Clues with Morgan Absher and Kaelyn Moore - SERIAL KILLER: Jack The Ripper

Episode Date: October 8, 2025

In 1888, a killer prowled London’s Whitechapel district leaving behind mutilated bodies, taunting letters, and a mystery that still grips the world. Jack the Ripper claimed at least five victims, and more than a century later, the clues he left behind continue to baffle experts.Morgan and Kaelyn dive into the Ripper’s reign of terror: examining the evidence, the suspects, and the chilling theories behind one of history’s most infamous unsolved cases. Show Notes: Trigger Warning: This episode contains descriptions of graphic violence.Kiki Schirr (https://www.tiktok.com/@schirrgenius?lang=en)Episode Sponsors:Find your fall staples at Quince. Go to https://www.Quince.com/CLUES for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada, too. Right now, our listeners can save 50% on a SimpliSafe home security system at https://www.SimpliSafe.com/CLUES. There’s no safe like SimpliSafe. Clues is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Don’t Miss out on all things Clues! YouTube: @CluesPod | @crimehousestudios Instagram: @cluespodcast | @Crimehouse TikTok: @Crimehouse Facebook: @crimehousestudios X: @crimehousemedia Clues is hosted by Morgan Absher & Kaelyn Moore  Instagram: @morgsyabsher | @itskaelynmoore TikTok: @twohottakes | @heartstartspounding To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I'm Dr. Hrini-Bot, host of Hidden History. Every Monday, I go where history gets uncomfortable. Vanished civilizations, doomsday prophecies, and events that science still can't fully explain. Listen to and follow Hidden History, available now wherever you get your podcasts. This is Crime House. In London and 1888, a series of mutilation murders would torment the public. Five women across White Chapel would be found brutally dismembered. The killer was precise, cruel to the point of inhumanity, and ultimately never caught.

And while we don't have a first and last name for him, we do have a moniker that is still as much of a household name today as it was more than 130 years ago, Jack the Ripper. We've talked about modern cases with multiple victims, but there's something about these murders that has really shaped serial killer lore. Plus, there's the fact that Jack the Ripper still remains a mystery, or do they? Numerous people have dedicated their entire lives to unmasking Jack, and we may be closer to solving these cases than we think. Hi guys, welcome back to Clues, where we sneak past the crime scene tape to explore the key evidence behind some of the most gripping true crime cases. I'm Kaelin Moore, and I'm going to be digging into the timelines, the backstories, and the case files on these cases. And I'm your internet sleuth, Morgan Absher. I'm the one who's diving into the Reddit forums to talk about everything I can find online and pulling out the threads that just don't add up.

And at Crime House, we value your support. So please share your thoughts on social media. Remember to rate, review, and follow clues to help others discover the show. For bonus episodes, early access, and ad-free listening, join our Crimehouse Plus community on Apple Podcasts. More on the case and the clues that defined it right after this quick break. One of this week's partners is Peloton. There's a specific kind of joy and freedom that comes from a truly great workout.

That feeling where everything just clicks. Peloton is helping you unlock that feeling with the new Peloton cross-training Tread Plus. powered by Peloton IQ. It's cross-training reimagined. Peloton IQ actually personalizes your journey by planning your workouts, tracking your progress, and even correcting your form in real time to help you unlock new versions of yourself. So let yourself run, lift, fail, try, and go. Explore the new Peloton Cross Training Tread Plus at OnePeloton.com.

Okay, we are kicking off spooky season with this one, and it is a big one. And I will warn you guys, I didn't know a lot about this case until prepping and doing the research. Of course, we hear about Jack the Ripper all the time and like pop culture media references. But wow, this case gets a little gory. So if you're looking for more traditional spooky, maybe wait a couple weeks until we get into Salem. Yeah, we're going to be covering the witch trials, which will also be very spooky and historical and informative. Yeah, no, this was a lot. I'm like, they didn't talk about this on Bridgeton.

Like, you're like, if it's not in Bridgetton, I haven't heard of it. Gosh, I'm just like, I was really going through the details. I'm like, okay, these clues, like everything you guys are going to get into today with us, it's pretty crazy. It's a gory one. And we're going to talk about the gore a little bit. So obviously we're not going to show the gore. But if you're watching this episode on YouTube, you are going to see some photos and maps and other assets that will help you kind of put the pieces together as we're telling the story. And if you're not watching, if you're just listening, you can find those same images on our Instagram that's at Clues Podcast.

Well, Morgan, you kind of kicked it off by saying today's case is massive and it is. People have been trying to solve this for 137 years. And I also, I can't even stress how many podcasts I've listened to where they're like, we've solved it, we've cracked it. No one has. It's still an ongoing mystery, which is why today we wanted to really give the full overview. We want to really try to pack in as much stuff as we can on this case. the known facts and the timelines, the clues that are most likely to be authentic, and the suspects and details that we personally found the most interesting, underappreciated, and also the most likely to be true. There's a lot of lore in this case, but we tried to sort through that when we were doing the research.

And because of that, for the purposes of this episode, we're going to stick to what sometimes referred to as the canonical five, the killings that most sources, old and new agree, were committed. by Jack the Ripper. There's several other killings where experts say Jack was responsible. There's several other killings really around the world where people say Jack the Ripper was responsible. We'll talk about those a little bit later in the episode. But for now, what we want to do as we go through the timeline is talk about the canonical five. And one last thing before we dive in, we've said this case is going to be gory. It is a bit of a heavy one. So I really just want to be clear and warn everyone that there are going to be a lot of graphic descriptions of violence, including discussions of extreme sexual violence and mutilation of the deceased.

As always, we'll do our best to talk about victims with compassion and dignity. But these were particularly brutal murders, and there's no way to tell you the basic facts of these cases without also sharing some pretty disturbing stuff. So with that in mind, let's dive in. So to understand how Jack the Ripper got away with some of the most vicious murders ever recorded, we need to understand the area he was killing in a little bit more. So the word slum barely covers Whitechapel at the time. The East End District on the north bank of the River Thames, just east of the Tower of London is where Whitechapel is.

It's a short walk from grandeur, and it felt like this totally other world inside of London. So London's population was really exploding at the time, but there weren't things like new housing, jobs, or social support for any of the people coming into the area. You had Irish families that were fleeing famine. You had Russian Jews who were escaping their circumstances. They were all pouring in through docks.

They were crowding the nearby streets. There's also language barriers and desperation that kind of fed sweatshops and turf gangs. Merchants raged at being undercut. Diseases were spreading in rooms that were packed with so many people. And many of these people were in condemned buildings also. And parts of the East End, more than half. of the children died before age five. Then there was the dark that was happening at the time. Industrial smog and the infamous London fog smothered the alleys. And in Whitechapel, street lamps were really scarce.

So after last call at the bars, everywhere in Whitechapel would go pitch black. Even the police were afraid of some of these alleyways because it was so dark and there was so much violence happening there that they refused to patrol some of the streets that didn't have lights. Yeah, I'm scared of the dark. There'd be no chance I'd be walking down those roads. Terrifying. And, you know, as all of this is happening, women really bore the brunt of a lot of this violence. So there were a lot of sailors that were coming in and out of the area through the ports. And that really exploded kind of like the sex industry at the time. The poorest women in the area often faced this brutal choice. They could either starve or they could enter sex work.

not have any protection, but at least be able to feed themselves and sometimes their children. Violence against sex workers was incredibly common at the time, and it was rarely punished. As journalist Florence Fendwick Miller wrote in 1888, women were routinely brutalized, sometimes killed, and if they survived, the law often called it, quote, common assault. Basically, at this time in London, if you were to scream out murder in the middle of the street, no one would even look twice. Whitechapel didn't just host Jack the Ripper. It made his work easier and his escape night after night far more likely. So that brings us to mother of five Mary Ann Nichols, who also went by the name of Polly. That's how I'll refer to her. She was born on August 26, 1845.

Despite living on the East End in a horrible situation, she had somewhat of a chance at life. Her dad is a blacksmith who was able to support her into early adulthood. At age 19, she marries a man who works for a commercial printing business. But from what we know, Polly's marriage isn't really a happy one. In part, it's because she is really struggling with alcohol addiction at this time in her life. Now divorce at the time is incredibly rare. So married couples who didn't get along usually just stayed together, but they would live apart. So essentially, Polly and her husband, William, would separate and reunite throughout the years.

but often they lived apart from each other. And every time Polly would move out, her children would stay with William, but he would send her a little bit of money as what he called maintenance for Polly. During this time, too, both of them have other partners. They're not really considering themselves married to each other. And then in 1882,

William catches wind that Polly is probably doing sex work. And everything changes at that moment. He just decides that he's not. not going to support her anymore. He doesn't want to give money to her if this is the life that she's going to live. He ends up contacting the church and he argues that he shouldn't be expected to raise their five kids by himself and support Polly financially. And of course, as everyone listening can imagine, the church sides with him. They're like, yeah, of course you don't need to support your wife anymore. So at this point, Polly, who's now 37 years old, is penniless.

There's not really many options for a woman in her position. She can't necessarily go out and get a job. So there's a little bit of pittance that she makes as a low-end sex worker. But that is really all of the money that she's making at this time. Soon she gets confined to the first of many workhouses where she's going to live over the next six years. Workhouses in London at the time are kind of similar to how the asylum system in America worked in like the 1900s. But they're a little bit more prisons for the poor. Inmates wear identical uniforms there. They're forced to perform manual labor whenever they're not sleeping or eating sparse meals. And part of this, we had this in the United States too, but like being that poor is illegal in Victorian London.

In America, we called it being a vagrant where you could just get thrown in jail for being that destitute essentially. But anyone who needs governmental assistance in London at the time can legally be confined to a workhouse and they can just get free labor from this person. And people in these workhouses, I mean, the situation was horrible. People are packed in like sardines. There's little to no medical care. So think of all the weird Victorian illnesses that were spreading at the time. Smallpox, measles, all of those outbreaks are just happening constantly in these workhouses. Also, kind of making things worse, Polly can't come and go as she wants. She has to stay there unless she has what they decide is a reasonable notice to leave. And that requires a whole administrative

process of getting that approved. So you can't just leave and come as you want to in these workhouses. So obviously Polly hates the system, as we can all imagine. And every time she manages to get out on reasonable notice, she goes back to sex work. She's trying to make some money for herself. But every time she leaves and does this, she gets in trouble with the law, basically, either for the sex work that she's doing or for sleeping on the streets. And they just send her to another workhouse. occasionally she has these periods of ill health so she'll get sent to an infirmary instead. But then when she's well enough, they just send her straight back to the workhouse system. It's this horrible, horrible cycle.

On May 12th, 1888, 42-year-old Polly leaves the workhouse that she's in for what she thought was a really good opportunity. See, the workhouse has procured her a job as a live-in domestic servant with a family in Wandsworth, which is this like wealthy area in South London. London. Walthier families at the time often asked women's workhouses to match them with potential household servants. So wild. It's so wild. The Victorian era was just like horrible. Polly writes her father and tells him the good news. She says, quote, I just write to say you will be glad to know that I'm settled in my new place and all going right up to now. My people went out yesterday and have not returned, so I'm left in charge. It is a grand place inside with trees and gardens back to front. All has been newly done up. They are teetotolers and religious, so I ought to get on.

They're very nice people. And I have not too much to do. And what this basically translates to is this was a sober household. And Polly ultimately thinks that this is going to be good for her. Within two months of her working at this place, so it looks like the situation sours. And in mid-July, Polly takes off from this house, and while she does so, she steals some of her employer's clothing on the way out. And that's when she moves into Wilmot's lodging house in an area that's right next to White Chapel called Spittlefields. This lodging house is basically a cheap motel that they call a Doss House. We're going to use that term a lot in this episode, a Doss House. There, Polly shares a room with her friend, Emily Holland, as well as three other women.

and all DOS houses charge the same for rent. It's going to be four pence a night, and that is what they call DOS money. But even splitting the DOS money five ways, it's really hard for Polly to make enough for her share. She can basically manage her nightly rent, but she has to get food, she has to get other supplies for herself. And also, she is struggling with alcohol addiction. And so in order to kind of keep herself from having withdrawals, she has to support her drinking habit. We were able to find that a glass of gin at the pub that was nearby cost three pence. And so she basically needs several drinks a night to stave off these symptoms of alcohol withdrawal, which can be deadly too.

So she's basically forced to spend this money. And on August 24, 1888, Polly moves into a different boarding house, one where the women can share beds with men. And this is because that allows sex work to happen and she can make a little bit more money this way. And the one that she moves into is called the White House. Within a week, Polly wants to leave her situation. She wants to leave the White House for one reason or another. And she wants to return to the shared room that she was sharing with those other girls at Wilmots. So around 1230 a.m. on Friday, August 31st, she leaves a local pub and she heads back to Wilmotz.

but she gets kicked out of the house because she hasn't paid her DOS money for the night. Drunkenly, she promises that she'll go out, she'll figure out how to get the money, and then she'll be back soon. So hold the room for me. And as she's leaving, she actually tells the people working there that she has this nice new black bonnet on, and she expects that that's going to help her attract some customers. So everyone who's working at the place knows exactly what she's going to go do. She also has on a fairly new dress. Some people have suggested that it was one that she's,

stolen from her former employer. And now sex workers like Polly at the time typically charge two to three pence for their services, depending on a myriad of things like what the customer requests. So in theory, she only has to find one or two customers so she can make her money and sleep in a room for the night. She leaves around 140 a.m. And around 2.30 in the morning, she happens to run into her roommate, Emily Holland, who's walking home after watching a fire at the docks. And Polly tells Emily that she's made her DOS money several times over that night just in the time that she's been gone. But she also confesses that she keeps spending that money on drinking. But now the pubs are closed.

So she tells Emily that she's going to go look for one more client. And if she can't find one, she'll just go back to the White House and she'll share a man's bed for the night. And she'll try again the next day. Emily and Polly part ways they go in separate directions. And Emily makes a note that Polly is walking east. And about an hour later, around 3.30 in the morning, Polly's walking down Bucks Row, which is one of the streets in White Chapel that's home to working people who can afford to rent cottages. And she meets someone while she's there. Now, maybe she thinks this person is paying customer, or maybe it's someone lying in wait, maybe it's someone following her. We will never know for sure. But I don't even know if she really sees what's happening in the thick London fog. But this man has a knife. And if Polly does see it, she doesn't make a sound. And right underneath the bedroom of a sleeping family, the man quickly cuts her throat twice. The second gash goes all the way down

to her vertebrae. It practically decapitates her and then, not finished with the attack, he slices her abdomen multiple times, inflicting either one or two severe wounds that expose her intestines and her stomach. Then he stabs her twice in the genitals. And moments later, around 3.45 in the morning, a delivery carriage driver named Charles Cross walks down Bucks Row on his way to work. And Charles, as he's walking, practically trips over Polly's body. And it's, remember, it's so dark at the time. He doesn't even really know what he's stumbled on. And he reaches down and touches her arm and he finds that above the elbow, she's still warm.

So if she is dead, which kind of looks like she is, but she hasn't been for very long. whoever did this though is nowhere to be seen there's no easy way to call for the police at the time and charles is on his way to work and he can't really be late so he ends up pulling down polly's skirt to cover her up and give her a little bit of dignity in the situation and then he hurries on his way knowing that he'll likely see an officer a patrolling constable someone on his route to work and sure enough just a few blocks later charles runs into an officer and he tells him what he saw meanwhile at the crime scene a different officer has separately stumbled upon the body, and things very quickly escalate from here. Before four in the morning, a doctor arrives on the scene, and he officially pronounces Polly dead. He says that she couldn't have been gone, quote, but a few minutes. So that basically means when Charles found her, he was mere moments away from seeing who did this. And that very morning, the Star newspaper runs a report on the crime. And the writer who has remained unnamed all this time, having seen the body himself, says, quote, no murder was ever more ferociously and rudely done. And that headline really sets off

all of London. And it really marks the beginning of the Ripper's reign of terror. And with that, our trail of clues begins. Starting with clue number one, we have Polly's wounds. Since all of these murders occurred clearly before modern forensics. Similarities in the M.O. was what was really looked at in these olden crimes. And so looking at the victim's wounds is what really helped all of these officers, constables, kind of know that this was a different killer. This is a new killer that they might not have seen before. According to the medical examiner at the time, Jack used a six to eight inch bladed knife, moderately sharp, and may have even been left-handed. And left-handedness was something that was very stigmatized in the Victorian era, as it had been throughout much of European

history. I feel like honestly, even my uncle growing up was left-handed, but they made him switch. Oh, yeah, my dad, too. No, they literally thought it was like demons. It was evil. In Victorian era. Evil. Comment if you're watching this video and you would have been thought of as demonic for being left-handed in the Victorian era? I would have been stoned. I had like vampire teeth before braces, so I would have been out for sure. A woman with vampire teeth? No, you're done. Yeah, no, done. And so kind of correlating this ferocious crime with maybe a left-handed person, it was really kind of spread around that like this person could have practiced witchcraft or could have habits of a criminal. Clearly, left-handed, stabbing people. So if Jack was left-handed,

it would have cut down the suspect pool considerably. Jack also had managed to kill Polly so quietly that those sleeping families on the street didn't hear anything, no screams, not a peep, meaning it also must have been pretty quick, no hesitation, and again, maybe lying and wait, maybe in the frame of a door, or watching, following her in the fog. And there also were severe abdominal wounds. And Polly was wearing what are called stays super different. than modern bras. It was like this tight, bone garment meant to shape the body under the clothing, similar to a corset, but like made way better and differently. And her killer seemingly didn't undress her or attempt to cut the stays while slicing her abdomen, meaning they were likely maneuvering

the stays and getting their hand under. I should also note, Polly's organs were exposed but not removed. and something the medical examiner really finds interesting with Polly's autopsy, there wasn't any evidence of recent sexual intercourse. So Jack didn't sexually assault her either. And because Polly was on duty as a sex worker that night and had just told her friend that she had customers, you know, a couple times over to pay for the Doss House rent, one possible explanation for this could be that due to the high rates of STDs

back in Victorian times and the threat of pregnancy, even at the age of 43, It's kind of speculated that Polly might have been selling other acts besides just like vaginal intercourse. That's interesting. I didn't know about that before we started researching this. Yeah. Yeah, obviously they're concerned about pregnancy and SDDs at the time. So it's still this weird juxtaposition for everyone noting that whoever did this crime stabbed Polly in the genitals multiple times. And so because of that, a lot of the investigators at this time kind of like point to this being.

Pickerism, which is when the killer uses stabbing as a method and they look at the knife as their own sexual organ and they get off, they get pleasure from performing these stabbings, especially in intimate areas like the genitals. It's sex for them. Yeah, which we just covered the Idaho case. And that was something that like we talked a lot about. And people online were talking about a lot. Yeah. Was that something that was motivating him? And it's so interesting. even throughout time, it just like keeps repeating itself. It's still present. And so more recently even in 2005, forensic professionals, including Robert Keppel,

a legendary detective specializing in serial killers, published a scholarly analysis of Jack Thripper's whole MO. They diagnosed him with certainty as someone displaying Pickerism by pointing out that he stabbed all victims far more times than necessary to just kill them. And there's actually a later analysis that says Jack might have been. acting out a different but related sexually violent compulsion, which is necrosatism, meaning he was getting sexual gratification specifically from mutilating the dead. Either way, it seems that Jack was absolutely sexually motivated in some way, and maybe for him, the murder itself was a sex act. Hey, before we jump back into the show, let's take a quick break.

But not just any break. This is a refreshing break. with Snapple. We all know about Snapple's iconic real facts, so let's take a minute to go over some of my favorites. Snapple Real Fact, 964, it is illegal in the United Kingdom to handle salmon in suspicious circumstances. Snapple Real Fact 1013. It is illegal to sing off-key in North Carolina. Snapple Real Fact 2033, Americans consume 150 million hot dogs on July 4th. Snapple Real Fact 705. Every ton of recycled paper saves about 17 trees. So grab a snapple, take a second, and enjoy the moment.

Because let's be honest, this might be the most refreshing part of your day. Snapple. Make your break more interesting. All right, now let's get back to Clues. This episode is brought to you by Quince. So lately, I feel like I've wanted to be more intentional about the stuff that I've been wearing every day. I want to lean into pieces that feel effortless and comfortable, but still look,

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now available in Canada too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E-com slash clues for free shipping and 365-day returns. Quince.com slash clues. The week after Polly died, the first week of September in 1888, the murder was all over the papers and it became such a hot topic around the East End.

There was enough interest from the public that Polly's funeral arrangements were kept secret to prevent gawkers from lining the streets. Yeah, that was a really interesting thing I've learned about this era is like funerals, like people would show up. And there was like windows with the dead in them that people would like line up and go view. Oh, yeah. No, the Victorian era London, especially because these people were so obsessed with true crime and they didn't have documentaries.

They only got it from the papers. So people would show up to crime scenes. Yeah. And there were 158 papers at the time. Sherlock Holmes was in its heyday. This was like the best selling. series. So people were obsessed. This is like really when true crime was going nuts, the origins of our our true crime bodies. We do a heart source printing episode on that. If you listen to our Who Killed

Seville Kent episode, it's all about Victorian era true crime obsession and how that affected crime scenes. But yeah, so they can't even publicize her funeral because they know people are just going to show up and try to gawk. So even if the people in Whitechapel didn't really care much about the welfare of sex workers or I would say women in general, or poor people or like anyone but themselves, they were pretty interested in how brutal this particular murder was. And not to mention, they were all really freaked out that they could be next. People on Bucks Row, especially, that was the area where Polly was killed.

They were worried about the killer lurking in the same spot again. So anyone who could avoid that area at night did. But not everyone was able to. And one of the women that unfortunately did have to frequent this area was Annie Chapman. She was a 47-year-old widow. Now, Annie has a lot in common with Polly. She was in her 40s. She was a mother.

One of her three children had died, and actually another one of them was institutionalized due to a disability. So Annie lived at a Doss House in nearby Spittlefields where she paid her nightly rent with sex work after she lost her husband's financial support. Annie and her husband, John, split up sometime around 1884, 1885, but he kept supporting her until he ultimately died in 1886. And just like Polly, Annie was forced into a bad situation. She had no other options, really, for how she could make money.

And unfortunately, for her as well, she developed this alcohol addiction. And a lot of the money she was supposed to spend on her nightly Doss money was going to buying alcohol. And exactly one week after Polly's murder, Annie's night started off eerily similar to how Polly's last night started. on the evening of Friday, September 7th, 1881, Annie isn't feeling well. She leaves her new Doss House sometime around 5 p.m. She's got to look for customers, even though she's not feeling well. She has to find customers so she can pay. Now, Annie at the time, had chronic tuberculosis.

She also potentially had syphilis, which both were incurable and potentially lethal at the time if you did not have access to proper care. So she returned home around 11,000. 30 p.m. and had no DOS money. But she was able to get a baked potato beer and some medicine for herself. At 1 a.m., she has to leave again. She returns at 1.35 a.m. At which point, the night watchman is like, listen, you're not getting in here unless you have your money. You keep going out and coming back with food, like pay me or figure something else out. But she doesn't have the money. So she asks if she can speak to the manager who at the Doss House is called a deputy. And just like Polly,

she tells this deputy that she plans to go out and earn the DOS money and she assures them she's going to be back shortly with this money. She asks that they don't give away her usual bed to another lodger before she's able to make it back. And then Annie leaves. Now, around 5.30 in the morning, a local woman named Elizabeth Long sees a woman who she later identified as Annie talking to a man at 29 Hanbury Street, which is just a mile from the side. of Polly's murder. Shortly before 6 a.m., a man named John Davis, who's a delivery driver living on the third floor at 29 Hanbury Street, he leaves his house to go to work. And when he steps outside, he finds Annie's body in the backyard.

And the scene is absolutely shocking. Now, not only has Annie been viciously mutilated, but it looks like her body has been posed. Her legs are spread out and they're pushed up towards her chest. Just like Polly, Annie died of a knife wound to the throat. There was a cut so deep it nearly decapitated her. And also, like Polly, her abdomen is sliced open and her organs are exposed. Now, John runs to the police station and he makes a report and the constables go straight to the scene. And by 6.30 in the morning, a coroner named Dr. George Baxter Phillips arrives and he,

He guesses that Annie may have died around two hours before they found her, so sometime around 4.30 in the morning. But he later acknowledges that, you know, there's a chance that her body cooled rapidly because it was pretty cold out that morning. So she actually could have been killed even more recently, somewhere between 5.30 and 6 a.m., which would have also meant that they were just minutes away from seeing who did this. And, you know, the scene is so bad that most people who come by can't even really look at it. But Dr. Phillips has to keep examining the body and he notices more and more strange things about the scene.

Now, first of all, her abdomen has not just been sliced open. Unlike the previous victim, some of her organs had been removed. Now, I mean, this part is really intense, you guys, but Annie's intestines had been severed and they had been placed on her left shoulder. But what is even more horrific, the more that the doctor looks at her body is he realizes that her uterus, part of her vagina, and part of her bladder are gone. And these missing organs would seem like a pretty big clue number two, but this has been pretty hotly debated. Most experts agree with the original case reports at the time that the killer did remove organs from the victims himself. But I did find one devoted Ripperologist, and these are people who just really make studying Jack the Ripper their thing. Ripperologists, it's a whole thing.

So they think that Jack just mutilated the bodies, and coroners or people working at the mortuaries were the ones actually removing the organs. They think that maybe they sold them to medical schools, which really needed as many human organs as they could get for practice, for surgeries. Yeah, they were digging up a lot of bodies at graveyards at the time. Yeah. And selling them to schools. Grave robbing was a huge thing. And so a lot of people even speculated that most doctors at the time would actually go grave rob themselves. And so, oh, yeah.

No, in America at the time, like Harvard had like a bring your own body to school policy for the people who were admitted to their program. So you had to go out and get a body from a graveyard and then bring it to dissect it if you were a freshman at all. Harvard at the time. Wasn't there a modern Ivy League school even that like one of their professors was caught? It was Harvard. It was the guy that worked in the mortuary. We have a hard-to-spotting episode on it. But yeah, he was selling the organs, mostly to this guy, Jeremy and Tennessee. But like, okay. So like, again, plausible. Yeah. So and again, Victorian time. So, you know, how good is this documentation and things like that? But this riprologist, that's their theory there. And they do have somewhat of an argument for that theory because they kind of speculate that Jack had to be skilled in removing human organs in order to do it so quickly in the dark outdoors, police bearing down on them in any minute.

Yeah, because we've talked about it. There's a chance that in this situation it was like 15 minutes that he had before someone was on the scene. Yeah. So it was fast. It was super fast. And the coroner himself even said like it would have taken me and my expertise. at least 15 minutes. So this person had to have been pretty skilled to be this quick and thorough and know exactly

what they were getting and kind of what they wanted to do. So this brings up a lot of big questions. Did Jack have some sort of specialized training in either surgery, autopsies, butchery maybe? A lot of modern investigators do think so. The coroner's report after Annie's autopsy literally says, quote, obviously, the work was that of an expert. There was a 1988 FBI profile, and this was done in an attempt to shed new light on the murders on their 100-year mark. And it actually dismissed the idea that Jack was a doctor or a surgeon. The FBI thought that he might have been either a butcher, a mortuary worker, a hospital aide, or maybe even a medical examiner's assistant.

They kind of speculated that because there was actually a wet leather apron, possibly worn during the murder that was found lying nearby Polly's body. This causes Jack to receive the nickname leather apron temporarily before Jack the Ripper catches on. And not to mention several of the sex workers who knew Polly mentioned a man who had been wearing a leather apron, tormenting women in the area with threats. The Jack, the butcher idea, did have a lot going for it, especially if he specialized in pigs, which are anatomically very similar to humans. I mean, they're actually using pig organs in human transplants nowadays. mind-blowing. So the police at the time also kind of liked this butcher theory. And so they actually

ended up going and visiting 76 different butcher and slaughterhouse workers as potential suspects during the course of their investigation. But even if their suspect was a butcherer, why remove the organs? Why take them with you? I would assume it's trophies. One would think trophies. Investigators, both olden and modern kind of look at three different possibilities, which is profit, sexual motivation, cannibalism. I mean, we've got modern serial killers that practice cannibalism, so that's not out of the realm of possibility. And maybe we'll get into that a bit more when we talk about a later clue we have. But for now, we're going to stick to sex and money, two motivators that come up over and over again in serial killer cases. If Jack was living in poverty,

like many in Whitechapel, some experts think he could have been harvesting them to sell, and that could have been his entire motivation to even kill. And while he wouldn't have gotten rich selling these organs to medical schools, he did pick organs like the uterus that were in pretty high demand, so at least it would have been substantial. But even that theory, I mean, killing multiple women, even women on the fringes of society that were very looked down upon, not really cared about.

It's a pretty big risk to take on killing women just for a little bit of extra money. I imagine it would have been easier just to find women to dig up and take their organs and sell them. I know. I mean, grave robbing was a popular thing. Yeah. And so that's why the FBI profilers actually thought that Jack wasn't totally jobless because he killed on the weekends. Suggesting that maybe he had a Monday to Friday job that left him with no time or energy to hunt victims on the weekdays. So that kind of leaves the sexual compulsion theory, which is the theory that is favored by the 2005 analysis performed by Robert Keppel.

And Keppel really just kind of gets into that pickerism and goes deeper into that rabbit hole. He also kind of goes further that maybe this was also a part of humiliating the victims and the women by posing them and, again, mutilating them even further than necessary. And as for stealing the organs, if it was sexually motivated, he probably kept them as you said, Kailen. trophies. Yeah, that's what I would imagine. A few little jars, which we're going to get into with one of our suspects. Or like an Ed Gein kind of thing of like, I just want to keep this because it makes me feel close to it or it reminds me of someone or I think like, I don't know, it reminds me of the brutality. I don't know. This is something like, oh, I don't know. I can't. I can't with

this. I'm like, I cannot imagine seeing little organs in a jar. Like, no. No. No. I agree. Like as your trophy? No. Okay. Let's get into our clue number three, which comes around three weeks after Annie's murder. Maybe. There's no way to be sure it's real, but currently most ripperologists seem to think so. On September 27th, 1888, London's Central News Agency gets a handwritten letter, and it's the first document to actually coin the name, Jack the Ripper. Now, it was one of hundreds of letters supposedly from the killer that were mailed to police and reporters around this time. Most of them did turn out to be hoaxes. I mean, again, you guys, like, there's 158 newspapers at the time trying to have the best story and sell their papers.

And it was super easy to get away with sending anonymous letters to the police or media. So there were a lot of pranks involving fake letters from notorious public figures and things like that. but the September 27th letter, known as the Dear Boss letter, does seem to be plausible. It could be real. I'm going to read it for you guys, but I will add, the spelling and handwriting are pretty good with this one. So if it is real, it's kind of speculated Jack was at least somewhat educated. It says, quote, Dear Boss, I keep on hearing the police have caught me, but they won't fix me just yet. I have laughed when they look so clever and talk about.

about being on the right track. That joke about leather apron gave me real fits. I'm down on hoars, and I shan't quit ripping them till I do get buckled. Grand work, the last job was. I gave the lady no time to squeal. How can they catch me now? I love my work and want to start again. You will soon hear of me with my funny little games. I saved some of the proper red stuff in a ginger beer bottle over the last job to write with, but it went thick like glue and I can't use it. Red ink is fit enough, I hope. Ha-ha. The next job I do, I shall clip the lady's ear off and send the police officers just for jolly, wouldn't you?

Keep this letter back till I do a bit more work, then give it out straight. My knife's so nice and sharp, I want to get to work right away if I get a chance. Good luck. Yours truly Jack the Ripper. Don't mind me giving the trade name. P.S. wasn't good enough to post this before I got all the red ink off my hands. Curse it. No luck yet. They say I'm a doctor now. Ha ha.

That's the end of the letter. And that's how Jack the Ripper gets his name. Another serial killer. That's a self-nameer. What is it with these guys? Unfortunately, the Central News Agency assumed it was just another weirdo messing with them, trying to get his letter in the papers. And so they don't take it seriously at the time, although they do forward the letter to police.

But again, there's a lot of people, even other journalists from the people. this time period that speculate it was someone just trying to sell papers. So, which we know, I mean, yeah, think about it at the time. If people are buying true crime and you have true crime to put in the newspaper and sell more papers, you're going to do it. What's better to sell a paper than a letter from the killer himself. Absolutely. So that's a tough one for me. So three days later, they were forced to reconsider the letter because of what happened in just the wee hours of Sunday, September 30th. Elizabeth Stride was a farmer's daughter from Sweden. She began working as a servant girl at the age of 17. Within two years, she'd left that job, and then three years after that,

the Swedish police put her on a list of known sex workers. At age 23, Elizabeth moved to London's Swedish parish, maybe with the promise of a servant job, or maybe she was just looking for a fresh start. And for a while, it really worked out for her. She met a coffee shop operator named John Stride in London, and the two got married in 1869. But just like Polly and Annie, she had a troubled marriage, and it ended in permanent separation. And that was in part because she really struggled with alcohol addiction. By the start of the Ripper murders in 1888, Elizabeth is 45 years old. She's desperately poor. She's a habitual binge drinker who will sometimes disappear for days at a time. So she supports herself with really,

just the combination of the only two sources of income that a woman in her position can get. She does sex work and she gets donations from the Swedish church. Now, she has a boyfriend of about three years. It's this day laborer named Michael Kidney, but their relationship is tumultuous. It's violent. He even at one point, I read about him trying to padlock her in a room just to keep her from going out to drink, which was kind of ironic because he himself had a police record for drunk and disorderly conduct. On September 26th, 1888, two and a half weeks after Annie's murder, Elizabeth shows up at a Doss House where she had previously rented a bed and she said that she had just had this really big blowout fight with Michael and she just needs a place to stay.

So on Saturday, September 29th, Elizabeth stays in and she cleans rooms at the Doss House. The deputy, who's another woman named Elizabeth, Elizabeth Tanner, pays her six pence for the help. And in the early evening, Elizabeth goes to the pub and she has a drink with. the deputy, who the two of them seem to be friends, and she returns to the Doss House from the pub, but then leaves again sometime between 7 and 8 p.m. And she has with her the 6 pence that she received for cleaning. She appears, at least from some witness, accounts to be in a good mood. She was able to pay for her bed the night. And so maybe she just had somewhere else to be that evening and she was going out before coming back to go to sleep. At around 11 p.m., she's seen by two laborers in Whitechapel.

and she's tucked into a pub's doorway to avoid the rain. She's also kissing a man. This short, well-dressed man is how they described him. The laborers end up teasing her about the PDA, and they kind of make the nice gesture of inviting the man to join them for a drink, but it appears that he and Elizabeth have already been in the pub, and they were actually on their way out. Now, at 1145, another laborer sees Elizabeth on the next street over,

and she's still kissing a man. Now, the descriptions of the men's attire does vary between witness accounts. So there's a chance that she was kissing the same man both times. There's a chance she was kissing two different men. But eyewitnesses sometimes describe details like clothing incorrectly. And given that she was kissing this man in both sightings, a lot of people believe that it was probably the same guy and that she maybe knew him, which is kind of an interesting detail. Who was this well-dressed guy that she went to go see out in the rain, even though she didn't need to work that night to make her DOS money?

Was he perhaps a well-off client? Was he a regular that she liked well enough to be seen kissing him at doorways? Maybe he was a boyfriend that she had. Either way, the testimony of the next two people to see Elizabeth that night is our fourth clue. Because those are potential sightings of the Ripper himself. At 12.35 a.m. on Sunday, September 30th, police constable William Smith spots Elizabeth in the company of a man on Burner Street. This is the same street where she was seen less than an hour earlier, making out with her mystery man. This again could be the same. We're a different guy. We really don't know. But Constable Smith says they were outside the international working men's educational club, which was a social club for men. And so it's plausible Elizabeth could have picked up a new date by waiting near the exit there. Smith describes the man he saw as about 28 years old wearing a deer stalker hat and a dark coat

and carrying a package wrapped in newspaper. He described the package as being six inches tall and 18 inches long. It makes me wonder if that could have been a knife, but again, Jack's knife was estimated from a corner to be about six to eight inches long, not 18. 18 seems like almost like a sword. Not really long.

Like really long, but hey, maybe he was wrapping in a way to disguise it. But again, we can't be clear. But 10 minutes later, two other men, Israel Schwartz and James Brown both see Elizabeth. But in different locations, Israel notices Elizabeth standing at the gateway to Dutfield's yard, a stable yard down the street from the social club. He sees a man approach, speak to her, then throw her to the ground, at which point she screams. But again, Victorian times, they didn't really care for women. And so Israel does nothing.

just crosses the street and walks away. But he does notice another man nearby smoking a pipe. The first man who threw Elizabeth down actually apparently calls to the second man smoking and says, quote, Lipski, which there's a lot of debate over what that means. So, I mean, Lipski was a slur for Jewish people at the time. and Lipski was also the name of another murderer at the time. Yeah, which is really interesting. Like that's another connection to a murderer. Some people suggest that the man called to the second man saying like Lipski as in like I'm going to Lipski her.

Like he was going to murder her. Some people say that he was calling the other man a slur. So I've even seen someone suggest that they actually heard him wrong and maybe he was saying Lizzie instead of Lipsky or was saying there's a, Polish word that sounds like Lipski, that meant something else. And so there's just a lot of confusion over what it meant that he heard. Yeah. And so Israel apparently, he wants no smoke. He's not getting involved. So he starts leaving the area on foot. And that's when he realizes he's actually being followed by that second man. This is like kind of the only hint we have that maybe Jack the Ripper could have had an accomplice, which I could also kind of see given like how

quick and brazen these ax where? Like maybe someone was on lookout waiting for a constable or a carriage to roll up. But this is just what Israel said he saw and heard. He described the man with Elizabeth as about 30 years old with dark brown hair and a mustache standing 5-5, wearing an overcoat and a wide-brimmed black felt hat. Keep in mind, 5-5 was the average height of a British man at the time. So we can't assume this was the same person as the short man Elizabeth was scene making out with earlier. Then we have the witness statement from James Brown, which totally conflicts with Israel's. James says at around 12.45 a.m. that night, which is actually the same exact time as Israel, he saw a woman, he later confirmed was Elizabeth, standing along the wall near a school.

She was with a man, and she was heard saying, quote, no, not tonight, some other night. He noticed the man was about 5'7, stout, wearing a long coat and a hat. That was all he could make out in the dark. Afterwards, James walked to his house close by, and 15 minutes later, he heard a woman yelling, quote, police, murder. But when he looked outside, he couldn't see anyone on the street. So it's possible maybe Israel and James got their timing slightly wrong. Maybe James saw Elizabeth first. Israel saw the beginning of the attack and James heard the end of it. Either way, it seems one of them might have spotted Jack the Ripper that night. Well, just 15 minutes after that, around one in the morning, a local jewelry dealer is driving his pony cart into Dutfield's yard where he is presumably planning on stabling the pony.

And as they enter the pony box and it won't go. And you work with horses. You know that they have this sixth sense for things. do. It is pitch black in the yard. So the dealer ends up using his buggy whip to kind of poke around in front of the buggy just to see if there's something there that maybe spooked his animal. And that's when he feels a human body. And it's warm. And because it's warm, the dealer presumes that it's actually just someone sleeping in the stable yard. It wouldn't be the first time that someone had gotten into that spot to sleep for the night. So he goes to the nearby

International Working Men's Educational Club. It's the same club that Elizabeth was seen outside of earlier, and he finds two friends willing to come help wake this sleeping stranger so he can put his pony there. And when the three men returned together, they realize that the body belongs to a woman and she is not sleeping. She is dead. And it's most likely from this single deep slash to her throat that she has. Now the incision severed her windpipe, making it impossible for her to scream as she was bleeding to death. And when the dealer realizes what he has just stumbled upon, his blood runs absolutely cold because he thinks back to how warm the body was when he first tried to wake this person who he thought was sleeping. So he realizes that this must have just happened. He most

likely interrupted Jack the Ripper during the murder. And investigators later confirmed that this is the most likely scenario. That's why Elizabeth wasn't mutilated or posed in any sort of lewd way like the other victims. Jack maybe abandoned the body because he heard the cart turning into the stable yard. So when the dealer was examining the body with his whip, there's a chance that Jack was still in there. I mean, think about how pitch dark it was in there. Maybe that's what the pony was walking at. Then maybe he fled right when the dealer went to go fetch his friends. But then they start worrying that if they did interrupt Jack the Ripper, maybe he was frustrated that he wasn't able to mutilate the body in the way that he had done to the other women. So what if he fled

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Catherine Etto's is a 46-year-old woman in 1888, but aside from her age, she's pretty different from the other victims that we've talked about this far. She's born in the West Midlands of England. She was actually the only one in her family sent to school as a child, but she had this brief interruption in her education after she was orphaned. And that's when she was sent to her first workhouse. But her aunt soon took her in and then eventually sent her back to school. At around age 21, she met this Irishman named Thomas Conway, and she ran off with him. but they never got married, which soured relations with her aunt who later refused to let her back into the house when she and Thomas ultimately separated.

Thomas was this self-published biographer and also a songwriter, and Catherine kind of started a business with him, where she would sell his books and also sell these things that he wrote called Gallo's ballads. this was a way of passing along true crime stories in the Victorian era. So whenever a public execution was planned, these balladeers would essentially write out the confessions from the suspect's point of view. I mean, the ethics of it obviously is super weird. But they would write these songs as if they were the convicted explaining the crime, talking about their confession, all this stuff. But they would set it to the tune of a well-known hymn. they could print these lyrics out and sell copies to the papers or just sell copies individually leading up to and during the execution itself. And the song Long Black Veil by Johnny Cash, if you guys know that song, is basically one of these ballads.

Catherine was so enthusiastic about this forum that she once sold a ballad to the audience at her own cousins hanging. He wrote a song about her cousin and she sold it and they made some money from this. But it wasn't all business for Thomas and Catherine. They also had these three children, even though the two of them never married. In 1881, the couple did split up. And Catherine, you know, landed right where any woman without much money in Whitechapel went, a Doss House. But initially, it doesn't seem like she became a sex worker, like the earlier victims that we talked about. She begins dating this fruit seller, this guy named John Kelly, who the two of them were monogamous.

for the rest of her life. Catherine sometimes worked as a cleaner. The couple did temporary farm work together on the outskirts of town. They were very poor. They often had to scrounge around for a few pence for their nightly bed and meal. But they seemed to be very good natured. They were well liked by everyone else at this Doss House. And Catherine maybe didn't know this at the time.

But by 1888, she had fairly advanced kidney disease. She knew that she didn't feel well, but she didn't know exactly what was going on. At the time, this was called Bright's disease. We talked about this in the Amy Archer episode. Bright's disease was kind of this catch-all term for kidney disease. And people blamed it on drinking because they didn't really know what caused it at the time. And now we know that Catherine wasn't a heavy drinker. She did drink occasionally, but she wasn't known to be a binge drinker or struggle with alcohol addiction.

So most likely that's not how she got Bright's disease. But by Saturday, September 29th, Catherine is pretty down on. her luck and she is in a lot of pain. She has really bad kidney inflammation that's causing this really, really bad back pain. Her boyfriend John Kelly that night pawns a pair of his boots so that he can afford to buy them a meal, but it's getting late and neither of them have the DOS money they need to pay for their bed that night. So Catherine decides that she's going to walk to her married daughter's house in Southeast London and see if she can just get a little bit of money from her. We don't really know if she made it there, but it seems like she did not.

Because by 8 p.m., witnesses say that she fell down drunk on the pavement, which there was a whole crowd that kind of like came around her to gawk at her. Like I said, she wasn't known for binge drinking, but she did drink from time to time, so it looks like this night she was drunk. And police show up to see what's going on. They see this crowd looking at this woman, and they end up taking Catherine to the drunk tank so that she can sober up. And around 1 a.m.

Now it's Sunday, September 30th. She convinces the constable in charge that she's ready to be released. She's sober now. She complains that she'll get a hiding or that is a beating for coming home so late. Though we don't know a ton about if the relationship she had with John Kelly was actually violent or if she meant hiding, more like a scolding. But the constable has very little sympathy for her and he tells her, you had no right to get drunk, but he still does let her go. She leaves on foot, but she's not heading back to the dock. house where her boyfriend is expecting her. She's heading back towards the area where she was found drunk.

Maybe she had made arrangements to meet her daughter somewhere near there, or maybe if she didn't want to come home to John too late without money. Or there's a chance, too, that she hoped the pub would still be open and she wanted to talk someone into buying her a drink. But she only makes it as far as Mitre Square, which is this tiny plaza almost a mile from where Elizabeth was killed. At about 135 in the morning, two men see Catherine on the street corner talking to a man. And they describe this man as being about 5'7, he has a fair complexion, and he also has a mustache. He's wearing a gray hat. He has a red kerchief. They kind of assume that he's maybe a sailor. Obviously, they don't think much of this interaction.

They both continue on their way. And just 10 minutes later, at 1.45 in the morning, A policeman patrolling Miter Square stumbles upon Catherine's mutilated body. But this time, even though it's only been 10 minutes, it does not seem like anyone was interrupted while mutilating Catherine. The killing blow, just like with the other victims, is this deep, deep incision on her throat. Then, like Polly and Annie, she's been cut open with a large cut that ran from her sternum all the way down to her pubic area. And one of her diseased kidneys as well as part of her uterus has been removed from her body. And whoever did this, which obviously they believe is Jack the Ripper, made off with them.

Also, like with Annie, the Ripper removed part of her intestines, but did leave them at the scene. They were laid across her body. And there was one piece of intestine that was placed carefully between her body and her left arm. But in this situation too, her face was also mutilated. There was part of one ear that was cut off and the missing piece later fell out of Catherine's clothing when she was undressed at the morgue. So that was something that was also removed but left at the scene. It wasn't taken like a trophy. She's found posed with her right knee drawn up.

Her bare thighs were exposed. And also half of her white cloth apron has been cut off, including one of the strings. And that apron is clue number four. for us. That same morning, around 255 a.m., a policeman finds the missing piece of Catherine's apron streaked with blood three streets away on Goulston Street. It's found lying right underneath a fresh chalk graffiti reading, quote, the Jews are the men that will not be blamed for nothing. Or something like that anyways, there's a lot of speculation on this graffiti. If you listen to some sources on this graffiti, they say the word is not in reference to Jewish people at all,

it's actually in reference to a word in the Freemasons society that resembles Jews. And so there's a lot of speculation that this could have been a message to other Freemasons. And nobody photographed this. And that might have also been intentional. In one of the sources, the constable, like the main police officer in London at the time, was speculated to be a Freemason. So he actually wiped this graffiti clean. Wiped it. No photographs before. And they did have photographs at this time, you guys. I did double track. So we write it as botched. It feels like a botched even in vintage times. Making a mark. And there's a little bit of debate on how this word was spelled too, right? A lot of debate on that. A lot of the riparologists get into it because some of them say the word was

spelled J-U-W-E-S, which could have been French. It could have been the French feminine word for Jews, which is J-U-I-V-E-S. But there's a lot of disagreement on more than just the spelling. Like the clue in general is just pretty controversial for a lot of people. Yeah, it could have been there before and he just happened to drop it there. Like, it could have nothing to do with that. Yeah, and obviously DNA testing isn't a thing. Like, blood typing wasn't a thing.

This was found so many streets over. are we trying to fit the peg into the hole? Like, does it even fit? Is it even evidence? Totally. So this one's very hotly debated. But if we assume that this bloody apron was really Catherine's, which people do speculate it probably was, it's because the coroner actually matched it with apron remnants found on her body. But it doesn't necessarily mean the person that dropped it there also wrote the graffiti. That could be a coincidence. But he might have. You know, he might have. And so if Jack really did write some of the letters to the police and the media, it was kind of clear with this graffiti that he really liked messing with people through writing.

And we have to look back to that dear boss letter. This letter hadn't been made public yet when Catherine died because the recipients still thought it was a hoax. But the letter did say they were going to cut off a piece of the next victim's ear and mail it to the police or the recipient or whoever. And then three days later, Catherine is killed and a big piece of her ear was cut off. But it was left behind at the scene. Maybe that was because they ran out of time and interrupted, yeah. Surrupted the earlobe. But it's clear that, you know, there's some correlation, especially with it being unpublished and ears hadn't been involved until now.

So if the graffiti was Jack's handiwork, maybe he left the piece of an apron as some sort of a signature. I mean, we saw this in our zodiac case. with one of the victim's clothing getting cut off and then later mailed to police, you know, kind of proving this is me. Right. It's clear. Taking credit. Yeah.

Liking the credit. Here's my trophy, but I'm going to give it back to you so you know it's me. Exactly. So a lot of people do think this apron scrap did come from Jack the Ripper. Some people speculate he was wiping his hands clean and then discarded it. But there is an interesting hole in the timeline because there's a witness who didn't see either their graffiti or apron on Goulston's. Street at 220 a.m., which is 35 minutes before the graffiti was found. If the witness is accurate,

Jack probably didn't take an hour to walk three streets over and wipe his hands. So what was he doing from 145 to 255? There's a riparologist named John Smith that thinks this kind of points to Jack living near Mitre Square and that he could have used this apron to actually carry Catherine's stolen organs back to his home before going out. again to leave the clue for police. And if that's true, it would narrow down the suspect pool a lot. But again, there's no way to prove it. But that brings us to clue number six, which is another letter. This time the addressee is George Lusk, who headed an anti-crime group called the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee. Again, everyone was terrified at this time. Papers are blowing this up. And they're starting to

establish little neighborhood watch, essentially. It's not just a letter that gets mailed to George Lusk, though. It's a small cardboard box, and in it contains a note and half a human kidney, which seemed to have been soaked in wine to preserve it. Again, no DNA, no blood typing, so we can't say for sure if it was Catherine's stolen kidney, but a medical examination found it to be a similar stage of Bright's disease, which, I mean, for ancient Victorian times, it's not that long ago, but like for those times to be able to match the kidney based on the disease progression. That they looked into it and they were like, this is our best guess, but it is based on a little bit of science, yeah.

A little bit of a vintage Sherlock moment. A little bit. A little bit. I'll add a little Sherlock box. There's our Sherlock box down there. And while it's possible that one of the hoaxers pretending to be Jack was a medical student with access to human kidneys, and maybe they decided to sacrifice one of his practice organs for a prank. But let me read this note for you guys just so you know what this other note said.

And I will say the handwriting and spelling are both way sloppier than the Dear Boss letter, which also could suggest this came from a different author. I mean, hoaxers were running rampant at this time. But it says, quote, from hell, Mr. Lusk, sore, S-O-R. It's supposed to be sort of probably. A lot of stuff is spelled wrong in this letter, unlike the first one. I know. I send you half the kidney. I took from one woman and preserved it for you. Tother piece, I fried and ate. It was very niece. I may send you the bloody knife that took it out if you only wait a will longer. Signed, catch me when you can, Mr. Lusk. End quote. I tried to read it for you guys with the bad spelling. No, you did a great job with all the bad spelling. I hope you enjoyed it. That's exactly what it sounded like in my brain when I read it. Mr. Lisk. It doesn't look like the same handwriting as the Dear Boss letter at all.

And a lot, a lot of people have gone over this. A lot of people have used these two to, like, say this was definitely a hoaxter and Dear Boss is real. But there's still a hoaxter out there that has a human kidney. Like, let's be real for a sec. Like, we have to figure out who this person is too. Yeah, I mean, people are losing it right now. But there's also some people that speculate it could have actually been the same. same person and is kind of pulling a little bit of a BTK on us and intentionally writing sloppy,

intentionally misspelling words to kind of detract from their education level, which, hey, maybe if this was a doctor and Jack was super highly educated and people are getting a little closer to finding out who he is, I better write a little sloppier. I better get them off my trail a bit. Yeah. What's plausible? Another theory is that maybe Jack was sober when he wrote the first letter and drunk for the second one, or maybe we wrote one with his right hand and the other with his left. And then, of course,

we have to consider the possibility maybe this letter or both letters wasn't sent by Jack at all. What does your gut say? I feel like the first dear boss one was probably plausible, especially given the detail about the ear. This one and who it got sent to

feels a little more hoaxter to me. Yeah. But the kid, The kidney in the box really throws me off. That's scary that someone, even someone else had a kidney. I know. Especially considering the times with poverty and organs were in high demand, I mean, people are robbing graves for them. So it doesn't seem like a medical student would just give up a valuable specimen.

Yeah, that's a good point. That's a good point. Yeah, so I don't know. Well, that kind of brings us to our last victim, at least amongst the canonical five. Although, like I mentioned earlier, there's a few other killings that some experts think may be the work of Jack the Ripper, but they're all unconfirmed for the most part. But this fifth woman, Mary Kelly, is very likely one of Jack's victims. But she is a departure from his usual pattern of picking victims in a lot of ways. In November of 1888, she's only 25 years old.

She's 20 years younger than the other women that have been found. She was born in Ireland and had lived in Wales before moving to England. So documents related to her birth seem to have been lost in the shuffle. Pretty much everything we know about her is from her boyfriend or people who really only knew her briefly. She apparently had very little or no contact with her family. Everyone describes her as being beautiful. She's taller than most men at 5'7. She's got blonde hair, blue eyes.

She has a very charming personality. Except she does have this tendency to drink until she becomes very rude and loud. That is, according to people who knew her briefly. She married pretty young. She was just 16. That was during her time in Wales. But tragically, she lost her husband in an explosion just a few years later. And like most of the other victims, in order to survive without any male provider, she supported herself through sex work.

But her younger age and striking appearance really gave her access to, let's say, a different class of clients. tell, at least at first. That's what it seems like. She arrives in London in 1884 and she's able to work in pretty high-end brothels. She may also have worked for a time with a French madam who procured sex workers for wealthy Frenchmen. Again, this is just what she told her boyfriend, so, you know, it could have been a little bit embellished versus her real life story. But if she was living the high-class escort life, either she didn't like it or she was a little bit of eventually dismissed, maybe potentially because she had what some people described as bad manners. But in 1887, she's fairly poor and she's living at a Doss house in the East End.

And that's where she meets her boyfriend. And he's the source of most of what we know about her. It's this man named Joe Barnett, and he's a day laborer and porter working around the docks. And according to him, it was love at first sight. They moved in together just a few days after their first date. It's not totally clear why they never got married, but maybe Mary was a traditional Irish Catholic and didn't believe in remarriage, even though her spouse had died. But they both together, at least according to him, spent way too much money on liquor. And after they moved several times, they managed to scrape together enough coins to rent a single room together in a house off Dorset Street in the spitiful slum.

They were basically living in cheap lodging that was like one step up from a Doss house, but it means that they didn't have to share rooms with strangers, which was nice for them at the time. Then in August or September of 1888, Joe loses his job, and that's when things really go downhill for them. Mary has to return to sex work to support them, but she can't exactly move into a brothel while she also lives with her boyfriend. So she takes to walking the streets at night looking for clientele that way. And while she's there, she actually makes a lot of friends. There's actually a lot of women her age working on the streets. And many of them are in a far worse spot than she is.

And Mary has this really big heart. She is meeting all these women. She basically doesn't want them to sleep on the street if she can help it. She's also, mind you, like everyone else in London, heard all these stories of Jack the Ripper. so she knows it's not safe out there for women to be living on the streets. So she actually goes to her boyfriend and is like, can all the women stay here? And he kind of like hesitantly agrees. But he finds himself living in a single room on Dorset Street with a rotating cast of sex workers that he barely knows.

But they all have nowhere to go. She turns her home into this big like sleepover, basically. On October 30th, 1888, it seems like Joe has enough of this situation. however, and he decides to move out of their room and into a boarding house. The couple doesn't break up, though, and Joe continues to visit her every day leading up until the night of Thursday, November 8th. Joe stops by that evening, as usual, but Mary is hanging out with her neighbor who lives at a different lodging house on the same cul-de-sac, basically. So Joe stays for a few minutes. He ends up leaving around 8 p.m. when she's not there. And sometime between 8.5.

o'clock at night and 11 o'clock at night, Mary goes out because at 11 p.m., witnesses see her, she looks like she's drunk, she's at a Spittlefield's pub, but she's with a man who is not Joe. This man has a mustache. At 1145 p.m., a neighbor and fellow sex worker sees Mary heading for her room on Dorset Street in the company of a man. Again, he's described as having a mustache and whiskers. He's described as being about five foot five. He's wearing a threadbare overcoat and a hat. And the other woman follows the two home, mostly because she's going the same way. And when Mary and this man arrive at her room, it seems like Mary begins drunkenly singing very loud, which she continues to do until at least one in the morning. There's multiple reports of this

detail, including from a neighbor who was annoyed enough that they considered going over and banging on the door because it was late and Mary was being so loud. But then, before they're able to go over and knock on the door, it seems like Mary goes out again, sometime between 1 o'clock in the morning and 2 o'clock in the morning. And we know this because there's this local laborer named George Hutchinson who sees her at 2 a.m. with what seems to be a different man. And he gets a very good description of this guy. George says that Mary's companion is about in his mid-30s, somewhere between 5'6 and 5'5 foot 7. So he's an inch or two taller than like the first guy. He has pale complexion, a slight mustache, and dark hair with bushy eyebrows. He's dressed

like he's rich also. He has this expensive overcoat on. He has a felt hat. He has a gold chain attached to his waistcoat. He also is carrying a small package, like you mentioned, earlier. Another package. George is curious enough about this scene to follow Mary and her companion as they stroll back towards Mary's room. And just outside of the cul-de-sac where Mary's address is, he hears her say, quote, All right, my dear, come along, you will be comfortable.

The two kiss and they go into the cul-de-sac where Mary's building is, at which point George leaves. And the next morning, around 10.45 in the morning, Mary's landlord sends his employee, Thomas Bauer, to remind Mary that her rent is now overdue. Thomas bangs on the door, but there's no answer. Now, he figures she's probably just ignoring him because he's there to collect rent.

He notices her door is locked, though, and he makes a note of it. So after a few attempts to bang on the door and wake her up, he ends up just peering in through her window. and that's when he sees Mary's very mutilated body on her bed. Now, Thomas runs to fetch the landlord, and they both go together to alert the police, and eventually the landlord just breaks down the door and lets them in. But it seems like the killer had either a key or he left without using the door because the door was locked from the inside.

When the police surgeon arrives, he says that he has never seen anything like this before. Now, like the other victims, the killing wound is the same MO. It's a slash to the throat that goes all the way down to the bone. Her nose, her cheeks, her eyebrows, and her ears are partially cut off, but her body is mostly skinned. Flaps of the skin for her stomach and thighs have been removed and actually placed on a nearby table and her breasts were also cut off with one placed under her head and the other by her right foot. Her abdomen, like the other victims, was sliced open, and her organs had been removed and staged around her body. Her intestines are on her right side. Her spleen was found on her left, and her uterus and kidneys are under her head, next to one dismembered breast. Her chest has also been cut open, and her heart is gone. Yeah, this is one image we will not be showing you guys on YouTube, but I did look at this crime scene photo. It was actually, according to one source, like the very first crime scene photo taken in London. Wow. So this wasn't really a thing to photograph victims like this until this victim. And it's like almost unrecognizable. Like it does not even, she does not even look human anymore. Right. I mean, it's so hard to. even distinguish a face. And like, as someone that's taken a couple different human anatomy

courses, like, like just hearing how much was mutilated or dismembered, removed, placed around the room, like, it again kind of goes for me back to someone who's very skilled in this and is very familiar with autopsies. Does it make you think that it's a surgeon? Because the ability, my first thing, hearing that her abdomen's been cut open and all of her organs are out, feels like a C-section in a way. There's like a skill that you need to be able to remove everything and pull them out. Yeah, it is bad. And I think it, I don't know if it's a surgeon because I feel like a surgeon would have been more precise than what you see in the image.

But maybe this is something you guys chime in on. If you're going to look at the picture yourself, I'm not encouraging you to. Again, it is very heavy and gory. But it doesn't seem as precise. It does feel very exploratory to me. Which I don't know. Yeah. But everyone do their own investigation if you care to do so.

Well, he was able to pull out her heart. And that seems to be the only thing that's missing from the scene, which is also interesting. So even though so many people have gone on record that saw this scene and have said that this was emphatically the worst of the Jack the Ripper crimes, it also in a way, seems to be the last, according to some sources. I mean, a lot of people believe that this was the last one. There's a couple other suspicious murders of women in Whitechapel during the rest of 1888 through 1889, and some people believe they could be Jack's work. But most people agree that Mary was the last victim. I mean, we might talk about it a little more, but there's like other murders that happen around the world where people think that

It was Jack. There's stuff that happens in America where people are like, did he come over here and commit more murders? Yeah. Now, if you're listening to this show or you consume true crime in general, you know that a lot of serial killers don't really stop just out of the blue, especially kind of if they're in their prime. Usually they get caught. Sometimes they get too old to physically kill anymore. Sometimes they die. I mean, some people do believe that Jack did die after this. But the FBI profilers, who have looked into this case believe that if he did die, it was most likely not suicide, because that wouldn't really fit anything else we know about his psychology. In 2005, when they were doing that forensic analysis of his M.O., the one that was done by Detective Keppel and his team, they didn't take any position necessarily on why Jack would have stopped killing. But they did point out that his murders were taking more and more time and planning to execute.

He was only able to mutilate Mary Kelly so extensively, because she had a room to herself. And she took him back to this room. So when he was in there, he wasn't interrupted for hours. So maybe Mary was the final fulfillment in this kind of like necrostic fantasy he had. And, you know, maybe there was a chance that he couldn't figure out how to repeat that experience. Because remember, she had her own room. And most of the women he was killing lived in these DOS houses where they shared rooms, basically.

Yeah. This was a very private experience for him. Yes. Uninterrupted. Yeah. I'm going to get into this a bit more when I talk about who the potentials are. And maybe because of how gruesome this one was, he wasn't interested in going back to having to quickly kill people on the street and only get to mutilate them a little bit. I mean, that's one of the theories. Yeah.

But whatever the reason was, it's believed that he stopped. But the investigation didn't. And everyone in Whitechapel was still terrified even more so now. and they were demanding answers. Now, the police were under very intense pressure to catch Jack the Ripper, so they put thousands of hours into the case. And one thing I will mention at the time, like the concept of a detective had only been around for about 20 years.

It was actually invented in London, and like the history of why detectives exist is really funny, and they just had no training. But basically, they had no skills in homicide detection at the time. They had just started the department. So there was, there's just like a lot of botched things that happened throughout the entire investigation. They ended up interviewing over 2,000 people over the course of this investigation. They arrested at least 80 people in this time too because they wanted to question them further.

But none of them get charged with murder. Every day that Jack the Ripper was at large, the local papers and the Whitechapel residents got more and more pointed in their criticism of the police force. I mean, in some of these newspapers that you go through, you can see Cardiff. tunes that were published that depict the local constables wandering around with blindfolds while criminals are getting away with murder. Meanwhile, there's also at the same time like this rise in photography. Cameras are getting better. More people are owning them. And that kind of combined with the extensive newspaper coverage that was happening and how newspapers would sensationalize crimes, especially on the east end. It really shed a light on just how bad the slums in London were at the

time. And so the worst slums in London end up all getting torn down and the land was sold off to developers who start building more modern apartment buildings there instead. And a lot of that population just gets displaced. Some of them were assisted in finding new housing, but a lot of them could not pay rent and just had nowhere to live. The workhouse system also eventually gets abolished, which really helped break that vicious cycle of labor that forced a lot of the poorest people in England from getting a leg up. So in a strange kind of indirect way, Jack the Ripper's hatred for London's most vulnerable women might have made the streets a little bit safer for them, but it didn't do anything to point police in the direction of who he was. And that's why even to

this day, people are still trying to figure out who Jack the Ripper really was. So who do we think he is? We've got a lot of theories on who could be Jack the Ripper. By one count, over five, suspects have been proposed by modern researchers, and it's possible that none of them are Jack the Ripper. He could have been some butcher who died and was buried in a Popper's grave with no marker. He could have gone a job as a sailor after the last murder and left Europe forever. And sadly, there's probably some stuff the police knew at the time that we don't even know now, because many of the City of London's police files were lost when London was bombarded during World War II's big blitz. Various other files believed to have existed also went missing over the years, possibly taken home in air or stolen as souvenirs.

But let's talk about a few suspects whose names we do know. I'll start with some that are probably the least supported by evidence, but are still super interesting. Up first we have James Maybrick. He was a cotton merchant in Whitechapel area who had a violent marriage and died, likely poisoned by his abused wife actually. And it was just a few months after Mary Kelly's murder that he died. Now he was mostly associated with this case because of a diary that surfaced in the 1990s, which was allegedly his handwritten accounts of the murders. And in this diary, he confesses to all of it.

However, we have found out now that this was a probable forgery by a scrap metal dealer named Michael Barrett. Michael confessed to faking the diary, then later recanted his confession. But because of technology, we were able to determine that the ink used. to pen the diary was found to contain a preservative not yet available in Victorian times. So for us, he's kind of out. I mean, there's fringe theories on Reddit pointing to Gandhi. I don't think that one. You hate that theory.

I hate that theory. I mean, there's even theories that the author, Lewis Carroll, author of Allison Wonderland, could have been Jack the Ripper. I mean, there's a lot of people pulling out strings. but one of my favorite of the bad theories is the De Gaugh theory. Yeah, this one is the one you always bring up to me. This one blows my mind. Okay, so for my friends that are maybe on TikTok, you might have come across a video from

Skir Genius. Her name is actually Kiki Skr, Shr, S-C-H-I-R. And Kiki has 68 videos breaking down potential theories, potential evidence on how Daegha, the famous artist, the painter of ballerinas, could have actually been Jack the Ripper. And this one really fits for me. So Kiki basically proposes this theory and gives all these reasons. De Gaugh had a really problematic relationship with women, often thought of them as animals.

He was extremely misogynistic. And around his early 50s, he became a really awful misanthrope and people just, like, did not want to be around him. And something about De Gaas's work, he painted ballerinas, he painted wash women. These were oftentimes women who also doubled as sex workers because those careers didn't pay. Like, ballerinas were, like, more higher up sex workers. Same with opera singers. I mean, you kind of see that in Bridgeton a little bit with opera singer. But, like, that was common for a lot of these careers.

And that is who De Gaugh painted. A lot of people also point to his art being the reason. He doesn't really paint their faces. He paints them in these awkward poses. I'm going to show you one painting from De Gaugh that almost reminds me how some of the victims were posed. Not showing a face, crouched over, legs pulled up. It's a ballerina bending down to tie her slipper. but a lot of these paintings are also super dark.

Another thing that you often see in De Gaas painting is a dark ribbon around the women's throats. A lot of interesting ties. I'm not convinced, Morgan. If I'm being honest, a painter that didn't like women and painted ballerinas. I don't know what the bigger connection is. So De Gaat also had this disease called Stargarts disease. It's a disease where the area behind the eyes can go black, like the gray matter activity in that region stops. And people with this disease do lose their vision over time.

But a loss of activity in the gray matter is also associated with a lot of serial killers. Like if you do brain scans on serial killers, the same area of the brains like don't light up. So there's that. But wasn't he because of that, he was nearly blind in 1888 when these were happening? He definitely had horror vision. He was still making art. In 1890, he really trained. transition to do sculpture instead of painting.

Because it was easier for his vision. Because it was easier. But again, look at how these cases progressed. The last victim he had ample time with in a room, could have been lit in any way he wanted. Also was a lot sloppier and more gory. I've got other people. I've got other things. I'm like, if you're not buying this one.

I don't think I buy. But I appreciate how much of a rabbit hole you have gone down with this. I mean, I have. I can appreciate a good rabbit hole. I have. I mean, there's so much and people are like, De Gaul lived in France. Well, okay, he could have gone over there. De Gaa also, like, did not really like people. He would never send letters to his friends. And during all the times of the murders, his friends would get way more letters than usual. Almost like he was setting up an alibi for himself. Daega also was, like, very classically trained. So he likely attended dissections at medical schools to learn about human anatomy. But again, you are absolutely right. A lot of people who disbunk this theory. do point to De Gaul losing, you know, his eyesight and being very visually impaired potentially.

But my girl on TikTok, Kiki, she has even gone deeper into murders in Paris. And so a lot of her newer content is breaking down murders in Paris because people are like, De Gaul wouldn't start killing people in his 50s around this time. How did he just start as Jack the Ripper in London? Yeah, I mean, Jack was also described as being around 30, right? And he was in his 50s. Five five, five tall. And guess how tall DeGaugh was? Five five. Five five. Five five. The average height of a man at the time. Hey, hey. I don't know, Morgan. So counts. But, uh, Kiki. What was his mustache like? Terrible. Terrible mustache. Okay. But he did have a mustache. Did fit. Okay. Did fit. Kiki is now going in a new evidence that like breaks down other crimes in Paris. And this is really interesting because Paris crimes was kind of controlled by the crown. And then it shifted. And so she's like going to.

through clippings. Kiki will be linked, a really interesting playlist to just watch through again, their 68 posts. Another suspect that is often talked about is Walter Sickert. And Walter is another artist, actually did work with Daggaugh, was in London around the same time. And Walter has a really interesting set of paintings that have now been dubbed the Camden Town Murder. and this is given to a group of four paintings and the original title is What Shall We Do for Rent? And he had an interesting style

but this painting, the one that's kind of synonymous with the Camden Town murder, is of a woman, line in bed, a man almost like with something in his hands or an apron, a leather apron on, sitting at the edge of the bed. It almost looks like what it would look like

if he was painting Jack the Ripper with his last victim. sitting at the edge of the bed. It's interesting. Walter Sickert also had an insane fascination with Jack the Ripper. Is quoted to have, I stayed in Jack's Hotel. Like, he was very, very fascinated by Jack the Ripper. So a lot of people kind of throw him in.

And he worked with Daegas. So it's just like this weird connection. I'm like, yeah, the connection. A lot of people speculating that Jack the Ripper did not work alone. Maybe they worked together then. But I know you're not, you're not convinced. Can I throw my two bad theories into the ring? Let's go.

Okay, so my two bad theories that I'm going to nominate for Jack the Ripper that I know there's not a lot of evidence, but a lot of people do point to these people. H.H. Holmes. Oh, that comes up a lot. So we're doing an episode on H.A.S. Holmes for our monster series on Harts Hounders Pounding this fall. That is a doozy. And, I mean, you want to talk about someone who was selling people, killing people to sell them to medical institutions, like specifically someone who was killing women to strip them down to the skeleton and sell.

those to the local medical colleges. If that's what Jack was doing, that MO fits. So I lived in Austin last year and I got so deep into the lore of the servant girl killer, who was a few years before Jack the Ripper. But basically, in Austin at the time, similar thing, there weren't any lights. There were no electric lights in the area. So it was like very dark in Austin at the time. And what was happening was there was this person that they never caught who was pulling servant girls out of their servant quarters in the back of houses and hatcheting them with a big axe. This is the axe one. This is the axe one.

And he would pull these girls out when their husbands were in the room with them, when their children were in the room with them. But he had the same MO every single time, pull them out into the backyard. It was mostly black servant girls. There were a few white victims. But, yeah, pull them out and would axe them and then would escape. He was never caught. I mean, obviously it's a very, very different MO from Jack the Ripper, but the author, Skip Hollinsworth of The Midnight Assassin, which is like a great book on the subject if you're interested, does say that, you know, some people think that he left. He left Austin, got on a boat in the Gulf and went all the way up to London and that's where he became Jack the Ripper. So those are my two that I'm throwing in the ring for bad suspects. But I'm curious what people think if anyone out there has hard. heard those.

Curious about your thoughts on these ones, especially dig off for myself selfishly. I know. Hi, Morgan up in the comments because I know I'm not doing a good job of it right now. I'm not selling you guys. But let's get into some of the more plausible theories because we've got some of those too. So there's been an interesting revelation with DNA evidence. In 2007, a Jack the Ripper Tour Guide and amateur riparologist named Russell Edwards won an auction

for a bloody silk shawl. And this was said to be taken from the body of Catherine Etto's at the time of her murder. But there wasn't just blood on it. There was supposedly semen, too. Thought to be left by Jack himself. According to a family legend, Sergeant Amos Simpson took the shawl as a morbid gift for his wife, and it had never been washed since. One of Simpson's descendants put it up for sale, and Edwards purchased it.

Edwards then published a book in 2014, claiming that he had the shawl tested for DNA, and it identified the Ripper. His name was supposedly Aaron Kozminsky. He was a barber with a history of serial mental health issues and was a suspect at the time of the murders. The police who interrogated him described him as, quote, hating women and, quote, having strong homicidal tendencies. In childhood, he had reportedly attacked his sister with a knife. He was also eventually confined to an institution with what we might diagnose today as schizophrenia or paranoid psychosis. We don't know much about Aaron's appearance, though. There's no known images of him. But we do have a picture of a brother who does have a similar appearance to a lot of the witnesses' descriptions.

But again, those descriptions were not even certain that that was Jack Thriper either. And there's also some big problems with this whole DNA analysis. It used mitochondrial DNA, not nuclear DNA. And as we've talked about in past episodes, mitochondrial DNA is more likely to be extracted from very old evidence. But it's not very specific like nuclear DNA. So it can't pinpoint an individual. It can only pinpoint a family tree from the female line, the mitochondrial DNA side. It can say like you are related to in some.

way. Exactly. But not specific. So all this could really prove was that whoever bled on the shawl shared a female ancestor with Catherine's known descendants and whoever ejaculated on the shawl shared a female ancestor with Aaron's known relatives, but maybe not specifically him. And there's also problems with Whipporologist. Russell Edwards, who was pushing this whole theory after buying the shawl to sell their book. Yeah, I know this comes up in the headlines like every five years. Yeah. Last summer people were talking about this too. I remember like we were kind of gearing up for the show and we were like, The Shaw. The Shaw. I want to know more about the show. So it is interesting. There's also been some other problematic issues with Russell and saying he found missing people and announced it before their

family knew. And then when they brought detectives there, there was nobody. And he's a tour guide? Was a tour guide. And is announcing that he's found missing people? Yeah, that's a little suss. It's giving problematic. But one of the first. the more interesting theories that I actually, I do think he kind of fits as well. I'm like, I'm like a little, I'm like maybe 30% digoss, 70% this guy, who is Francis Tumbleatee. He was a self-styled doctor with a history of living under false names. Again, had a ridiculous handlebar mustache. A lot of sources actually describe him as a bit of a quack, a snake oil salesman selling a lot of odd herbal remedies to heal people.

Very common in Victorian times. It sure was. He was also believed to have been gay, so might not have been very sexually motivated, but still the pickerism was a thing for him. A lot of his acquaintances say he hated women, had violent explosive rage, and he also had a collection of preserved organs.

He had uteruses in glass jars, would often pass them around at dinner parties for people to look at. Interesting. I don't think I could eat dinner after seeing all of that, but no. Hmm. No. The timeline for him matches up really, really well. He traveled to Liverpool in June of 1888 and was in London during the murders. He actually did become a top suspect at the time and was arrested on November 7, 1888, for charges. that were actually associated with homosexuality, which was probably investigators

using kind of as a ploy to investigate him further for the Jack the Ripper killings. He did get out in time to have killed Mary Kelly on November 9th. Then it was arrested again on November 12th on the suspicion of committing the White Chapel murders, got out on bail on the 16th, and by the 24th had fled to France, then later back to the United States.

Where he became H.H. Holmes? Maybe? No. No. But there is something really, really interesting where the American papers, like, when he got back, did confront him. And he didn't really say anything great. He was like, well, I wear coats and I wear hats. Oh. So you do the math. Like, he was very weird in all of his explanations to the press. And a lot of people said he was very, like, the most likely suspect. There is one source I found that. upon his death, they found a brass ring in his pocket. And now organs were taken from a lot of the victims, but like no other personal items were taken except for our second victim, which is Annie Chapman. Annie Chapman was known to have a brass ring. And that was missing after she was killed. So then we have our guy here found with a brass ring in his pocket upon his death. So there's that. Always carried one of the trophies with him.

Always carried one of the trophies. Again, the organs, the uteruses in the jars. There's a lot of speculation that he did provide abortions and had one go very, very wrong. And it is interesting that you mentioned with our last victim, Mary Kelly, that it almost looked like an abortion, like pulling out or like a C-section. Like a C-section. Yeah. Like you understood the anatomy of a woman. So that is an interesting kind of correlation, but yeah, that's the last one I got.

That's the one I think I kind of think fits the most that we know about. Interesting. There's a lot of evidence that H.H. Holmes was also providing abortions. And that was maybe that he was killing some of the women because he would chloroform them too hard accidentally. Because that's what you would do to kind of knock someone out if you're going to perform surgery. They would die and he'd be like, whoops. And he would just take the skeleton and sell it. So, I mean, interesting.

It's just crazy. Yeah, it was totally different time. Very, very spooky. I will say, if you have another suspect in mind, feel free to write it in the comments. I mean, there's hundreds we could have gone through. Oh, this- Simply don't have time this episode to go through everyone. No.

Please let us know. I'm so curious what everyone thinks. I know. And let me know what you think are the ones we do have. I mean, I'm down to go down more rabbit holes and investigate other suspects. Oh, yeah. I definitely. I just think this is, it's crazy what. really stemmed from Jack the Ripper in terms of how we look at true crime and how the papers

treated true crime and killings up until kind of recently other copycats that copied similar methods. Oh, yeah. We were even just talking about how the Black Dahlia feels like that was maybe inspired a little bit by Jack the Ripper, just the way she was posed and the way that she was dismembered. You definitely have, maybe you can't call them copycat killers, but you have people being inspired by these murders. I know. And it's sensationalism of it. Yeah.

Really crazy. But there is part of me that thinks that this will never be solved. No. Just because we don't have the DNA evidence. We're too far past. Exactly. We're too far away from it to ever truly solve it. Even with the advancing technology that we have, like DNA, all of the DNA evidence that's

untested could technically be tested again, but it's not really going to tell us anything conclusive. Yeah. And after so many years. I mean, who knows if the seaman wasn't from that constable that stole it for his wife. And even the story of the scarf and how it became in his possession is kind of lore. Like the lore of the story is that the constable stole it and gave it to his wife. We don't know that for certain.

No, maybe this is truly one of the unsolvable cases. It will never be solved. Right. But I do want to note, Black Dahlia has come up a lot in the comments. And I know it is a more covered case, but if you guys do want us to get into it, please let us know in the comments. I know there's a lot that has come out recently with one of the sons of maybe the killer that has come forward. I've been like, yeah, my dad's the killer. So there's some newer stuff on the case.

And so if you guys want to see it from us, let us know in the comments. Definitely let us know. That one always gets me. Maybe because it's so close to home because we're in L.A., but it's right here. Yeah. Really spooky. I mean, what we do know about this case is that. Jack the Ripper was successful at killing at least five women and mutilating their bodies very badly because he was operating at a place in time where women's lives were definitely not valued, not poor women, and especially not women with substance abuse disorders or history of sex work.

And remember the constable who let Catherine out of the drunk tank? When she said that she got a beating for coming home late at night, the police officer's response was that she would have deserved it because she had no right getting drunk. And what about Polly? She was sent to a workhouse to do forced labor for the crime of being poor. The authorities clearly thought that she had no right to decide what to do with her own life either. Or what about the witness who admitted he saw a man knock Elizabeth Stride to the ground? And instead of intervening or fetching the police, he just walked away. He decided it was none of his business.

I mean, obviously these women deserved better. And unfortunately, it just looks like we'll never figure out who actually committed these crimes. So justice on this one feels like it'll never be served. I am curious for everyone listening what they think. Have we solved it? Are one of these suspects the one that did this? Or, I mean, as we kind of mentioned in this episode, this is something that I talked to the researcher of this episode about. Like, was it just a pig butcher who's buried in a Popper's grave and we'll never know?

I mean, that's a possibility too. It's just. It's unsolvable. It's unsolvable. It's one I think about often, though. Again, let us know your thoughts. but we are moving on to our missing person of the week. So first, before we dive into the missing person of the week, we actually have an update on one of the cases.

This came from a listener who messaged me on Instagram. Oh, my gosh. But Nikki Chang, who we talked about in one of our episodes, her husband has been arrested. They have not found Nikki. She has not been located, but authorities have concluded that she is the victim of homicide. Wow. And the listener that sent this to me did say it was as tragic as it is. It was like something the community has been waiting for for a long time.

And so people, it just feels like a little step towards closure. But wild, which thank you so much to, it was a few people that reached out to kind of give me that update. So as you're listening, if you hear updates on these cases, definitely let us know because it's really, really important stuff. I know. That's why we're doing this. Yes. Trying to get the word out. But our missing person of the week today is Summer Wells.

So she was age five at the time she disappeared. She was reported missing on June 15, 2021 from her home in Rogersville, Hawkins County, Tennessee. Parents say that she was helping her mother and grandmother plant flowers. But then she went inside to play with her toys. And shortly after, her mother says that she could not locate her. The mom said that she called downstairs to Summer, but there was no response, which was unusual. She checked and she saw that her daughter was gone. Now, an endangered child alert and then an amber alert were both deployed.

Extensive searches of the home and surrounding area, including the nearby woods, were looked into. There was also a report of a red or maroon Toyota pickup with ladders on the back that was seen in the area around the time, but we don't know if there's any connection. A bit after the disappearance, a neighbor did come forward and say that she and her children heard a scream about an hour before summer disappeared, but that didn't really lead police. to any sort of breakthrough. Her parents, Candice, and Dom Wells believe that there has been an abduction, possibly from or behind the basement, and maybe she was taken down the hill to the vehicle that was seen in the area. But as of today, there's been no arrests.

No one has been named a suspect, and parents have passed polygraphs. So the sheriff has said that everyone remains a person of interest in this case and that there's no evidence to determine abduction versus walkaway slash lost. The case remains active and Summer was described at the time of her disappearance as being three feet tall, 40 pounds, blue eyes, blonde hair, and she was last seen in a pink shirt and gray pants. If you have any information, you can call TBI at 1-800-TBI find or 1-800-824-34-6-3. That is all we have for this episode of Clues. I hope you guys enjoyed getting into this one with us. I hope you hung in there, guys.

Hope you hung in there. I don't know if I did. I know this one's going to be long. Well, yeah, this is a long one. There's a lot to this one. And if we didn't talk about your favorite riper suspect, please get on social media and let us know why you think this person is it. We want to hear from you guys.

Your thoughts, your theories, your feedback. All of that is what makes this community so special. At Crime House, we value your support. So again, share your thoughts on social media. And remember to rate review and follow clues to help others discover our show. All right. We'll see you next time. Bye, guys.

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in store or online, at pandora.net, and let your summer unfold. When someone goes missing, the headlines focus on what happened. But the truth often lives in the smallest details. I'm Sarah Turney. After my sister disappeared, I learned how those final hours, the last conversations, the last decisions can haunt families forever. And I'm Courtney Nicole. After seeing crime impact my own family, I've learned how overlooked moments,

missed red flags, and unanswered questions can change everything. Together, we're bringing those lived experience. experiences into the work. This is the final hours, a crimehouse original powered by Pave Studios, a podcast that puts the moments before a disappearance under a microscope. Listen to and follow the final hours wherever you get your podcasts, new episodes every Monday.