Thinking Sideways: Jack the Ripper

Speaker 1 (00:18):
Well hi, and welcome back to the podcast. If you've
been here before, if this is your first time, welcome, Yeah,
I'm Steve as always, I'm joined by Devin Joe and
this is thinking Sideways and ladies and gentlemen. Happy Halloween October.
It is, it is, and this is this is the

(00:40):
final show of our Halloween sweet I know, a couple
of weeks back, I gave a little bit of a
teaser and didn't tell anybody what we were doing, But
that's because we're doing it now. Yeah, and what we're
gonna look into is something that a lot and I
mean a lot of people have requested that we cover it.

(01:00):
Jack the Ripper, I gotta tell you too. There was
a lot of personal sacrifice for me because in researching this,
I was constantly having to change my underwear because it's scary.
It's a scary story. It is. Yeah, although luckily I'm
not a prostitute, so it seems like you're kind of
like if you're not a prostitute, you're not probably get
also like not in like London. Also it's been like

(01:22):
more than a years. Yeah, probably dead, might or might
not be dead. You never know. But it seemed seemed
like an appropriate story to to do for Halloween. I
imagine that most everybody is probably familiar with the story
of Jack the Ripper, but for those who don't know
it as well as others, were going to go ahead,

(01:45):
We're going to start at the beginning, and then we're
gonna go ahead and walk our way through the case.
And there's some things that I wasn't aware of until
I've done the research, and so I think there's a
lot of colonels of really interesting things that we're going
to bring up. You know, I gotta be honest, I
haven't been super familiar with the Jack the Ripper story.
I mean, you know, I kind of knew it existed,

(02:05):
but like I, despite maybe some indications, don't necessarily love
like horror movies or stuff like that. So I've never
liked seen any of the movies that we may reference.
I didn't really ever investigate the whole Jack the Ripper thing.
So this has been like a really really interesting thing
to be researching because I literally had like no frame

(02:28):
of reference for this. So I would fall into the
category of people who benefit greatly from a whole lot
of explanation. Well, and the nice thing is we we
realized early on that this was such a big story
that we probably couldn't and shouldn't tackle it on our own.
So what we did is we got a little help

(02:50):
and we reached out and we were lucky enough to
spend some time talking with a gentleman by the name
of Richard Jones, and we we should probab Just let's here,
let's have Richard introduced himself. Yeah, I'm Richard Jones from
the Jacketer patern in London, which is rippert dot com.
I'm a jacket guide and I've also written two books

(03:12):
on Jack the Ripper and made three documentaries on Jack
the Ripper. All right, well let's start with London itself.
The time frame we're working in is literally just that
year pretty much pretty much just pretty short time span
of like, for example, the Acts of New Orleans that

(03:32):
was over eighteen months. Yeah, this is a very very
compressed time frame. And to talk about I know, this
is one of the things that you you were going
to take on, Joe, was to kind of tell us
a little bit about London at the time. Yeah, exactly.
And of course, you know, you can get a lot
of you can get a lot of background an atmosphere,
you know, Sherlott Colins. The series started I think the

(03:53):
year before The Ripper started, and you can get a
lot of the atmosphere of London from eating those those
books and those stories and which were which are great,
by the way, I love those things when I was
a kid. Um. But and let me tell you about
the specific neighborhood. These were called the White Chapel murders.
And actually the White Chapel murders were eleven murders, of
which only about five are actually directly attributed to the Ripper.

(04:17):
So the neighborhood of White Chapel, let me talk about
it a little bit, was a neighborhood in the London
in London's East End, and the East End by the
late sixteenth early seventeenth century had attracted a lot of
industrial development, a lot of stuff that was kind of
smell a like foundries, slaughter houses, tanneries, breweries, and lots

(04:38):
of people were there because back in those days, of course,
we didn't have cars and freeways in suburbs, so you
had to live near where you worked, so there were
lots of people there. And England at this time, beginning
about the seventeenth century started a period of urbanization where
people were leaving the countryside and walking to the cities.
And you see similar phenomenon today if you go to
places like South Paulo, Brazil, same thing, people who have

(05:00):
just flocked to the city and they're living in hideous slums.
So that same thing happened back in England at that time.
This and this lasted until the mid nineteenth century. Uh.
And since things like foundries, breweries and tanneries and slaughter
houses tend to smell really bad, that kept rents down.
So if you're poor and from refreshing and from the countryside,
you're gonna gravitate towards the east end. And of course

(05:21):
that increased the poverty and over crowding that already existed
there even more. Uh in the Victorian Area era from
about eighteen forty onwards. It was made even worse by immigration,
mostly from Ireland and Eastern Europe. And so these slums
are getting extremely crowded. Impact And by the way, I
read a book about conditions in Britain at this time.

(05:43):
It's called Capitalism in the Story is by Friedrich Hayak.
Very good book and part of the reason for that
is that the Napoleonic Wars and stuff. There have been
massive shortages of building materials and stuff like that because
of the war, and so substandard housing was kind of
the norm, and window was crowded. Brewing him were very
much the norm. Anyway. Prostitution was endemic in this area.

(06:04):
In Metropolitan Police estimated that there were sixty two brothels
and roughly twelve hundred prostitutes in White Chapel alone, which
is a very small area. Yeah, it's not that big
of a neighborhood. Yeah, and that's only part of the
East End. Also, Jack London, you guys have heard of
Jack London, called the Wild and all that stuff. Yeah,
he decided to go undercover in nineteen o two. And

(06:24):
of course this is fourteen years after the murders, but
still I don't think things have changed probably all that
much in that time. So he went undercover in the
East End and put out old, ragged clothes and lived
among the poor for three or four months apparently, And
he actually slept in the streets and stuff like that.
I mean, he had he had an out. I mean
he had money, so he could actually leave and go

(06:44):
get a nice hotel room and take a shower or
something like that. But yeah, but he's spent time in
there and he and he and he took up and
talked to a lot with a lot of people. And
I've been reading his book about it. He wrote a
book about it called The People of the Abyss, which
I am not actually through with yet. Unfortunate. I think
it's interesting Joe did all his research by reading books. Yea, yeah, yeah,

(07:06):
The People of the Abyss. But anyway, I recommend it,
Like I said, I haven't finished it yet, but it's
it's it's good reading so far. But here's how he
describes his first foray in there. It's and it's funny.
We read the book. He got to London and he's
in the better part of London. He's saying, Oh, I
want to go to the East End. Everybody says, like,
why the hell would you want to go there? He
really seriously, he gets so he gets this cabby, this

(07:28):
guy with a handsome, you know, horse drawn cab or thing,
and he says, I want to go to the East
End and this guy saying, where do you want to
go there? And I just want to go there, says why,
and finally talks this guy says, basically, I want to go.
I want to go to the East End, and I
want to go find a second hand store where I
can buy some radial clothes. And so they travel along

(07:49):
until they find one of those. And here's this description
of his first foray into the East End. Nowhere in
the streets of London may want to escape the site
of abject poverty. While five minutes walked from almost any
point will bring one to a slum. But the region
my handsome was now penetrating was one unending slum. The
streets were filled with a new and different race of people,
short of stature, and a wretched or beer sodden appearance.

(08:12):
Here and there larch a drunken man or woman in
the air was obscene with sounds of jangling and squabbling.
At a market tottery, old men and women were searching
in the garbage thrown in the mud for rotten potatoes,
beans and vegetables. Well. Little children clustered like flies around
a festering mass of fruit, thrusting their arms to the
shoulders into the liquid corruption and drawing forth morsels but

(08:34):
partially decayed, which they devoured on the spot. I know,
I know, that's life according to Jack London in the
East End. So in other words, Whitechapel was an armpit
and I looked at it just today. I went out
on Google street View and I cruised around. You ever
cruise around the streets. I've actually been there, and it's
it's not it's not as bad as it's not a

(08:57):
bad place. It's very busy and it's very tight quarters
compared to what we're used to here in the States. Yeah,
but it's not. It's not a slummy joint, but it buildings.
But no, it's not Hell on Earth by any means.
It's like it's come up a lot in the world
since then. And Richard has some really good points about

(09:19):
the area at the time as well, And since he
actually lives in a lot and he probably has a
lot more knowledge of it than you. Yeah, so let's
let's go ahead and have here his description White Chapel.
White Chapel got a bad rap at the time. I mean,
there were parts of White Chapel that were horrible slums,
but there were parts of White Chapel that were as

(09:40):
good as any other parts of London. And that London
had worst slums than Whitechapel, but it was White Chapel
largely because of the Ripper murders. White Chapel got the
press coverage, and so today when we tend to think
of slum in London, we tend to focus on that area.
But there were parts of Merrily Bone, parts of notting Hill,
even parts of the City of London not too long

(10:01):
before the Ripper murder which were just as bad and
in some cases even worse. But as I say, because
of the press coverage, the history's focus tends to be
now on Whitechapel and the East end of London as
a whole got the You've got the agricultural revolution and
throw people off the lands, I mean this this standard,
but then you've got unemployment in it in the farmlands

(10:22):
of Essex and everywhere. You'd had the Irish potato famine,
so you've got the people coming over the potato famine.
Then it'll say programs, the Jewish eystated, and really the
the whole I mean London was well, it was the
wealthiest capital city in the world, as the biggest port
in the world as well, so it was a massive place.
But right on the doorstep of the City of London

(10:43):
the wealthiest square mile on Earth. You had these people
living in abject poverty conditions crammed into common lodging houses
and it didn't go unnoticed by a lot of people. Well,
so you probably want to talk about the murders. Huh, Well, yeah,
I wish probably get into the murder problems. No, I
feel like the murders aren't even like the bulk of

(11:03):
this story right now. I think we need to talk
about the victims. They're definitely important. And when you read
about this story, you're gonna hear about the canonical five
and those are the five main victims, and Joe kind
of touched on that a little bit in the beginning.
There are there's talk that there were other victims that

(11:24):
could have been ripper victims that aren't directly attributed to him,
and we're actually going to start out with one of
those victims first. Yeah, that's the thing about it. It's
it's really hard to say because it's like, you know,
you're living in a slum and people tend to stab
each other death and the slums a lot, so yeah, yeah,
they do. So the first person that we're gonna talk about,

(11:45):
her name is Martha tabram I. Believe it's how you
pronounced her last name, Taban. She was thirty nine years old,
and like a lot of the women that we're going
to talk about, she'd fallen on hard times. Uh. In
eighteen seventy five, her husband leaves her for her quote

(12:08):
unquote love of the drink. For thirteen years, she's with
another man. Uh he evidently used to sell trinkets, and
then eventually he uh he leaves her, and she doesn't
know what to do, so she kind of turns to
prostitution is a way to get by. And I guess

(12:29):
I'll just mention, you know, it's gonna start to sound
a little repetitive when do we start talking about the
history of these The story pretty much goes for all
of these women, they had a husband who left them
or died. They were with a man for a little while,
that person left them, they had to turn to prostitution.
But also they were drunks, but they had to turn
to prostitution, and because of that things maybe went a

(12:52):
little downhill. These are all these are all I think,
really sad stories, you know, I mean, in their searching.
A couple of these victims, it's like their lives really
could have turned out a lot better. Unfortunately, alcohol was not.
I'm not crustating against alcohology, you know, I love me
my beer, but but yeah, and it didn't serve them well.
I think another point to make is, I can't remember

(13:15):
the exact phrase that was used, but not all of
them were what you would say called a full time prostitute.
They would turn to it in times of desperation. It
wasn't as if they were out working the streets all
the time. A lot of them did other little things
to try to make money. But when money was short

(13:36):
and you needed a couple extra shilling, there was there
was an answer. Um. And Martha here was kind of
that way. She was at a full time prostitute. But
on the sixth of August she was seen out and
about with another prostitute whose nickname was Pearley Paul. They
all had, They all had great nicknames. They really did.

(14:00):
Uh And these ladies evidently they were partying with a
couple of soldiers or maybe they were sailors, It's unclear.
And around midnight they parted ways, and Peary went with
one man one way, and Martha went with the other
in the other direction. Martha took the gentleman that she
was with, if she was with a gentleman, because again

(14:21):
we're not positive, into an alley of a location known
as George Yard. And I think that this is probably
a good place to stop real fast and explain if
anybody who hasn't been to London. It's not a grid,
it's not square blocks. It is full of tiny little
alleyways and they cut in between and they twist and

(14:43):
they turned, so there's lots of dead ends and dark
places for business to happen, if you know what I
mean by wink wink business. So that's what she was doing.
She was going into one of these dark alleys. I
was gonna say, by the way, and I've never driven
in London. I've always been on foot there and had
been there that much. But it's like I would hate
to drive in that town. Holy crap. Oh, it's it's insane,

(15:06):
absolutely insane. But back then, Martha's body was officially found
at four five on the seventh of August, five in
the morning, at the entry of one of the buildings
in George Yard. Evidently there was several buildings. Sounds like
it was kind of a courtyard. But I'm not positive.

(15:28):
Several people in the night had come home and gone
through the entry and upstairs and that had come back down.
None of them saw her body. It wasn't until a
man by the name of John Reeves was leaving in
the morning and he came down the stairs and he
realized that there was a body laying in the entry

(15:50):
and it was in a puddle of blood. And uh,
this was four forty five in the morning. There were
reports of people coming in at two o'clock in the morning.
Somebody left I think like to thirty or three. They
didn't see her. So the window for where how she
could have when she could have got there is pretty narrow.
But again, this is accounts that are over a hundred

(16:13):
and thirty years old. Yeah, from people who were likely
drunk at the time, right, and who are used to
the first thing in the morning, you're not really paying
attention it it's dark. You gotta remember, there's no lighting. Yeah,
and you're also used to people like maybe being passed
out in your stup or whatever that you know, you
would probably say, I mean, I didn't see it. I
didn't recognize it as a corpse, but yeah, there was

(16:33):
like a body I had to step over versus like, no,
there was nothing there. It's probably worth remembering too that
this is London eight and they didn't have street lights
like we have today. It was freaking dark out, very dark,
very dark. I mean I was there at night and
even with modern lighting you could do one of those
alleys and it's freaking dark. The medical examiner showed up

(16:56):
at five thirty in the morning and had placed the
time of death at somewhere between two thirty to two
forty five in the morning. Now this isn't modern forensics.
It wasn't as if they were, you know, using a
thermometer to check the body temperature or doing it had
an accurate judge of lividity things like that. You know,
this is kind of guesswork. Yeah, it was. It was

(17:18):
c s I. London was kind of crude at that time.
It was very crude. Well, the way she was killed
was extremely savage. She was stabbed thirty nine times. Let's see,
there was five wounds in her left long, two in
her right, one wound in her heart, five wounds in

(17:38):
her liver, two in her spleen, and six in her stomach.
They weren't able to identify which was like the first. No,
they couldn't tell which was first. But the weird thing
is that all of these wounds appeared to have come
from a pen knife except for one, and that was
the one that pierced her stern um. And they said

(18:00):
it was probably a bayonet or a large dagger. And
the bayonet made him think that it played into Remember
we said that she was supposedly with some soldiers. Soldier
would have a bayonnet. I believe that this one was
I think attributed to gang violence. Correct. They think it
might have been, but it's it just was I never

(18:21):
got a clear read. It sounds like, I mean, you know,
it sounds like to me, somebody stabbed her a bunch
of times and she didn't go quite go down because
she was stabbed with a little bitty knife. And then
finally somebody else steps in and says, okay, could they
go our time and hit you with the big bayonet.
So that's interesting because then I felt it would have
gone the other way that like some soldiers were drunk

(18:43):
accidentally like stand from the band for whatever reason. And
then was like, oh crap, uh, this seems like something
that could happen in the the you know, in white chapels, Like,
here's a pen knife, I'll just STAB's not going to
cover it up, you know sort of That's where my
mind goes with, that's interesting that we're opposite. So yeah,

(19:04):
I know, I'm thinking that I'm thinking to set somebody
decided that this is not working out, let's go for
the big downs here. But how old was she? She
was thirty ninety nine stabs. No, that is not necessarily
Insignificand well, no, that's true, But they also don't This
is one of the reasons that she's considered an outlier
and they don't think that she was one of the

(19:25):
ripper victims. Is the m O is not the same evolved.
One of the things that happened in every ripper killing
was the throat was cut and hers was not, and
they and they stabbed her, didn't They didn't rip her
open the way corre she was just stabbed to do.

(19:45):
She wasn't open. But we're going to get into that.
I get one just like it was one final Like
I'm right that like it wasn't an abandoned area. There
are a bunch of people sleeping around. If you were
going to like stab a lady thirty nine times whatever
with a pen knife, she's going to scream and make noise.
Versus if you're going to run her through the bandet

(20:07):
and she dies and then try and cover it up,
that's going to be pretty like quiet compared pertly. I'm
not gonna I want to say, though, that I swear
somewhere in the reading I heard someone reported they thought
they heard a scream. There's so many of that though, Like,
like I witness statements are really bad, especially when it's

(20:29):
two in the morning. Well it's not only two in
the morning, but it's in like a really horrible neighborhood.
Like there's drunks and like a bunch of crazy people
wandering around all the time. You think you kind of
tune it out. I mean, you know, one of the
victims that I'm going to talk about in a little
bit here, people were like, well, I don't know, like
I heard some screams in the distance kind of but
like that's pretty normal. I didn't think anything of it.

(20:53):
I think that's just kind of speaks of the time. Well,
let's let's move on to the first of the canonical five, okay,
and that would be Mary Ann Nichols. The first of
the canonical five. Yeah, Mary and Nichols a k A.
Polly Nichols was killed five days past her forty three birthday,
and that was August thirty one, I believe, eighty eight. Married.

(21:15):
A little bit of background here, had been married, she'd
had five children, but unfortunately fallen under the influence of
demon rum and uh because of her alcoholism. Although their
other there there's conflicting accounts as to why the marriage
broke up. There's always extenuating circumstances, the drink and yeah, yeah, yeah, so,
and there were all kinds of different theories. But anyway,

(21:36):
but it broke up about eighteen eighty one something like that,
probably because of our alcoholism. But again this is in dispute.
So she spent most of her remaining years between then
in eighteen eighty eight when she died in workhouses and
boarding houses and workhouses you probably want to know what
those are? Just gonna yeah that workhouses and yeah, exactly

(21:58):
what boarding houses. Obviously there are places just go rent
a room or rent a bed for the night or
by the week or whatever. And then workhouses are places
where if you're if you're poor and sort of derelict,
then you're sort of grabbed and stuffed into the workhouse
and kind of forced to work, but at the same
time you have a place to live. It's kind of

(22:18):
like a poor farm here in boarding. Yeah, you like
work for board you know. And and one of the
things that's really crazy is gosh, in the boarding houses,
I can't remember what they call it, but it wasn't
always rooms that people would rent. I mean, this is
just a bed. Well, they actually had what equated to

(22:38):
rows of coffins that you would lay in and that
was your itty bitty place to sleep. And then if
you didn't have enough money for that for I don't
remember what it was. A couple of pennies is the
phrase I'm going to use. But whatever the currency was
at the time, the smallest amount it was a couple
They had poe in these places, and they would tie

(23:02):
a rope two ropes, wanted about shoulder level and one
about butt height, and for a couple of pennies you
could lean against that with a buch of other people
and sleep on your feet. That this is how crazy
the boarding houses were. Just to get a place so

(23:23):
that you were out of the weather rough times. Um,
I'm really glad I'm not living there right now. Uh so,
she uh She scratched a living mostly from just handouts, charity, prostitution,
and she was of course an alcoholic and the money
she made she mostly spent on alcohol. At the time

(23:44):
of her desk, she was living at a boarding house
in Spittlefields, which is a neighborhood just north of Whitechapel
So onto the murder at one thirty am on August
thirty one, she was booted out of her boarding house
because she didn't have money to pay for her bed.
So apparently this was a pay as you go kind
of basis here, you know that one Yeah, yeah, uh so,

(24:04):
she laughed, saying she was going to earn some money
on the streets to be back. The last sighting of
her was at two thirty am at the corner of
Osborne Street in Whitechapel Road. And I'm sure you're all
familiar with that. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. Actually, there's a
lot of maps out there that really show this quite well,
so people can definitely look that up. Yeah, it's good

(24:24):
to help follow along, it is. It's great, you know,
using Google Maps, I was able to look at that
and able to chart out her course, So she was
at one White Chapel Road. White Chapel Road, of course,
was a fairly busy thoroughfare and actually not not as
slummy as the rest of White Chapel. Apparently at that
time it was reasonably good, reasonably good repair. As soon
as he got off of it, things sort of went downhill,

(24:45):
but it was okay. Uh. So she probably was plying
her trade on White Chapel Road and between where she
was last seen and where she probably encountered the ripper,
I'm instivating fifty ft. It's the distancing she covered between
and the time she was murdered. We'll find out, we'll
find later was about three am or a little bit after.

(25:06):
So's covering sevent d fifty feet in half an Hour's
not unreasonable, now, yeah, yeah, So she was moving northeast
on the on the street apparently, and I'm believing she
met the ripper someplace further away, well, you know, quite
a bit further away from Osborne Road. Anyway, at three
forty am her body was found. There's a short little

(25:28):
side street north of White Chapel Road called bucks Row.
Now it's called Derwood Street. So if you're going to
do a Google on that it's Derwoard, not bucks Row.
But she was found in a short little side street
was only which is only a couple of blocks long,
called bucks Row by a cart driver and he's she
was laying on her back and her skirt had been
raised over her head. Her throat had been cut twice

(25:50):
from left to right. Was to me implies a right
handed ripper. Do you think that makes sense? Yeah, and
her act of it had been violently slashed. There was
one massive jagged gash, other smaller gashes I know. Yeah.
They called a surgeon who examined the body, and he
arrived at four am and 'st a minute. She'd been
dead for about half an hour. His name was Dr
Hanley Llewellen. He later suspected the wounds indicated a left

(26:13):
handed ripper. And I don't know why he suspected that,
because for me, I mean, when I'm looking at somebody
who strode to slash from left to right, I'm thinking
right hand, Hello, left to right, right to left right. Sorry,
we're just standing in here. I'm just slashing at their Yeah,
he would. When you slash somebody, you're probably most likely
going to do it from behind. You're gonna grab him.

(26:34):
You're gonna pull their chin up, and you're gonna like
draw the blade across the throat from behind right, probably
but also maybe not. Yeah, I mean if you we'll see,
if you're standing in front, then it would be the
reverse because you're I would imagine that you wouldn't overhanded
from right to left, you'd pull from left. You'd want to.

(26:55):
But Joe, why do you have a knife. Oh my god,
that's how I die. So you're you're you're gonna show us.
All right, So let's say let's say I'm in the ripper. Okay,
first of all, if I if I, if I'm gonna
slip your through from behind, I'm gonna I'm gonna do
it like this. You're going to pull from your left
to your right to be the victims left to right

(27:17):
across the right. Let's say. But let's say I do
it from the front. Now, the best way to do
it from the front is to do it like this
is to the It like runs down your the side
of your arm. Yeah, exactly, I'm not. I'm not. Essentially
I'm pointing the If I'm holding my fist out in
front of me, the blade is pointing downward, and then
I just walk up to her and I go, why

(27:38):
am I like this again? A left to right from
her point of view? Wound? Um, If I do it,
that's that's that is the best way to do. I
guess the next way to do it is to grab
her hair and do this. Although I could do this,
which is going from either directionard, but I mean anyway
that you know, I don't want to believe with the

(27:58):
port two point too much. I think that to me,
the left to right wound indicates a right handed ripper. Dr. Llewellen,
who examined that who was on the cuts, said that
he's he believed that the wounds indicated that he was
a left handed person. I guess it would just matter
like how deep each part. I mean, you know, right

(28:19):
cut usually gets deeper in the way that it goes
as it travels, so he would know kind of but
also maybe not. Yeah, but anyway, it was a sharp
it was a sharp knive. She probably died pretty quickly.
Mercifully that, the rumor that the ripper was left handed
persisted for pretty much forever, even though llewell And himself

(28:41):
expressed doubts about his own theory. Later on. The inquest
into the death went on for more than three weeks
after the murder because they were still bringing into evidence,
they were still interviewing people from around the neighborhood and
things like that. At the end, the major finding was
that Marianne Nichols was murdered at just after three UM,
so that would put her death about half an hour

(29:03):
after she was last seen. And then the next the
only major thing after that, and this has nothing to
do with anything, but I'll bring it up. Bring it
up anyway, somebody started to rumor that somebody's name, quote
leather Apron quote unquote was the killer. We're gonna talk
about leather Apron more. I know, leather Apron. Yeah. Yeah.
There was a Jewish bookmaker or a Jewish bootmaker in

(29:23):
the neighborhood named John Piser who has apparently had the
nickname leather Apron, and so he was arrested of course
because hey, he's Jewish, he's got a leather Apron. Although
I gotta say, I do to say his nicknames, go,
leather Apron is pretty damn creepy. Yeah, it really is. Yeah,
that's that's like you know, the locals, it's wearing your

(29:45):
your work clothes. Constantly think if your garbage man, If
you graberge man wears his coveralls and then just goes home,
he is wearing him, goes to the grocery store, he's
just wearing him, goes to the bar, he's just wearing him.
It would be a little weird. So I can see
how you would be like, hey, garbage man, what's up?
You know? That be how that nickname starts. But it's
the weird leather apron. It's just there's just something kind

(30:07):
of there's sort of serial killerish about it, you know.
I I understand why that would arouse suspicions. Anyway, this
guy was arrested and of course interrogator probably beating who
the hell knows, But he later was released and actually
received some settlements from a few papers that have published
libelous information about him. Well, let's let's move on to

(30:27):
our next victim, who is Annie Chapman. Annie was some
kind sometimes called dark Annie. She had a full dark
head of hair, and that's how she got her nickname.
But she was forty seven years old at the time
of her death, and same story. She'd moved to White
Chapel after her marriage had fallen apart. She had issues

(30:49):
with drink. Uh. She was all actually getting what would
equate to alimony from her ex husband, which was a
amount of ten shillings a week, and also had a boyfriend.
She was living with a man. Well, when her ex
found out that she was living with another man, he

(31:10):
cut her alimony to two shillings a week, and suddenly
her boyfriend evaporates because there's suddenly not this easy flow
of money, because you know, ten shillings totally enough to
live on. At the time, it actually wasn't it was
it was okay money. I mean it didn't it didn't
get you everywhere, but at least it was something. Well,

(31:32):
at that point she didn't have a consistent income, and
as we said, she she took up casual prostitution along
when doing some other words. It's just such a great term,
casual prostitution. Yeah, yeah, there were so many prostitutes. How
did they find their customers? I mean, I mean, if

(31:54):
you were a john, it must have been like just
I mean incredibly juicy times. I imagine that they were.
You know, there's all kinds of men in the area
coming off of ships and coming in to do words.
I imagine that it wasn't hard. Probably also worked pretty
hard hawking their wares. Probably and I probably should have
mentioned this in my description in the neighborhood too, is

(32:16):
that it was not far north of the Thames River,
not far not far away from the docks. Yeah, well,
at some point anyway, this is going to be on
September eighth of uh Annie was not allowed to stay
at the lodging house that she'd been at because, as
we just talked about with several she didn't have the

(32:38):
money so that she couldn't stay, so she left to
go make the money. That is a that's another common
theme in these these guys. Are they all go back
to there? That guys, these women all go back they
get booted at because they don't have the cash, and
ye next thing you know, they're dead. Not all of them.
But at some point between after five fifteen to five

(33:03):
thirty in the morning, there's a carpenter who lived at
number twenty seven Hanbury Street, and he went into the
backyard of his premises and as he goes towards the door,
he said he heard a woman say no. And he
wasn't sure where it comes from, but he thought it

(33:23):
was on the other side of the fence of the yard.
Then he went back in. He came out a couple
of minutes later, he heard something hit the fence that
divided number twenty seven, where he lived and number twenty nine,
which is the next house over. What was his name,
It was Albert Koch. I hope I'm pronouncing it right.

(33:46):
Sorry Albert if I'm not, But yeah, he said, it
seemed as if something touched the fence suddenly. He didn't.
He didn't, however, go look and see what it was. Instead,
he went back into the house and he left for work.
And that's how he said he knew what time he

(34:07):
heard all of this because as he walked out, he
looked up at the big clock tower and see what
time it was. He said it was five thirty two
when he left. About six o'clock that morning. Another gentleman
by the name of John Davis, who lived in twenty
nine Hanbury Street, came downstairs, and when he walked out

(34:27):
into the narrow passage, which is essentially an alleyway, he
saw what ends up being any Antie Chapman and a
couple of workmen come around right at that time, and
he says, man come here. He is evidently what the
story goes, and they found the mutilated body of Annie Chapman.

(34:51):
Her dress was pulled up around her knees, which we
heard in the last murder. This is starting to become
a bit of an m o um. A deep cut
had been slashed across her throat, her intestines had been
tugged out and laid across her shoulder, which is disturbing,
and her uterus and her bladder had been removed, and

(35:14):
the unse was taken with like that was our found, right,
that is correct? I do not I do not remember.
She was the one where I think it was the
first kind of hey, maybe this person has some kind
of medical training, wasn't she? No, that's actually that comes
in later on. But these organs were removed and uh,

(35:38):
you know, as with the others, it's it is extremely grizzly.
I don't know where which direction they thought her throat
was cut from. I didn't catch that detail, though, I'm
sure it's out there. I just didn't catch it. But
that's how she was killed, which is not a nice
way to die, I don't think. But at least he
uh slit first before we started tearing their bodies up

(36:03):
a mercy. We've we've got to believe that, because otherwise
you would think that the screams of agony would have
been so loud people would have been caught on the
first time, first try, of course. So the next victim
Caniconical Canada. Canaical victim is Elizabeth Stride, and she uh

(36:24):
is a little different than the rest of the victims.
Her story. She was forty four years old and she
was from Sweden. She was killed on September eighth. She
was originally married to a ship's carpenter um after a
life of prostitution, so unlike many of the victims who
turned to prostitution, she was pretty much prostitute the whole time.

(36:48):
She was described by her boyfriend kind of at the time.
I guess he was kind of her boyfriend at the
time as having a calm demeanor except for when she
started drinking. Oh yeah, I do remember that about her.
She she's a little fiery when she got Yeah. Yeah.
So her husband died of TV and they had no children.

(37:11):
Her husband, the ship's carpenter I think it would yeah, toberculosis. Sorry,
And I think it was um like ten years before
she came to White Chapel, however, a little like snippet
of the kind of person she was. She told, like
everyone in White Chapel, that her husband Um and two
of their nine children had died, died in the thinking

(37:33):
of the Queen Anne, and that she lost all of
the teeth on her left side and developed the stutter
because somebody had kicked her in the faith as they
swam to safety. Yes. Uh So, after her husband died,
she moved to White Chapel and turned to hooking again
and had kind of an on again offgin relationship with
the Jewish man Um, during which times she learned Yiddish.

(37:57):
And this may come into play later, it will come
into play. Uh And in fact, Elizabeth Stride was seen
just twenty minutes prior to her discovery, the discovery of
her body. Um, she'd been seen many times throughout the night,
and almost all of her night was like very well
accounted for. You know, she was selling her weares, she

(38:18):
was with different gentleman, she was drinking, she was brawling,
she was drinking some more. Yeah, she was seen with
three different gentlemen, and everybody kind of just assumes that
she was. They were clients of hers. She was last
seen rejecting the advances of a man just outside of
a Jewish social club, and there was a concert that
was happening in the club, but nobody said they heard

(38:41):
anything happen. There were a lot of people around when
she died, but nobody heard anything, maybe because there was
a concert hap probably, but also maybe not, It's hard
to tell. One witness named Israel Shorts reported seeing Stride
being attacked and thrown to the ground outside of Duke
Field's Yard dut Fields Yard dut Field Yard um at

(39:07):
about am and apparently the according to Israel Schwartz, the
attacker called out Lipsky to a second man who was
standing nearby. But it was possible that there was some
kind of uh anti Semitic taunt happening there because apparently
there was a prisoner that was really famous at the

(39:28):
time who was an anti Semitic who was named Israel
Lipsky the corner at the time. Blackwell thought that Stride
might have been pulled backwards onto the ground by her
neckerchief before her throat was cut. When they found her,
her neckerchief was cut in half along with her throat. Um.
Another corner later concurred that Stride was likely to have

(39:50):
been on the ground when she was killed by a
swift slash from left to right across her neck, and
then there was bruising on her chest that suggested that
she was pinned to the ground during her attack. So
that I don't want to go I mean, you know,
I feel like we don't have to go into a
lot of the grizzly details. A lot of these you
can kind of assume from where the trajectory has been going,

(40:13):
that's where we're headed. Yeah. The one thing about the
Ripper is that his attacks grew more horrific as time
went by. Yeah, there and every one of them that
they got more savage. And we're going to talk about
just a minute, pretty bad already. And this and Elizabeth
Stride is one of the two of the double night Right,

(40:33):
and she she only had her throat cut. She wasn't
fully butchered as the others were. What's led some people
to suggest that perhaps because it was so busy around it,
that he was interrupted in mid course. Correct, And that's
what leads us to victim number four four, which would
be Katherine Kate Adams. Again, a little background on Kate

(40:59):
She's forty six years old and same story Fallen on
hard times, has issues with drinking. On Saturday, the twenty
three of September, she was picked up at eight thirty
at night by the local police constable because she was
passed out in the road. They hauled her in. They

(41:22):
say she's sobered up enough that they let her go
around one o'clock in the morning. If I remember the story,
they knew she had sobered up because they knew her.
And she was sitting in her cell kind of singing,
and everybody could hear and Okay, well, I guess Kate,
you're okay, let's get you out of here. The weird
thing is that she didn't head in the direction of

(41:45):
her lodging house. She kind of went in the opposite direction.
There was police constable walking his route, which took him
through an area known as Miter Square, and he found
the body of Kate at one in the morning. His
route took him through Miters Square fifteen minutes earlier, though,

(42:06):
so one thirty came through and there was nothing there.
He came through and he finds the body. That suggest
that perhaps the murder between his powers of deduction. Uh, well,
here's here's what they find. And and this is this

(42:27):
is pretty grizzly. But Um, her neck had been slit,
Her thighs were naked because of course her her dress
had been pulled up. Um, her abdomen was exposed. Her
intestines had been pulled out and placed over the right shoulder. Um,
there was matter smeared on her cheek. A piece of

(42:51):
her intestines, evidently about two ft long piece had been
cut free and was laying next to her left worm,
almost as if it had been laid there by design.
Her right ear had been caught. There's a bunch of
clotted blood on her. I mean, basically, she has been butchered.

(43:13):
And this one is so interesting, interesting because well, I
mean I think that actually, Um, Richard talked a little
bit about this too, in terms of that, you know,
we just said there was like fifteen minutes this happened,
like truly, this all of everything that Steve just said

(43:33):
happened in fifteen minutes. Yeah, and she was still warm,
the body was still war which tells you it was
minutes ago. Yeah. But when you think about it, it
wouldn't take that much time. I mean, you split her,
throw up, throw on the ground. You know, basically stabber, ripper,
open reaching, rip out, some oregans, lay him on the ground.
It wouldn't take any time at all, really, well theoretically,

(43:57):
I mean, it could have been quick and clean. It
could have been quick and messy, could have been any
of that. It's hard to say. I think there's some
some details that aren't nearly as gory that are probably
pertinent that we can share. And Richard helped kind of
walk us through that. And and let's let's hear what

(44:18):
he said about that. Yeah, what happened was Elizabeth Stride's
body was found at one o'clock in the morning, and
she was found in Duckfield Yards off Burning Street. She
was found by a man named Louis Deemschutz, who had
come back to the yard from he'd been hawking cheap jewelry.
But he was the steward of a work on the
Polish and Jewish working Men's Club Socialist Club that was

(44:40):
in Duckfield Yard. And as he came into the yard,
his pony shied and pulled aside, and he looked into
the dark and he saw something lying on the ground.
So his first thought was it it was just something
lying there, so he reached over to lift it with
his horse with his whip, and he couldn't, so he
jumped down and struck a match and it was a woman.
Now his next action is that no one's really ever

(45:03):
explained it. He presumed it was his wife and she
was drunk. To investigate, to check on his wife, and
he found his wife in the kitchen, and that's when
he went to the other members and he said it
there was a woman downstairs, and she's drunk or she's dead,
I'm not certain which. So they went down and that
they found that her throat had been cut, and it
was in fact a murder victim, but the rest of

(45:25):
her body hadn't been mutilated, which was the murder's opera
endi of the Ripper killings. So this led the police
to surmise that the ripper had been interrupted, that when
he come into the yard, he'd actually interrupted the ripper,
and the ripper had jumped back, and it was that
sudden movement that startled the pony, which caused it to shy.
And then whilst amshus in the yard, and fact, it

(45:46):
dawned on him later that day that the ripper was
probably hiding alongside him in the dark yard. So had
he acted differently at that point, the chances are would
have been taken. But he presumed it was his wife
and went into the club, which gave the ripper those
for minutes or even seconds to get out of the yard,
and he headed for the city of London, which is
where he met Catherine Etto's now her body was found

(46:07):
forty five minutes later in Miter Square, which is no
great distance away from Berna Street. You could even walk
it in in less than ten minutes, so her body
was found there. It was just as I say, two murders,
and that became known as the Night of the Double Murder.
But there is a belief or a theory that Elizabeth
Stride wasn't a Ripper victim because she was actually seen

(46:30):
being attacked by a man called Israel Schwartz fifteen minutes
before her body was discovered, So some people think that
she was actually a coincidence, not a victim. And bizarrely,
some some historians even referred to her as Lucky list
Stride because she only had a throat cut, the rest
of the body wasn't mutilated. That I say, what's lucky

(46:51):
about that? Exactly like guys, lucky he didn't get this
is it? And I said, that's the night. Probably he
came closest to being caught, but say that, don't damn
should didn't didn't say he left the scene and that
gave the rip of the time he needed. Next up

(47:11):
is the last of the canal five. We'll just cut that.
So Mary Kelly, she was found well murdered uh November
nine eight and she uh was like only twenty five

(47:32):
years old, which is, um, if you've been following along,
quite young for this kind of spate of murders. And
there's no really good information about her life prior to
eighteen eight seven. Uh. Mostly it's just like conjecture or
like what she told people. Um. She was probably married
at sixteen to a coal miner who died like three

(47:54):
or four years later in a mine explosion. She was
probably from Ireland, but beyond that the facts are pretty
few and far between. After her husband's death, she took
to prostitution. Apparently she was really really attractive, but it's
a little bit of a mystery as to like what
she actually looked like. Um. She had a couple of
different nicknames. One was Dark Mary, but they think that

(48:18):
probably that had to do more with um, the type
of personality she was when she was drunk, then with
her appearance. She probably had blonde or red light red hair. Um,
she was fair. They called her fair every once in
a while. She had a lot of nicknames. I don't
even want to go there. She was described as um

(48:40):
very quiet, a very quiet woman when sober, but noisy
when drunk or when in drink excuse me, by the
man that she was living with at the time of
her death. But also I'll note that's why I believe
that she's Irish, because I am Irish too. I am
I well to be fair, I'm noisy all the time.
I'm not it once sober. We're gonna dive into this

(49:02):
and this one, as Joe was mentioning, they just keep
getting worse and worse. This one's rough. Um. By most accounts,
after a long night of multiple sightings with multiple men,
Mary was probably seen with a man whose description uh
is inadmissible to me because it was clearly false, but
fine entering her room in a boarding house. I say

(49:24):
it was false because it was a man by the
name of George Hutchinson, who we're going to talk about
in a little bit who was friends with Mary. Um
he met her at two am. She said, Hey, I'm broke,
Can you give me some money? And he said no,
I'm broke too, and then they like parted ways, but
he creepy watched her leave and uh met with somebody

(49:47):
who George said it was a man, another man, and
she said he said that she seemed to know him,
but the man was dressed really well for the area,
so he, being a good samaritan m George followed her
and this man back to Mary's house uh and watched
the house for like an hour and provide the police

(50:10):
with an i possibly detailed description, including like eyelash color
which he could totally see of this. Yeah, from like
twenty yards away. Absolutely, so there's been a whole lot
of kind of stuff there. But the story is probably
at least partially true because another woman who lived in

(50:30):
the boarding house said that she saw when she came
home at like two thirty am, there was a man
standing across the street watching the house. So that's yeah,
that was Hutchinson. That's creepy either way, it doesn't really matter.
There are a few reports of Mary being around at
like eight am or ten am the next morning, but
pretty much those are false. The corner said that her

(50:53):
her time of death was between two and eight am,
which is a wide range, but the mutilation that she
sustained after death was definitely a couple hours worth of work.
I don't want to go into too much detail about this.
We've been doing lots of Grewsome stories this whole time,

(51:15):
and we've already talked about some grewsome stuff this but
like this takes the cake. I mean, no one in
the house heard any commotion to signify when she might
have been killed. But she was killed with a slash
to her throat. Probably it was quick and quiet. The
rest is really awful. Her clothes were neatly folded on
a chair next to her bed, which means that maybe

(51:38):
it was a john that she brought home. She was
likely um asleep. They think she was asleep when her
throat was cut, um, signifying that the person was in
there with her. However, um her room in the boarding
house didn't. She lost the key, so she broke a
window and just like would read gin and unlock it,

(52:01):
so it could have been somebody who gained access later.
Her mutilation is horrifying. Body parts removed, all kinds of cuts, gouges,
runs the gamut. You really want to know about that,
there will be Yeah, just google her. There are pictures
to Another nice little tidbit fact is that there was

(52:26):
apparently like a really large fire in her You know,
they've had stoves in their rooms and there had been
some clothing burned to provide light. Foresaid mutilation. So that's,
you know, my might might think. My take on that
is that the the murder probably had his clothing soaked

(52:46):
with blood, did a quick change of clothes, and then
just through the clothes in, which is even more disturbing
because that means he brought a change of clothes in
banding to get that wild. Yeah, but she was she
was living on and off with a man, So there
it's possible that there were other most or as as

(53:07):
I think somebody has mentioned, there's also the theory that
perhaps Jack ripperd dressed as a woman when coming and
going from these things too. That was Yeah, that was
Jack London or who was it knows Arthur Conan Doyle
had come up with that. Yeah, and I believe that
maybe he just borrowed some of Mary's clothes. I mean

(53:30):
it would explain why, like nobody saw anything unusual leaving
the women's boarding house that she lived in. But yeah,
not a nasty little murder. And then we we've got
one more outlier that we're just going to cover up. Briefly,
this is related sort of maybe I don't really know.
This is Francis coles um ak a Francis Coleman. Francis

(53:53):
Hawkins also noticed charity. Now, uh yeah, I don't know
where that came from. But she she was someone like
Marianne Nichols and all the others. Her life was unapproved
by alcohol. She was a prostitute in the Whitechappell area
for reportedly about eight years preceding her death. And on
the day preceding her death, she had been bar hopping

(54:15):
with the emergencyman named James Sadler who was arrested and
and they they actually tried to uh send her prison
for her murder, but it didn't work out that way
because he had a pretty good alibi. Looking into that
a little bit, this is real quick, because I don't
think this is even related to the ripper she liked
many of the others. Went went back to her lodging
house where she had been staying. She was booted out

(54:36):
because she didn't have cash to pay for her bed
for that night, and so she wound up back on
the streets looking to earn a little money so she
could sleep for the night, and she bumped into a
fellow prostitute named Ellen Klena or Colina Colinna. I don't
know how her neighbor was pronounced, we'll say Klena. Anyway,
A man approached them. He propositioned Klena and uh, he

(54:58):
apparently made her spider sense tank and she said he
wouldn't have sex with her, and so he punched her
in the face. Why didn't I know? What a great guy?
And then propositioned Frances Coles, and Coles left with him. Well,
well that's not good judgment, do you think I mean? Well,
at two fifteen a a m Her body was discovered

(55:20):
by a constable named Ernest Thompson. There was a railway
art and she her body was in there, and she
was still alive. Her body had been her throat had
been slit from ear to ear. She was bleeding profusely,
but he noticed that her one eye opened and closed,
so she was still alive. At that time. He blew
his whistle for more help and all that stuff, and

(55:42):
they won't got a doctor. But of course she died
because she bled out yeah yeah, but uh, it doesn't
look like she was really she's part of the White
Chappel murders, but the murder was not really the same. Yeah,
you know, it's just it's just that one piece was left.
She wasn't mutilated, although then again it's possible because the

(56:05):
constable reported that when he was approaching the crime, seeing
you're retreating footsteps that sounds like a man's footsteps running away,
and so it's possible that interrupted again he interrupted the
interrupted the crime, and that maybe it was a ripper.
But here's why I don't think it was. Okay, Uh yeah,

(56:27):
James Sadler was released because witnesses that seeing him and
he was a merchant seaman. He was seen between two
and three am, and it was too drunk to commit
the murder because he had been bar hopping with her
the night before. Uh, the reason I don't think so
it is no mutilation, although again there's extenuating certain necessary. Also,
she was killed with a blunt knife and the Medical

(56:48):
Examber reported that the ripper used a sharp knife. This
was a blunt knife. So okay, there you go. Well
that that is seven victims total that we've taught about.
And I think, you know, things that I hadn't thought
about was the lives of these women at the time,

(57:09):
the things they go through. And I know it's sad,
it's very sad, and and they're they're kind of in
this story, as Richard said, he said, they're they're kind
of the forgotten piece of the story of who they were,
and he brings up some really good points, and so
I want to share that with everybody. I think the
the other important thing is that I mean, I think

(57:32):
the victims. I think the victims often become from one
of a better way of putting the forgotten victims in
the case, because we just got the names of these women.
But what they virtually all of them full of a
similar pattern. And it was a really tragic pattern in
that I wouldn't say they came from wealthy families, but
they certainly came from you know, they weren't policy stricken women,

(57:55):
but they all become alcoholics, and it was a sort
of a downward spiral that they then their marriages have
broke down, they've been sometimes ostracized from their families, and
then they ended up in the East End of London,
living transient existence in the common lodging houses. So they
weren't prostitutes by choice, they were prostitutes by necessity. And
I think that's the thing. That we've got tragic victims

(58:17):
who often get overlooked, and I think that's the case.
And also the fact that he was the world's first
real media murderer. I mean, it's often said he's the
world's first serial killer, which is not true, but he's
certainly the first one where the press start to realize this,
this is capturing people's imaginations, and so the press start
going to town on it. And what's interesting is that

(58:40):
over that ten week or so period, when when the
murders are really grabbing the attention and terrifying people and
shocking people, the newspapers are coming out several times a
day reporting on what's going on, the latest finds, and
they're bringing all this salacious detail to their readers, and
suddenly you've got they must go over the top. And

(59:02):
when Mary Kelly gets murdered, it seems she's the last victim.
It seems that the press realized they've gone too far,
and it's almost as there were lights which has been
switched off and it stops it that the salacious detail
eases off and then interest is lost. But for that
ten or so a week period, we've got this opportunity.
I can't think of any other period in history where

(59:25):
you can look at a specific part of a major
city in anywhere really, but in a major city in
England in this case, you can look at a tiny
part of that area and because of the newspaper reportage,
get an insight if you like, it's a window into
the past, and just look at the daily lives of
the people living through the horror of the jack that
of the murders. We've we've covered the victims. Now something

(59:48):
else that we need to talk about is the actual
activity to the police. Yeah, they wus right exactly now,
they did just go for douch instant. By the way,
in the nineteenth century, I don't think they I don't
think the donut existed. I think it might have accidentally

(01:00:08):
been made. But I believe that is a dunkin Donuts creation. Okay,
I know it's not a dunkin Donuts creation. Please nobody
said a scathing emails I was making that up. It's
a joke. But let's let's talk about the police and
something that people need to understand about the time in
the area. There was not one police force. There was

(01:00:29):
actually two police forces in operation that we're trying to
catch Jack the ripper. There is the Metropolitan Police and
then there's the City of London Police. The murders of
Mary Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride and Mary Kelly all

(01:00:50):
took place in White Chapel and Spittle Fields, which was
not really actually in London city limits, correct, that was
outside of it. So that was the jurisdiction of the
Metro Police of Metropolitan Police, and they were investigating those
four murders. Katherine Attos, however, when she was killed in

(01:01:12):
Miter Square, that's inside of the City of London, so
her her death came under the City of London Police.
And here's here's how the how this works is when
London was first created, and we're going back to Roman
times because London was a Roman outpost and at that

(01:01:35):
time they call it the Golden Mile because Rome had
built this and London was a one basically a one
mile square and they had built walls around it, and
the Thames ran through the middle and these walls. I've
seen remnants of these walls, and we're not just talking
about a brick wall. We're talking about six to eight

(01:01:57):
feet thick and upwards of funny feet high. All commerce
happened inside of the wall, so that's why they called
it the Golden Mile, and everything else everybody lived in.
All the work happened outside of that area. So if
you ever happen to get a chance to go there

(01:02:19):
and see these walls, they're fantastic. The pieces that are
still there are amazing history because there are thousands of
years old in the middle of a freaking giant city.
And I thought I didn't see those in London, but
I saw it when I was in Chester, England. There's
that was also another Roman walled city, and there's remnants

(01:02:40):
of the wall is still there and it's it's it
really is incredible to think that this is like back
to the times before Christ. It's amazing. Yeah, well, these
you know, these these policemen, they are doing a lot
of work. You got police constables that Bobby's basically that
are on their route and they walk their route to

(01:03:01):
keep an eye out. Jack the Ripper murders hit, they
are suddenly inundated with work. And this is back in
the day again, like we said, no cars. Everybody's on
foot or maybe not a horse, and you gotta track
everything down. So it is tons and tons of work,
and there's a little evidently there was a little bit
of bad blood between the two police forces. It wasn't

(01:03:24):
like they really worked together. And there's a lot of
things where guys, you know, as I know one of
us had said at some point or maybe it comes
up later, they named their suspects, but they're all naming
different suspects, so people weren't really working together. So though
I know they were trying to do good, it wasn't
the most organized search and investigation that I've seen. That is,

(01:03:49):
and that is like really typical. I mean, they've heard
many stories and things like serial killer investigations here in
America where the local police department gets really really territorial
with the FEDS, like the FBI comes in and stuff
like that. There's a lot of bad blood. It's so
it's it's part of the course. Well do you know
who else was trying to do good? The White Chapel
vigilance committee. Oh yeah, that's right. Those guys, do you

(01:04:11):
talk about them? Yeah? Yeah. They were trying real hard
to do good. They were comprised of like fourteen area businessmen, tradesmen,
one actor, and they were formed out of quote a
concern not for the women who were being killed and mutilated,
but the impact the killings were having on the commerce
in the areas. On September tenth eight, which may have

(01:04:36):
been a bit late. Uh, they elected their chairman, who
was local businessman George Lusk, who becomes fairly important in
a minute. I'll talk about this in just like a second. Here.
They were interviewed by lots of local papers. Uh. They
encouraged the police to issue a reward for information, and
when the police were like nah, they were like, all right,

(01:04:58):
we'll do it. So they he put a bunch of
posters up trying to inform people, saying, you know, any
information that leads to the arrest of this person, we
will give you a regard. Yes, it was not a
whole lot. And actually after the death of Elizabeth Stride,
the committee decided that they were unhappy with the level
of protection that the police were offering, so they created

(01:05:20):
their own citizen patrol Force and employed to private detectives.
But George Lusk in October of was the recipient of
one of the famous Ripper letters. In fact, it gets
a little worse than that. It was a nice little bit.
It's a nice little bit of of ripper lore. It's
the from Hell letter. Yeah, this is very popular. Yeah,

(01:05:41):
so uh. He returned home to find a small package
in the mail. Upon opening it, he found half of
a human kidney and a note that read from Hell,
Mr Lusk, s O R. I send you half the
kidney I took from one woman per praised it for you.

(01:06:02):
The other piece I fried and ate. It was very nice.
I may send you the bloody knife that took out
took it out if only you wait a while longer,
signed catch me when you can miss your lux Lusk.
You should, if you want, you should go out and
read it. It's there's so many misspellings in here. I
can't even it's awesome. Well I've seen a copy of

(01:06:23):
the original two and it's it's almost illegible to Yeah,
Mr Lusk, he was pretty sure it was a hoax actually,
and so he was like, yeah, just throw it away.
But he told a couple of his fellow committee members,
and they said, well, actually, maybe we should take that
to the police, and he said, all right, fine, So
they took it the police and it kind of just
fades into lore from that point. There's a lot about

(01:06:45):
the letters, and I don't think that we're actually going
to talk too much about the letters. Um, I think
that our interview with Richard shed some really good light
on the letters. Yeah, the letters, I think typically in
situations like this, usually all kinds of cranks write letters,
and so it's really hard were you know, journalists or whatever.
But this one particularly sticks out because it did have

(01:07:06):
that half a human kidney, which follows quickly after another letter,
you know, and I don't I didn't take notes on this.
I just kind of vaguely read about it. So I'm
doing this from memory at this point. But there was
another letter that wasn't released that was right before Lusk
got it. Uh, this package with a letter that said
that they were the ripper or whoever sent the letter

(01:07:28):
claimed they were going to send half a kidney to somebody,
and then a couple of days later, half a kidney
showed up. So there's some there's a little bit of
evidence to suggest that perhaps there was some of them
were legitimate, but there were, you know, as Richard talked about,
and actually we should probably just let him talk about it.
There's there's so many letters that it's hard to kind

(01:07:49):
of suss out what's real and what's not. Yeah, and
plus but you know, also if you're planning us a
crank letter with half a kidney in it to some person,
then it's not that hard to like plan at all
and send out a letter saying you're going to send
Hafrican is somebody's several days prior to that. I mean
it really, you know, that still doesn't prove anything to me.

(01:08:10):
Now that the letters, well, first of all, I mean
one of the things we have to differentiate between is
the White chapp Or murderer and Jack the Ripper. I
often said Jack the Ripper was the man who never
existed because he didn't. He was the creation of a
letter writer. And that was the famous dear Boss Lenser.
I keep on hearing the police have court me, but
they won't fix me just yet. And it goes on

(01:08:31):
to gloat over the murders, and then it signed Jack
the Ripper. Now the letter arrived where it entered the
investigation when the police were getting a lot of press criticism.
So the police made the letter public in the hope
that it would give them a breakthrough, and very soon
they realized they've made a massive mistake because once the
letter went public, it gave the murderer a name, that

(01:08:52):
name Jack the Ripper, and so the media throughout the
world latched onto that name and it almost turned it
into a sort of a pantomime on the streets of
the East End of London. And the other effect was
that when that letter went public and it was signed
Jack the Ripper, hoaxes throughout the land began reaching for
their pens and the police become became swamped with this

(01:09:14):
a tidal wave of Ripper correspondence. So there were lots,
and we're not just talking one letter. We're talking lots
of letters that were coming in because every one of
them had to be investigated and assessed and if ever positive,
if it was possible, to followed up, and it brought
the police investigation almost to a standstill. It had the
opposite effect that what the police had wanted, It gave
them more more false information they needed. But the letter itself,

(01:09:40):
the police at the time and a lot of experts
today are convinced it was the work of the journalist
who actually did it, probably just to keep paper papers selling,
but it certainly did turn five sword least then murders
into an international phenomenon and gave birth the legend of
Jack the Ripper. So another kind of issue that uh,

(01:10:00):
we wanted to bring up is kind of it has
the potential to be an inflammatory issue, and that's fine,
is that there was a lot of anti Semitism happening
in London at this time. There's I mean, you know,
and Richard talks about this little bit and we'll we'll
let him talk about it in a minute. But you know,
after the double event on thet um police of course,

(01:10:23):
just like you, just were scouring the area for clues
and at about three am a constable found a bit
of bloody cloth like a shawl the apron. It was
a piece of the apron excuse me that was apparently
later to be confirmed as part of Katherine at ows
ETOs apron excuse me, And above it written in chalk

(01:10:46):
was either the Jews are the men that will not
be blamed for nothing, or the Jews are not the
men to be blamed for nothing. Um Jews is spelled
j u w e s. There are are a couple
different police officers who responded to this. They all wrote
down different things that this said. And I guess here

(01:11:09):
is where we need to back up a little bit
to the Mary Ann Nicholas murder. Nichols murder and the
rumors about her killer being Um, the Jewish man named
uh leather Apron. This was not a particularly good time
for Jews in London, no matter what. There were a

(01:11:29):
lot of them, A lot of them were in this
kind of White Chapel slum area, and as Richard kind
of talked about, their influx kind of coincided with these murders.
And I think that everybody could pretty much agree that
like this is totally circumstantial. It doesn't actually say anything
about Jewish people on the whole. But of course, if

(01:11:54):
there's a new group of people in an area and
then things that people have never seen before start happening,
they're going to blame the new people for the new thing.
And there were a lot of Jews from Eastern Europe
who who would come into the area absolutely and a
ton of Irish that had also recently come into the
area too, sure, but I think you know, one of
the things that's really handy about the like Eastern European
Jews that come into the country is that they all

(01:12:15):
speak Yiddish or their native language, not English, so it's
very it's so it's kind of the human nature of
it to just say like, well, those people are different. Well,
it alienates them from you and you from them. So well,
there's also the blood libel thing too, you know, the
I mean, there were there are lots of really really

(01:12:36):
nasty stereotypes about Jews and it's circulated in Eastern Europe
for years, the blood libel being you know what that
is that the Jews had would would kidnap and exanguinate
Christian children and use their blood to make mots of
like matza cakes. So yeah, yeah, well there's but there's
the other aspect of this as well, where we kind

(01:12:57):
of get into the the potential of police may have
apprehended the ripper and there was one credible witness, but
they were both Jewish, and it is part of Jewish
law that you can't testify against each other. So there's
there's that aspect of it as well. There is that
actually part of Jewish law. Yeah, yeah, it's in the Bible.

(01:13:20):
There's also some kind of weird things with the translation
of this statement because there's a double negative and there's
a huge misspelling. So there are some people that think
that with the double negative, the phrase means was was
meant to mean that the Jews would not take responsibility
for anything. There are also people who suggest that Jews

(01:13:43):
spelled that way is actually like a slang word for two,
which I don't know what that would make that whole
thing mean. There's also some kind of like massionic Freemason
interpretation there no matter what, and you know all that
Richard kind of tell us because he tells it better.
It was destroyed before there could be a good record.

(01:14:06):
You know, photographs existed at the time, but there's no
photographs of this graffiti. And you know, Richard says, why
So when that message was found, Sir Charles Warren, who
was the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, he was horrified because at
six o'clock that morning, you were going to have the
Petticoat Lane Market around that doorway, and it was going
to bring hundreds of gentile buyers or even thousands into

(01:14:28):
an area and to a market that was staffed largely
by Jewish storeholders, and how the building where he was
found that was Jewish flats as well. So what he
thought was, if that's on the wall in the morning,
we're going to have riots that were innocent Jews will
be will be attacked by the mob. So he destroyed
the message, he had it raised before anybody could see

(01:14:49):
it the next morning, and that's fed into the conspiracy
that Sir Charles Warren, being the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, that
he's done it to cover the fact that the Jewey's
might have been reference to a Masonic ritual. But it
probably was. I mean, the different officers who saw it's
some said it looked faded as they've been there for
some time. My personal belief is it was coincidence. It

(01:15:12):
was already in the doorway. Ripple just happened to drop
the apron in that doorway. What's not often pointed out
is that there was lots of racist graffiti against the
Jews going up in the streets at the time because
they were scapegoats. So it's probably just a piece of
that graffiti. But it feeds nice the way the fact
the misspelling the ju W e s it's that misspelling

(01:15:34):
that's seen it turn up as part of the Masonic
ritual and stuff like that, So you don't he probably
don't think the Reppert was Jewish, then, right, I I
think he might well have been. I certainly because Metzki
was certainly po po polished jew so him and his
family had come over. And I think, actually it says
one thing we don't know about the police from quite

(01:15:56):
early on, when when they realized that if they kept
pushing that that this this theory they were looking for
sort of a Jewish immigrant, this could lead to anti
Jewish rioting and programs, and innocent people would be killed.
So I think if the police did catch him and
he was Jewish and they couldn't try him so you
had to go to an asylum, I think the police

(01:16:17):
probably would have covered it up because they would have
had full scale rioting in the East End and innocent
people would have died. So I think from that point
of view, the police show themselves to be quite enlightened.
So I think there's a good possibility that he was
as I say, And if it was Aaron kause Minsky,
which of all the suspects, I mean he's up there.
Because the two highest ranking officers seemed to believe, definitely

(01:16:39):
believed he was the killer, then I think we have
to believe it, but say it's interesting and had they
revealed it and then said, well, we're not going to
prosecute because he's going to an asylnum and we haven't
got the evidence that we need that they would have
had rioting, and I think that's what the police were
terrified of. Now we get to the part of the
story where we look at the suspects of who could

(01:17:02):
have done this, some of the some of the and
there's there there's a huge smattering of potential and I
emphasize the word potential suspect. I want to like suffice
to say that there is an entire Wikipedia article dedicated
only to the suspects in this case, and it is huge.

(01:17:23):
It includes George Clooney, by the way. Well, here's the
thing is that we we brought up a couple of
questions to Richard that he had some really good input on.
And the things that that we wanted to kind of
find out was one, why did the ripper do it?

(01:17:46):
You know, what was his motivation? Um? And then the
next was of course, why are there so many suspects?
And like I said, he had some really good things
to say. To be honest, I don't think there was
a motive. I think it was just purely for the
pleasure of the kills. There's all sorts of theories, the

(01:18:08):
theories that he he had been he had caught a
disease off a prostitute, and he was his revenge. There's
a theory that he wanted to rid the East End
of prostitution. There's a wonderful theory that George Bernard Shaw
first put forward that he was a social reformer and
he did the murders to expose the horrible conditions in
the area. So, which is an intriguing one progressive this

(01:18:30):
is it. He was just saying, you know, and no
one's listening, so that I'll do something that will make
people sit up and take notice. And they certainly did
sit up and take notice. But really I just think
he was just probably some nobody living in the area.
He had he had voices in his head and every sort,
and those voices got too much and he went out
and murder. And for the rest of the time he
was probably somebody who people living next door people who

(01:18:52):
saw him thought, you know, he's eccentric, but he's harmless,
and and that was it. And that's often what these
serialal has turned out to be. It's often when when
they brought to justice, or if they're brought to justice,
it's often the last person you've ever expected it to be.
So you were saying, you kind of think the voices
in his head. That kind of leads me to think
maybe something like schizophrenia. Yes, as I say, it could

(01:19:14):
go in any form of illness, schizophrenis seems highly likely.
The interesting about kause Minski is that we from what
we know of him when he is in the asylum,
he's not in the In fact, he's put down as
non violent, so he just doesn't seem the sort of
the sild who would did. However, after stress that the
kause Mensky we know is the Kazminski from eight one onwards.

(01:19:37):
We don't know what he was like in eight Uh,
you know, he could have his condition could have deteriorated
by eighteen ninety one a great deal. But the only
violence he's ever put it was shown to have done,
is to throw a chair at an attendant the asylum.
So he doesn't seem home assylum, and there's other suspects
who most certainly were homicidal. So it's it's interesting. We'll

(01:20:01):
say it's just one of those things that we'll just
never know. I'm just curious why why has the list
of potential suspects grown so exponentially. The main the main
reason is because he wasn't caught, So anybody can come
up with a person. I mean, what what a lot
of writers do is they get their suspect and then

(01:20:21):
they make the facts that their suspect. There's very few
writers actually do it the other way around, which is
what should be done. Get the facts and then sorry,
get the facts and then look at who the facts
lead to. The point is if you go to a
publisher and so I want to write a book on
Jack the Ripper, They're only really consider you if if

(01:20:41):
you've got a suspect, and the more dramatic the suspect is,
then the more chance you've got that book being published
and you know, and then the book becoming a best seller. So,
like I said, that's that's that's a lot of good information.
And I really like the points that that Richards brought up.
Now we're gonna look at a couple of the suspects,

(01:21:04):
again are too many to really go into. We're gonna
go into a couple of them, and we're not going
to talk about the royal family or anything like that.
Well maybe I actually I I'm gonna go into that
one a little bit because I find that one fun.
It is fun. It's a fun lark and the things
that that that get brought up are pretty humorous. But

(01:21:28):
let's let's not go there yet. So let's start off
with the first one that we've got on our list,
which Montague John Drew. Yeah. Uh, Montague, who, by the way,
I don't believe was the killer, but let me but
he's still believed by some people to be the killer. Uh.

(01:21:50):
He was from an upper class background. He studied at
Oxford worked as an assistant schoolmaster, and while he was
doing that, he studied law and he became a barrister
in eighteen eighty five U and for reasons unknown and
November eighteen eighty eight he lost his job at the
school where he was a school of monster for reasons unknown. Again,

(01:22:12):
as I said in on December thirty one, eight eight,
his body was found in the Tamas River. Unfortunately, he
had stones in his pockets, which apparently it kept his
body submerged for about a month. So he apparently went
into the river early in December, and he was thirty
one at the time of his death. And that wasn't
just just as another bit of history, that was not

(01:22:34):
uncommon at that time for people to go into the
Thames and not be found for a while. And the
Thames is a very nice, relatively clean river today, was
not at the time. Again, as Joe talked about tanneries, breweries,
all these things, all of their in open sewers, all
dumping into the Thames. So it's a nasty river. So

(01:22:54):
nobody wants to go looking for someone they think might
have gone into the river because you don't know it,
you'll come back out. Yeah, and I'm sure it reeks.
People probably didn't even want to get close to the
river back not safe drinking water. Yeah. Yeah. The contents
of his pockets, he had a train ticket data December one.
He had sixteen pounds that's that's British pounds, not sixty

(01:23:17):
pounds of gold, but he had sixteen He had gold
worth sixteen pounds British or sterling. I guess would be
a bit way to put it. And he also had
a check for fifty pounds. Uh. And by the way,
this was a lot of money in those days. Yeah,
And so he was carrying a lot of cash that
was that was still in his pockets. Yeah, in the pockets. Yeah.

(01:23:37):
So he was a robbery and murder was obviously not
amotive here. Um. He his state was valued at about
a quarter of a million dollars pounds in today's numbers.
So uh, financial privation was probably not a motive for
the suicide. If he wasn't indeed a suicide. It was
ruled suicide after the inquest. Apparently his family had depressed

(01:24:00):
a mental issues. His grandmother committed suicide, his attempted suicide,
his sister later long after his death, killed herself, and
also there was a note that he left which read quote,
since Friday, I felt that I was going to be
like mother and the best thing for me to do
was die. So I'm thinking that perhaps he actually did

(01:24:24):
commit suicide, but his death coincided with the end of
the Ripper murders, which is why sometime after the fact
that it didn't have it right away, but eventually years
later people started putting two and two together and saying, hey, golly,
he killed himself right at the same time the murders ended.
I don't believe that there's no cred I just don't

(01:24:45):
believe there's any credible evidence that he was actually the Ripper.
What do you guys think, any any opinions there? The
timing is the convenience. But yeah, and if we're going
by like people who died around the same time exactly,
there's a lot of them. There's a lot of people
I know exactly. And so I think it's a kind

(01:25:05):
of a slander on this guy's memory that he's been
suggested as possibly being the Ripper, because there's absolutely no
evidence for it. But and yet still he is considered
to be a prime candidate as the Ripper, unbelievably. So
the next candidate that we've got is a gentleman by
the name of Michael ostrog And he wasn't a suspect again,

(01:25:30):
kind of like Montague, he wasn't a suspect that came
out right away. Instead, he came up several years later
from a letter that was written that's been referred to
or or called now the MacNaughton memoranda. The memoranda says
Michael ostrog a mad Russian doctor and a convict, and

(01:25:53):
unquestionably a homicidal maniac. This man was said to have
habitually been cruel to women and and for a long
time was known to have carried about with him surgical
knives and other instruments. His antecedents were the very worst,
and his whereabouts at the time of the White Chapel
murders could never be satisfactorily accounted for what he might

(01:26:18):
have been unstable, but nobody could ever pin the name
on him. And again, as it was, he came up
later on. But he was a petty criminal. So this
is my again, this is my issue with him being
called the suspect. He was a petty criminal. He was
never known to be a violent criminal. He was in

(01:26:40):
and out of jail for petty theft, but never murder.
And he was arrested for theft in July of eighteen
eighty seven and sentenced to six months of hard labor,
So that's from September eight eight seven forward, released on
March tenth of eighteen eighty eight, So this is before

(01:27:01):
the murders happened, and he was quote unquote cured of
his petty theft habit. Well, the problem is is that
he not too long after that, was arrested and sentenced
to two years in prison for theft in Paris on

(01:27:22):
the eighteenth of November, which is before the killing stop.
So that's why I have a problem with with Ostrog
being keyed in as one of the major suspects. Yeah,
that would make sense. Okay, so much for your week, candidate.

(01:27:43):
Let me give you another week candidate here. George Chapman.
George Chapman was also known as the Burrow poisoner. He
was He was a Polish London with an unpronuncible name.
His his last name was I'm not going to pronounce
his entire full name, but the surname was Klausowski or Klosowski.

(01:28:03):
I think, yeah, there's lots of kind Klosowski. I think
that there's the best way to pronounce it. But he
was arrested supposedly, and I've got conflicting information about this,
and he was supposed he was arrested in question regarding
the Ripper murders. He had training and surgery and warsaw
and worked there as a doctor's assistant until about December

(01:28:26):
eighteen eighty six and to the best of our knowledge,
he arrived in London in eighty eight. He married while
he was in London. Apparently liked to play the field.
He had several mistresses, three of whom he murdered by
poison later on. This is well after the whole track
the Ripper thing was done. The murders took place in
nineteen o one and nineteen o two. An investigation into

(01:28:48):
the last murder Fount revealed that the death was due
to poison. So the bodies of the previous mistresses were
exhumed and tested, and well, it turns off he poised
in them too, and so he was tried for the
murder of the last one, whose name was Maud Marsh
and I was convicted and was hanged in April nineteen

(01:29:09):
o three. So why is he suspected to be the Ripper? Well,
here are the reasons. A Scotland or detective name Frederick
Aberleine said that he was his chief suspect, and the
reasons were that he had questioned his wife and the
wife told police that he would often go out for

(01:29:30):
night or at night for hours on end. Another reason
is that he arrived in Whitechapel at about the same
time the murders began and left to go to America
about the same time that the murders ended. His description
matched out of the mass and the man last seen
with Mary Keller Kelly, which we've talked about. Yeah, the
description is uh, you know, to my mind, kind of bogus. Yeah. Uh,

(01:29:54):
he was violent and this is kind of documented. He
was misogynistic. Okay, So again, Frederick Aberlein, the Scotland er detective,
said that for those reasons, he believed that he was
the best ripper suspect. But I think it's pretty thin.
I mean, as far as him going out at night
for hours on end, well, the guy was a philanderer,

(01:30:16):
of course. Of course he left to go out for
a night, you know, and and have sex with his mistresses.
Of course he did so. And that doesn't really mean
anything to me as far as the other stuff goes.
I mean, it's just none of it really is much
in the way of Evans. Well, sorry, he's a weak candidate.
Are you guys ready for a strong candidate? Yeah, he's
already Yeah, are ready? Aaron Kosminsky, I've heard of this guy. Yeah,

(01:30:42):
you may recognize him. He's the one who like a
couple of months ago, DNA evidence quote proved was the ripper.
He was a Russian Polish barber. He emigrated to England
in the eighteen eighties, and he did indeed live in
White Chapel in eighty eight and he was Jewish. I'm

(01:31:05):
gonna go ahead and like give it up front, modern detectives,
this is my like big problem with him. Modern detectives
aren't sure that this is like that Cosminsky is the
Cosminski that police suspected back in the eighteen late eighteen nineties.
But I'll talk about that in a little minute. Kase
Minsky was in and out of a sane asylums and
institutions most of his life. One could assume that, like

(01:31:28):
in this day and age currently and you know, the teens,
if somebody was in and out of mental institutions, they
wouldn't then be allowed to like be barbers moments like
around people's next But these were different days, um, and
you know, his insanity took the form of auditory hallucinations,
paranoid fear of being fed by other people that actually

(01:31:49):
was so bad that it drove him to pick up
and eat food that people dropped as litter and he
refused to wash uh, and the cause of his insanity
was cited as um self abe. Yeah, that which we
now know, let's be honest, is not like so much
cause of insanity as like sanity. Yeah exactly. But yeah,
the that was that was I mean, when I was

(01:32:09):
a kid, I mean, self abuse was supposedly got to
create issues for you. Yeah. So in February of eight year,
nineteen nineteen, self abuse, masturbation. Yeah, okay, I'm just making
sure I understood. Not that I'm trying to make dis gratuitous,
but I just wanted to make I understood your story

(01:32:31):
looks on your face like self abuse wink. Okay, in
a story where we've talked about a man cutting uteruses
out of women, masturbation, that's a bridge too far. That's
a bridge too I can see it. Though. It's kind
of like it's kind of like the gateway drug to
like mass murder and stuff like that. So I guess.
In February of nineteen nineteen, kause Minsky, he was institutionalized

(01:32:55):
at this point, had been for a number of years.
His illness had driven him down to a startling ninety
six pounds, and he died in March of that year
in in a mental institution. Right, So, the Cosminsky connection
to the Ripper murders wasn't really established until a couple
of years later when people were going through old records.

(01:33:19):
Um A constable apparently in nineteen eighteen ninety four wrote
a lotter to his daughter saying that Cosminski had been
a suspect that no first name had been given. The
letter stated that Cosminski was a suspect because he had
quote a great hatred of women with strong homicidal tendencies.

(01:33:41):
And I'll be honest, nothing in any records of of
Aaron Cosminski, the man that we're talking about right now,
suggests that he was violent in any way. The only
little spate of violence he had was he threw a
chair at a nurse once. And he was in and
out of institutions a lot. Most records say that he

(01:34:03):
was kind of um, yeah, he was like he was
actually scared of people a little bit. He didn't he
was actually scared, you know, as I said, he was
scared of like people, He didn't want to be fed, like,
he was scared of interacting on like an emotional level
with other human beings. He didn't ever attack anybody. He

(01:34:23):
would just kind of like would sit in his cell
and be quiet a lot. A few years later, Commissioner
wrote a book in which he said that the ripper
was a low class Polish Jew. And um, before we
even get into the DNA evidence part, uh doctor's notes.
As I said, I'll describe Kasminski as harmless. Also, he

(01:34:45):
spoke mostly Ish when he was locked up, which indicates
that his English was likely not very good. Um, which
means that it would have probably been pretty hard for
him to lure women into alleys, to be a john
of any kind. But you the other the other big
thing for me is that Aaron Cosminski wasn't put away
until eight um, and the murder stopped in That's kind

(01:35:08):
of key, yeah, he the murders should have gone on
for longer. Yeah. And then we come to the DNA
evidence part of this, and I guess we'll let Richard
explain a little bit about what the DNA evidence is about,
and then I'll I'll talk about it a little bit after.
You know, he kind of describes how the evidence quote

(01:35:28):
evidence came about to begin with. He can do it
way better than I can, you know. And for the
DNA evidence. I loved when we when we asked Richard
that question, his initial response was my favorite party. I
was hoping you wouldn't ask that one. We have to
the DNA. It's the evidence is interesting. Basically, it's a

(01:35:50):
shoal that purports to be the show that Katherine knows
was wearing, and it was reportedly found next to her body,
picked up my police officer and taken home, and it's
passed down through generations of the family and finally it
was auctioned in I believe it was two thousand and
seven when it was bought by Russell Edwards, who's the
man behind the new book on it, and he then

(01:36:10):
had it subjected to DNA testing and he then matched
the DNA to a descendant of Katherine Eddo's. It was
a descendant of Aaron Kazminski. The only problem is he
hasn't told us. He's refusing to say who the descendant
of Aaron Kasmnski is, so historically we can't really check
the veracity of that. It purports that on the shore

(01:36:32):
they found our Aaron cos or they found the DNA
evidence to suggest that Aaron Kasminski had been near the
shore but even if his DNA is on the shore,
that it doesn't prove that he murdered Katherinettos, just that
he was somewhere, you know, that he met Katherinettos and
what since what what are occupation asked that he that
he'd been with Katharinetto's So, in my opinion, the shold

(01:36:53):
the shore doesn't actually prove anything, but it's it's interesting.
I mean, it keeps the case going, it keeps the
interest in the case, and it adds an experiment to it.
So let's just say it's interesting that it say that
the two mating officers do seem to have thought that
Kasminski and so I would say, yeah, it's it's interesting,
but it's not conclusive, and it's it's far from conclusive.

(01:37:16):
And I think we'll never know for sure because so
much of the evidence has gone you know, I'm with him,
you know, I'll say upfront, I don't buy this whole
DNA evidence thing. Um, there are a lot of problems
with it. You know, they got the DNA off the
shawl that supposedly maybe belonged to one of the victims.
We've kind of discussed this. Not only is that week,

(01:37:36):
but there's like no chain of evidence for the shaw
the study or the evidence hasn't been pure reviewed. Also,
as a fun fact, the news broke in, uh the
Daily Mail, which you may or may not recognize as
a British tabloid. That's like where the results were first published.
That's a little sketchy and world. Well actually, you know,

(01:37:58):
in fact, one of our own Oregonian reporters, Susannah Bowdman,
puts it, the Daily Mails reporting on science and scientific
evidence is let's say, not known to be robust. Is
like yes, actually, and the thing to remember too is
that you know, nobody knows who this shawl or whatever
it was belonged to, if it was We're Killers, or

(01:38:21):
if it was the victims, if it was the victims,
and if it had some quote unquote DNA evidence. Uh,
well she was prostitutes, so it could have had d
evidence from all kinds of guys on Yeah, and I
guess so as a final nail, mcoffin Richard brings this
point up, and we don't even know, in all honesty,

(01:38:42):
we don't even know that was her short. It's it's
it's one of those interesting things, and it's it's passed
through a lot of different people. I mean a lot
of people have had it. I suspect, although I can't
you know, well, I don't know for certain, but it's
been it's been handled. And there's also rumors that her
sentence handled to the conference. Whether whether that's true or not,

(01:39:03):
that's in dispute. But certainly the photographs of Russell holding
the shawl up, it's not banked, it's not you know,
it's just there. There's no cross contaminations. Also a possibility
to look at as well. And it here's my one
last final huge problem with Aaron Cosminski is Aaron David Cohen.
You guys, did did he come up in your research

(01:39:24):
at all? No, that name doesn't. So it turns out
Aaron Cohen is a name that asylums used when names
like for example, Kosminsky would have been too hard to pronounce,
or like the person admitting that person to an asylum
was lazy. It was like it was like a John Doe. Okay,
they were like, that name is too hard to spell.

(01:39:45):
We're just gonna say you're Cohen from now on. So
Aaron David Cohen a k A. Nathan Kozminski was a
bootmaker in Whitechapel in the area until on the twelfth
of December. He was institutionalized because syphilis. He was crazy,

(01:40:05):
it turns out, and kind of the killing time. Kind Uh.
It's hard to tell because you know, records are sketchy,
but I recommend a Google on this guy. He was violent.
He was violent against women, he was violent against nurses.
He went kind of crazy. He was institutionalized just right
after the like conical murders. I can say that word

(01:40:31):
tonight ended. His last name was Kiminski instead of Kosminski.
He was a polished Jew who was a bootmaker who
wore a leather apron at the time. I think that,
you know, if we're talking about like strong Kosminsky, I
I suggest David in the name Minsky has been spelled
many ways, and there's been a lot of conjecture over

(01:40:53):
which Kosminski was. So I think that David Cohen is
a huge problem for the Kosminsky situation. Yeah, no, it's
all confused. I mean, what's his name, Like the same
thing with Klosowski was a k. George Chapman. I mean,
I mean, yeah, they've all got these kind of like
similar sounding names and it's just a big jumble. Yeah,

(01:41:17):
I agree. Yeah, So anyway, I think I think we'd
agree that the ripper was probably not just kidding. No.
I mean I have I have an outlier that I'd
like to bring up that we've talked about a little bit.
And you know, he's not accepted as a serious. Yeah,
let's have it because I've got some not so serious Yeah,
And we talked about him a little bit. George Hutchinson,

(01:41:40):
the dude who like stood outside of Mary Kelly. Yeah,
and then like and then was like, yeah, no, his
eyelashes were black. I think, you know, as previously stated,
on November twelve, George went to the London Police to
make a statement about the November nine killing Mary Jane Kelly.

(01:42:01):
He gave a super detailed description which we just talked
about and nobody really believes this description. And in fact,
one of the inspectors said that, uh, maybe maybe George
was trying to cover his tracks, or maybe maybe George
was you know actually a lot of it's not uncommon

(01:42:23):
for sir killers to insert themselves into the investigation. Yeah,
that was I mean, that's kind of the conjecture here,
is that like he was like, oh, yeah, you know,
he got a great look at him and this is
exactly what he looked like, and but he wanted to
be a part of it. The other thing is that
he was he was pretty broke and at the time

(01:42:43):
he would have made a whole lot of money selling
his story to the newspaper. But he is brought up
as like a vague kind of there's not a whole
lot of information on him, but it could. I mean,
it's it's possible, possible, not plausible possible. The next outlier
that we've got is what's often referred to as the

(01:43:04):
Royal conspiracy and the Freemason connection. And I could walk
through that, but we we talked with Richard about this,
and I really like the way he puts it. We're
actually gonna have Richard explained the Royal conspiracy and then
how that ties in with the Freemasons. The classic one

(01:43:27):
here has causes the Royal conspiracy and the fact it
might have been a member of the royal family, which
is one of my favorites. This is it. It's been
around since the fifties, the Royal family theory. The member
of the royal family in question was Prince Albert, ed
with Victor, who was Queen Victoria's grandson and would have
been King of England except he died in eight But

(01:43:49):
we know his whereabouts on the knights of most of
the murders, and he I mean the knights of the
double murder. He wasn't even in London, so we know
where he was. He was, so that he probably wasn't.
And then that comes into the Royal conspiracy theory that
Prince Albert Edward Victor had had a child by his
mistress Annie Elizabeth Crook. The Freemasons had broken the family

(01:44:13):
up because the chart that it's all to do with
her being a Catholic and everything. The Masons had broken
the family up. The child was smuggled to safety by
their servant, girl Mary Kelly, who brought it to the
East end of London, and then she told the felling
with a gaggle of drunken prostitutes, told them what she knew,
and they started black men in the royal family. So

(01:44:33):
the Mason set out to silence all the prostitutes, and
they did it with the royal physician, Sir William Gold,
who went around in a carriage and depending on what
film version that tempts them to the carriage by showing
them bunches of grapes and then they get murdered and
Mary Kelly is the last victim. So with that, the
murders coming to an end because there's no longer the

(01:44:53):
threat of the royal family or society being blackmailed. Wonderful theory,
but it's probably just a spiracy theory. That's a fun theory,
but theory it doesn't. Yeah, but it doesn't bring it
in account. Why than the mutilations took place? Now, I mean,
as I said, I would love to believe it was
a deranged ancestor of Prince Charles, but no, you know,

(01:45:18):
you bring up another good point there, which is the
Mason's and I've I've heard them refer seen them referred
to in a lot of this. And is that just
based mostly from this, this royal theory or it mostly
comes out of that. The whole thing came in well,
first of all came up with it was Jack the
Ripe of the Final Solution and it was a book

(01:45:38):
by Stephen Knight, and Stephen Knight was based on a
chatterman called Joseph Sicker to what the claim was that
the Joseph sick had claimed that he was he was
related in some way to it, and so he went
and so he gave the theory to Stephen Knight. Stephen
Knight and then developed the theory both on both of

(01:45:59):
them and are dead. But it's it's it. I mean,
it's wonderful to think that it's it's a government conspiracy,
that the Mason's got involved, and that everyone did it.
And of course people like people didn't like that type
of conspiracy theory. But it's it's highly unlikely. But as
I say, but the Masons being such a shadowy organization,

(01:46:21):
you know that everyone's got this, They've got this mystique
about them and all the rituals they perform and everything.
So it's it's I mean, this is the whole process
of murder. But I decree the Christopher Plumber film also
the Front Health film as well. But let's say it's
it's it's good entertainment, but as historical fact, it leaves
a lot to be desired. But it is cool though,

(01:46:43):
And if you could find a tire to like, say
the Knights Templar and the Holy Grail, that would be
even more awesome. How it's fantastic. I mean, it's all
you need is that, you know, maybe have Princess Diana
involved in it as well. Yeah, I'm gonna work on that.
I'm gonna come and get Rolls Well involved, you know,
get a few alien abductions and maybe having escaping on

(01:47:05):
the Titanic, and you've done it so well. So anyway,
I'm not convinced. Well, I I also have I have
one other outlier that I liked that I wanted to
bring up because there's actually some credence to it. You
got to talk about the aliens, No, I'm not. We're

(01:47:25):
gonna talk about a guy by the name of Carl
fine Bomb. Okay, Carl fine Bomb. I'm not sure how
to pronounces yeah, fining bomb. Okay. Well, anyway, Carl was
executed in the electric chair on the twenty seventh of

(01:47:48):
April eighteen nineties six for the brutal murder of a
woman by the name of Julianna Hoffman. Carl murderer by
slitting her throat. He was not able to do anything
else because her son interrupted the murder and he jumped

(01:48:09):
out a window onto the roof, and then Carl took
off and they caught him. But here's the thing that's
not his real name. We don't know. We don't know
exactly what his name is. His name could be it
was Anton or maybe Carl with a C or a
k zon or zom or stro bomb like a stro bond,

(01:48:35):
I don't know. He evidently changed his name at some point,
but we don't know why. And evidently he did this
on a regular basis. Where where did Well, this murder
happened in the United States, so it wasn't in England.
But he was a sailor and in the eighteen eighties

(01:48:55):
he was you know, he had a merchant lifestyle, a
marine her lifestyle, and his whereabouts aren't exactly clear. But
what we know is that he supposedly could have been
and would have been in the area in England at
the time, in London. Uh. And then the other thing,

(01:49:19):
and this is the what drew me to it. Okay, well,
I said it had a lot of credence. It's actually
pretty weak, but I like it anyway, is Uh. What
we know is that after he was executed, as soon
as his declaration of death was put out, his attorney,
William Sanford Lawton, stated, I believe that Carl Feinnenbaum who

(01:49:44):
you have just seen put to death in the electric chair,
can easily be connected with the Jack the Ripper murders
in Whitechapel. I will stake my professional reputation on that.
If the police will trace this man's movements carefully for
the last few years, there investigations will lead them to
London and to White Chapel. But did he provide any

(01:50:05):
evidence or of course not, of course not seeking attorney. Yeah,
I actually I think that this guy was looking to
cause a little media splash. But it is interesting that,
you know it was. It wasn't just a quick slash.
He really cut this lady's throat in a vicious manner

(01:50:27):
while she was in bed, and we don't know where
he was, and we don't know what he could have
been doing that whole time. So he's just this ephemeral,
mysterious person. Yeah, it could have been, But I mean,
what the circumstances of this particular murder though, which it
was The woman he murdered. Was she a prostitute? No? No,

(01:50:50):
what how this whole thing went down? Is she was?
I think it was New York Is where this took place.
She needed some money, so she decided to rent out
a room in her house and he was her first lodger,
first and last. Yeah, it sounds like it without saying yeah,

(01:51:13):
and within a day or three I if I remember
the details correctly, then he committed the murder. He killed her,
so he if it didn't take long. But it's just weird.
I was thinking about but maybe not thinking that. Yeah. Yeah, yeah,
so I'm thinking probably that it's possible, but no reason

(01:51:36):
to really believe. So so yeah, no, no, I I
completely agree with you on there. Uh. And you know,
there's the issue of and one of the things that
was brought up was that it potentially if this guy
wasn't it, it's but possible that the ripper was a sailor,
would explain why he was out of town for weeks

(01:51:58):
on end and the murders didn't happened. But my issue
with that is why don't we hear about these kind
of grizzly murders in other ports of call, even places
that aren't super super populated. You would think that there
would be record of a prostitute or a woman with
her throat slit and her organs pulled out. There'd be some.

(01:52:21):
It was definitely like a widely publicized thing too. I mean,
you know, it wasn't just like, oh you only know
about this in White Chaplain in London. No, the whole
world was looking for this guy. They were all fascinated
by him, and he was a new sensation worldwide. So
you know, if one woman showed up with something like
that in any other port of call, it would have

(01:52:43):
set off alarm bells. I mean, it just would have. Um,
it's absolutely true, although you know it might be it
might be also the fact that he was a sailor,
but perhaps he was also like a racist, like say,
he was a German who hated the Brits, so he
did a special isles to their bodies. But when he
was like often you know, other other ports, he didn't

(01:53:04):
he stabbed people to death, but didn't didn't sad. Yeah,
it's possible something like that too. Yeah, No, that's that's possible.
And and the big mystery about this, this whole Jack
the Ripper story, is that we have this time frame
where the canonical five are murdered, very short time frame,

(01:53:25):
and then it stops. Yeah, and it's a little weird
as to why it possibly could have stopped. And there's
theories about, well, he was caught and he was committed
or he committed suicide or anything like that. And and
we we did put that question to Richard because we

(01:53:46):
wanted to know, because he's done so much research on it,
why he thought they just stopped. So suddenly the can
have been there's there's a handful of reasons for the murders,
because someone like this doesn't get fed up and think,
while I enjoyed that, but I think I'm going to
collect stamps. Now, something stopped him killing that either he

(01:54:07):
got caught, he might have died. So he could have
died if if I say, if he had been given
a disease, he could have he could have died of
that disease. He could have committed suicide. He could have
been with his family who realized what had happened, and
so they put him into a private assignment. That's a possibility.
Now the possibilities he went somewhere else, he moved and
continued killing, and they didn't make the connecting. You know,

(01:54:31):
they didn't make the connection between the two, which is
highly unlikely because they were looking for him all over
the world. I mean, there's everyone the world over knew
about these killings. So if he had gone somewhere else,
the connection would have been made. The other possibilities the
police did catch their man, whether they knew it was
the ripper, It's possible he was arrested for another crime,
went into it, went into a prison and they didn't

(01:54:51):
realize who they got. Yeah, I mean, there's there's all
sorts of there's all sorts of suspects who came into
the area left because the other thing about the area
was because it was close to the docks, so you
did have a lot of each of ships shipping coming
into the port of London very close to the doctor.
He had foreign sailors coming in left, right and center,
and you had say one of the reasons for the gaps.

(01:55:15):
All the theory is that the reason for the gaps
is because it could have been someone on a ship
who was out of London for a period of time
and then came back again and commenced murdering. The other
interesting one is that the famous the Dr Tumblety, the
American who's h who was arrested for acts of gross
indecency and seems to have been a quite a favor

(01:55:38):
favored suspect and he skipped bail when he was released
from police custody. He they said, you're not going to
run off are He said, no, no, no, and then
he skipped bail and went to America where he was.
Now the interesting about tumble Tears that Dr tumblet everybody
knew where he was. The reporters were staking at his
house in New York, and Inspector burn at NYPD actually

(01:55:59):
had him on the valence and the reporters in America
were going to him and saying, you know, in America
they seem to have known that he was suspected for
the Whitechapel murders, and they said, you know, is he
going to go back? And he said, now, he said,
what tumbled he is wanted for is not extracitable, So
he couldn't have been extraunited for what he had done,
which seems to have been he actually got caught up

(01:56:19):
that there was this act of gross and decency with
several men and that that's what he'd done, and that
could he couldn't have been expracited for that. But he
obviously if he had been a murder, he would have
been extradited. So obviously NYPD and the London police didn't
seem to think he was the Ripper. A lot of
people think that he went to America and then disappeared,
which is just not true. So this is awful what

(01:56:45):
Jackie Ripper, just like, in general, Jackie Ripper is pretty awful.
Are you gonna say he's misunderstood? No, I mean it's
like an awful story. And I guess it like rounds
out our October and I'm kind of honestly happy that
we're time with October. Now we can go do like
really interesting stuff, not creepy grizzly yeah, not weird creepy
grizzly stuff. But I think, you know, we don't. I

(01:57:06):
don't think we need to talk about theories. I think
that's out there well, and we've talked about obviously the
stuff that we kind of like, and we obviously curated
this episode all so I don't think we need to.
I mean, I think we're pretty good. Would you guys
think we're good? Yeah, I think we're there. We kid,

(01:57:31):
I can't blame this one on that, So I guess
you know, there will be probably a lot of links
on our web, which is um of course, as always
thinking Sideways podcast dot com. And by the way, of course,
you know as you said, all the links are gonna
be on there. We will have the link to Richard's
website to company on there. And if you are if

(01:57:55):
you're gonna be in in London, if you are in
London and you are the tour, I've been on ripper
tours and they're awesome. Yeah, those tours are fantastic and
you really get to see the neighborhood and you really
get to see it from the street and it really
is awesome. And by the way, that doesn't doesn't rich

(01:58:15):
or have a book coming out? I believe, Well, Richard
has written two books, and I didn't know that he
had a third. Okay, well, okay, probably on his website. Sorry,
we were way off traffic. The other place you could
be listening to us as iTunes, you probably are. If
you are, feel free to leave us a comment in

(01:58:35):
a rating. As always, we love that you know, we
drop our shows every Thursday, so if it's Thursday and
you realize you haven't downloaded it, you can stream a
straight from Stitcher. It's always a good thing. We've also
added a couple of others we have, Yeah, we've We've
added tune in dot com. So we're on there. Now,

(01:58:59):
I know that we are in a couple of the
apps that are really popular, that the podcast apps for
the iOS and the Android we've gotten on their list
Fangled apps. Yeah things, We're in a bunch of places. Now.
Check the website. It lists everywhere that we're available for
downloads and streaming. Yeah. And you know the other place

(01:59:20):
you can find us as Facebook. Um, there's a group
and page. You can like us and join the group.
Some good conversations happening there. Um. We also, as of
this week, are on Twitter. Find us, find us, and
follow us, and we'll figure out how to use this Twitter. Yeah.

(01:59:43):
I'm the youngest one in this room, and I'm like,
don't know totally how to use it. So we're going
to figure it out with text messaging services yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah.
And other than that, I don't know, but yeah. And
then you can always send us an email that email addresses. Again,

(02:00:06):
as always Thinking Sideways podcast at gmail dot com. We
have a couple of emails that we should be reading,
but this show is like two and a half hours long,
so we're gonna go ahead and postpone those for just
a couple of weeks. I'm sorry about that whoever, you know,
we replied to you, I promise we'll read you soon.
It's two and a half hours is too long. So

(02:00:29):
with that, I say good night by everybody to Lou
George Clinty. No, I think I think we've thinking that.

(02:00:49):
I think we've solved the mystery. I think we have now.
Actually I'm gonna I'm gonna tell you who my suspect is.
Have you noticed he made a Ripper movie number one,
and you know he doesn't seem to age. Yeah, I
think I think, Yeah, I think John Johnny Depp is
a I mean I was used to say I think

(02:01:10):
it was Queen Victoria because in Colombo, well and that
was getting involved. Yeah, well, you knowiced that in Pirates
of the Caribbean and all the sequels, he seems to
be very proficient with the play and he was addicting.
His addicted to absent wasn't as well, Yeah, exactly was.
It was board Hales and his brain and made him
go insane. And yeah, so there you go, it's Johnny Depp.

(02:01:33):
Johnny Depp done it. In fact, he certainly murdered Abiline's
reputation in the film, because Abiline was nothing like Johnny Depp. Yeah,
probably it's Abiline is the character who Johnny Depp played
in the film. But it's it's very very very very
very very very very very very very very loosely based
on a BLINEAOK, a little artistic license with that one,

(02:01:56):
but then again, it's a great film. It's it's you know,
it's it's really atmospheric. And what they were setting out
to do, they weren't setting out to make a documentary.
They were setting out to make, you know, a good
horror film. And I think they stated there they did
a pretty good job indeed, And how can you not
make a great horror film when you've got the actual
Jack the Rippers starring in it.