Doomed to Fail - Ep 148 - A Very Famous Series of Murders in Whitechapel: Jack the Ripper

Episode Date: October 31, 2024

Happy Halloween!! Today, we tell the classic tale of Jack the Ripper - who was he? We probably will never know, but we learned some stuff along the way. Like -  most of his victims were not sex workers; they were poor and unhoused, and in 1888, London's mind was the same thing. PLUS - it has to be considered that they were killed while sleeping (and this blew Taylor's mind, but would make a lot of sense!). Join us today if only to remind yourself that this is not the worst time to be alive!  Many Sources:The Complete Jack the Ripper - by Donald Rumbelow - https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/the-complete-jack-the-ripper_donald-rumbelow/349500/item/2433792/The Lodger - by Marie Belloc Lowndes - https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/the-lodger_marie-belloc-lowndes/611895/#edition=5724823&idiq=10679678The movie The Lodger by Alfred Hitchcock - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qFiw5VtmyIAfter Dark Podcast - https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/after-dark-myths-misdeeds-the-paranormal/id1705694900The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper by Hallie Rubenhold - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37570548-the-five Join our Founders Club on Patreon to get ad-free episodes for life! patreon.com/DoomedtoFailPodWe would love to hear from you! Please follow along! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail] 

It's a matter of the people of the state of California versus Hortonthal James Simpson, case number B.A.019. And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Boom, we are back, Taylor. How are you? Yeah, how are you? Happy Halloween. Right? It's Thursday. Are you trick-or-treating?

No, what kind of trick-or-treat? My last trick-or-treat, I wanted to dress like a werewolf. And my mom was trying to do it on the cheap. And so she ended up, like, doing my makeup. And I ended up looking like a kitty cat with, like, whiskers. And I was like, this is really embarrassing. I never want to do this again. Were you like 15?

It's like, yeah, probably like 18. But yeah. You don't get trick-or-to-hooters. Your house is really far from the street. Yeah, actually, yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, I don't think last year I got any trick-or-treaters. Yeah. So, but you do, right?

I don't get trick-or-hutors, no, because there's no. I live up a hill Yeah It's really It's a lot of work to walk up this hill For very little reward Just to see if we're there But we'll go to a different neighborhood

And go trick or treating Hey what's trunk or treat I've heard people say that It's where you go to a parking lot And people have their cars decorated And they're like parked in the parking lot Have a trunk open and there's candy in the trunk So like you can decorate your trunk spooky

Or like my My brother-in-law just had a picture they did a had like their back of their minivan open with like big eyes and um teeth and then you just go so you just like you get the experience of like stopping at different places to get candy but you're just like in a parking lot interesting okay so they'll do it at like a church or a school or something so like kids who aren't in the neighborhoods that can trick or treat you can go you know things like that is that what you're going to do with the kids no we're going to go actual trick or there's like a neighborhood that has it so i think we're going to go there nice yeah it'll be fun

what are they dressing as Lauren's is going to be a lion because she loves lions and Miles is going to be a cow. All right. Very, very animal thing. It's going to be cold too. Yeah, it's going to be in the 60s. So it'll be fun. We had, um, Florence's birthday party yesterday and some of them were costumes and stuff. And we had a thing last week. And yeah, it's been cute. Fun. Oh, and I'm making everybody about work every day. Today I was a door of olives. I don't know if you've seen my drawer of olive costume, but this is the headpiece.

My sister made it. And then it's a dress that I don't have in here, but it's like, This is big olives all over it. That's so funny. That's very cute. Technically, I'm supposed to wear a costume tomorrow on Zoom, and I literally have nothing planned. I am. Yeah, it was cute.

This morning, like someone in our dev call was dressed like a chicken, like a full body chicken outfit. That's fun. Today's theme was food. Tomorrow's theme is, tomorrow's theme is pop culture. I'm going to be Bruno Mars. Gonna be awesome.

Do you remember that time that someone ordered a chicken comedian? at work. Yes. Wasn't that horrible and embarrassing for everyone? Why does they do that? That's horrible.

It was for a birthday. Ugh. So sad. Anyways. Anyway, wait. To introduce us. This has been terrible. Happy Halloween.

Welcome to James to fail. Here's a podcast that brings you. History is most notorious disasters and epic failures twice a week, every week. Today is Halloween. I'm Taylor, joined by Fars. I'm Fars, joined here by Taylor,

and we are going to be discussed. a topic that I'm probably not going to be able to guess. Well, I do want to say as Halloween comes to an end, a big thank you to our friend Jay and a big no thank you to Faris because you didn't join any movies, but it was very fun. And we've watched many, many a film with Jay over the past couple weeks. And some of the scary ones we watch, you watch Incantation, that was on Netflix, that was super scary. I watched Oddity, that was on Shutter last night, and that was pretty good.

two minutes ago so we've watched what's been your favorite um looking at it we haven't watched all of them we saw wishmaster i don't know if i've ever seen that it's from the 80s it's like actually pretty fun yeah the i can picture the um the VHS oh yeah yeah yeah it was very scary a thousand percent he was like in gin and he like you know for some reason he has to like he has a grant three wishes to like get out or something of the like lamp that he's in and like he does hilarious things like he one guy wishes for a million dollars and the next scene is that guy's mom getting on a flight and signing up for insurance for a million dollar insurance policy and the plane just explodes it's like this is like good wishmaking it's hilarious so yeah that was a good one um i liked i liked i liked oddity a lot that we watched the other night we watched the other night we watched watched um mine was the people under the stairs that was fun it's always fun to oh my god

it's so stupid it's so long yeah it's fun to watch again um winnie the ploo blood and honey was exactly what you expected to be it was great i love that movie maybe even weirder but it was fun yeah super fun so yeah it's been really fun so i have one more than

um thing for Halloween. Hold, I'm looking at what it was, the cleansing hour. Did I watch this one? Oh, yeah, the cleansing hour. It was not, cleansing hour was not good

until the last 10 minutes. And then you were like, that was real fun. Are you able to share the sheet with me? I don't think I've accessed this one. I guess. No, I'll share as you. No, because I want to watch

like horror movies like for the waning days of October. And I just want to, like, not have to pay for it. So, and Jade does an incredible job of telling you which ones are free and which one aren't. I know. He's a good job carrying out. I thought it to you. Yeah, super fun.

So anyway, anyway, let's talk. I will tell you a story, farmers, about a very classic crime that is very spooky and scary and that we still talk about today. I actually mentioned it in the most recent what we do in the shadows last night. So it was like, it's something that we'll talk about forever. So I'm not going to make you guess, but I'm going to talk about Jack the Ripper. Ooh, fun. I read a lot of books. I read The Complete Jack the Ripper by Donald Rumbullo.

I read The Five, The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper by Haley Reubenhold. I listened to the After Dark podcast. And this isn't, I can really talk about this, but I read a book called The Lodger by Marie Belloclundice. It was written in like the early 1900s about. the idea that Jack the River could have been someone that was, like, lodging at someone's house, you know, like someone who's renting a room in your house. And they just, like, he, like, sneaks out in the middle of the night and she hears him. And then she, like, the next morning knows that there was a murder and, like, trying to figure out what to do, you know?

Yeah. And I watched the movie The Lodger by Alfred Hitchcock from 1927, which is a silent film and one of his first films. And it's pretty great. You can see it on YouTube. It has a totally different ending than the book. So you've got to do both if you ever want to. But they're pretty fun. So, in reading this, so the book I read was the complete Jack the Ripper.

And there was another one that was like the complete and final Jack the Ripper. And then there's like the complete and I'm right you're wrong, Jack the Ripper. Like, no one fucking knows what happened. You know. Jack the Ripper was the ditty of his generation. I mean, we know it. We know what happened. We know who did he is.

We don't know who Jack the Ripper is. I mean, like that's what like you would do. if you were probably super rich and, like, wealthy. It had to be a rich, wealthy person. It had to be a doctor. No. Mm-mm. It didn't have to be.

Okay. I'll tell you why. I'll educate me. Okay. So, no one really agrees on anything. But some of the facts are actual facts. So we'll talk about those. People who are obsessed with Jack the Ripper are called Ripperologists.

And there's thousands of books on him, you know. Some of the stuff that I read was like, everything comes at it from a different angle. You either like, this is, like, like, wait, where did I go? Oh, so some people are like, it doesn't matter who he was, you know? Like, it's just, like, we shouldn't talk about,

or we shouldn't talk about how gruesome the crimes were. Or, you know, it doesn't matter, really, it just matters, like, the people who were, you know, killed, they're the ones that matter or whatever. I think that I still want to know who we was if we could ever figure that out, but I don't think we ever would, you know? Yeah. And like there's stuff that is like, there's like maybe DNA evidence that could like find him. That's just like never going to work. You know, it's like over 100 years old. Like it's just not a thing. And the also like I do think also like, you know, it's interesting that there are modern rippers, you know, like. Peter Curtin was like 100 years ago, but he was like the vampire of Dusseldorf, like a ripper. There's the Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe.

And then I was like, wait a minute, maybe it's someone named Peter, who's Jack the Ripper, because there's two other rippers are also named Peter. How do you define a ripper? It's really just like a press moniker for like a fun, like a, like a, they like wanted to be a ripper. I think that it was like, he was initially called, it was like the Whitechapel murders and also they're called leather apron for a little bit because they were thinking he would have been like a butcher. someone who wears a leather apron, which is weird and gross. Like, I get the idea that you would have an apron out of leather, but I also hate that word, those words together. If you want to walk around the city, just completely covered in blood, you should dress

like a butcher. That's exactly true. Exactly right. So, I also, like, definitely would love to know who the zodiac was, you know? Like, I think the mystery keeps it mysterious, but it's also, I think we should. it'd be cool to know you know that one's a weird one that we don't know given how pop i mean i don't know maybe it's not that weird because didn't richard ramirez get pulled over in a stolen car and then write like the devil sign on the hood of the car and then run away

in the night like i mean they weren't going to catch him either yeah um yeah so i don't know but i think so we're going to talk a little bit about the crimes um mostly about the women and then a couple of the suspects and like what happened and then some stuff that i learned that like negates other stuff that I've learned like listening to like other podcasts about it or just like what I thought I knew you know so I think that it's interesting because this is the one where there's like a thousand different perspectives on what happened more than you would think so it is 1888 and we are in London and it is awful basically obviously yes yes especially awful if you are poor and you are probably poor most people are poor um the queen Victoria just

had her 50 year jubilee the year before. And people were obviously, like, excited about that, but also, like, just, like, the coronation of King Charles the other day, I don't know, when was that, like, a year or two ago. But you're like, he's driving in his, like, golden carriage for the town and people, like, can't afford food, you know? That's so crazy. Yeah. So the poor in London, they're, like, really poor.

It's, like, I'll ever twist poor. Hundreds of people sleep on the ground. You've been to London, right? actually i've been in london several times but i've literally never left the airport oh well you had not been i've laid it in the city i just never went into the city um but trafalgar square is like a big square you can go there now as like a big statue people would just hundreds of people would sleep there every night um they'd sleep in corners they'd sleep in alleys they'd sleep behind houses which is like the unhouse population was out of control um some things that you could do

to get aid from the city of London, you could get outside aid where you would like apply for it and say like, you know, having trouble getting employment. I have nowhere to live. And they would give you money. Like they would give you like a little allowance every day so that you could eat. You could also use that money to potentially get like a bed in a lot in like a lodging house for a night. But you paid by the night. So you had to like pay to get in and then you stayed. The money in these and this store. it's a little bit hard to understand. I don't really understand how much a shilling is or like a pence or like what that means. But like if you did have a Queen Victoria gold shilling, now it'd be worth like $400. But I think it's like not that much money in this time. You could also live technically inside of a workhouse, which is a place where you go when you have like pretty much given up. You get to stay there, but you have to do like manual labor.

Like for some reason, part of one of the jobs was breaking rocks to like move rocks to a different place. like really bad work. They're dirty. There's bugs everywhere. Everyone is sick. Like, it's terrible. You would also go there if you need like a doctor and you were homeless or like have a baby. You would go to these workhouses and just like really, really bad conditions. Like women would be in labor next to like a drunk person next to an old person dying. You know, like it was just a terrible place to be. It was like a government paid. Yeah. But you had to do the manual labor and you would get let in in the evening and you would get let. Let. out at like 9 a.m. in some cases, like you couldn't leave any earlier than that. So you couldn't

find any other work either. Like you only had to do the jobs there because by 9 a.m. all of the other like day to day jobs are already taken. So don't we like kind of currently do this where if you are on like a social welfare program, you can't actually get a job because if you get a job, you'll make too much money and but you don't have enough to get on your feet. Yeah. Like you can't have more than like $2,000 in savings ever, in some cases for disability. So you can't save. Like you can't do you are you are stuck. I'm glad the cycle is just repeating itself. I know, John Oliver did something about it recently. It was terrible. Um, yeah, that woman who was sleeping in her car and then her car got, that's what it was. She was like, I had to sleep in

the car because I can't have $2,000 or whatever you said in my account. Yeah. Yeah. Oh. that's wild um another option that's a little bit that a lot of people would do was a lodging house you paid by the day but it was gross you would like share bath water with people you know like it's not like the beds were clean any of that um but if you didn't have the money you didn't get a bed so you would like you know you'd leave every morning try to come back at night but like if you didn't have the money they wouldn't let you stay um it also means like you had to carry everything that you owned you know so people had like pockets whole like a couple things but they weren't like um able to like leave their stuff anywhere. We're also in Whitechapel, London, which is like a just a terrifyingly poor part. A lot of people would immigrate to that part and start to try to like, you know, join society from there. And that was like made it really difficult. It was, you know, the kind of thing where it's like 17 people living in a 10 by 10 room, you know, like if you did own or were able to rent like a house or a place to stay. A lot of alcoholism, lots of violence, lots of sex. work lots of anti-Semitism so just like a really really rough place to live you can imagine

yeah it sounds like literally skid row right now yeah and yeah yeah also have you ever seen sweenie todd i feel like at that's the same time as well it's like you know it's just very gray everything's everything's awful i only know this was most of time it is musical yeah well i only know the song because it was in the office oh fun yeah i like that anyway everything's terrible So let's talk about the crimes of Jack the Ripper. So people have been murdered all the time. They were murdered all the time in this area. People are always murdered all the time.

But there are the, quote, canonical five, who are the five women that they believe were the victims of Jack the Ripper. Donald Rumbleau, who wrote the complete Jack the Ripper, thinks that there were four. I'll tell you about that later. So, like, you don't really know. It could be up to 11. There were, like, 11 of these style murders, like, around this time. they were not all sex workers you hear that over and over again some of them were but they were not all that um in this time like being a poor woman and being a sex worker was kind of the same

thing in like the record books you know they would look at you the same way it didn't really matter whether you did it or not um they're um also like so i'm going to tell you about the lives of the women and then the they're where they were found than a couple of suspects but But one, I'm not going to really talk about how they were killed, like, how they were like maybe snuck up or maybe like in the middle of doing something. Because like in the Rumblelow book, his opinion is that for all of the murders that they were in the middle of like having sex and the woman was leaned towards the wall with her skirts up, you know, like that's what, how he thinks that they were killed.

But then Haley Rubinhold, who wrote the book The Five, she makes a statement that I was like, like, whoa, this actually makes a lot of sense, is that maybe they were just sleeping when he attacked them. Well, how did you kill them? I'll tell you. He like, mostly, he was, for the most part, slip their throat first. And it would be, but no one, no one really ever heard any scuffling or anything. So, like, there were 100% nights when these women were sleeping in doorways, you know, when they were drunk sleeping in doorways, drunk sleeping in alleys. So it seems easier to slit the throat of a drunk person, you know? Or of a, like, a drunk sleeping person.

It just seems weird that they, like, made up the whole dress flung. It's like... What could no one knows? Yeah, because you can slit their throat anyway. It doesn't... It's a weirdly specific way to slit someone's throat. I know. Yeah.

So, I don't know. I don't mean, I've been reading books this week, so no one knows. But, I mean, but the sleep thing kind of made a lot of sense. Because, like, not even a sleep, like, passed out, you know? Yeah. in some cases. So there were inquests, inquest into all the murders to kind of figure out exactly what happened. Between 1888 and 1891, there were, like I said, 11 murders that could potentially be these.

But these are the five that they think are most likely actual jacks there. If he was one person, I don't even know. We're not going to even get there, you know? So first, we have Mary Ann Nichols, aka Polly. So she went by Polly. She was born on August 26th, 1845. She went to school until she was 15. She was literate, which was a big deal.

Like not everybody in this time was. Her parents were a laundress and a locksmith. They did not live in workhouses. They lived in like their own home, which was a big deal. But it was still like a very dirty, dirty and crowded, like, area they lived in in London. But she, but they, her parents tried their best. Her mom died of tuberculosis because, like, everyone's half dead in these stories. But her dad kept the kids and didn't abandon them, which is like,

Wow. Great. You know, like, he tried. So, like, good for him, you know. So her dad, you know, stayed with the family, took care of the kids. Polly, when she was 18, got married to a man named William. And in the beginning, they were very happy. They were actually invited to.

live in a special new kind of apartment. So there was a man with a last name, Peabody, who came from America with this idea of making better housing for these slum neighborhoods. And the idea was like, you know, we will give like young families, you know, a room, maybe a shared kitchen, maybe a shared like laundry area. But you could stay in these apartments for like reasonable prices, but you have to like abide by certain rules. So there's no drinking. There's no like violence. There's no you have to have a job, things like that. So his idea was like the incentive to stay here is to like live a better life. So families would would be able to like move up from there. So it's a pretty good deal considering everything else is terrible. So her and William got this, got this apartment and it worked for a while. But still like in this time there's no birth control. There's just everyone's just having babies. all the time. And so Polly has her fifth baby. I mean, things are not like great. So while she's

having her fifth baby, they hire a neighbor to come and, um, and help. And her husband ends up having an affair with that neighbor. Um, her name is Rosetta. And eventually William and Rosetta will get married and have more children, but they did have to leave the Peabody buildings because you weren't allowed to like live with your mistress. You get kicked out. Pretty straight. Eventually, the dick kicked out. But Holly left her husband after he had this affair, and she had to go to a workhouse, where it was like the place where you really don't want to go, is like the hard labor to prove that she was in, like, distress and to get a divorce.

But it was like almost impossible to get divorced, and she couldn't just get a divorce. Like she couldn't just, he would be like, I didn't do anything wrong, you know, whatever. So she just lived apart from him, but she was able to get like a little bit of a settlement from him. So he paid her five shillings a week for a while to, like, help her. But basically him and Rosetta took the kids, and she was just like on the streets by herself. And so she also started to drink a lot during this time. And like, like, most of these women are going to be like very severe alcoholics, you know. so she's drinking all the time your life sucks you got like 17 kids you're homeless you're breaking

rocks for a living like why wouldn't you're going to do like like everything's fine no thing is not fine so even though polly was not fully divorced um there is no way for a woman to make enough money doing women things like sewing and whatever to take care of herself so she needed to have a man to like live with so they could like try to get in it together so she was ended up seeing a man um and because she moved in with someone else her husband was able to go to the court and stop giving her five shillings a week so now she was like had even less money um she would be in and out of workhouses she would sleep in trafalgar square um in april 1888 she got a job as a servant through a work program um she which was a pretty good job she lives in a nice house um but they were

very, very religious and they didn't drink and they probably made her do things like read the Bible to like a tone of her sins, you know, like it wasn't great. They made her stop drinking. I mean, I could do that if I was drinking. Oh, yeah, they made her stop drinking. So she was fired her three months, probably for drinking. Got it. Yeah. Didn't last long, unfortunately. She's in and out of lodging houses like paying, you know, her pennies to get, get a bed. Finally, it's 11 p.m. on August 30th, 1888, and she's drunk. She's trying to get a bed in her usual lodging house. And the witnesses say that she said a couple things.

She said, I've had my lodging money three times today and I've spent it. But you can imagine in a drunk voice. And all I've spent it, you know, all I have made money and I've spent it. So, you know what I mean? She sounds fun. And then she said to someone, so dog, Moss money is like your money for your bed. D-O-S-S. I don't know. I've never heard that before, but that's what that is. She says, I'll soon get my Doss money. See what a jolly bonnet I've got now. So I think Jolly Bonnet that she was going to pawn her hat. Some people have said that meant that she was going to go and, you know, do some sex work because she looked great. I don't think she looks great. But you know what I mean. She was less. She doesn't look great for like what you had on the streets there. Yeah. So whatever she said, she said something. She was definitely drinking.

spending a lot of her money on booze that night as she did most nights a lot of the people in these stories would pawn things for like a day you know so you like pawn your boots for a couple pence and then you get them back if you don't get them back up there a certain amount of time then they can sell them or whatever so like a lot of stuff is pawns so you probably went to go pawn her her thing and i mean also then like it's 11 o'clock at night it is dark as shit um there is um i think i've mentioned it before and i have it here this book the invention of murder i've like try to log through it a couple times but it has a bunch of stories in it by judith flanders and it starts with the story of you know a servant going out and then while she's gone her um the family she's working for is murdered but like they talk about how you get lost in your own neighborhood when it's that dark you know it's just it's just you walk up the door and it might be in like a black hole so it's dark um and she's she's you know walking around um at 340 a m a man named charles allen cross finds Polly's body laying on a sidewalk.

Her body's on the sidewalk and her left hand was reaching out, touching a gate, so she's a little bit like spread out. Her throat had been cut. Her vagina had been stabbed. Her stomach was opened with huge cuts across her abdomen. And they found out that when they found her, her face was still

warm, but her hands were cold. She would have died immediately from having her throat slit, but it would have taken at least five minutes to do the rummaging around in her belly. But nothing was missing. um william nothing was he was literally rummaging in her belly but he didn't like take any organs or anything oh because some of them they think that he took like a kidney i even if i rub that down i think he took like kidney from another one

and also think he came mailed a kidney to the police at one point and was like oh this is the lady's kidney so he like was taunting the police a little bit i don't think i'm going to get to that because there's so much but no but he's just kind of like rummaged in her inside it's gross you the way you replied to me was like almost like a yeah of course he was rummaging in her organs like he's just the ripper he's not like patting around the head and kissing around the cheek like so William her her first husband and her friend Ellen identified her body William hadn't seen her in three years both William and her friend Ellen testified that Polly did not do sex work so like they were like that she just was she was an alcoholic and not well

But she was not, they testified that she's not a prostitute. So she died a few days after her birthday on August 31, 1888. She was 43 when she died. Our next victim is Annie Chapman Smith, or Annie Smith Chapman. She was born on September 24th, 1840. She was the daughter of a soldier. She went to school. They had a military school, so she went to school.

And things were going pretty well. And then Scarlet Fever came through their barracks. or wherever they're living. And four for siblings out of six died in two weeks of scarlet fever. So just like so fast. Her family was like destroyed. Her father died by suicide by slitting his own throat because he was so upset. Her mother ended up renting out rooms in her home.

And one of the people she rented, she was a man named John Chapman. And John and Annie got married. There is a wedding picture of them where they are. dressed very nicely and he's like leaning against a cabinet and they like paid a good amount of money for it as well as when they would have children later they would take pictures of the children which is like in a time where you didn't really do this yet which I think totally makes us for someone who lost so many siblings so young you'd like you'd yearn for a photo of someone you know so she did that but she was also definitely like a very severe alcoholic

for a very long time and also during her pregnancies her children were either they died early or they were like obviously disabled and now we'd say it was fetal alcohol syndrome but they didn't like know that then that was happening she could not stop um john got a good job as a driver out in the country but she had to leave because she was making a scene every night like he just like he kept the children and kept his job and she um she had to leave when she went into the city he gave her a little bit of money each week but like never really saw her again he did die a few years later of cirrhosis of the liver so like he wasn't innocent in the drinking you know most likely what are these people drinking it's such a good question i think like rum

and like weird british moonshine it can't be like good rum it's got to have like horrible stuff in there there's beer it's definitely not good yeah um and she would walk 25 miles from the center of london to where john was to say goodbye to him when he passed away um she lived in those common law situations like I was saying like you couldn't really be by yourself you're a woman you need to have a man to like take care of you in some way for like a protection and for like getting if you get better jobs so she had a couple of those common law situations that you would maybe take someone's last name but like not officially that was really common where you like didn't really get married but you take their last name for a certain amount of time which seems nice because less paperwork right she was also not a sex worker she sewed and crocheted and would sell the things that she was making she also when she's in 1888 she's very sick she also has tuberculosis

so I mean imagine everyone's coughing also up blood yeah it seems like a horrible time to be alive horrible so on September 7th 1888 she went to her usual lodging house but didn't have any money

she asked them to hold the bed for her and she went looking for money to borrow from a friend she probably so she ended up being found sort of in between two houses in a yard. It was a place that was known as like a safe place to sleep. The yard was not locked. It was like a little bit covered and she probably wandered in there to go to sleep. She at 5.15 a.m. someone said that they heard a woman say like yell no, but she was already dead by then because they found her body at 6 a.m. and she'd been dead for

at least two hours. Her throat was cut so badly that like her head was. like nearly cut off. She, there were no signs of a struggle. She had been totally disemboweled. A section of her stomach was on her left shoulder. And another section of her skin plus her small intestines were on her right shoulder. I'm trying to envision that.

Just like gobs of like innards on top of you. Yeah. And then some of her organs, this is more of some of her organs may have been missing. And they, it's either. this is like a big no one knows anything i mean either he took them um or whoever killed her took them or they took them in the hospital when they were doing the autopsy which totally makes

sense because they were like do that all the time like take bodies to like study them you know i guess like that's what they remember they's like grave rob to be able to see bodies yeah i guess i'm like somebody like looking at the body in the moment and realizing that it's missing organs versus we sent the body off somewhere Yeah, I mean, you wouldn't know until you send the body off somewhere. But it's like, they kind of gotten lost in transit. They're not going to like just hack it up right there in the middle of the alley. Yeah, I mean, it was already pretty hacked up.

She, so Annie's, um, her brother was, uh, his last name, Smith was also an alcoholic, just like, you know, several members of their family. After he identified his sister's body, he got sober and he moved to Texas. So if your last name is Smith, you live in Texas, you could be related to. any chapman there's probably only one of you um she died on september 8th 1888 she was 47 so all these women are like that's kind of the oldest shit for like rough yeah absolutely um our next victim is elizabeth stride elizabeth was born november 27th 1843 in sweden so she grew up on a farm in Sweden. She was basically primed to be a servant. She moved from her farm to the city to be a servant and she ended up getting pregnant. And so someone got her pregnant. We don't know if it was

like mutual or if it was like an assault or like a power thing. Like who knows. He got her pregnant and he gave her syphilis. Cool. As you do. Uh-huh. And at seven months she had a stillborn baby. But her reputation then was tarnished because you can't get pregnant without being married. obviously in this time. So she moved to London to kind of start over again. She learned English by the end. They said that she spoke, you couldn't even tell if she was Swedish. She spoke English just, you know, as well as they did. She married an older man and they ran some coffee houses and it was like kind of a good business. Like some, there were some coffee houses in town where you could like, I don't know, just like a cafe. You'd go and sit for a little bit and read and then like

not drink booze, just drink coffee and it's hard to be kind of fashionable. So they did that for a little bit but then that failed and she ended up kind of out on her own um she ended up being going on um like living in the streets and becoming kind of a grifter she would kind of make up make up these lies to get sympathy to get people to give her money so there was a thing called the princess alice disaster which was a um a boat that sank and she said that she was on it and lost her children and husband um just to get more money from people um she was back and forth between like different men, getting money from them. At one point, like a more well-to-do woman saw her and thought she was her sister. And she just said, yep, that's me. And she started spending time with her and taking

her money. So, like, she just was kind of doing whatever it takes to survive. As she was getting older, she was getting into her 40s. She ended up having seizures from the syphilis. It just like gets worse and worse. And on September 29th, 1888, some people saw saw her talking to some different men, but who knows if those witness statements are true, you know? Who knows if any of it is true? It's so long ago, there's no records. Nobody cares about these people.

Like, there's no law. Like, there's no, nothing. Like, yeah, I feel like there's, I mean, all these witness statements are like, yeah, you know, I saw her walking down the street. I knew her, but it's like one in the morning. Like, you're drunk too, dude, you know? Yeah.

How I believe what you said. So her body was found at 1 a.m. And her throat had been slit, but that is it. So Elizabeth Stride died on 30th of September 1888. She was 44. Elizabeth is the one that Donald Rumblow thinks was a domestic situation and not Jack the Ripper. Because this is the first of two that he killed on the same night, which is called the double event. Which you know was possible because remember when Ted Bundy killed those two women at that lake?

Yeah. same day so like well no it wasn't a lake it was the the wasn't the sorority house yes he killed several people a sorority house or yes he went to a lake and he got one woman to help him with his car took her away murdered her came back upon another woman and murdered her before they even knew the first woman was missing yeah so it's not even any apparent behavior like it's just there wasn't any history of serial killers so like to then they're like this possibly can't be the same

guy because this guy doesn't do it this way. Well, they thought that it was. The author said it thinks that it wasn't. So who knows? But anyway, the same day. So the same day, September 30th, they also found Catherine Eddows.

She called herself Kate. Kate was born on April 14th, 1842. She lived with a pretty normal family. She went to school as well. And her parents passed away in the same year. So she went to live with relatives in, and like work for them, but they kicked her out.

So she was probably like stealing or doing something that like they didn't like and they kicked her out. She married an Irish man named Thomas Conway. They had a baby and they would do things. He was a peddler and like a cellar. So it would go around. They'd go from like town to town. And she would write limericks and songs for people and they would like get people little poems, write poetry. They never got married, but they cohabitated.

And she, one of the towns they went to was Loxley, like in Robin Hood. That's fun. Yeah, that's fun. She also had a tattoo of his initials, which was, like, really wild because, like, ladies didn't have tattoos, you know. Eventually, both her and her husband were drinking in excess, and her husband got violent, and she took her children to the workhouse, which is, like, not anything that you would want to do, but something that, like, you would have to do if you were in, like, a really dangerous situation. She also, her sister would help her sometimes. Eventually her children grow up and she's estranged from her daughter because she keeps, like, stealing money from her daughter as well to keep drinking. So, um, so Kate is known in the neighborhood.

Um, she eventually meets a man named John Kelly. He didn't abuse her, but they were both drinking a lot. Um, and they were in and out of different houses. Um, she was arrested for being drunk and disorderly a lot. Which is like terrible, but also you had to sleep inside, you know? Yeah, that's all you have to do. Yeah. So she in on September 1888, Kate and John went to Kent, the area of England to pick hops.

And they, which was like a thing you could do seasonally and you would like make a good amount of money. So they did that when they got back to London. They, they were trying to find a room where they could both be in together because you could, you could rent a bed for two people. but she um it didn't have enough money so he ended up paunting his boots and like finding a bed for himself and she was on the streets so it's saturday september 29th 1888 and at 8.30 p.m. she was drunk and passed out on the street um she was arrested because she was passed out on the street and at 1 a.m. they let her go they said that she was sober enough to get out and they let her go um so they got out of out of the um police station at 1 a.m. They found her body at 144. So in those 44 minutes, he found her and killed

her. I wrote, she had also been disembaled in all caps by accident. So it just jumps out of me. But her face was cut up. Her intestines were put on her shoulder again. Her and the next one, on their Wikipedia pages, there's some really gruesome pictures of their bodies. It is very bad. she is the one where oh she's the one where okay this is like a weird theory there was like a part have you remember this was like a part of her apron with poop on it found in an alley no so like they knew it was part of her apron because it was like pulled off but like the theory is like people would just go to the bathroom in alleys right and they would like rip off bits of their clothes to clean themselves so that's not like it's gross but it's not like abnormal you know you know it's

funny. Taylor is when you said that her and her husband would go hot picking. I just picture like this cute couple and then we go like cherry picking when it's cherry season. And I was like, oh no, this is like shit covered hell in London in the 1840s and that's probably not what happened. That was actually the best time of their life

though when they were hot picking because it was like finally it's just not like a cute romantic date. It's like no. They slept in a barn. Yeah. No. But at least it had a roof. You know what I mean? So this little piece of apron. is found in an alley like nearby.

I may know that it's hers because like the pattern matches all the things. And then above it on the wall is graffiti that says the Jews are the men that will not be blamed for nothing, which it doesn't make any sense. It's like a weird double negative, but this is like a weird thing. So they say, you can write it? For real. So they say that it's graffiti. And so in my head, I imagine it really big written on the wall, right? But it's not.

The letters are three quarters of an inch high. So it's very small. And I learned in the After Dark podcast that everybody always had chalk with them because you would like maybe like need to write a note on the street or like telly up something at a restaurant or like whatever. So chalk was not something that was weird. So it was written in chalk and these short letters. And then the police officer who found it around. raced it right away because he was afraid of like violence if people were blaming Jewish people

for the Jack Ripper murders or whatever. So it was a race. So we don't even know if it was really there. We don't know what it looked like. We don't know what it said. So like it's people take that and run with it and say Jack the Ripper must have been Jewish. But like it could have been totally unrelated, you know? So was like just anti-Semitism just generally rampant in the world? Like at first I thought that it was like most things I read like make it sound like it's part of it. But I feel like it's not part of it at all you know right um when she died uh so um so kate eddows died on the 30th of september 1888 she was 46 when she passed away um 500 people came to her funeral she had a glass hearse um take her through town because people like genuinely cared for her and were afraid you know

you're looking at her pictures this is what like it looks like a great Rizley just went to town. And that's why I think a lot of other podcasts are like, we're not going to talk about the gruesome part. And like, I want to mention it because it's so interesting. But like, like,

what was he doing? Why is he doing that? Why is he where much you're under there? And also in the middle of this, he does send a kidney to the police. And there's always like a couple letters. Some of them are like potential hoaxes. Some of them aren't like he's kind of talking with the police.

Maybe it's just like very, it's all stuff that we'll never figure out. So crazy. So our last victim. is, what is our last time? I think I lost it. Our last victim is Mary Jane Kelly. There it is. Mary Jane Kelly. Her past is a little bit more murky. She kind of like made up her past so she didn't tell anyone the truth most likely. She said she was born around 1863. That makes her a lot younger than the other victims. She says she was from Ireland or Wales. She said that she had children, that her husband died, but there's no, to see, there's no paper trail for any of that. So they don't know what. happened um she was absolutely a sex worker so this is the one where like that was her job she worked in a high class brothel um in another part of london where it would be like you would have like a fancy dinner and go to a show and then go home with someone so you could like pretend that

it was a little more up and up than a thing oh does Wikipedia have these pictures of like they shouldn't like i almost feel like they shouldn't do this I totally agree. And it didn't come up until Kate's and I was like, oh, my God. And then like the Mary Jane Kelly is a really bad. Let me tell you a little bit about her first. So she was a high class sex worker. She was sex trafficked to Paris by her, by her, like, madam.

And she managed to escape, but she had to work in like a worse neighborhood after that. So she was working on the East End in Whitechapel, and she was seeing. a man named John Barnett. So Mary Jane and John shared a room and I'm pretty sure that I've been there because I'm pretty sure I went on a Jack the Ripper tour when I was in London and grad school and that we like walked past Mary Kelly's house. So it was like a 10 by 10 room on the first floor of a building with a door like heading into an alley that she shared with John. They was at 13 Miller's court. They had a little bit tumultuous relationship. They would fight. At one point, they were fighting and someone threw something and it broke the window next to the door. So you could move the curtain, put your hand through the window and open the door from the outside. So like the room didn't lock, basically. So on November 9th, she's out late with her friends. John came by and he left a friend named George and one named Mary visited. Mary left at 1 a.m. when she came back at 3, the lights were off. So she thought that Mary was asleep. George said that he was, um, that she saw her with someone and she said he can come back later they think that that could be jack the ripper but no one really but it's who knows and who knows what the fuck georgia's deal is you know um but 11 a m someone came to collect their rent and he opened the door by putting his hand through the broken window and opening it and um he found her body and you can see it online it is awful like what is that like did he saw in half sort of so he took the flesh out of her thighs so her legs are really far apart he took everything out of her stomach um she her legs were cut open her abdomen was removed her uterus kidney and one breast were under the bed her liver was between her feet her intestines were to her right the other breast was by her right foot her skin

removed from her from her thighs and stomach was on the table next to her so she is mutilated yeah just it looks like an animal just got to her yeah so So that was November 9th, 1888, and Mary Jane Kelly was only 25. So she's the youngest of all of our victims. So those are the main ones. As I said, there might be others. What are your thoughts right now? I'm going to tell you a couple suspects after this.

Yeah, I'm just shocked that Wikipedia puts the pictures up. Like, they should be blurred. You should have to choose to click on that. At the very least. So there was one one. It was the face looked like it was like. Like a baseball mid. Yeah.

And I was just like, I really probably, I probably still really clicked, show me the picture. But like, man, I wouldn't have, about it. We would have consented to it. Yeah. It wouldn't, it would have just like popped out at me the way that one. That one was like even grosser almost in the Mary Kelly one. Yeah. Yeah.

They're really bad. So like you were saying before, like, could it be a doctor? Like the assumption that it had to be a doctor. Who knows? It wasn't like as surgical as I thought it was, you know, like definitely someone like escalating from the first one where he just like stabbed her belly. But like moving the intestines to like the shoulders and moving them around and stuff. It's really like it feels exploratory and weird. Taylor, Jack the Ripper is weird.

You heard it here first. Breaking news. Yeah. Some people think that So some of the people that they think it could be There's a man named Montague John Druitt He was a lawyer and a teacher He died by suicide after the last murder

So things stopped after that So that's like convenient that could be him I don't know None of these guys I think I don't have like a favorite There was a guy named Aaron Cosminsky He was a Polish Jewish barber And he was later committed to an asylum him. And he's the one where like the DNA evidence says it could be him, but like that DNA evidence is crap. And he was also like very disturbed. Like his family was like, yeah, he should probably be in an institution, you know. But he is brought up because he's Jewish and because of the graffiti about Jews not being blamed for nothing, which I don't even think, I can't, I don't believe that that's 100% related, you know? Why would you do that yourself of your Jewish?

I know. That doesn't make any sense. There is someone who named George Chapman who was a Polish immigrant and another barber which I guess probably is the reason that the guy's a barber in Sweeney Todd

but he poisoned his victims and he was in prison in the U.S. during most of the things like probably wasn't him. There is oh no no I'm sorry. George Chapman he was executed in 1903 for killing his wife so he's definitely like not great it was dr thomas neil cream who was in the united states but he was a serial killer who poisoned his victims but

also the emmo doesn't match um there's the artist walter sickart who is a british painter and he sort of made himself a um a suspect because he painted things like a painting called the jack the ripper's bedroom where it's like he painted his own bedroom and there's like a weird figure in it and he painted like a man next to dead bodies you know like looking upset about it so you're like well stop painting yourself doing these murders yeah that's weird and nerd so um people think that it could have been him but um i don't know and then the other fun suspect is prince albert victor the duke of clarence who is the grandson of queen victoria so they said that he did it to kind of like cosplay as a poor person, slum it down in Whitechapel, potentially because he was gay and like he hated

women, like a bunch of weird things. But he probably didn't do it either. Like he was kind of a weird guy. He wasn't very smart, probably because of like royal family inbreeding, etc. But I don't think he did it. I don't know who did it. Yeah. It was all, if it's all one person even, you know, there's nothing like they think, they call him like gentlemen Jack and they think that potentially He was, like, a higher upper class person because of, like, the witness statements who may have saw someone who looked like that. But I'm like, again, like, I don't think any of his witnesses are credible. No, I think, I think it has to be someone who is, like, rich or royalty or of status because if you're a normal, one of the middle sociopath, then why not make it so that your true identity is discovered after your death? Unless you have, like, a family that you need to preserve their credibility for?

Like, do you think the zodiac might be alive? and have a letter after he dies that finally lets us know who he was. I hope so. I hope so, too. Wasn't, did I live across from the Zodiac guy? Remember the Jaws house? Across my place off western?

I don't remember. The house looked like a shark. Oh, yeah, yeah, no, that was a black dahlia thing. That, uh, yeah, yeah, sorry. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, but they also think that could have been a doctor. But I mean, anyone can get a knife, you know? Like, I don't know.

I feel like that doesn't prove anything to me either. And also, I'd like the leather apron idea because like you said, like, yeah, I'm covered in blood. I'm a butcher. Leave me alone, you know? Yeah, but are you butchering like one o'clock in the morning? I guess you could be. Probably. I feel like, yes.

That's a very good alibi. You know? I feel like that's the time. Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. it's again like with stuff like this like it's so hard to wrap my head around it because like understanding the time in which this story occurred is like so hard to actually really internalize like the police don't give us shit everybody smells like shit everybody's homeless they're half drunk it's like nothing makes sense so why not just throw this in the mix sure just start gutting people who cares like we're sleeping in an alleyway covered in rats like oh yeah oh my god I didn't think of that you're covered in vermin, I'm sure, like, all sorts of, like, bad buds. Would it be better to just be killed with, like?

I mean, it's definitely a, it's a rough life, you know, it's very, very sad. This one died of tuberculosis, that one died of scarlet fever. This one's going to die of starvation, it's rice to the liver. Like, it's like, just end it. I know. It's pretty, pretty fucking terrible. Yeah. I hope that it makes a lot of sense to me that they would have been asleep.

yeah of course yeah that's the most logical thing yeah like i didn't think about that but when like i read that in the intro to the five book i was like oh well it totally makes sense you know like because they're going to be passed out on the street whether they're like and like most of them were drinking so they're not going to hear you coming up behind them with their little clickety-clack shoes on the cobblestones you know so you can just kill them hold on you're looking at dead bodies. No. Anyways.

No, I'm just like reading some random stuff. Anyways, no, that's a fun story. It's fun. I don't know. It's too far in the past when we really give a shit, but I mean, I don't know. It sounds sad. I don't know. Sorry, I don't mean like, don't give shit. I mean, like, usually

it's like, oh, it's a sad story, but it's like, who cares? People all would have been dead, like, you know, three years after this happened anyways. Yeah, but I still, I care about it. I think I think it's so hard. It's so hard to be a woman now, even things like getting your period in this place. Like it just must have been so hard.

And having babies in like a gross workhouse situation and things like that. Just like you really didn't have a chance. Okay. Looking at 170 years after the fact, was it not worth it for them to lose their lives so that media could have so much fun content to go off of? I know, and that's on us. That's an indictment of all of us. We're the true killers. The parologists, yep.

Who are we? I mean, look at you. You're generating content. I know what I'm saying? You're not wrong. But I'm glad you're generating the content because I think it's a really interesting thing. Also, it really adds to the bestique of like old-timey London where it's like, you can just like kind of close your eyes and like imagine like just like someone. secretly like walking through like the cobblestone alleys with like a trench coat on like it's foggy and like

a little rat stories out on the side like it i mean a thousand percent it's a whole vibe like it is like when you when you ask about Halloween horn night like mm-hmm all they're really trying to ultimately create is that moody of an atmosphere if you weren't inside when the sun went down like good luck you know again something you would say it about modern day skid row yeah totally totally um yeah pretty terrible also there's like um the yeah the yeah oh oh oh oh they're looking at these pictures again um yeah it's just a hard it reminded me a little bit of like the other day i got in the i was in a parking lot whatever and i got in the car and immediately i locked my doors and i was thinking to myself oh i have to

remember to teach Florence that you know because like that's like you have to do that immediately and then like you know if we talk about this all time like all the times I would walk home with my keys in my hand just in case you know like in New York in Queens like in like places that like are a thousand times more safe than Whitechapel in 1888 but still never 100% safe you know I got home yesterday Luna was sold the border and like you've seen my house but you've never been here when it's like night and like when it's night and you're alone in the house and like everything is a window around you. I know, I was going to say,

I feel like you have not put curtains up, have you? No, I have not. It is a little bit like, okay, somebody could just like walk straight at my yard and just be staring at me in bed. And usually I don't even think about it because it's like Luna's here. And like, she's so horrible.

But she's just a mean dog. And like, it makes me comfortable that she's so mean. Yeah. I mean, I get that feeling too of like the vulnerability of like somebody could be out there. somebody could be trying to get in like it's freaky and i think we don't think about how dangerous it is to be you know an unhoused person on the street you know someone could stab you like you said because you're vulnerable because you're sleeping yeah like you said in

your sleep one you know like at some point your body has to shut down so whether you find like a little dark corner to sleep in or like you know a tent in skid row or something like it's not safe you should also get curtains it's weird um lost angels watch of that. That is a documentary from 2010 filmed on Skid Row interviewing eight individuals who ended up there and it is

the stuff you hear that those people experience like crazy. Yeah. You wouldn't wish that on anybody. I know. That's really sad. Taylor, thanks for sharing.

We'll leave it on a upbeat note. Woohoo. Yeah, read any of the thousand books in Jack the Ripper. They're all fun. It's fun to be like, I think it's this guy. I think of this guy. I'd be like, wait a minute, there's this. You know, oh, that's fun.

Do you have anything to sign us off with? I do not, but happy Halloween, everyone. I hope you had a nice October. And thank you for listening. Find us on all socials at DoomdefellPod. Email us. Doom tofellopod. Gmail.com.

Great. Who do you think, John? the Ripper is. Tell me. Let me know. That'll be a great thing to write in about. Or Zodiac. But it was obvious, oh, my God, if you are the Zodiac, please call us. Or if you, like, found a letter in your grandpa's house that, like, confirmed

that he was Zodiac, you're not sure where to go with that information. We'll take it. We get press immunity. Mm-hmm. Because we're pressed. Yep. We can scoop that. It would be awesome. Sweet. We'll go ahead and cut things off. Thank you.

Thank you.