Speaker 1: Pushkin at the Lyceum Theater in London's fashionable West End.
Speaker 1: The lamp's dim and a hush falls over the audience.
Speaker 1: These spectators have come to see Richard Mansfield's celebrated performance
Speaker 1: in the strange case of Doctor Jekyll and mister Hyde.
Speaker 1: I have destroyed the balance of my soul. The evil
Speaker 1: power within me has masterly. Mansfield stars as Henry Jekyll,
Speaker 1: a respectable doctor who has secretly developed a potion that
Speaker 1: allows him to transform into the malevolent and murderous Edward Hyde.
Speaker 1: It is Hide now that controls Jekyl, not Jekyl. Hide.
Speaker 1: His metamorphosis from the upright doctor Jack into the stooped
Speaker 1: mister Hyde is astonishing. He contorts his body and facial expressions.
Speaker 1: He changes his voice and his gait too. Mister Mansfield
Speaker 1: contrives the marvelous transformation with wonderful adrogness. The change is
Speaker 1: amazing in its completeness and rapidity. This is a masterful
Speaker 1: piece of deception. Men are said to shudder at the
Speaker 1: fearsome spectacle, women to faint and be carried from the theater.
Speaker 1: But as the play continues its run into Autumn eighteen
Speaker 1: eighty eight, dark clouds gather over the production. Women are
Speaker 1: being murdered on the streets of Whitechapel, and to some
Speaker 1: Mansfield's genius for disguising himself arouses suspicion. After Kate Edos
Speaker 1: and Elizabeth Stride are killed, a troubled citizen addresses his
Speaker 1: concerns directly to the police. Dear sir, when I went
Speaker 1: to see mister Mansfield take the part of doctor Jekyl
Speaker 1: and mister Hyde, I felt at once that he was
Speaker 1: the man wanted, and I've not been able to get
Speaker 1: this feeling out of my head destroyed. I do not
Speaker 1: think there is a man living so well able to
Speaker 1: disguise himself in a moment. It appears that the police
Speaker 1: didn't take this writer seriously, but his fears underline something
Speaker 1: that's come to define the Ripper story and seen it
Speaker 1: become ever more grotesque, a tangling of fact with fiction
Speaker 1: and confusion about where reality ends and artifice begins. I'm
Speaker 1: Hallie rubbin Holt. You're listening to Bad Women. The Ripper Retold,
Speaker 1: a series about the real lives of the women killed
Speaker 1: by Jack the Ripper and how we got their stories
Speaker 1: so wrong. One side, money Plenty and friends too by
Speaker 1: the score. Then fortune smile upon me. Now one pass
Speaker 1: my dome Alney, I'm not with her. Fla seems to lonely.
Speaker 1: One come free for Rokcome to watch up murders latest details.
Speaker 1: In October eighteen eighty eight, the rippers murderous activities seemed
Speaker 1: to cease, but White Chapel did not go quiet. Interest
Speaker 1: in the killings thrived, and the atmosphere in the East
Speaker 1: End seems to have been almost carnivalesque. Rubber Necking Londoners
Speaker 1: filled the streets, speculating on the whereabouts of the murderer
Speaker 1: and hoping to glimpse his crime scenes. On the outskirts
Speaker 1: of this vast chattering excited assemblage of humanity. Cost among us,
Speaker 1: who sold everything in the way of edibles, from fish
Speaker 1: and bread to fruits and sweets, and newspaper vendors whose
Speaker 1: hoarse cries only added to the confusion of sounds heard
Speaker 1: on every hand, were doing exceedingly large trades. People from
Speaker 1: far beyond Whitechapel were also mobilizing to satisfy their appetites
Speaker 1: for the macabre. Apparently, the denizens of West London have
Speaker 1: begun to take a lively interest in the doings of
Speaker 1: the Whitechapel murderer. A very large number of cabs and
Speaker 1: private carriages containing sightseers have visited the scenes of the tragedies.
Speaker 1: Cottage industries sprang up to accommodate these strangers, as locals
Speaker 1: transformed their homes into miniature theaters, where for a fee
Speaker 1: one might watch the hustle and bustle of Whitechapel unfold
Speaker 1: and potentially its more sinister goings on too. Every window
Speaker 1: of every inhabited room in the vicinity was thrown open,
Speaker 1: and seats at these windows were being openly sold and
Speaker 1: eagerly bought. In the eighteen eighties, the practice of slumming
Speaker 1: had grown in popularity. Members of the wealthier, middle and
Speaker 1: upper classes would visit impoverished neighborhoods in order to learn
Speaker 1: how their social inferiors lived. In some cases, these visits
Speaker 1: were motivated by altruism, but others simply sought a cheap thrill.
Speaker 1: The horrors they brushed by threw into more brilliant relief
Speaker 1: the dane tenus of their own fair surroundings. Because a
Speaker 1: morbid curiosity craved the stronger sensations of real abominations, the
Speaker 1: Ripper murders, it seems, did nothing to deter the popularity
Speaker 1: of London's East End as a destination for slumming. From
Speaker 1: organized tours to rented rooms transformed ad hoc into viewing platforms,
Speaker 1: Ripper commerce was energetically underway. Victorian culture was very vigorous,
Speaker 1: and it could take any event, any sensational event, and
Speaker 1: transform it into a kind of cultural experience. That's writer
Speaker 1: and historian Matthew Sweet. Murderers always end up the subject
Speaker 1: of songs or little melodramas or plays. In the case
Speaker 1: of the Jack the Ripper murders, these were pretty soon
Speaker 1: processed into well a waxwork entertainment. Sculpting famous faces in
Speaker 1: wax was a popular way to part Victorians with their money,
Speaker 1: and notorious villain housed in chambers of horror or particular
Speaker 1: crowd pleasers, all kinds of monstrosities inside, only a penny
Speaker 1: for admission. This was not lost on the Whitechapel entrepreneur
Speaker 1: and showman Thomas Berry. Just a couple of years previously,
Speaker 1: a man named Joseph Merrick, who suffered extensive tissue over growth,
Speaker 1: had been exhibited in a shop on the Whitechapel Road,
Speaker 1: under his theatrical superque The Elephant Man. So the neighborhood
Speaker 1: was no stranger to trading on the monstrous, and Barry
Speaker 1: seems to have recognized its business potential. Can I see
Speaker 1: the amazing bearded lady? At his show? The curious could
Speaker 1: reportedly meet a champion female boxer, marvel at a woman
Speaker 1: who ate nearly six hundred pounds, and gape at a
Speaker 1: bearded lady said to be half gorilla, or for just
Speaker 1: a penny. But these weren't the only women on display.
Speaker 1: Berry added wax simulations of the Whitechapel murder victims to
Speaker 1: his Learned Museum, Apparently murder by murder. Polly Nichol's inclusion
Speaker 1: in the gruesome display was followed by a mannequin of
Speaker 1: Annie Chapman less than five days after she was killed.
Speaker 1: Long rows of vilely executed waxen figures and plaster busts
Speaker 1: propped up, some upright summer skew against either wall of
Speaker 1: the showroom, rigged out in the refuse of a petticoat
Speaker 1: Lane old clothes shop. Apparently Barry's macabre effigies weren't very lifelike.
Speaker 1: One newspaper suggested that Some of the sadly mutilated figures
Speaker 1: had been recycled from previous exhibits. These horrible objects are
Speaker 1: like nothing that ever lived or died, said a journalist
Speaker 1: who paid the show a visit. They can only be
Speaker 1: compared to the visionary offspring of an uncommonly severe nightmare,
Speaker 1: unearthly combinations of hideous waxen masks and shapeless bundles of rags.
Speaker 1: One of them is blotched with dabs of red ochre,
Speaker 1: indicative of the unknown assassin's butcherly handiwork. Barry's gruesome showmanship
Speaker 1: extended out into the street, too. Gaudy Placart's tempted passers
Speaker 1: by with the promise of further horrors inside his establishment.
Speaker 1: The prominent feature was that they were plentifully besmeared with
Speaker 1: red paint, this, of course, representing wounds and blood. Barry's
Speaker 1: neighbors weren't all in support of his business venture. Some
Speaker 1: reports suggest that a large and outraged crowd assembled to
Speaker 1: tear his posters down. Suppose you are all englishmen and
Speaker 1: women here, then do you think it right that that
Speaker 1: picture should be exhibited in the public streets? Before The
Speaker 1: woman's body is hardly cold, shame. Others claim that they
Speaker 1: were removed by the police. Barry himself went on trial
Speaker 1: for filling the White Chapel Road with visitors and thereby
Speaker 1: causing a public nuisance. Still the waxworks remained on display
Speaker 1: for months. Morbid fascination underpinned Barry's business, which was nothing
Speaker 1: new for the Victorians. In fact, certain murderers achieved a
Speaker 1: kind of sinister celebrity. Broadside ballads of the kind sung
Speaker 1: by Kate Edos had long recounted the diabolical deeds of
Speaker 1: criminals or repeated the remorseful confessions they made In the
Speaker 1: shadows of the gallows I murdered I once did love
Speaker 1: Harriet Seager. Some Victorian true crime enthusiasts even collected novelty
Speaker 1: porcelain figures of well known murderers, displaying them on the mantelpieces.
Speaker 1: But the Rippercase was of course different because it has
Speaker 1: no personality like that to organize itself around, so it's
Speaker 1: robbed of something. There's no star as it were in
Speaker 1: this show. There's no murderer for people to feel sentimental about,
Speaker 1: or to letters of proposition to while they're awaiting execution.
Speaker 1: As October eighteen eighty eight ruled on. Frenzied journalists and
Speaker 1: anxious readers continued to propose theories about the killer's identity.
Speaker 1: The Daily News says that some time ago, Texas was
Speaker 1: horrified by a similar series of murders. They have ceased.
Speaker 1: Perhaps the murderer has crossed the Atlantic and renewed his
Speaker 1: experiments in Whitechapel. A surgical theory comes from Paris that
Speaker 1: the murderer is a fanatical vivisectionist and disciple of Perkle,
Speaker 1: the German naturalist. The Burke and Hair theory that the
Speaker 1: murderer is employed to get anatomical specimens for some experimentalist,
Speaker 1: the Jekyll and Hide theory that the murderer lives two
Speaker 1: lives and inhabits two houses or two sets of rooms.
Speaker 1: The killer was a cipher avoid into which fears and
Speaker 1: fantasies might be projected, some of which have exerted an
Speaker 1: enduring influence over the story. Take the idea that Richard Mansfield,
Speaker 1: the star of Jaqueline Hyde, was the killer. Polite society
Speaker 1: was not entirely at ease with the notion of slumming,
Speaker 1: and there was a powerful fear that seemingly respectable gentlemen
Speaker 1: might surrender to their basest urges. In the debauched surroundings
Speaker 1: of Whitechapel, a west End doctor Jekyll might so easily
Speaker 1: become an East End mister Hyde, and doctors in particular
Speaker 1: were viewed with suspicion. Far from being beneficent healers. In
Speaker 1: the popular imagination, medics were often seen as scalpel happy,
Speaker 1: sadists or obsessives, driven to ghastly extremes to further the
Speaker 1: medical knowledge. When it was suggested to the police that
Speaker 1: the killer of Polly Nichols required some anatomical knowledge to
Speaker 1: inflict the wounds as he did, it reinforced the widespread
Speaker 1: sentiment that an educated medical man could easily be the murderer.
Speaker 1: That way of seeing the ripper as a respectable person
Speaker 1: who transforms into a monster to commit these crimes is
Speaker 1: something that the case has never really shaken off. So
Speaker 1: I think in a way, the ripper has never escaped
Speaker 1: doctor Jekyll, and in a way, doctor Jekl has always
Speaker 1: been sort of one of the suspects. The ripper retold,
Speaker 1: we'll be back in just a moment. The days of
Speaker 1: October eighteen eighty eight ticked by with no further murders,
Speaker 1: but interest in the case reached fever pitch. It was
Speaker 1: during these weeks that the infamous from Hell letter was received,
Speaker 1: along with the human kidney that had supposedly been removed
Speaker 1: from kate Edos. This mailing was most likely a sick
Speaker 1: hoax that had added yet more fueled the raging fire
Speaker 1: of public interest. Everyone seemed to have an opinion on
Speaker 1: how to end the killings. It is suggested that the
Speaker 1: whitechapple prostitutes should walk in couples and that every street
Speaker 1: walker should carry a pistol. Journalists and newspaper readers seemed
Speaker 1: united in the view that the police needed to raise
Speaker 1: their game and shared suggestions on how h division could
Speaker 1: remedy its lack of success. In certain parts of London.
Speaker 1: Every policeman ought to have the right of stopping and
Speaker 1: searching anyone to see if he carries a knife. Another
Speaker 1: idea is to draw a line round the area of
Speaker 1: the murders, constitute a number of temporary police stations, and
Speaker 1: make every man living in the area report himself before
Speaker 1: going to bed. These suggestions varied in their seriousness. Policemen
Speaker 1: have mostly big feet, where thick boots and have a
Speaker 1: heavy tread. If they wore rubber shoes, they might come
Speaker 1: on the murderer unawares. Policemen should disguise themselves as women
Speaker 1: and act as decoys, though the policemen say they have
Speaker 1: beards and bass voices fatuous or not. What all these
Speaker 1: critiques pointed to was growing unease. No culprit had been apprehended,
Speaker 1: and few trusted that the lull and the murders would last.
Speaker 1: Could the police actually be relied upon to make the
Speaker 1: streets safe again? Sir? It was estimated in New York
Speaker 1: that every electric street lamp saved one policeman and was
Speaker 1: less expensive to maintain. The East End's inhabitants were in
Speaker 1: no mood to await improved street lighting. They were taking
Speaker 1: matters into their own hands. There was a move to
Speaker 1: bring vulnerable women indoors during the hours of darkness, and
Speaker 1: a number of charitable groups opened temporary refugees throughout White Chapel.
Speaker 1: Female residents avoided, if possible, venturing out at night and
Speaker 1: took in friends who didn't have lodgings. One woman, a
Speaker 1: sex worker called Mary jen Kelly, began offering sanctuary to
Speaker 1: acquaintances in the trade She invited them to stay with
Speaker 1: her in her tiny room at thirteen Miller's Court, right
Speaker 1: in the heart of the rippers killing ground. The Whitechapel
Speaker 1: Vigilance Committee, a recently founded neighborhood watch group, continued its activities.
Speaker 1: The Daily Telegraph reported that this band of tradesmen, which
Speaker 1: held meetings by night in a room above a pub,
Speaker 1: had two key objectives. First, they wished to publish far
Speaker 1: and wide their disagreement with the authorities handling of the investigation.
Speaker 1: With pen and ink, they drafted a flurry of angry
Speaker 1: letters and petitions. Second, with cudgels and whistles, they patrolled
Speaker 1: the district in the dead of night, hoping to catch
Speaker 1: the criminal of themselves. Some press reports hint that the
Speaker 1: constables of h Division took a dim view of these vigilantes,
Speaker 1: warning that should these zealous amateurs accost respectable citizens by mistake,
Speaker 1: they'd be in trouble. But despite all the activity, the
Speaker 1: killer still roamed free. Criticism of Scotland Yards inadequacies only increased.
Speaker 1: The Palmell Gazette, a paper run by the campaigning reformer
Speaker 1: WT Stead, led the charge, blasting the police force for
Speaker 1: its failures. London is the greatest city in the world,
Speaker 1: yet her detectives are at fault, utterly and apparently hopelessly,
Speaker 1: at fault because of this, because of that, because of
Speaker 1: the other. For there are as many explanations as there
Speaker 1: are explainers. There were rumors that the police force was
Speaker 1: turning on its own commissioner, Sir Charles Warren. This in
Speaker 1: fighting was reported on as far afield as Chicago. Warrem
Speaker 1: pays no attention to the public clamor for his resignation.
Speaker 1: He suspects, and probably with good reason, members of his
Speaker 1: own force with writing letters to the newspapers about him,
Speaker 1: and he has been making a big row about it.
Speaker 1: And then matters took a strange twist. After the murders
Speaker 1: of Elizabeth Stride and Kate Edo's on the same night,
Speaker 1: it was suggested that bloodhounds might help the police track
Speaker 1: the White Chapel fiend. Dogbreeder Percy Lindley indorse the initiative
Speaker 1: in a letter to the Times, though not without scoffing
Speaker 1: at the police. There are doubtless owners of bloodhounds willing
Speaker 1: to lend them if any of the police, which I
Speaker 1: fear is improbable, know how to use them. Commissioner. Warren
Speaker 1: saw Lindley's letter in the paper and hurriedly wrote to him, Sir,
Speaker 1: on subject of bloodhounds, perhaps you could answer a question
Speaker 1: I have put to many without satisfactory reply. Warren was interested,
Speaker 1: but skeptical could bloodhounds really work on a busy London street.
Speaker 1: Lindley was adamant that scenthounds could indeed track down the
Speaker 1: culprit if they were able to reach the next crime scene.
Speaker 1: Weakly enough, two dogs, Burgo and Barnaby, were obtained and
Speaker 1: trialed in a London park. The papers, however, were derisive.
Speaker 1: Shall jack the ripper's art surveil to battle Scotland yard forsooth?
Speaker 1: Quick on the flying murderer's trail? Unleash the bloodhound truth?
Speaker 1: The Palma Gazette published a ballad mocking the idea and
Speaker 1: the hapless commissioner. Where'er he skulk in hovel pent or
Speaker 1: through the street's red handed rome? I Charles, with sleuthhound
Speaker 1: on the scent, will hunt the miscreant home. Within weeks,
Speaker 1: the embattled Sir Charles Warren had tendered his resignation. Without
Speaker 1: that atmosphere of failure that surrounds Scotland, yard in this period,
Speaker 1: because it's perceived as politicized and incompetent. Historian Matthew Sweet Again,
Speaker 1: then you don't get Sherlock Holmes and the detectives who
Speaker 1: come after sort of riding to the rescue to tell us, well,
Speaker 1: you can't rely on these people, these flat footed imbeciles.
Speaker 1: You need to get some kind of human computer in
Speaker 1: to solve these mysteries for you. The genius private detective
Speaker 1: Sherlock Holmes made his literary debut the year before Polly
Speaker 1: Nichols was murdered, but it was only after the vicious
Speaker 1: and still unsolved Ripper killings that his popularity soared. Holmes
Speaker 1: is a reassuring figure. Nobody has been prosecuted for these murders,
Speaker 1: but Holmes can see everything. Holmes knows. The benighted police
Speaker 1: were baffled by scant evidence and a cacophony of conflicting
Speaker 1: witness statements. By contrast, the fictional Sherlock Holmes could read
Speaker 1: the world around him with total clarity. Holmes turned each
Speaker 1: clue and observation into a key to the mystery, a
Speaker 1: process he referred to as deduction, the idea that you
Speaker 1: can deduce something about a space in which a crime
Speaker 1: has taken place, that you can look careful at the evidence.
Speaker 1: You can take a scientific approach by forming hypotheses, testing them,
Speaker 1: and rejecting them. This is I think a key shift
Speaker 1: in the way that policing works. It becomes a more
Speaker 1: intellectual occupation, the space for thinking in it, and there
Speaker 1: is this class of detective who is supposed to be
Speaker 1: able to engage with the world in this much more
Speaker 1: sophisticated way. Holmes was ahead of his time. In fact,
Speaker 1: decades later, the real life pioneer of forensic science, Edmund Lockhard,
Speaker 1: instructed his students to read Sholock Holmes stories in order
Speaker 1: to better understand key forensic principles. The fictional Holmes is
Speaker 1: a first class chemist and publishes scientific papers. He gets
Speaker 1: down on his hands and knees, measuring and collecting details
Speaker 1: from crime scene. A fledgling forensic science existed before the
Speaker 1: Holmes stories began appearing, but the novel's prefigure some of
Speaker 1: its later developments, such as the revolutionary technique of fingerprinting
Speaker 1: by a man's fingernails, by his coat sleeve, by his boots,
Speaker 1: by his trouser and knees, by the colossities of his
Speaker 1: forefinger and thumb. By each of these things, a man's
Speaker 1: calling is plainly revealed. And only the second Holmes novel,
Speaker 1: and perhaps in a swipe at Sir Charles Warren, the
Speaker 1: master sleuth sends for a hunting dog, Toby, to help
Speaker 1: track down a murderer. Holmes says he values the scruffyhound
Speaker 1: more than the whole detective force in London. For Victorian readers,
Speaker 1: then Shrlock Holmes was an antidote to the poison of
Speaker 1: the Ripper murders, capable where the real police were bumbling,
Speaker 1: clear eyed and logical, with the true crimes taking place
Speaker 1: in white Shovel's stubbornly defied explanation. It's of little wonder, then,
Speaker 1: that Shall Holmes has been called on several times to triumph.
Speaker 1: Would the police failed and apprehend the killer? What was
Speaker 1: the name of this unfortunate prostitute, Polly Nichols? How did
Speaker 1: you know she was a prostitute? Take this nineteen sixty
Speaker 1: five movie a study in terror. Holmes in his sidekick
Speaker 1: doctor Watson are on the ripper's trail. No respectable woman
Speaker 1: would be out alone in the streets of White Chaplets
Speaker 1: such an hour. Therefore, she was not a respectable woman
Speaker 1: who make it seems so simple. Holmes has indeed made
Speaker 1: it seem simple. His famous deduction technique has fooled many
Speaker 1: of us into believing that the case might still be
Speaker 1: cracked if only we go over and over the remaining evidence,
Speaker 1: looking for that one vital clue that has been overlooked
Speaker 1: by less brilliant minds. This is nonsense. The crime won't
Speaker 1: be solved, but that hasn't stopped generations of authors and
Speaker 1: hobbyists concocting theories as fanciful as any novel by Sir
Speaker 1: Arthur Conan Doyle. Consuming these stories won't get you any
Speaker 1: closer to knowing the true identity of the killer, but
Speaker 1: what you will glean from them is a flavor of
Speaker 1: the sensibilities and anxieties that play in the eras when
Speaker 1: they were written. Jack the Ripper was a Russian obstetrician
Speaker 1: who was doing all these murders on behalf of the
Speaker 1: Zaris Secret Police to make Scotland Yard look stupid. So
Speaker 1: said the writer William LQ, who claimed in his nineteen
Speaker 1: twenty three autobiography that he had gone through the effects
Speaker 1: of the scandalous and sinister Russian holy man resputant and
Speaker 1: found an incriminating manuscript. Now this is a landmark because
Speaker 1: this builds the Ripper into a kind of conspiracist way
Speaker 1: of looking at the world that I think has been
Speaker 1: very influential and continues to be influential upon what we
Speaker 1: are pleased to call Ripperology. By the swinging countercultural nineteen sixties,
Speaker 1: Jack the Ripper is no longer a foreigner but member
Speaker 1: of the stuffy and sexually repressed British establishment. Jack the
Speaker 1: Ripper is perfect material for a kind of anti victorianism
Speaker 1: that goes totally mainstream in the sixties, that becomes an
Speaker 1: absolute orthodoxy in British and American culture. To the Victorians
Speaker 1: had an underworld where all these repressed bad things were kept,
Speaker 1: and Jack the Ripper was their bad conscience, arising from
Speaker 1: the feculence of the sewers in some strange kind of
Speaker 1: Freudian way. As the nineteen sixties turned into the Blika
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies, the Feverish conspiracy that the British monarchy had
Speaker 1: directed the murders to cover up the romantic entanglements of
Speaker 1: a prince took hold of the public imagination. You get it.
Speaker 1: In its most baroque and weird mutational form, where Queen
Speaker 1: Victoria herself is responsible, and that I think shows this
Speaker 1: at its most naked. That were blaming her really for
Speaker 1: Jack the Ripper. The Ripper retold will return shortly. So
Speaker 1: we've come to a barber shop. On the window it
Speaker 1: says Jack the Clipper, but it also says London born
Speaker 1: and bled. The spirit of Thomas Berry, the Victorian showman
Speaker 1: waxwork impresario is alive and well in Whitechapel, the Full
Speaker 1: Ripper for fifty two pounds and the Royal Ripper for
Speaker 1: seventy pounds. And I have no idea what actually that is,
Speaker 1: but obviously somebody enjoys having that done. Today. Whitechapel is
Speaker 1: a veritable Jack the Ripper theme park. Behind a black
Speaker 1: and red facade is the Jack the Ripper Museum. It's
Speaker 1: gift shop sells Ripper shot glasses and Teddy Bears. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: the Jack the Ripper and Sherlock Holmes, two of us
Speaker 1: deposits excited passengers in Whitechapel before whisked them across London
Speaker 1: to a Holmes themed pub. Now'm sure all of you
Speaker 1: here today do you know that Jack's victims were ladies
Speaker 1: of the night, weren't they? They were the chiefs? And
Speaker 1: at Miter Square were Kate Eddo's perished. You might encounter
Speaker 1: several different ripper tour groups at one time, their guides
Speaker 1: all delighting in the salacious and gory details of the
Speaker 1: women's death. Recording to Mautree, they realize that they left
Speaker 1: kidney in her in higher womb. Would you think whether
Speaker 1: the killer body ripped them from inside her and taken
Speaker 1: the willim He'd also taken only half of a white aprone.
Speaker 1: We went under cover on one tour. Our guide was
Speaker 1: proudly dressed in a cap coat and neckerchief, matching an
Speaker 1: eyewitness description of one ripper suspect. He later told us
Speaker 1: that when the location of Kate's murder was resurfaced a
Speaker 1: few years ago, he took one of the old cobblestones
Speaker 1: from the corner where her body lay as a dark memento.
Speaker 1: They're incredibly popular since they're from hell film. You saw
Speaker 1: far more guides out there, some of whom I've never
Speaker 1: seen before. You know, Andy Hallett takes visitors to London
Speaker 1: on many types of walking tours, but it's Ripper walks
Speaker 1: are something different. I mean I've arrived in Miter Square
Speaker 1: and there's eight or nine different groups there. I'm sure
Speaker 1: I've done walks when I've been talking to someone in
Speaker 1: the group and then a week later see them peddling
Speaker 1: the walk, you know, and they've just picked up, you know,
Speaker 1: having a go. Given the stiff competition, many guides fall
Speaker 1: back on the tried and tested methods of Thomas Berry,
Speaker 1: bringing with them laminated images of the mutilated corpses. Well,
Speaker 1: I don't like seeing any pictures of the women. I
Speaker 1: don't like seeing any pictures at the murder scene, photographs
Speaker 1: taking in the mortuary. You know, I'd never do that.
Speaker 1: I think it's horrible, just, you know, horrible things to do,
Speaker 1: and people do that. Yeah, I mean that's very popular
Speaker 1: for those who still have an appetite after all that gruesomeness.
Speaker 1: There's Jack the Chipper, a good old fashioned fishing ship
Speaker 1: shop with a twist. Wouldn't it possible to get one
Speaker 1: of your little fish and chip boxes? The chain wraps
Speaker 1: its meals in facsimiles of newspaper pages from eighteen eighty eight.
Speaker 1: These include images of the victims, which means you can
Speaker 1: literally eat your lunch of a drawing of Elizabeth Stride's
Speaker 1: dead body. Things are changing. People are increasingly voicing their
Speaker 1: concerns about how and where we tell the Jack the
Speaker 1: Ripper story. So the kind of stories don't we tell,
Speaker 1: the kind of things that we commemorate actually have an
Speaker 1: impactness is people's lives that we're talking about here. For example,
Speaker 1: since it opened its doors in twenty fifteen, the Ripper
Speaker 1: Museum has been targeted by protesters who rail against its
Speaker 1: tacky depiction of the murdered women, something that people should
Speaker 1: be making light of, or selling moths about, or selling
Speaker 1: t shirts about thy accompanying and just recently, a branch
Speaker 1: of Jack the Chipper was the subject of a neighborhood dispute,
Speaker 1: with locals criticizing the proprietor's exploitation of the victims for profit.
Speaker 1: We're going to talk about a shop in London and
Speaker 1: it's being boycotted because its name is Jack the Chipper.
Speaker 1: Now what a protesters saying about that? The owner had
Speaker 1: to go on national TV to offer a defense of swords. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and disdain most people, they love it. This is Jack
Speaker 1: the Chipper. I like that. In response to the public outcry,
Speaker 1: the chip shop offered a fifty percent discount of female customers,
Speaker 1: just to show they weren't there to be disrespectful. I
Speaker 1: give you fifty percent discount and everybody be happy. Several ethical,
Speaker 1: even feminist walking tours of Whitechapel have sprung up since
Speaker 1: you know your book, you know, I think it's changed
Speaker 1: and established. Guide Andy has totally revised his Ripper Walk
Speaker 1: in light of the new research on the victims. Traditionally
Speaker 1: it had always been that they were five prostitutes. You know,
Speaker 1: definitely talk about the biography of each of these women now,
Speaker 1: which I never did before. Really, the social history, which
Speaker 1: I think is incredibly important, and you know, the dignity
Speaker 1: of the women. But something of our own jacklin Hyde
Speaker 1: approach to these murders persists. We perhaps know we shouldn't
Speaker 1: look for entertainment in the bloody deaths of women like Polly, Annie,
Speaker 1: Elizabeth and Kate, but people still can't quite resist the temptation.
Speaker 1: They are interested in the graphic detail, of course of it.
Speaker 1: I mean, they're interested in horror stories. I mean people
Speaker 1: come along to it because they feel they're in a
Speaker 1: kind of safe place. But they could listen to this,
Speaker 1: you know, very graphic. You know parts of it which
Speaker 1: are very graphic. I mean we have people fainting, Yeah,
Speaker 1: we have either the other day someone fainted on the wall.
Speaker 1: You know what prompted the faint. Well, we're talking about
Speaker 1: we were talking about Annie Chapman and the murder of
Speaker 1: Annie Chapman, and she just you know, went over. At
Speaker 1: the end of my conversation with Matthew Sweet he recalled
Speaker 1: attending a conference were Patricia Cornwell's theory that Walter Sickard
Speaker 1: was the Ripper drew laughter from the audience. This woman
Speaker 1: got to a feat Latin American academic and she said,
Speaker 1: I don't know what you're all laughing at. There's nothing
Speaker 1: special about these murders. There are murders happening like this
Speaker 1: all over the world. Why are you English so stuck
Speaker 1: on Jack the Ripper? I think that academic had a point.
Speaker 1: Why are we so comfortable turning these despicable crimes into
Speaker 1: a thriving tourist trade or a punning name for a
Speaker 1: fish and chip shop. It has a lot to do
Speaker 1: with our lack of empathy for the victims. As long
Speaker 1: as we cling to the caricature of based prostitutes, we
Speaker 1: can hold them at arm's length, and they remain as
Speaker 1: real and human to us as the Tatty Wax Works
Speaker 1: and Thomas Berry's Chamber of Horrors. As October eighteen eighty
Speaker 1: eight turned into November, the roots of the lucrative ripper
Speaker 1: industry were still taking hold. The ghouls and thrill see
Speaker 1: because flocking to Whitechapel waiting for the Ripper to strike again,
Speaker 1: may have felt some slight disappointment that they had missed
Speaker 1: out on the drama. But the lull must have brought
Speaker 1: some comfort to the beleaguered residence of the East End.
Speaker 1: It offered enough respite to allow many to let down
Speaker 1: their guard, to begin to resume their regular nocturnal habits.
Speaker 1: Women like Mary Jane Kelly felt safe enough to begin
Speaker 1: to sleep alone, to go out at night, to feel
Speaker 1: perhaps that the danger had passed, that the Ripper was gone,
Speaker 1: but gone he had not bad Women. The Ripper Were
Speaker 1: Told is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and me
Speaker 1: Hallie ribbin Hold and is based on my book The Five.
Speaker 1: It was produced and co written by Ryan Dilley and
Speaker 1: Alice Fines, with help from Pete Norton. Pascal Wires, sound
Speaker 1: designed and mixed the show and composed all the original music.
Speaker 1: You also heard the voice talents of Ben Crow, Melanie Gutridge,
Speaker 1: Gemma Saunders, and rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have
Speaker 1: been possible without the work of mir La Belle, Jacob Weisberg, Jenguera,
Speaker 1: Heather Fane, Carli mcgliori, Maggie Taylor, Nicolemarino, The Talmulad, Eric Sandler,
Speaker 1: and Dan Yella Lakhan. With special thanks to my agents
Speaker 1: Sarah Ballard and Ellie Kron