After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - Victorian Thames Torso Murders

Episode Date: May 27, 2024

At exactly the same time as Jack the Ripper, another serial killer terrorised London. Just like Jack the Ripper, all their victims were women - their dismembered bodies left floating in the Thames. This is the dark history of the Thames Torso Murders, a case which asks questions about what crimes we choose the remember and what ones we try our hardest to forget.Written by Maddy Pelling. Edited by Peter Dennis. Produced by Freddy Chick. Senior Producer is Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code AFTERDARK sign up at https://historyhit.com/subscription/ 

Welcome to True Spies, the podcast that takes you deep inside the greatest secret missions of all time. Something out of the dark that's appeared in love. You'll meet the people who live life undercover. What do they know? What are their skills? And what would you do in their position? Vengeance felt good. Seeing these people pay for what they've done felt righteous. True Spies from Spyscape Studios. Wherever you get your podcasts. We're back at After Dark.

And today we are talking about one of the most intriguing, but possibly not the most well-known case. And that is the Thames Torso murders. Now be aware that this episode contains details of dismemberment. 1888 and London is about to be in the grip of a serial killer. No, not that one. Because while so-called Jack the Ripper captivated the imagination and fear of the city in that same year,

it's not his story, nor the story of his five canonical victims, that we're going to talk about. Instead, it's the story of a series of simultaneous crimes, equally ghastly, though largely forgotten today. equally ghastly, though largely forgotten today. London in 1888 was all Dickensian grime and belching factories, murky warehouses and streets lined with the poor. While in its drawing rooms fires blazed and the fashionable performed their rituals of polite respectability, the city's dark underbelly writhed and squirmed. There, all manner of people fought to survive.

If this sprawling, shadowy metropolis was the beating heart of a British empire, then its lifeblood was surely the great dirty river that ran through it. Impregnated with the detritus of centuries, the Thames would, in one spot, offer up treasures along its muddy shore, while in another, gratefully and without judgment, absorb secrets and souls into its depths. secrets and souls into its depths. In May 1888, a bargeman employed in the ferrying of goods along the Thames saw something in the water at Raynham, to the east of the city. Familiar with the river

and all it held, perhaps he hoped he'd stumbled across some valuable discarded cargo. Fishing what turned out to be a canvas bag from the water, he unwrapped this unhappy package. Inside, to his horror, he found the mouldering remains of a human torso. Hello, and welcome to After Dark. I'm Anthony. And I'm Maddy. And today we are talking about a case that should be more recognised than it is, the Thames Torso Murders. Now, we're in London, 1888, and if you say that time and place to me, I go Jack the Ripper, just as you mentioned in your opening, 1888. And if you say that time and place to me, I go Jack the Ripper,

just as you mentioned in your opening, Maddy. But we're not talking about Jack the Ripper. But the details of this case potentially have the ingredients to be more impactuous, more bruising. Impactuous, is that a word? Tis now. Well done.

I'd have to have coined it if it wasn't. I want to keep the IP on impactuous in case that's not a word. But it's certainly something that I'm surprised we don't know more about because the details are so incredibly, incredibly grim. But just for some context first, obviously, we have Victoria on the throne. People are probably familiar with some of this because of the Jack the Ripper cases, right? Absolutely. I mean, I think 1888, as you say, it's a year that everyone's mind goes to that very famous series of murders of women in the East End of London. As you say, Victoria is on the throne. And we've already talked about on this podcast, the real tension between this Victorian queen, a woman on the throne, and the idea of femininity and womanhood in the

Victorian household on the Victorian street. There's a lot of tension there. There's a lot of misogyny. There's a lot of pigeonholing women into the idea, in a very binary, simplistic way, of the angel in the house and the whore, essentially, on the street. So the roles of women, the lives of women are changing rapidly during this period. They're also subject to, as I've said, misogyny, immense violence, as we see. Now, the Jack the Ripper case in 1888 begins at the end of the summer and it continues until November of that year. We are talking about a case that begins in the spring of the same year. So this happens before so-called Jack the Ripper claims his first canonical victim, but it will overlap with that.

And it's just fascinating to me that, I mean, I'd sort of heard of this. It was on my sort of peripheral knowledge of the period. I didn't know when it was though. I wouldn't have necessarily been able to tell you it was the same year. No, exactly. Essentially the same time. What happens is we have two serial killers operating in the same city, in some of the same areas at the same moment why haven't we heard of this story it's a fascinating scene that you've set up because we have a bargeman and we have a body or a part of a body a torso a part of a body and you know this is a very difficult episode in terms of discussing

some of the mutilation that these victims fall prey to. They're all bodies of women and they are all cut into pieces. And those pieces appear along the Thames, in the Thames, sometimes in London, London, but it seems concentrated around the river. The other thing to say about this case, before we dig a little bit deeper into it, is that really the river itself, the Thames, is a character in this story in its own right. Yeah. And that's not unusual. Again, there are a couple of cases in the 18th century, I'm thinking about severed heads specifically, something which I surprisingly know a little bit about.

Can I just say you are obsessed? With severed heads? With severed heads. Yeah. The amount of voice notes I have had in my life from you about severed heads, it's worrying. And here we are presenting this podcast. Who knew? Severed heads tend to pop up in the Thames, not to be too flippant about it.

And they cause headline news in, say, the 1720s, for instance. There's a case that's very, very famous. Turns out that it was a woman and her lover that disposed of her husband. So these aren't the first body parts that are found in the Thames. We need to do that episode. It's a really interesting case. Beginning of chapter two of her husband. So these aren't the first body parts that are found in the Thames. We need to do that episode. It's a really interesting case. Beginning of chapter two of my book. The thing that we have here is the Thames as a receptacle, the Thames as a dumping ground, the Thames, as you say,

as a character in its own right. And maybe you could tell us a little bit about what's actually going into the Thames, because brace yourselves, it ain't pretty. Just as it isn't pretty today, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a famous quote, and I forget who by, I think it was an MP, who described it as, it's liquid history. And that is what the Thames is. It's full of the detritus of centuries of Londoners, basically.

And any mudlarker will tell you, you know, if you go along the Thames, you can find in the sludge everything and anything from the past there, including human and animal remains and you just will find something you will find things yeah it's so full of stuff and on the sludge you can find you know on the banks all these incredible pieces of broken fragmented evidence of people's lives and their loves and their crimes over the centuries and you know today famously the thames is full of sewage as many rivers are in britain but you know if you go to youtube there's videos of people using huge

magnets to pull up shopping trolleys sometimes whole bags full of guns or safes that haven't been cracked and things like that so it's a real receptacle for some pretty dark things, including human bodies throughout the centuries. Which brings us back to spring 1888. And this torso discovered, again, I do not have experience of this firsthand, but I am imagining that to cut up a torso is not the easiest thing in the world. To take the limbs from a torso probably is the right way of putting it. That suggests to me, and again, Jack the Ripper is just ringing in my ears,

this anatomical knowledge. And we have this in the Jack the Ripper case and now it appears we have this here too. I'm just wondering if anybody's ever laid these two cases on top of each other to look at timings, et cetera. But anyway. Oh, there's a lot of that.

Is there? Okay, sure. Of course there is. But yeah, so talk to me about that. I presume that's part of the conversation at the time that there's anatomical knowledge here yes definitely and we're going to go on to talk about the medical knowledge that's used potentially by the killer but also by the people who investigate this case actually and it's a really interesting moment in the history of medicine in the history the understanding of women's bodies specifically, and actually a lot of the medical misogyny that was around at the time, as you would maybe expect. There are lots of theories, and this is going to crop up throughout this episode, that the killer might have been a surgeon, potentially, because you would need the tools

to do this. Same as happening in Jack the Ripper case. A lot of people, more commonly in this case, so we're talking about like coroners, police that investigate it, theorize that maybe the killer is a butcher. Same as happening in the Jack the Ripper case. Yeah, exactly. So it's highly parallel. And again, it says so much about how women's bodies are seen, how they are, yeah, and the sort of dehumanisation of them, actually, and that they are sort of reduced to all these

different parts. But one of the differences is that we're not able to identify the victims in this case, right? One of them, potentially. We think we might be able to. But you talked earlier about why don't we know this case a little bit better? And it occurred to me, maybe that's why we're not able to put names to a lot of these bodies. And maybe that makes for something that's a little bit less accessible for people, I don't know. But certainly we are left with quite a few unidentified bodies and potentially one that has been identified. It sounds to me that what you're saying initially, at least,

is that the reception to this is, well, this is grim and this is not great, but things happen in the Thames. So when this body is found at Raynham, which is downstream in terms of the Thames flowing. Okay, geography. Our producer told me that. I did not look this up. The torso has presumably come down from a more central location in London

and been sort of snagged in the water there by the bargemen. There's a feeling, yes, that they can't identify who it is other than it's a female body. The coroner who, by the way, conducts an inquest in the local pub because there's no morgue at Raynham in 1888, so the torso is just taken to a pub, which is not uncommon in the 18th century, but surprising maybe for the 19th century,

and tells you lots about the infrastructure in terms of policing and dealing with the dead and victims of crimes, in particular, in human remains, because they can't find out who the woman is. Also, they can't even say how she died. I mean, obviously she's been cut up, but it doesn't necessarily mean that she was murdered. They can't actually prove that. So the inquest rules simply found dead. That's the term that's given to this. I mean, found as a delimbed torso is pretty important, but found dead is what it says on the certificate.

And it's kind of chalked up to being one of the oddities to come out of the Thames. And of course, we're not into the Jack the Ripper era here. That's going to come out of the Thames and of course we're not into the Jack the Ripper era here that's going to come later in the year so this is a one-off as far as the police are aware in Raynham this is a one-off event they can't move the investigation forward and they chalk it up to just file it away it's a blip and nothing more. So we've been mentioning the Jack the Ripper case an awful lot and we were discussing whether there are

or there are not links with this particular case. The cases are about to coincide now. They're about to overlap, right? They are. So the first case we've got is in the spring. It's months before

the Ripper case begins. That is all about to change and they are about to overlap. Thank you. I'm joined by a host of experts to tell the stories of the six queens of Henry VIII, who shaped and changed England forever. Subscribe to and follow Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. In September of 1888, London's police force was being tested. September of 1888, London's police force was being tested. In Whitechapel, a second victim, Annie Chapman, of so-called Jack the Ripper, had been found dead on the street. Fear pulsated through the city and its officers of the law could do little to stop the panic and the speculation.

and the speculation. But on the 11th of the month, a new terrible discovery was made on the foreshore of the Thames at Pimlico. An arm severed at the shoulder had washed up. The Times, possibly in an attempt to quell the tension, reported it initially as a prank by medical students. Distasteful, certainly, but nothing to be alarmed at. But then, in October, another torso appeared, this time on the embankment at Westminster,

ironically close to what would later become the police headquarters at Scotland Yard. It was not long before connections were made between this and the arm found weeks earlier. Thomas Bond, a police surgeon today credited as the first officer to begin profiling criminals, identified each body part as belonging to the same victim. By now, media interest in the case had exploded, with journalists not only reporting on the crimes, but even getting involved in the police investigation. On the 17th of October, one reporter called Jasper Waring secured police permission to use a sniffer dog to search the nearby area around the crime scene for further evidence. Together, they found a severed leg belonging to the same woman, this time buried at a nearby building site. at a nearby building site.

What I'm really, not struggling with, struggling is the wrong word, but what I'm really taken by with this is that we are in a situation where there are two significantly dangerous serial killers operating in London, in and around similar-ish areas at the same time. Now, obviously the MO looks very different in both cases. Different and the same in that they're both targeting women and mutilating them,

but in different ways. Yes, I think a criminologist would say these are not the same person. And it's so interesting because, as I just mentioned, Thomas Bond, one of the policemen who's investigating the torso killers, is one of the first people to use profiling of criminals. And I think that you can see how that's developing in this era. This idea of trying to work out what the, as you say, the sort of mode of operating is for each of these killers, because they clearly are, I think it's fair to say, separate killers. because they clearly are, I think it's fair to say, separate killers. And the sort of motives, the psychological motives of their crimes, how they're treating their victims and the bodies of their victims, you can see how that's all coming into play here.

Another thing which feeds into that pattern that you're talking about and that's emerging, and we know we're more familiar with the pattern from the Jack the Ripper cases, but this is a different pattern or an adjacent pattern, let's say, whatever, that's emerging here. And it struck me early on in this is that because of that anatomical link, people are talking about medical students. And I was like, yeah, are they just disposing of body parts from cadavers, essentially? So that would have been verging on illegal and certainly frowned upon, absolutely frowned upon. And I think when the Times reports that it's because there's already been, know we're on unfortunately annie chapman's just been killed she's the second jack the ripper victim in white chapel and there's real panic real fear a real media frenzy and i think the times is

almost downplaying that if one can downplay the discovery of an arm on the foreshore of the Thames. But I think there's a sense of, you know, in certain areas of the media in this period, there is a real irresponsibility in terms of how the Ripper case is told. But I think there's also a feeling with the torso killer, and maybe this is one of the reasons why it hasn't survived in the mythology of true crime in the way that Ripper has, is people downplay it, maybe because it just felt like London was too out of control. And I suppose as well, when we look at the Ripper case, we know from the work of so many historians that the women at the time were all labelled as sex workers. And therefore, there's a suggestion that they're fallen women, that they in some way deserved their fate, or they at least were partly at fault in putting

themselves into a situation where that could have happened to them. And I think maybe with the torso killer, because the women aren't identified, and there isn't the same narrative given to them. Now, I will say the police do speak to certain communities when it comes to searching for missing women, and that includes sex workers, women living on the streets. So they are thinking, at least, that a lot of these victims come from the same communities that the Rippers victims came from, potentially. But there isn't the same narrativization. And I wonder if it's that mixed with the fact that there's this panic that needs to be downplayed and contained. And the Ripper victims, the Ripper case, by comparison, the media at the time and the

police at the time, gives a much more rounded narrative. I think all of that plays into it. But for me, I think it even boils down to something even simpler, which is that the women are unidentified and therefore their narratives and their story and their history gets lost. And we know in the Ripper case that their history gets kind of shaped to match what the newspapers want to sell at that point. We can't even do that or they can't even do that at this time because they don't know, in the majority of cases at least, who these people are. And therefore they become pieces rather than people. Absolutely and that has to be the motivation of the killer as well right that he's anonymized them by taking their heads, taking their arms, taking their legs, putting them in different parts of the city. He's stripping away any

identity they may have and completely removing that. And that's something that the media does pick up. We've got an image which I want you to describe. So this is from the second discovery. So the torso that's found in Whitehall. Now, it's really close to where the Scotland Yard headquarters is going to be. It's being built, I believe, in this year. headquarters is going to be. It's being built, I believe, in this year. And it feels like a taunt in the same way that the Ripper is meant to have taunted the police and written into newspapers. That's been relatively debunked, I think. But to me, that feels like a decision by the killer

to do that. So just describe for us this image, because I think it says so much about the understandings of the case at the time. So this is from the Illustrated Police newspaper of October 1888, and it's labelled the Whitehall Mystery. We see three men who are gathered around the torso of a woman that's lying in what looks like rubbled ground. Probably there's some cobbles there, but there's bricks and stones and things lying around. So it's not a genteel location. It looks to be under some type of arch or a bridge or something. There is a barrel in the background, again, lending to that kind of lack of gentility. The three men around, one of them is well-dressed.

In fact, two of them are quite well-dressed. And then there's a third man standing up in the left-hand side of the picture who looks like he's possibly working class, sleeves rolled up. And then, of course, at the centre, there is this naked torso of a woman who is just about to be covered

or has been uncovered by the gentleman kneeling beside her body so it's quite an arresting image i think there are so many things to pick up on and what you've said there so the barrel and the sort of bridge arch i think is giving us that proximity to the thames there's a hint that the river's there thinking about the river as this sort of main character in what is quickly becoming a mythologized narrativized. You're right in that the men are all dressed in very different ways. And I think one of the things about this case, unlike the Ripper case, which seems to target the poorest of the poor and the bodies are found in consistently

slum areas or impoverished areas in the East End, that this case affects people across the city of different social classes because these parts are cropping up or resurfacing literally from the river at different points and different people are finding them. So I think there's something there and there's a real anxiety that anyone could find one of these body parts. The fact that this is dubbed the Whitehall mystery, again, we're into that narrativising straight away. This is being made into a story. It feels very music hall-esque. It's almost like a play. Mystery is the key there, isn't it? Yeah. It's like a penny dreffle or a popular novel at the time. Now, I think it's really interesting what you said about, is this woman being covered up or uncovered? There's a lot here, I would say, about the

aesthetic around women's naked bodies, because all these body parts are, of course, found undressed, and also the sort of fetishization of them. And something about the male gaze here. Now, the way that this body, this torso is presented in this image, it feels very sexualized to me. It reminded me, as soon as I looked at it, of the classical sculpture, you know, with the arms and legs and head missing. And there's something there about women's bodies being made into art. And here we're seeing a real torso depicted in an image. Are these men covering that up?

Or as you say, are they maybe having a look out of curiosity? And I don't know, there's something there about looking at these body parts that become detached from the person and made into something else, almost into a macabre form of art. And people certainly have a level of curiosity that means they want to look at them. But this is not the end, right? This is very much towards the beginning of these discoveries. There's going to be more. There are. So we've got the two torsos that are found in 1888.

One of them overlaps with the Ripper case. Towards the end of 1888, the Ripper case has petered out. He hasn't been caught. The murders seem to have stopped. Now, on the 4th of June June 1889, so a year later, a new female torso is found again in the Thames, and then more body parts start to appear. So we've got the same pattern happening again. This time, and what's different about this is that the, well, there's two things that are different, really. The first thing to say, and and this is really i find this even hard to say to be honest the torso that's discovered this woman was eight months pregnant

so there's two there are two victims here and it's really hard to even imagine that isn't it the other thing to say is that this victim is identified which is remarkable. So she's identified as Elizabeth Jackson, who was living relatively locally to where she is found in the Thames. And canonically, she's described as a sex worker. Now, we know from Hallie Rubenholz's work on The Five, that's not necessarily the case when looking at the victims, especially female victims in this social class that often if they were living on the streets if they were in any form of vagrancy the police would automatically categorize them as sex workers so i don't know how true that is she may have been involved in the sex trade she may not have been i think we have to be a little bit wary of

categorizing her as that now the reporting on this is really fascinating because again i think it speaks so much to 19th century artification is that a word inventing words today we are this sort of transferring of real life into art into narrative now i'm going to just read a little bit of a report, again, from the times of where these other body parts are being found. So these are unfortunately the parts of Elizabeth. This is still the same victim, or they were identified as such by the police at the time. So this is an account from the times, and I think there's a kind of literary quality to it. And this is, again, quite brutal. Tuesday, left leg and thigh off Battersea, lower part of the abdomen at Horsley Down. Thursday,

the liver near Nine Elms, upper part of the body at Battersea Park, neck and shoulders off Battersea. And it goes on and on. And it reminded me when I read this of like a Sherlock Holmes story, that idea of the great sprawling city and people's lives being fragmented across different sites. You think about the irregulars going around the street and gathering clues. I mean, aside from being horrendous in terms of how this killer is depositing real human remains around the city, it feels like these elements are being picked up and elevated in the press and written up in a way that isn't wholly dissimilar from contemporary literature, from contemporary novels. contemporary literature, from contemporary novels. The other literary connection with this, and I have to say this sent a shiver up my spine when I read this, was that part of one of the legs from Elizabeth's body was thrown, presumably by the killer, over the wall of a garden that backed onto the Thames. Now, the house and garden belonged to a man called Percy, who was the son of Mary Shelley. So we're thinking Frankenstein connections,

we're thinking body parts, putting body parts together, taking body parts apart, we're thinking monster, we're thinking... Was it intentional? Is that accidental? Yeah, that feels... And when you think of the Jack the Ripper case as well, and we think so much about his so-called communications with the police, the dear boss letters, the writing into the papers, all of that. And there's endless reams of things you can read about whether that really was him or not.

And there's all these strange people who step forward out of the shadows to fake some of those things and they've got their own motives. This to me, in the same way that one of the previous torso is found near scotland yard this feels communicative in some way pointed i mean it could be a coincidence but it just it's an odd coincidence really stuck with me when i read this it really

shocked me so again with this torso we're getting the theory that the killer is some kind of surgeon or has some kind of anatomical knowledge, maybe not medical knowledge, but anatomical knowledge. So the inquest for this case, the doctor, who's called Dr. Braxton Hicks, and we can talk about him in a second, he says that the cuts on the body, the way the body's been taken apart, is reminiscent of a surgeon or someone like a butcher or a knacker. So someone who's killing animals, maybe. Again, I just, I don't know. And I know people have dismissed this and I don't know enough about the crossovers and why, and I'm not a criminologist, but there is so much here that's glaringly Jack the Ripper related in maybe not

the execution, but in everything else. And at the same time. And happening at the same time and before and after, like the sweep is interconnected. I'd love to see their two profiles by a criminologist, by a policeman, and to see how they overlap and how they don't overlap. Because I think they're really fascinating. And the fact that we know so much about one of these killers has been, you know, mythologized endlessly in ways that's really distasteful. And the other killer, we don't know anything about them.

of course, famously lent his name to Braxton Hicks contractions, which are when a pregnant woman's body's preparing for birth, they're sort of like practice contractions that you can have before you go into real active labour. And of course, a man gave his name to that solely female experience. But there's something here about women's bodies in terms of medical practitioners being seen as parts, again, that Braxton Hicks himself would have encountered women's bodies as a doctor, not necessarily thinking about the whole patient. And it should be said, actually, that he was an activist who fought against baby farming in the 19th century. But in terms of how he would have encountered women's bodies, understood women's bodies anatomically, there's a lot about them being parts, being a person taken apart're also present in the actions of the men who were trying to bring the killer to justice and who, at least in their own time, would have been appalled by these crimes, but nevertheless would have understood women and women's bodies in a way not dissimilar to how they're encountering them when they are dredged from the Thames. It's a really interesting point to make, I think, when we're talking about this, and it relates to some of the points that have been made in terms of Jack the Ripper's victims

as well. But unlike Jack the Ripper's victims, these killings tend to go on from what we can see. Yes. And it's really unclear in this case how many victims there were. When we think about Jack the Killer, there's the canonical five, arguably maybe some more. It's really difficult to pinpoint how many victims there were of the torso killer. The torso killer did not stop with Elizabeth Jackson. At the end of 1889, police constable William Pennett discovered another mutilated victim, this time in White Chapel. For the police force and the local residents in this particular part of the city, the effect must have been doubly devastating. Was Jack the Ripper back again? Or was this the same killer who had haunted the banks of the Thames, hiding in the shadows under bridges to dispose silently of the evidence of his crimes?

The mode of killing seemed like the torso killer, yet mutilation of the organs suggested it could be the work of Jack. The truth was elusive. The victim was elusive. The victim was, again, unidentified, though several names were put forward. Emily Baker, Lydia Hart, all women who had disappeared from London's streets. The police, it seemed, had failed them twice.

Once in failing to make the city's streets safer for them, and a second time in failing to catch their killer. The identity of the torso killer remains a mystery, as does the exact nature and duration of his foul career. There are, as well as the cases we've discussed, other crime scenes associated with this strange, horrifying story. A decade earlier, in 1873 and 1874, body parts had been found near Battersea, Woolwich, Putney and Limehouse.

Then there was a skull, the only head to ever be found, discovered in Tottenham in 1884. There is even a theory that the same killer was responsible for a torso left on the steps of a church in Paris in 1886 and in Lambeth in 1902. Wow, this is a really interesting case. It's frustrating. It's devastating. It's devastating that there's no answer. Yeah, that's the thing, right? And there's no answer in the Jack the Ripper case either. But there are people, we have at least the five canonical victims. We can give those women

back something of their lives and something of their dignity. And ultimately, who cares who Jack the Ripper was? If we can give something back to the victims and put them into a context and into a world that they existed in. And I think we can do some of that in this case, in that we can speculate about the kinds of women, the social classes they were from, the locations in London that they were from. We don't know really how they were killed. We only know how their bodies were disposed of. And often, because they were put into the water and floated away down the river, we can't even pinpoint at what point they entered the river, entered the Thames. So it's incredibly frustrating. I think it's outrageous as well. It really angered me

researching this, that these women have been so dehumanized, so literally pulled apart, so anonymized. It's incredibly grim. It's incredibly frustrating, but it's left me feeling really angry about the fact that that happened and that they haven't been commemorated. One thing I would love to know, and maybe people can write in and tell us, is if there's any memorial to these women. And if not, how do we get on going? How do we start a campaign for this? Because I would love to see them commemorated. I mean, you only have to walk into Whitechapel, into the East End today to see so many references, some tasteful, some not, to the Jack the Ripper case. Why are we not talking about this case and what happened to this woman? It tells us so much about women's lives in the 19th century.

It tells us so much about the police force. Some of the police who were involved in this case were involved in the Ripper case. There must have been so much pressure on them. And if they couldn't catch a man who was leaving his victims in the context in which they were murdered, they certainly couldn't catch someone who was leaving the evidence of his crimes scattered across the city. It's so outrageous. It's so infuriating. But I would love to uncover something more of the women,

and I would love to commemorate them if we can. I think let's take this as a starting point for this conversation rather than the end. I think we would both love to hear from people either at our email address, afterdarkathistoryhit.com or on social media. In the meantime, and we are treating this as the start of this conversation, thank you once again

for listening to After Dark. Please leave us a review. We've had lots of new people coming to the podcast, which has been absolutely incredible. If you've listened to us and never left a review before, hop on, give us the old five stars

and we'll keep coming back with the murder mysteries and the true crime details from the 18th and 19th century. But until next time, we'd love to hear your thoughts on this particular case and we'll talk to you again soon. Welcome to True Spies. The podcast that takes you deep inside the greatest secret missions of all time. Submit me out of the dark that's appeared in love. You'll meet the people who live life undercover. What do they know? What are their skills?

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