Mind of a Serial Killer - Jack the Ripper Pt. 1

Episode Date: March 2, 2026

Jack the Ripper remains one of the most infamous unsolved serial killers in history. His brutal crimes shocked Victorian London and continue to grip the true crime community today. Despite numerous suspects, modern forensic attempts, and over a century of investigation, the identity of Jack the Ripper remains unknown. If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow Serial Killers & Murderous Minds to never miss a case! For ad-free listening and early access to episodes, subscribe to Crime House+ on Apple Podcasts. Serial Killers & Murderous Minds is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios 🎧 Need More to Binge?  Listen to other Crime House Originals Clues, Crimes Of…, Murder True Crime Stories, Crime House 24/7, and more wherever you get your podcasts! Follow me on Social Instagram: @Crimehouse TikTok: @Crimehouse Facebook: @crimehousestudios YouTube: @crimehousestudios 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

Hi, it's Vanessa. If you're drawn to true crime stories about disappearances, there's a new crime house original you should check out. It's called The Final Hours, hosted by Sarah Turney and Courtney Nicole. Sarah's an advocate for missing and murdered victims whose own sister disappeared in 2001. And Courtney is a true crime storyteller who's seen firsthand how crime can change a family forever. Together, they bring lived experience to every case, examining the moments just before a person disappears, the routines, the timelines, the small

details that often get overlooked, because every disappearance has a moment where everything still feels normal until it doesn't. Listen to and follow the final hours on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday. This is Crime House. When it comes to serial killers, it's no. secret that women are the most vulnerable targets. That's especially true for sex workers. And this tragic trend goes all the way back to history's most notorious serial killer, Jack the Ripper. In Victorian-era London, Jack went after some of the city's most financially disadvantaged

women. His gruesome methods led to a media frenzy, which only created more noise for him to hide behind. As people's fear, frustration, and fascination grew, Jack found ways to commit the most shocking murders England had ever seen, and gave rise to the definition of a serial killer as we know it. The human mind is powerful. It shapes how we think, feel, love, and hate. But sometimes it drives people to commit the unthinkable. This is serial killers and murderous minds. A Crime House original. I'm Vanessa Richardson. And I'm forensic psychologist, Dr. Tristan Engels. Every Monday and Thursday, we uncover the darkest minds in history, analyzing what makes a killer.

Crime House is made possible by you. Please rate, review, and follow serial killers and murderous minds. To enhance your listening experience with ad-free early access to each two-part series and bonus content, subscribe to Crime House Plus on Apple Podcasts. Before we get started, be advised that this episode contains discussion of murder, disembowlment, and mutilation. Please listen with care. Today, we start our deep dive on history's most infamous and unidentified serial killer, Jack the Ripper. In 1888, Jack terrorized East London.

He targeted women who were struggling to get by and killed them in some of the most gruesome ways imaginable. In the process, he became a media sensation, and his story continues to haunt us today. As Vanessa goes to the story, I'll be talking about things like why some killers target those who are the most vulnerable, how their own past trauma can lead them to act impulsively, and once their impulses are satisfied how they find ways to keep upping their thrill. And as always, we'll be asking the question, what makes a killer? In the 1880s, London's Whitechapel neighborhood felt like hell on earth to many of its residents. It was one of the city's most densely packed slums, full of poverty and violence.

Women in Whitechapel were especially vulnerable since they hardly had any financial independence. They were entirely dependent on their husbands to make a living, which meant if their husbands left them or died, they had nothing. When that happened, a lot of women in this position turned to. sex work, and this only made them more vulnerable. Because by 1888, Whitechapel was not only rife with thieves, brawlers, and drunks, it also became the hunting ground of one of the most violent serial killers the world has ever seen. This grisly chapter in London's history began in the early morning hours of August 31, 1888.

43-year-old Marianne Nichols was hoping to make some quick cash. Marianne was a divorced mother of five. She'd been down on her luck ever since her marriage ended after 22 years. It's not clear why she and her husband split, but now Marianne was struggling to get by. She bounced around various lodging houses in Whitechapel, where she could rent a room on a short-term basis. She was required to pay a nightly fee to secure her spot.

Cash was often hard to come by, so Marianne resorted to sex work to make ends meet. Prolonged exposure to environments where crime, violence, and instability are a daily part of life, which unfortunately is common in poverty-stricken areas. The nervous system adapts to that. What might feel shocking or alarming to someone in a safer setting can start to feel routine to someone in these settings. Over time, that can look like desensitization. Danger feels normalized, and the threshold for what registers as risky is vastly different.

And when you're constantly struggling to survive like it sounds like residents of Whitechapel were with food and security over crowding and illness, immediate survival needs are prioritized. Chronic financial strain and scarcity taxes people's cognitive bandwidth, too, because if you're constantly worried about how to meet your basic needs, risky options do seem like viable choices to do that. So sex work, even theft, are choices that might shock people who aren't living in poverty and aren't in these conditions. and who aren't living in a constant state of survival, but to those who are living in those conditions, it's necessary. It's what leads them into high-risk behavior to begin with when, if given more favorable circumstances, they may never have considered it to begin with.

How might that alter someone's sense of trust in other people? And even if their trust is low, how might they weigh that against more urgent needs, like having a roof over their head at night? All experiences shape how we trust, But I think living in chronic instability where betrayal and exploitation are common, trust is often more cautious or conditional. People become more alert. They read people in the room more readily because they've needed to adapt to survive.

But at the same time, they might trust situations that others wouldn't because their urgency can override trust in situations it wouldn't for others. So this might mean going with a stranger because they're offering payment or shelter or relief from the street. The decision to do that isn't rooted in trust so much as it is necessity. It's a calculation they're making under pressure, where in reality, all available options to them carry risk. But unfortunately, the least dangerous choice might still be dangerous to someone in these conditions. Well, for many women like Marianne, sex work was the only job that allowed her to make some extra money in a pinch, which was the situation she found herself in that August night. It was 2.30 a.m., and Marianne had spent all her money at the pub. If she went back to the lodging

house empty-handed, she'd be kicked to the curb. So before going home, she set out toward Whitechapel Road to find a client, heading northeast toward another street known as Buck's Row. Nobody knows exactly what happened next, but as she meandered down a dark alley, Marianne may have noticed a well-dressed man walking toward her. When they approached each other, Marianne offered her services and the man was extremely receptive. They ventured deeper into the alley together where they were less likely to be seen. Once they were alone, the man's demeanor quickly changed. He pulled out a knife and attacked Marianne. She barely had time to process what was happening before he sliced her throat. All it took was one swift motion and Marianne collapsed to the ground.

Then the man cut two deep gashes across her abdomen, as well as one vertical cut from her lower ribs to her pelvis. What happened after that has remained mostly a mystery, but soon Whitechapel locals would discover the gruesome murder and start to piece things together. By the time the killer was long gone, a carriage driver named Charles Cross was headed to the stable yard to start his shift. As he walked down Buck's row, something caught his attention. It looked like a bundle of cloth lying on the ground. Charles walked over to inspect it. In the dark, he couldn't see all the blood. But he could make out that it was a woman lying unresponsive.

Her legs were splayed into the street, and her skirt was hoisted above her knees. Charles thought she may have had too much to drink and passed out. Before he could think of what to do next, he heard footsteps from behind. He turned to see another carriage driver, a man named Robert Paul. Charles called Robert over, and he agreed that the woman was probably drunk. She was lying halfway in the road, which they knew wasn't safe. So Charles leaned down and tried to wake her up, but it didn't work. So he gently touched her hand and realized it was ice cold.

Charles was startled, so Robert crouched next to him and touched the woman's chest to see if she was breathing. It seemed like she was, but her breath seemed shallow. Robert said they should sit her up, but Charles didn't want to touch her again, so instead they pulled her skirt down and went off in search of a police constable who could help her. When people unexpectedly come across a scene like this, most often the reaction is a mix of instinct and uncertainty. How that plays out depends on factors like environment, time of day, and context. In this case, Charles is a mix of instinct. initial instinct or assumption of the situation given the location, the position of her body,

and the early hour was that she was intoxicated. He made that assumption based on potential biases. But at the same time, when a situation isn't immediately clear or the environment is ambiguous, the brain often defaults to the least threatening explanation. She's intoxicated, not deceased. It's a way of buying time emotionally and cognitively before accepting. that something more serious may have happened. There's also the concept of diffusion of responsibility. When more than one person is present at a scene like this, individuals often feel less personal pressure to take full control.

Each person looks to the other for cues about how serious the situation is. If both men felt uncertain, that shared uncertainty could slow any action because each is going to assume that the other might step in. But also, most people aren't medically trained. And once they realize that Mary may be in serious distress, the responsibility may have shifted or diffused in their minds to someone that they believed was better equipped to help. Seeking out a constable would have felt like the appropriate next step to them, and it's one many people do and have done in very similar situations. Charles and Robert figured that the woman, who'd soon be identified as Marianne Nichols, would be okay.

So their main priority was getting to work on time. But soon, the people of Whitechapel would learn of the nightmare that had taken place. After Charles and Robert left, a constable named John Neal happened upon Marianne's body. Unlike the other men, Constable Neal had a lantern. He held it over her. Then he jumped back at the sight of her throat, covered in blood. Robert had been wrong. She wasn't breathing, at least not anymore.

Neil quickly sent for the town medic, Dr. Llewellyn. who arrived around 4 a.m., he examined the body, then cast a grim look toward Constable Neal. Mary Ann's injury was no accident. She'd been killed, and based on how warm her arms felt, he guessed it had happened within the last half hour. As the two men processed the horror, another constable joined them. Charles and Robert had notified him. He relayed their story to Dr. Llewellyn, who realized the killer must have fled the scene right before Charles got there.

Before the doctor could speculate any further, he noticed the ambulance approaching. So back then, ambulances consisted of two men pulling a wooden hand cart. The constables lifted Marianne onto the cart, and that's when Dr. Llewellyn noticed the large pool of blood underneath her. Now he questioned his original theory. This attack had been far more gruesome than he'd thought, but Charles and Robert didn't hear any screams.

He started to wonder if the crime had occurred elsewhere and the killer moved the body to this spot. There are a range of reasons an offender might move a body, and they generally fall under a spectrum from practical to symbolic. From a practical standpoint, moving a victim often reflects awareness and problem solving. The offender might be trying to avoid detection, delay discovery, or relocate the body to a place that offers more concealment. The fact that he sliced Mary's throat first strengthens this theory because it makes it difficult for her to scream for help. That's concealment. And it also suggests risk management and an understanding of consequences.

In a crime of this magnitude, the offender may have been trying to remain unseen or unheard during this salt and then later left the body somewhere it would eventually be discovered because perhaps they wanted that. So on a more symbolic end, moving a body and position. positioning it can sometimes reflect a need for control. When a victim is deliberately posed, it can indicate continued dominance or an attempt to shape how the scene is interpreted. In Mary's case, her skirt being, quote, hoisted above her knees could be meaningful, but it could also be incidental to the assault or from being dragged post-mortem. So body movement can suggest planning,

control, and post-crime awareness, but really it tells us that the offender remained cognitively engaged after the attack and made a decision about how the crime would be discovered. This killer was obviously he knew what he was doing with this attack, and moving the body would require a certain level of comfort handling a corpse. What are those things suggest about his psyche? Well, first, that would suggest that they have the ability to remain very functional after such a brutal attack. So the injuries that you described are significant, but they also require quite a bit of strength on their own to carry out. He was able to carry out these actions with focus and agility and retain enough focus and strength to relocate her body with that level of blood loss without

being seen. It's very hard to move a body. So that's hard to fathom. But how were there no blood trails, too? That's what I wonder. And then second, the willingness to handle her body after an act like that shows a significant aversion to death and bodily trauma. This is someone desensitized to it. So they likely had prior exposure to death and violence, or at the very least, a very strong capacity to compartmentalize what they are doing. There's definitely significant emotional detachment here to carry out such an act. It can also point to behavioral rehearsal or fantasy life. Some offenders mentally rehearse violent acts like this long before they carry them out, and when the real event happens, they may move through it with disturbing efficiency because,

psychologically, it feels familiar to them. It's something they've been waiting to do. This is someone who could suppress normal emotional responses and remain cognitively organized and aware of their surroundings under pressure instead of fleeing in a panic. And that level of psychological control is often seen in offenders who are operating from a place of fixation, fantasy, and deeply internalized anger. Well, Dr. Llewellyn knew he and the rest of the investigative team had their work cut out for them. And the task only loomed larger when he examined Marianne's body more closely at the mortuary and discovered the stab wounds on her abdomen. The severity of the wounds was shocking enough, but then Dr. Llewellyn realized that Marianne had been completely disemboweled.

He called for Constable Neal, who'd accompanied him to the mortuary. The men knew they had to find whoever did this and fast. They searched Marianne's clothing for clues about her identity. And on the inside of her petticoat, they found a stamp that said Lambeth Workhouse. A workhouse was a type of boarding house where people performed hard labor in exchange for shelter and food. There were dozens in London at the time. And while it's unclear exactly when Marianne stayed there, authorities asked some women who currently lived at Lambeth to see if they could identify her. Soon, investigators confirmed that the victim was Marianne Nichols. They weren't able to learn much about Marianne's life, but they suspected that, like many women at the time, she'd turned to sex work after falling on hard times.

That would explain why she was roaming the streets at that hour. It would also mean one of her patrons was most likely the culprit. And they'd soon learn Marianne probably wasn't his first victim. In the early morning hours of August 31, 1888, 43-year-old Mary-Ean, Anne Nichols was found dead in London's Whitechapel neighborhood. Her throat had been cut and she'd been disemboweled. Investigators quickly pieced together that Marianne was a sex worker who'd likely been killed by one of her clients. Now they were faced with a haunting realization that a killer might be hunting down sex workers because weeks earlier another woman had been killed in a similar fashion.

On August 7th, the body of a sex worker named Martha Tabram was found dead in an apartment building. She'd been stabbed 39 times in the throat, heart, lungs, liver, spleen, and stomach. Now that Marianne had been killed with similarly violent methods, investigators wondered if the same man was behind both crimes. What happened to Martha would be classified as overkill, which is more injury than needed to call. death. That is often associated with rage, personal grievance, or displaced anger. That doesn't mean the offender knew the victim personally, though. Sometimes the victim represents something the offender resents, or they symbolize humiliation or rejection, for example. In this case, it could be that they are women, or it could be that they are sex workers or both. Regardless of the

reason, though, victim's selection is targeted and more often about vulnerability and accessibility, and women, especially women in poverty in an area like Whitechapel back then, were readily exposed to strangers, they were isolated at night, and had limited protection or even family. That's a desirable target for a predator like Jack the Ripper. Now, the violence itself reflects emotional volatility, but the victim selection is definitely targeted and strategic. Especially if this offender is someone who had fantasies and urges that they're not carrying out, they are not choosing victims at random.

These killings happened before the term serial killer had come into use. That wouldn't happen until like 100 years later in the 1970s. So what effect could the news of this string of likely targeted killings have had on the people of Whitechapel? Yeah, term or not,

the impact is still very real and very intense, especially in an environment like that. Most who live there, as we understand it, are living in survival mode as it is. They live in poverty, scarcity, and fear just trying to meet their basic needs. And now there's violence in their community that exceeds anything they've ever known

or anything they know how to anticipate. And if sex work is their means of survival, and that's now being targeted in an extremely brutal way, and there's no lead on who is doing this, this will make people more vigilant, terrified, and suspicious than they already are. Threat response systems will be on overdrive. The entire community will be affected on a very deep level.

There's also a strong psychological need for explanation. When people can't identify who is responsible, rumors begin. Communities often start to speculate. They blame outsiders or accuse marginalized groups. That can increase social tension and mistrust, sometimes more than the crime does itself. There's always a ripple effect of crime. So as news and rumors of these gruesome murders spread across town,

people's fear caused palpable tension. Soon it was clear that the killer thrived on that feeling, because in early September 1888, he seemed to strike again, and this time his brutality reached unthinkable levels. In the early morning hours of September 8th, about a week since Marianne's death, 47-year-old Annie Chapman roamed Whitechapel's shadowy streets in search of a client. Like Marianne, Annie had also been married with children. Unfortunately, one of her children had died of meningitis and another was severely disabled. She'd started drinking as a way to deal with her grief and stress,

and soon her alcoholism destroyed her marriage. Annie's husband still gave her an allowance after they split, but when he died in 1886, she lost her only form of income. Annie had moved to East London and started selling crocheted goods. she made a little money, but not enough to live on. So as she bounced between lodging houses, she took up sex work to pay the bills. On September 8th, Annie was strapped for cash.

The owner of the lodging house where she was staying was going to kick her out. So she went out in search of work. She'd been drinking, so she was a little unsteady. But as she made her way down one of the alleys, a man spotted her and knew exactly what her business was. He approached her and asked to pay for her service. and Annie agreed. Around 5 a.m., they likely slipped into a dark part of the alley.

Once they were completely out of view, the man lunged at Annie. She screamed as he reached for his knife, but then he stopped himself. He put his knife away and instead grabbed Annie by the throat with one hand and muffled her face with the other. He watched as she struggled to breathe. Finally, Annie's body went limp. He dropped her to the ground. then pulled his knife back out and sliced her throat so badly he almost beheaded her.

But he still wasn't done. Just like with Marianne, the killer sliced Annie's abdomen. However, he took things even further. He reached in, pulled out her intestines, and draped them over her right shoulder. After that, he cut out her uterus and took it with him as he escaped into the night. This level of escalation suggests the violence is becoming more psychologically immersive for the offender. Earlier, the injuries were severe, of course. Here, the offender appears to spend additional time engaging with Annie's body in a more deliberate and very intrusive way.

We talked about posing or staging bodies earlier, but this is much deeper. Positioning organs on the body introduces a communicative element to the crime scene. whether consciously intended as a message or not, staging behavior can indicate that the offender is no longer focused on the act itself, but on how the scene will be discovered. Remember, he's starting to thrive on the fear in the community, and this could be him playing on that. This, to me, suggests that he wants an audience. Now, the removal of her uterus could be symbolic. Reproductive organs can represent sexuality, identity, power, and vulnerability. targeting and removing it can indicate a deeply distorted fixation about control over women's bodies.

But he didn't just remove her uterus, he took it with him, which could be trophy collecting behavior. He may have wanted a reminder of the event, allowing him to revisit the emotional or fantasy components of the crime afterward. That suggests to me that he is deeply preoccupied and ruminating between offenses. But what's also notable here is the increasing boldness he has. spending more time at the scene, engaging in more complex surgical acts, and leaving the body in a highly altered state, all suggest that he felt confident enough to take greater risks. So this progression indicates a killer whose behavior is becoming much more ritualized, more symbolic, and more internally driven. This is fascinating that he took parts of her body, of Annie's body. Do you think it was more likely that the killer's goal was to keep Annie's uterus for himself? Or do you think he wanted to make sure her body was. found without it for some reason. It could be either or both, but psychologically, I think it leans more towards personal retention. This was already a highly altered staged scene.

If the goal had been shock value alone, leaving the uterus at the scene would have accomplished that instantaneously. Instead, its absence took time for investigators and medical examiners to recognize, which suggests that the removal may have had a more private meaning for him. Taking an organ also requires additional time and risk, which often points to the act serving a psychological purpose for him. And given the precision of the injuries, it wouldn't be surprising if he did keep it, at least temporarily, as a way of maintaining a connection to the event. That said, the reason for keeping it, I think, would differ from offenders we've seen in more modern cases like Jeffrey Dahmer, for example. What that would be, I'm not sure, but something about this feels prideful to me.

When Annie's body was found and constables arrived at the scene about an hour later, they realized just how difficult it would be to find this killer. They couldn't imagine what kind of monster would do this to someone. Adding to their challenge was the fact that the killer's MO was pretty much their only clue. Nothing was ever left behind at the scene to point them in his direction. Witness testimonies hadn't led to any progress either. so investigators started forming a profile of the killer based on his methods. Criminal profiles weren't an established practice at the time,

and in fact the profile created for the killer terrorizing Whitechapel is largely thought of as one of the first profiles ever developed. Due to the killer's anatomical knowledge and skill with a knife, the authorities believe he was most likely a butcher or in the medical field, and based on the fact that all the victims were women, and the killer had made a point of stealing Annie's uterus. They believed he was a loner who hated women, either because he'd been jilted by a lover

or because maybe his mother never loved him. By today's standards, this profile might seem overly simple, but at the time it was groundbreaking. Unfortunately, it didn't help investigators zero in on a suspect as quickly as they'd hoped, and that might be why the killer may have tried to lure them in. On September 27th, about two weeks after Annie died, reporters of the Central News Agency received a letter that was dated two days earlier.

It was scrawled neatly in red ink and started with, quote, Dear Boss. The writer claimed to be the killer. He started by mocking the police for not being able to catch him. Then he went on to express hatred for sex workers. He said he had fun killing them and had no plans to stop. Before signing off, he said he'd remove his next victim's ears and send them to the police. As vile as the letter was, the reporters weren't certain it was actually from the real killer,

but they didn't want to take any chances, so they mailed it to Scotland Yard. It arrived on the evening of September 29th, and investigators analyzed it right away. At first, they thought the same thing the reporters had, that the letter was someone's sick idea of a joke. But when the killer struck again, he did something that made authorities think he really did send the so-called Dear Boss letter. Later, on the night of September 29th, at around 11 p.m., 44-year-old Elizabeth Stride was out in search of a client when the killer spotted her outside a pub. She'd been talking to another man, but they ended up walking in different directions down the alley. So the killer followed her.

When he caught up to her, they were in a more well-lit part of town, somewhere less private than where the killer usually committed his crimes. He asked Elizabeth if he could hire her, but Elizabeth didn't seem interested in speaking to him. She tried to walk away, and that's when he attacked. He grabbed Elizabeth and tried to pull her down a dark alley, but she screamed and fought back. So he threw her onto the ground. But before he could do anything else, something caught his eye. He looked up to see a man standing on the other side of the street watching him. If the killer was selecting sex workers because they were accessible and symbolically represented something he resented,

then being refused by one would have felt especially threatening to a sense of self. That kind of rejection can register as humiliation. And individuals with traits like entitlement, superiority, and low empathy often struggle to tolerate perceived slights like. that. When their self-image is challenged, they may react with disproportionate anger, especially if they already view the other person as someone they should be able to control. So in that context, rejection can act as a trigger, intensifying the need to reassert dominance. That doesn't mean rejection caused his violence against her on its own, but it may have amplified emotional arousal in the moment, making him more likely to act impulsively and with less caution and without risk of appraisal.

From a profiling standpoint, though, when we see this kind of sensitivity to any kind of perceived humiliation combined with a need for control and dominance, we would often expect those dynamics to extend beyond the crime scene. So if this is an offender that had a romantic relationship, we would anticipate patterns of coercion, possessiveness, or controlling behavior in that relationship as well. These traits tend to be personality-based. not situational, meaning they often show up across multiple areas of a person's life. Does this behavior suggest that the profile of the killer was at least partially correct, that his hatred of women stemmed from being jilted in the past?

I think it's certainly consistent with that theory, though, without their history, it's hard to say for sure. But when an offender shows intense violence towards women, sensitivity to rejection, and a need to reassert dominance after humiliation like that, those patterns do align with a history of personal grievance or romantic rejection. And in profiling, we often consider whether unresolved anger toward a specific woman may have generalized into hostility toward women as a group. Sometimes, though, that starts with a caregiver like a mother, not a romantic partner. However, that being said, misogynistic violence doesn't always begin with a single triggering relationship. It can also develop from resentment, social isolation,

distorted beliefs about entitlement to intimacy or chronic feelings of inadequacy or inferiority. Sometimes the anger is less about one specific rejection and more about repeated, perceived failures in forming relationships and core beliefs that they have about women in general. The killer realized what a big mistake he'd made. But then, before the bystander could do anything, the killer spotted another man across,

the street. The second man was too far away to see what was going on, so the killer thought quickly. He'd noticed that the first man had what was described as Jewish features, and at the time London was riddled with anti-Semitism. So the killer yelled out an anti-Jewish slur, which caught the second man's attention. He looked up from his cigar, spotted the first man, and broke into a sprint chasing him down. Within moments, both men were gone. Once the coast was clear, Jack dragged Elizabeth into an alley where he slit her throat, killing her. However, as he prepared to mutilate her, he thought he heard someone coming again, so with his knife still in hand, he took off. About 15 minutes later, a different passerby finally found Elizabeth's body. He alerted the police,

who confirmed she was dead. They were surprised her injuries weren't worse. They'd been expecting a gory mutilation, like what happened to all the women before her. They had no idea that Elizabeth's death was only the beginning of the horror that night. If you're drawn to true crime stories about disappearances, there's a new crime house show for you to check out.

It's the new crime house original series, The Final Hours, hosted by Sarah Turney and Courtney Nicole. Sarah is an advocate for missing and murdered victims whose own sister disappeared in 2001, and Courtney is a true crime storyteller and investigator who witnessed firsthand how crime can change a family forever. Together they bring lived experience to every case, looking not only at what happened, but what led up to it. Each episode examines the moments just before a person disappears, the routines, the timelines, and the small details that often get overlooked. because every disappearance has a moment where everything still feels normal.

A text that doesn't raise concern. A routine that goes unchanged. A door that closes, just like it always has, until it doesn't. The final hours puts those moments under a microscope, because when it comes to justice, there's no such thing as over-analyzing. Listen to and follow the final hours on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you listen. New episodes every Monday.

On September 29, 1888, the killer who'd been terrorizing Whitechapel took the life of his fourth confirmed victim, Elizabeth Stride. Unlike his other victims who'd been mutilated and disemboweled, the killer only cut Elizabeth's throat. He probably planned on doing more, but he almost got caught and had to flee the scene. So as investigators responded to Elizabeth's murder, the killer went on the hunt for his next. victim that very same night. He had an urge to carry out all of his usual steps, and he wouldn't rest until he'd done it. The killer is someone who needs to be in control. He's ritualized. He controls the setting, the victim, the manner of death, their body after death, the way they're posed, what parts of them they get to keep, and what parts of them he gets to keep, and how they're found.

So being interrupted is the equivalent of losing his control. It's the equivalent of losing his control. It's the of interfering on his domain. It's also probable, like I mentioned earlier, that he is a fantasy-driven killer who is very likely to be preoccupied with these fantasies between killings, meaning he's been ruminating on this very moment for weeks to days

or however long it has been between kills. So there's been a buildup of tension and excitement and an interruption leaves a very powerful sense of incompletion and therefore strong frustration and agitation as a result. So after an interruption, or incomplete offense, some serial offenders do show a quicker return to offending behavior. In those cases, offenders may take greater risks, they might act more impulsively, or deviate from their usual planning, which can increase the chance of mistakes.

Again, not all offenders respond that way. Some become more cautious after a close call like this. It depends on personality, experience, and how the offender interprets the interrupted event. Well, it seems like this killer was completely fixated on conducting his ritual. After killing Elizabeth Stride, he walked for about 15 minutes before he found his next victim. 43-year-old Catherine Eddows had just been released from jail after being caught drunk in public that night. At around 1.35 a.m., she entered an area known as Mitre Square, and that's where the killer spotted her. Like all of his previous victims, Catherine was a sex worker, and when he approached her flirtatiously, she reciprocated. Then all of a sudden, the killer pulled out his

knife, and in one move, sliced Catherine's throat from ear to ear. Once Catherine was dead on the ground, he worked quickly. First, he sliced up her face, including her earlobes. Then he cut open her abdomen, removed her intestines and draped them over her right shoulder, just like he'd done to Annie Chapman three weeks earlier. He also removed Catherine's uterus, which he'd done to Annie as well. However, he then removed Catherine's left kidney, which he'd never done before. When the killer was finished, he cut off a piece of Catherine's apron to wipe his knife with, then took the piece of fabric and her two organs with him when he escaped.

After running for about 10 minutes, he stopped and picked up a rock, which he used as makeshift chalk to scrawl a message onto a building. He wrote that Jewish men were responsible for all the recent murders. Then he dropped the piece of bloody apron onto the ground and darted off. A few minutes after Catherine was killed, a constable discovered her body. He was stunned. This was the second victim that night. He immediately ran to find backup and, officers rushed to the area. Before arriving at the scene, one group stopped when they spotted the shred of bloody

apron on the ground, and when they looked up, they saw the chilling message on the wall. As they read, they tried to decode its meaning. They thought the killer might be trying to trick them, but they weren't sure how exactly. Maybe he wasn't Jewish and was trying to deflect blame, or maybe he was and was trying to make it seem like someone else was casting blame toward Jewish men. The constables went in circles until they realized they had no way of knowing what game the killer was playing. Sometimes this gaming behavior is strategic intended to misdirect investigators and shift suspicion toward a group or to create confusion because it slows an investigation. It also creates rumors and tension within the social climate, which can also redirect attention.

And this makes sense given what he yelled out right before Elizabeth's death. he could be playing off of that. But at the same time, when it comes to Jack the Ripper, no one has the faintest idea who he is. He's already possibly sent a letter taunting authorities and reporters, and now this. So this feels more like psychological gratification, too. It creates a sense of power,

not just over the victim, but over the narrative. He now gets to shape how the crime is interpreted. That can feed feelings of superiority, control, and intellectual dominance over authorities, but also the community, especially since he was nearly caught. There's also a performative element here. Crimes like this can become communication

where the offender feels they're in a back and forth cat and mouse with law enforcement. Even if the message doesn't clearly mislead investigators at all, the act of leaving it can be internally rewarding because it extends the crime beyond the physical act itself, much in the same way that posing and mutilating the body does. It's about control. How do certain social prejudices

is like anti-Semitism in this case, hinder criminal investigations. Well, it can certainly shape how they interpret new information and how evidence is viewed. Suspicion may be directed toward a marginalized group not because of proof but because it fits existing stereotypes, which is harmful in so many ways. Prejudice can also destabilize communities, which makes cooperation harder. If a group feels unfairly targeted, in which this case they are, they may distrust police, withhold information, or avoid engagement altogether. That loss of trust can deprive investigators of valuable leads in context. It can also turn communities against one another, making them more suspicious and afraid than

they already are of each other. The same can be said about sex workers as well. They're a marginalized and highly prejudiced group currently being targeted by a serial offender. Social bias like this interferes with objectivity. It pulls attention away from behavior and evidence and toward assumptions, which can delay or derail an investigation, and all that does is cause more harm. For now, all the officers could do was try and work with the concrete evidence before them. So they made their way to Mitre Square, where they gathered around Catherine's body. They confirmed that the fabric they'd found earlier had come from her apron, and they took note of all her injuries, including the cuts to her ears, which looked like. the killer had tried to remove them. The constables were stunned. Authorities had been notified of

the Dear Boss letter, where someone claiming to be the killer said he'd cut the ears off his next victim, but the public didn't know about that. When Scotland Yard heard what happened to Catherine, they realized the person who'd sent the letter might really be the killer after all. If that were true, he was playing a sadistic game of cat and mouse, and they weren't going to let him continue pulling the strings from the shadows. So on October 1, 1888, two days after Catherine Etos was killed, Scotland Yard released the Dear Boss letter to the public

in hopes the residents of Whitechapel could help catch him faster. Once people saw it, they also believed it was actually from the killer, and that's when they started calling him by the name he'd signed the letter with, Jack the Ripper. The killer now had a name.

Not only that, he said, seemed to be making contact with investigators, and he'd seemingly killed Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Etow's on the same night. The story gained more attention than ever. Reporters from all over the world flocked to East London to cover it. Suddenly, Whitechapel was swarming with journalists trying to get the latest scoop, which caused a major problem.

Because instead of sticking to the verified facts, a lot of reporters relied heavily on local gossip and speculation for their stories. And when they didn't have that, they made things up. Mainly, they published fake statements from fake witnesses that described the killer as having Jewish features or otherwise described him as quote-unquote foreign. A few dogged journalists even jumped headfirst into the investigation. They followed investigators, bribed constables, and wandered around dressed like sex workers to try and lure Jack in. But these antics only served, to muddy the official investigation.

Over the next couple of weeks, investigators received more letters that claimed to be from Jack the Ripper. The letters included gruesome details about the victim's deaths. One even threatened to kill three women in one night. However, the authorities could tell these letters weren't written by the same person

who wrote the Dear Boss letter, either because the handwriting was different or the more recent letters contained details that had already been reported on. And they blamed the press for sending hoax letters to drum up interest in their stories. Let's talk about media coverage, because law enforcement often relies on the media to enlist the public's help when they can't solve something or they're struggling with it. Someone generally knows something or saw something. But sensationalized media coverage not only draws people in, but it can cause problems too, like what you're describing.

People are drawn to mystery and uncertainty. We want answers. especially if it's in your own neighborhood. Unresolved tension keeps people coming back, and the media often amplifies this by emphasizing the twists and the clues and possibilities rather than facts. People are also threat monitoring, especially when there's an active sadistic serial offender on the loose. We are wired for survival and to pay attention to danger, so any information involving violence keeps our brains locked in. Another factor is vicarious experience. Sensational coverage lets people feel close to extreme events without being in danger themselves.

It creates safe distance from the horrors, which ironically makes it easier to engage with. But also, if the danger represents something that they themselves can identify with, that's even more compelling. And then there's the phenomenon of hoax confessions or attention seekers claiming to be the offenders. These people are often seeking a sense of importance, control, or excitement that they're lacking in their own lives. In addition, they're also lacking any consideration for what this kind of behavior does to the investigators, victims' families, and their friends, as well as their communities. How might in-group or out-group bias factor into the sensationalism around the Jack the Ripper story at the time, especially given the level of anti-Semitism and xenophobia there was in the false reporting?

That's a great question. Let's describe what that is first. In-group-out-group is a psychological tendency where people feel more. trust, empathy, and loyalty towards those that they see as part of, quote, their group, and more suspicion or negativity toward those that they see as outsiders are, quote, out group. These groups can be based on nationality, religion, language, class, neighborhood, or any other shared identity marker. Under normal circumstances, this bias can be subtle. But when fear enters the picture, especially fear of violence, it becomes stronger.

people instinctively look for someone to blame, and it often feels psychologically easier to place that blame on an out-group rather than someone who seems familiar or similar to themselves. So during the Jack the Ripper murders, there was already widespread anti-Semitism and xenophobia and Whitechapel. We saw how Jack the Ripper prayed upon this concept when he wrote anti-Semitic remarks at a crime scene. Sensationalized media coverage tapped directly into that by portraying training the killer as foreign or Jewish without evidence. So as we can see, this exacerbates sensationalism. It exacerbates rumor.

It causes harm and misdirection all throughout this investigation. The people of Whitechapel noticed that despite the constant barrage of headlines, the actual investigation was barely making progress. Even though Scotland Yard was looking into potential suspects, it never seemed to amount to anything. Frustrated with a lack of clear answers, citizens started forming vigilante groups. They patrolled the streets at night, armed with sticks, whistles, and lanterns, trying to catch the killer themselves. One of these groups was called the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee. It was led by a man named George Lusk, who'd formed it right after Annie Chapman's murder in September.

George was determined to stop Jack the Ripper. The committee was extremely active in the streets at night. practically everyone knew who they were, and that put George at the center of one of the most salacious stories yet. On October 16, 1888, two weeks after the double murder, George received a package at home. It came with a letter, which he opened first, and was shocked to read. The words from hell were scrawled at the top of the letter, which went on to say the sender had enclosed half of one of the victim's kidneys, and that he ate the other half. At the bottom, the letter was signed,

Catch me when you can. Like everyone else, George knew that Jack had taken Catherine Eddo's kidney. Now he had to see for himself if that's really what was in the package. He slowly unwrapped it, and when he looked inside, his blood ran cold, exactly as the letter had claimed, there was half a human kidney. George felt his stomach turn.

He quickly closed the box, then tried to collect his thoughts. This might actually be Catherine's kidney. On the other hand, it could be the work of a sick prankster, someone with access to human organs, like a medical student, or maybe it wasn't even human. George had no way of figuring it out on his own, so he weighed his options. He wasn't sure if he wanted to notify the police.

Not only did he have little faith in them, but he knew reporters were following their every move, and he didn't want to fuel the spread of more misinformation. Instead, George showed the kidney to two of London's top doctors, both of whom confirmed it was human. And once they were certain of this, they went to the authorities. From there, multiple experts weighed in to try and determine whether the kidney was Catherine's, but they couldn't reach a definitive, unanimous conclusion.

And despite how careful George had tried, to be, the press caught wind of the story anyway. Some outlets claimed the kidney was from a woman about Catherine's age, who appeared to have been a heavy drinker. Others said it was confirmed to be Catherine's. While investigators were considering these possibilities, none of it had been confirmed, but that didn't matter to the people buying and selling tabloids. To many in Whitechapel, this was the moment the story became too wild to control. Soon, people didn't know what to believe, which caused them to ignore some of the more legitimate reporting. And it was just as people turned a blind eye to the real, looming danger

that Jack the Ripper carried out his most gruesome and disturbing crime yet. Thanks so much for listening. Come back next time for the conclusion of our deep dive into Jack the Ripper. Serial Killers and Murderous Minds is a crimehouse original powered by Pave Studios. Here at Crime House, we want to thank each and every one of you for your support. If you like what you heard today, reach out on all social media at Crime House. Don't forget to rate, review, and follow serial killers and murderous minds wherever you get your podcasts. Your feedback truly makes a difference.

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