylight was breaking into

the White Chapel streets. One of the divisional inspectors for Whitechapel was taking stock of what the morning might bring when he saw men running. To his surprise, they were pounding the street toward the police station on Commercial Streets. He waved them down and when he asked them what they were doing, he got a startling reply, another woman has been murdered. They led him to number twenty nine.

The inspector had to press through a group of onlookers in the passage before he was then led into the backyard. That's where he saw her body. The site was so terrible that he immediately asked for some sackcloth to cover her and set about clearing away the crowd that had gathered. He also sent someone for the Divisional Police Surgeon, Dr. George Baxter Phillips, whose medical office was just a few

blocks away at two Spittle Square. More officers arrived to help control the scene, and an ambulance was on the way. The surgeon arrived at six thirty am, pulled back the sacking to examine the body and got to work. His observations and the inspector's notes together give us a gruesome picture of the scene. The body of the woman was left lying on her back at the bottom of the stairs that led to the house's back door. A jagged cut had split her throat, blood was pooled around her shoulders.

Her legs were pulled up, and her abdomen had been opened wide. Her stomach and intestines had been partially removed. The surgeon, Dr. Phillips observed that it looked like she had been choked to unconsciousness before her killers started cutting. Her tongue was sticking through her teeth, and her face was swollen. Feeling the temperature of her body, Dr Phillips estimated that she had been dead for roughly two hours

before he arrived. On the back of the house, blood had splashed on the wall, and blood had been smeared at the base of the fence that separated the yard from the property next door. By the look of it, they guessed that the woman had entered the yard alive and had been killed right there where they found her.

The other thing they noticed a few small items were laid out in a line next to her body, a scrap of cloth, two small combs, and a piece of envelope stamped with the mark of a military regiment containing two small pills, oh and something else. A short distance away in the yard, near a water tap, they found a leather apron. When he questioned the residence of the house, the inspector learned that one of the men who lived there, John Davis, had been the first to spot the body.

The clock chimes woke him at five am, and he had a cup of tea and then went downstairs. The front door had been left open all night, which he said was typical, so nothing disturbed him, that is until he went through the house and opened the back door. He spotted the dead woman's dark shape at the bottom of the steps. Even in the dim pre dawn light, it was easy enough to see the violence she had suffered. Terrified,

he ran for help. Three men in the street heard him calling and followed him back to look at the body in his yard. When they noticed the blood on her face, they scattered for the police. One of them, though, had stopped at a pub for a glass of brandy. All four men who saw the body before the police arrived would later describe the terror that had overtaken them. Not all of them found constables, but they certainly told

anyone they could find about what they had seen. By the time the ambulance arrived, really nothing more than a stretcher to carry the body away, there was a crowd of curious east Enders pressing in around twenty nine Hanbury Street. They had to be held back by a line of constables. Writers and journalists who had caught the scent were in the muddle of ts and later illustrations printed in the papers showed a row of helmets over grim mustaches pressed

back against the door of the house. Another drawing shows an officer in turn pressing back the eager onlookers with an outstretched arm while the shrouded corpse is carried away. Dr Phillips ordered the body taken to the same mortuary where Polly Nichols had been a few days before on Old Montague Street. He would arrive later in the day to conduct a full postmortem examination. As the police set out on their hunt for traces of the killer, the other residents of the street were told to appear at

the inquest to give statements. Constables were sent to various lodging houses and pawnbrokers in the neighborhood. They asked about anyone who had come in smeared with blood or blood stained clothes, but none of these efforts turned up any leads. A report file that day said that every possible enquiry is being made with a view of tracing the murderer, but up to the present without success. Again and the White Chapel Inspectors requested that Frederick Abberline assist them. He

was already at work on the bucks Row murder. The death of Polly Nichols, and at the very least the police were sure of one thing. This new killing was by the same hand. But when it came to finding even the smallest clue to lead them forward, the police, just like the rest of White Chapel, found themselves at a loss. It was not his first examination, but it may have been the worst. Dr George Bagster Phillips had

been a surgeon in Whitechapel for twenty three years. If the pictures are anything to go on, he was slightly jolly, with wavy sideburns and a short beard running under his chin. One of the police officers who knew him said that he looked, for all the world as though he stepped out of a century old painting. An old fashioned man, they said, in both his personal appearance and his dress.

Despite being the opposite of Coroner when Baxter in his approach to fashion, Doctor Phillips was nevertheless charming and popular with his colleagues, and by all accounts with the public too, who came into his office for surgery. But in the afternoon of September eighth, he could only have looked grim, and his office that day was the mortuary, where he made a thorough examination of the woman who had been

killed just hours before. He considered the wounds and began to think about what would lead someone to act this way. It was true that the stomach and intestines had been divided and moved out of the body, but there was something else too. Doctor Phillips noticed that while the cut on the throat was jagged, the cuts through the abdomen were clean and deliberate. And what's more, the woman's uterus

was missing. He guessed that the same knife had been used to make all the cuts, something very sharp with a thin, narrow blade. He thought of the kind of knife that he used when performing a post mortem. Thinking about his own skill as a surgeon, Dr Phillips guests that he could not have performed all of the mutilations to the woman's body in less than a quarter of

an hour. He began to guess that, just maybe that was the whole object of the operation, That these injuries to the woman's dead body were signs that the killer had anatomical knowledge, that possessing a certain portion of the woman's body was the murderer's goal. In short, he began to piece together what we might call a criminal profile. The Star and other London papers had their own ideas about who the killer might be, and those notions were

sweeping through their London readership. From the body of the dead woman on the mortuary table in front of Dr Phillips, a different kind of story had emerged. In the days to come. These two competing stories, the journalistic monster and the experienced surgeon, would compete in the public eye. They would tangle and wrestle for the upper hand, just as Scotland yard detect times wrapped their brains and scoured the streets of Whitechapel looking for leads, and the winner would

become the face of a killer. That's it for this week's episode of Unobscured. Stick around after this short sponsor break for a preview of what's in store for next week. The papers across London trumpeted the murder scene at the end of Act one as the most powerful and horrible thing ever seen on the modern stage. The Star proclaimed the show's Mr Hyde and odious monster, with brutality in

every line and look and gesture. By the time a woman in the real London was actually killed in the yard behind Hanbury Streets, the play had been drawing London crowds for a month, getting people out of their homes for a night of voyeuristic pleasure. And when the papers turned around and started reporting a real murderer in the same terms, well it started to blur the lines between fiction and reality. And if the killings were in a sense Jackal and Hyde brought to life, well why shouldn't

eager thrill seekers flocked to that scene as well? It was our first glimpse of a pastime that would endure all the way to modern times ripper tourism had begun. Un Obscured was created by me Aaron Manky and produced by Matt Frederick, Alex Williams, and Josh Thane in partnership with I Heart Radio. Research and writing for this season is all the work of my right hand man Carl Nellis and the brilliant Chad Lawson composed the brand new soundtrack.

Learn more about our contributing historians, source material and links to our their shows over at history unobscured dot com and until next time, thanks for listening. Unobscured is a production of I Heart Radio and Aaron Monkey. For more podcasts for My Heart Radio, visit i Heeart Radio app Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H