S3 – 5: Flaws

from across England. It was the kind of thing that Donald had managed to sort out when he was on the trail of the Brighton Railway killer. That may even have been the reason that Charles Warren thought he was the right man to handle the things. But this was something different, and from our point of view today, some of the ideas that reached the police are truly baffling.

Take the suggestion. On septem the week after Annie Chapman was killed, The Star said that police had received a request to photograph the retin as of the dead women. They were hoping that an image of the murderer had been imprinted on Annie Chapman's eyeball. Could a camera properly calibrated, take an imprint of that image and reveal the face of the killer. That was just one of the desperate

suggestions made to the police that September. There's no way that the police could take action on every whim and scheme that reached them, let alone take them at face value. The city waited in terror for the killer to be captured, or for another woman to be murdered. The city waited, but Donald Swanson could not. He had work to do. Here's historian Adam would. At this time, Swanson and his

family were living in South London. I would imagine, knowing that route, it would have been probably a cop right in each day and each evening. And he does actually describe his working day in between September December. It's quite

a heavy workload, he said. I had to be at the office at half past night in the morning, then I had to reach for all the papers that had come in which took me in who we live in PM and sometimes between one and two in the morning, then I had to go to watch chaplains through the officers, genuinely getting home between two and three, I am so, you know, you can you imagine that there's there's something like about fourteen hours minimum of just literally just reading

the reports and statements which are coming each day. That's an enormous amount of work for one officer to do. And as the days stretched on, with Polly Nichols and Annie Chapman's inquests both still open, with interviews and evidence being reported in the papers, well it wasn't like anyone was holding their breath. No, the panic in London was what you might call vocal. One letter to the editor at the start put things in stark terms. The detectives

were clearly inefficient. In fact, they were so ignorant of London that their policing was a joke. And the writer thought that he knew why a police force dependent on taking men from the military rather than recruiting them from London neighborhoods. In fact, Londoners who might be able to actually or of the community, Well, they weren't even allowed into the Metropolitan Force because they didn't meet the standards of Army service, standards that were hardly appropriate for the

very work of policing a city. At least that's what the letter argued. Under the present system, it said, men are kept out not for want of skill or knowledge, but because they are below the standard five ft nine inches. Today the public are made to pay for height and not for brains. But that question of whether the police should recruit from the military, and whether London crime could be addressed by people who weren't London born, well that

was nothing new. In fact, those had been common complaints about the London Police for a very long time. How long, well, right from the beginning, since about eighteen nine. That's when a reform bill was passed under the Home Secretary Robert Peel, the Act for Improving the Police in and Near the Metropolis it was called. But almost exty years had passed

since Peel had organized the London Police. So when he was put in charge of supervising the investigation of the White Chapel murders in Donald Swanson, wasn't just sorting through mountains of official reports from East End constables and thousands of rabbit trails suggested by British citizens. It was also navigating Robert Peel's legacy, and not all of it was good. This is unobscured. I'm Aaron Manky. A lot had changed before Robert Peel remade the London Police. According to his

modern plan. The city was patrolled by a patchwork of parish beatles, elected constables, deputies, and night watchmen. The roots went back to a time when tenant farmers took on the task of what was referred to as controlling and reforming the ungodly. Early parish policing wasn't so much about enforcing crown law. That was the work of sheriffs. Instead,

it was about things like enforcing church attendance. What did that mean for these predecessors of the police, Well, in one significant way, it meant that some of these jobs were unpaid. Punishing people for swearing, drunkenness and vagrancy was a service to God, after all, and people shouldn't expect to be paid for that right. Other policing roles, while

less connected to the church, were no less burdensome. For a while, there was even a market in what we're called Tiburn tickets, the rewards that were given out for prosecuting someone with a felony. If that person was convicted and executed, a Tiburn ticket was awarded to the person who had made the arrest, and then the ticket holder was exempt from future duties in the parish. As you can imagine that made those tickets quite valuable to get

out of the job. Wealthy Londoners would pay handsomely for a ticket that someone else had earned, and the ticket holders knew they had something valuable on their hands. They would even advertise them in the papers. In eighteen eighteen one, tickets sold in Manchester for two pounds. By one estimate, that's roughly twenty five thousand pounds today, and the get out of work tickets weren't the only things for sale

in London. The Nightly Watch in particular, earned themselves a reputation for being in the pockets of anyone wanting to get away with something nefarious under the cover of darkness. Some even spent their nighttime hours avoiding dangerous situations entirely so when it came to protecting the property of the wealthy, there was really no police force to rely on. That led to even more armed forces popping up in the city.

For instance, along the banks of the River Thames, rich merchants would organize their own security forces to protect the merchandise in their ships and warehouses. So much for preventing crime, but when it came to solving London crying before the eighteen hundreds, while there were the Bow Street Runners. They were a professional group of detectives originally formed by the parish magistrate to guard against highwaymen on the main roads

into London. They made their money chasing rewards for crime solved, but in the early years of the New century they were also caught collecting rewards for crimes they committed. Clearly, there was something deeply wrong with the way the city was patrolled and crime was managed. With London growing, all those mercenaries riding out from bow Streets and the parish constables marching their neighborhoods made a muddle of either preventing

or solving crime. But Robert Peel's ideas were battle tested. After all, he developed his system for controlling a population with police just next door. In the decade before he got his reform passed, he was honing it to a sharp point in Ireland. That's where the traditional authorities the landed gentry, had been failing to control the world poor. A seventeen eighty nine rebellion had shocked the British aristocracy. It was caused by a deep depression and the collapse

of prices for farm products. Before the rural poor had not owned their land, but now they didn't even have a way to make a living. But the British government decided that rather than address the problem's root cause, they needed new means of social control, so they gave the job to Robert Peel. His diagnosis was brimming with the typical condescending prejudice. Rather than seeing an island of dispossessed people, he instead saw the irishman's natural predilection for outrage and

lawless life. So he created what he called a peace preservation force to discipline what he called the morally depraved of the lower orders. What a pedestal you must have placed himself on. When they marched out into Ireland, Robert Peel's constables were mocked using his name aim The Irish residents called his forces bobbies after Roberts and Peelers. That makes sense. Those names stuck too, and came back to London.

When Peel's model for cudgeling the Irish poor was returned to England, he came home to find that from his perch it looked like there were lower orders in London as well as in Ireland. When Robert Peel's bill passed in eighteen twenty nine. It created a unified, centralized force of policemen, all gathered in London under his command. Their orders were to prevent crime, but they weren't very well

received by some Londoners from the beginning. One of the complaints against them was that they were outsiders, pushing out the old neighborhood watchman and replacing him with unfamiliar oaths and bullies. One east Ender said in disgust that his hatred for the Bobby's was because they were and my quote, red hot Irishman just imported they were strangers, They didn't know the city they brought their clubs down upon. There may have been some element of truth to that too.

Even towards the end of the eighteen hundreds, only one out of every six police in London had been born in this city, and that included Chief Inspector Donald Swanson. His family, you see, it was from Scotland, and there were plenty of Scots in London's Metropolitan Police. But there were things that made Swanson unique as well. Here's Adam Wood. Once again, Swanson nothing perhaps uniquely among policemen of that time.

A lot of what comfortables joined the police were from out of London laborers or farm workers, and came looking for a regular work, which the police obviously was at that time. But Swanson was born to a brewing family. Eventually, by Tommy was sixteen, he became a second master at the Miller Institute, which is the school he was in, assisting the head teacher, and it looked as though he

had a career marked out in education. I don't know whether, as I said, Donald just gave up turned his back on a educational career, or he went to London to support the family, which I suspect may have been the case. He got a job quite quickly in the offices of the City Clock, just as a general clock, nothing too strain uous, but again some degree of intelligence was required. Swanson put that intelligence to work when the company he

was clerking for closed down. That's when he picked up the paper and browsed the job advertisements, and a position in the Metropolitan Police caught his eye. You see, Donald's oldest brother had served on the City of London Police force for a time before moving back to Scotland to do the same in Edinburgh, and for him policing became a profitable career, so Donald decided to follow in his

brother's footsteps. He wrote in an answer to the advertisements, after passing an examination with flying colors, he had three weeks of drill training and that's all it took. In less than a month. Donald Swanson was a London Bobby. If we peel back the layers, there's a lot to criticize, because right from the beginning the new unified police force didn't quite live up to the neats and tidy plan.

They were supposed to reform and replace a group of bullies who were easily paid off, But right out the gates the Bobbies earned themselves a bad reputation. First there were the arrests on flimsy evidence. It's true that a lot of the new policemen were brought in from outside the city and they took to nabbing people on the streets just for being near the scene of a crime. Then there was the slow realization that these new policemen, well,

they developed a bad habit of abusing that power. After one constable was caught stealing mutton from a neighborhood butcher, patrolman across the city were met with mocking cries of who stole the Mutton. After all, the bobbies were supposed to prevent crime, not perpetrated. But it wasn't just a leg of lamb that uniform bullies felt themselves entitled to. There was also their relationship to London's world of vice.

Although under most circumstances prostitution was not actually illegal for most of the century, there were still plenty of ways that the new constables could make life hell for sex workers. Only a few of the stories filtered up to London's reading public before the end of the century, though, and at the time it was clear most of the wealthy

and middle class London liked it that way. They were okay with their new bobbies bringing the club down on the London poor as long as they could look the other way, as long as it kept them in their place. There aren't stories of Swanson indulging in the worst of these excesses. The worst reprimand he received in his days as a constable was for drinking on the job, but there's no doubt that he was part of the effort

to clean up the West End. He had been on the force for three years when he and Aberline made their undercover raid on the illegal theater in eighteen seventy one. It was part of police operations that would push most sex workers out of haymarkets by eighteen seventy four, and it was the kind of operation that made Swanson's intelligence stand out from the pack. He was only a constable,

but his plain clothes work didn't go unnoticed. It made him material to be lifted from ranks of peelers on the streets into the hallowed rooms at Whitehall, where professional sleuths took up the mantle of crime serving from the Bow Street runners in the early eighteen forties. But the decade when Swanson joined the detectives is one that would

give them quite a bad name. You see, they had more power than the Bobby's naturally, and in eighteen seventy seven word got out that they had been using that power for evil in what became known as the turf Fraud scandal. Here's Adam Wood once again. Well. The turf Fraud was a long running scam in which a London gang committed a fraud on a rich French widow that Superintendent Frederick Williamson of the Detective Department sent his best men to investigate. But for some reason, the gang always

seemed to be one step ahead and avoided arrest. They're eventually captured and sent to prison, but one of them then wrote to the government revealing the reason that had been so difficult to arrest was that the detectives had been bribed to warn them when the police were getting close.

Free detectives from the department and one corrupt solicitor were put on China found guilty as you say in eighteen seventy seven, and the result was that the Detective Department of School and Joad was completely disbanded and replaced by a new system called the Criminal Investigation Department or the CID. All of the detectives who had served in the old department that not being arrested replaced on Freemont's proviation, had

to prove they could be trusted. Luckily, for Donald, he'd only been appointed to detectives two weeks before the discovery of the turf fraud, so he cannot have been evolved in the cover up by the corrupt detectives. Needless to say, it was a massive disgrace for the detectives, and make no mistake about it, it was noticed by all of London. After all, it had begun in the papers as a fraudulent advertisement. That's what lured in the French Widow along

with other Parisians. Now the papers said things like the detective service has broken down and is no longer to be relied upon. The call came from all sides to overhaul the force, which included the new c I D in eight seventy eight, just ten years before the Whitechapel murders began, and Donald Spanson would be one of the men responsible for that work. But if London was a place where established people like Donald could remake themselves into

something new, it wasn't that easy for everyone. But sometimes even newcomers needed a shot at remaking London. The police were called missionaries. They were bringing the gospel of British middle class refinements to the undisciplined mass of London's poor. At least that was the idea. If we think about the legacy of violence and corruption that the early Bobbies or the turf fraud scandal left behind, then that kind

of praise might sound contrived. But then there's the equally ironic fact that when it came to London, missionaries, perhaps the most famous group called themselves an army and in August of eight seventy eight, William and Catherine Booth summoned them to a war congress in the East End to plan his campaign. That's when they founded the Salvation Army right there in Whitechapel. Here's Dr Drew Gray. If we're sending missionaries out to Africa, you know, we're sending the

likes of Stanley and Livingstone. There's kind of explorers come missionaries to bring the word of It's not just the word of God, is it. It's the word of white civilization two so called uncivilized African tribes in that terribly imperialistic way that was such a feature of the nineteenth century.

But if you're going to do that in Africa, then surely you need missionaries to go out to White Chapel and Spittlefields, and then down below the river south of the River into the Borough and Southolk Burman's in places that way. Similarly, it looks like the world has been neglected. It looks like Christ is not permeating into those parts of the empire. Like the detectives at the New c I. D. William and Catherine Booth had ten years to transform the

neighborhood before it's the darkest chapter would begin. Of course, there was no way for him to know that at the time. But if you told William Booth that a remorseless killer would soon be carrying out his brutal plan in Whitechapel, William wouldn't have been surprised. In fact, he

did know London well. He arrived in the city in eighteen forty nine, and together William and Catherine had been preaching hell, fire and damnation in East London since eighteen sixty five, when they founded the East London Christian Mission. When they rebranded their work as the Salvation Army in eighteen seventy eight. There were ways that they reinforced middle class values. They wanted the London poor to look a lot more like the sober and orderly families of those

with money. But they also knew what it took to reach East London with their message, and that meant they sometimes offended the middle class notions of what was proper and respectable. First of all, there were the Hallelujah lasses that was the nickname for Salvation Army women, and starting with Catherine Booth, they were out there preaching right alongside the men. Then there was the music, the thing for which the Salvation Army would become best known in the

East End. They were singing religious songs, for sure, but those songs were set to the tunes of the popular music that match women out on the town would have heard in London's music halls. Even the advertisements for their gatherings borrowed designs from circus posters and newspaper advertisements, and they were posted up in places like pubs, music halls and coffee shops, anywhere that dock workers, costermongers and bookies

taking bets would likely see them. So by the eighteen eighties the Salvation Army had something of a bad reputation among wealthy Christians, who thought that Christianity was only true if it was suitably reverent and refined. But they took criticism from other directions too. Years more from Dr Drew Gray and then they were former Methodists, and they wanted to bring religion and abstinence from alcohol to the people of the East End. They operated by holding large public

meetings and organizing marches true communities. These marches are accompanied by brass bands made up of members. There's a military system of organizations, so General Booth is at the head, and they have soldiers, and of course they distribute their weekly newspaper, the War Cry, on the streets and by

going into public houses. And they brought their kind of brand of religious further into communities like Whitechapel, which often drew down quite a lot of abuse and ridicule from the locals, and they might not have listened to the rhetoric that they were putting out their Christian vision. And you quite often find Salvationists being brought before magistrates by the police for causing a nistance, not causing an obstruction.

But they're clearly people who were driven by a very strong religious beliefs to affect change in the communities they see that are so blighted by alcohol and poverty, crime and homelessness. So the Salvation Army had a complicated relationship

with their Eastern neighbors. There's no question they were motivated to help with the misery and suff weren of desperate people, and we can easily share the compassion that reformers felt for people whose homes had been smashed to make way for London's new buildings, or who had come in from the countryside looking for jobs only to find that many of the city's businesses just wanted to chew them up and spit them out for the benefit of London Banks,

And as we explored in the last episode, there was a lot of confusion about the difference between a working woman and a working woman and whatever they were actually preaching in their sermons. The message that came through from the Salvation Army was that the way to raise yourself out of poverty was to first transform your inner life, to remake yourself. But if part of what a woman in the East End was supposed to do was stopped working, how could they have any life to speak of? Now?

Some East End women, like the matchwoman Mary Driscoll, had what you might call an interesting relationship with anti vice campaigners like the Salvation Army. Even if she didn't love working for Bryant and May in their match factory, that didn't mean she would fully embrace the message of the angelists in her neighborhood who were telling her to quit working for a living, let alone, to abandon her Catholic faith.

Like many of the match women, Mary Driscoll was an Irish Catholic, but that didn't mean she rejected everything about their ministry. In East London. Here's Dr Louise ra There were no flies on marriage. She was a very clever woman and like all Eastern moms, she did whatever she had to do to survive. And the Salvation Army, the Sally Anne was some of the people that would do good work amongst the poor and crucially ran soup kitchens and would give out soup and give out free food

and mary. But only if you were, you know, a good Protestant. They were not in the business of giving it out to Jewish people of Catholic people. So Mary trained all her children to sing Salvation Army hymns and they would go along to these soup kitchens sing these hymns, you know, passionately pretend to be religious. A Salvation Army would be terribly impressed and they would get their free shoop,

no doubt. Some mothers across the East End who were making do with low wage work were grateful for some help feeding their children, even if they didn't appreciate being thought of as sinful prostitutes just for working outside their home. But what about the women who were sex workers. Some of them did follow the Salvation Army's call and trying to change their lives the way the new Evangelistic movement taught.

But there were others who made new lives for themselves, not by abandoning sex work, but by using it as a tool to better themselves to climb the social letter. Sarah Tanner left us a few traces of her life. They come to us mostly because she was an acquaintance of the writer Arthur Munby. He tells us that when he first met Sarah in the eighteen fifties, she was a maid working for an Oxford shopkeeper. When he met her a couple of years later, her situation was entirely different.

She was on the street in what he called gorgeous apparel. In fact, she was doing business along Regent Street as a sex worker. When he asked her why, she said she had chosen it herself. She enjoyed it, and she told him she found it profitable. A few years later he ran into her again. His first impression was of how truly well she seemed, hail and hardy. When they fell into conversation, she told him she had raised enough money to employ tutors who were teaching her writing and

the other accomplishments of her day. In fact, to his surprise he found her and I quote respectable. To his even greater surprise, he found she had saved enough money after three years of sex work to open a new business, her own coffee shop. When he visited the shop, he asked a local policeman about its reputation. Respectable was again the answer, and Sarah Tanner it wasn't the only one to follow that path. Take Elizabeth Gustuf's daughter. She was

born in Sweden. As you might have guessed by her name, her father, Gustuff, was a farmer. Elizabeth was the second of fortu Dren and her family was devoutly religious. The parish records from her village north of the port of Gothenburg showed that she was taught in the church there until she was sixteen, that's when she was confirmed, and in the records of her move to the city on the coast, notes say that she was well behaved, but even said that she was well versed in the Bible.

For a few years, we know that she worked in the city as a maid for the Olifson family. Maybe that would have sustained an intelligent country girl, but a series of tragedies struck. First, her mother died then the next month she found out she was pregnant. Six months after that, she was in the hospital being treated for an incurable venereal disease, and within two weeks she lost the baby. By the end of the year, she was registered with the police as a sex worker and fighting

to survive life with syphilis. But Elizabeth did survive. She picked herself up, found work as a maid once again, and was discharged from the government roles of sex workers. It seems that she was a fighter. It took almost three years, but eventually Elizabeth inherited some money from her mother's estate, and she used that money to buy passage to London. In her new home, she remade herself yet again. She even took on a new name and came to

be known as Liz Stride. Here's historian Paul Beg this Stride was registered as a prostitute in Sweden, but how and why isn't certainly known. She managed to gain some decent employment in Sweden and she was taken off the prostitute's register, and then a small inheritance enabled her to emigrate to London. She worked here and then married and even ran a small coffee shop with her husband. Like Liz Stride, coffee itself was born elsewhere, but made itself

at home in London. In fact, it came into British society from even farther afield, borrowed from Turkish culture when the English and Ottoman empires were trading more than blows coffee, and the coffee houses were a London fashion for a century. In sixteen fifty, the very first British coffee house was opened by a Jewish businessman in Oxford. Soon enough, the city's coffee houses were filled with scholars as well as their books and their conversation. In fact, across the seventeen hundreds,

they were the haunts of high society. Early London coffee houses where places where news was read and discussed. They even garnered the nickname penny universities because a patron could pay a penny at the door and step into a world of culture and conversation. Coffee was served alongside other exotic beverages like tea and drinking chocolates, and they were full of smoke from another new leaf tobacco, all gathered

from the reaches of the Empire. Tea had overtaken coffee as the drink of polite society by the eighteen hundreds, but there was still enough buzz around the idea of a coffee house for it to mean something when Sarah Tanner opened the doors of her own. But while Tanner's respectability as the owner of a business is the last thing our ther Munby writes about her, Elizabeth story goes on, and it takes a darker, more tragic turn, because, like

any Chapman, Liz Stride drank heavily. It seems that for a while she was still able to run the business with her husband. They even moved their coffee shop to Poplar High Street for a while, but by one her marriage had collapsed. In December of that year she was in the White Chapel Workhouse infirmary, and it seems that for the rest of her life after that she was scratching out a living in the East End. Here's Paul

beg once again. She took to pleading, apparently meaning mainly for the Jews, and it was said that she could speak Yiddish. But her life spiraled downward. Her drinking landed her in court on charges of being drunken, disorderly and using obscene language on several occasions. A fellow Loggio, where she stayed from time to time, told a journalist you said when she should when she could get no work, she had to do the best she could for a living,

and that was in relation to being a prostitute. But he was defending the said that she was a nice and clean old woman you couldn't wish to meet, like Annie Chapman. Liz also met a man who would be her partner in Whitechapel life, but their partnership was a troubled one. By all accounts, the man she lived with was violent. In seven she lodged a complaint against him with a local magistrate, and she continued drinking. There were times when she would leave her partner for weeks on end,

and honestly, who could blame her. On the night after Martha Tabron was murdered, Elizabeth Stride was in court. She had been dragged in for a drunkenness and for using obscene language. She was told that she would be locked up for five days or she could pay a five shilling fine. At the time, Liz Stride had the money, so she paid the fine and walked away. And it wasn't the first time she had been fined two shillings and sixpence on Valentine's Day year before, when she was

arrested on the same charges. By now, though, I'm sure you know where Liz Stride story goes, because in the early morning hours of September, Liz Stride found herself doing something few people had the courage to do that autumn, walking alone through the dark of Whitechapel. It was almost one in the morning. Israel Schwartz was walking on Berner Street. He was just one turn away from his home on

Ellen Street. One might say that he lived just around the corner, but Israel might not have felt like he was close to home as he walked along the street that night. You see, like so many other East Enders, Israel was new to England, so knew in fact that he couldn't even speak English. That didn't mean he was alone though, after all, he was Jewish and he lived in Whitechapel. Here's Paul Beg to give us some context about that. The Eastern Jewish community was largely consisted of

Eastern immigrants fleeing persecution in Eastern Europe. They formed tight knit communities, often built around people who had come across from the same village, so whole streets could be taken over by people who fled from the same village abroad in Eastern Europe, and they had their own little places of worship, and of course they were looking for kosher food. They would only be eating food provided in the main

by their own community. That made for a lively neighborhood like the one around Berner Street, a sense of home away from home. But of course, as we know, there were real resentments that simmered in London against men like Israel Schwartz. Some of them had long histories, to others were more about the neighborhood itself and how it was changing.

Immigrants coming from Eastern Europe were content to take a room with the whole family living in a room, and so these properties, many of these properties could be let to lots of people instead of one person. So the single tenants were finding it very hard to find somewhere

to live. And so there's a lot of ill feeling about these people, which basically boils down to the difficulty that we have in being able to distinguish between hostility towards people because they were Jewish or just because there were foreigners. So yes, even though he was close to home. There were reasons that Israel may have tightened his color and kept his eyes down as he walked. There were reasons he may have felt uncomfortable in the darkness of

his own street. But Israel didn't know just how bad life in the neighborhood was going to get, because that night, Burner Street is where he saw someone die. You see, he turned onto Burner Street from the larger thoroughfare commercial Road, and he saw that he wasn't alone. Ahead of him, he saw a man stop and speak with a woman who was standing in a gateway. The pair was standing in the walkway that opened into the core called Dutfield's Yard.

But what he saw wasn't just polite conversation, even at such a late hour, and it began when he saw the man grab her and try to pull her into the street. It seems like maybe she resisted, she was going to be pulled away from where she stood, but that didn't stop the violence. Israel saw the man spin her around and throw her down the footway, and he heard her give a low scream, and then another, and

then a third. In the darkness of that early hour, Israel Schwartz avoided the scuffle by crossing over to the other side of the street to pass by, but he realized he was walking right toward another man, one who was standing still and lighting a pipe. That's when a call rang out from the darkness of the Dutfield Yard gateway across the street. The voice shouted Lipsky. It was a name that Israel knew. Even though he couldn't speak English, he would no doubt have been familiar with the racial

slurs being thrown against Jews in East London. If Israel already didn't want to get involved in any of it, well, now he was sure he had to leave and quickly. So he walked on. But as he did, he heard footsteps behind him. In fact, the second man, the one with the pipe, it started to follow Israel down the road, so he took off running. He didn't stop until he had passed under a railway arch. When he turned around,

his pursuer had vanished. It had barely taken any time at all, a few quick looks, a few screams, a short chase down a darkened street. But we can imagine that those few moments would stay with Israel for the rest of his life, because if his account is true, then he saw the attack that killed Liz Stride. That question, though, of whether Israel Schwartz gave a true account, is a

tricky one. What we do have is the story as he told it, the story as it's written down and entered into the police record, written down, of course, by Chief Inspector Donald Swanson, and it would make Israel Schwartz the most significant witness in the White chap murders because he had done something no one else had managed to do so far. He had laid eyes on the 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. When Martha Tabram had been killed in George Yard, nothing was found in the neighborhood around her that would help the police identify the killer. When Polly Nichols was killed on Buck's Row, the sweep led to the discovery of her identity, but nothing else. And when Annie Chapman was killed behind twenty nine Hanbury Street, the discovery of the leather apron in the yard beside

her gave fodder for racist speculation, but little more. And even as Catherine Etto's body was found in Miter Square. Police were still searching for clues around Dutfield Yard, where Liz Stride had been killed just an hour before. They also found nothing to put them on the trail of the murder. Things would be different in the case of Katherine ETOs, though, because when police fanned out from the place where her body lay, some of them went back

toward Whitechappel. Previous searches around the body of the victims had come up empty handed. This time what they found would become the very center of the hunt for the killer. Unobscured 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 other shows over at History Unobscured dot com, and until next time, thanks for listening. Unobscured is a production of I Heart Radio and Aaron Menkey. For more podcasts for My Heart Radio, visit I heart radio, app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H