Speaker 1: Pushkin. Jack the Ripper is closing in on Polly Nichols.
Speaker 1: He stalks the streets of Whitechapel, passing the same pubs,
Speaker 1: shops and doss houses as her. Soon their paths will cross.
Speaker 1: A common prostitute outselling sex will mean a monster driven
Speaker 1: to murder and mutilate walls. When I embarked my research,
Speaker 1: this was the story I thought I would be telling.
Speaker 1: But as I probed Polly's history, mining archives and scrutinizing documents,
Speaker 1: I found loose threads. And the more I pulled at
Speaker 1: those threads, the more the Jack the ripper myth unraveled.
Speaker 1: I'm Halley Rubert, hold, you're listening to Bad Women. The
Speaker 1: Ripper retold a series about the real lives of the
Speaker 1: women killed by Jack the Ripper and how we got
Speaker 1: their stories so wrong. One side, money plenty and friends
Speaker 1: too by the score. Then fortune smiled upon me. Now
Speaker 1: one pass my time, Aloney and not well Harf sees
Speaker 1: to lone me. I'm come free, walkout. So far we've
Speaker 1: traced Polly's humble beginnings in the printing district, her failed
Speaker 1: marriage to William Nicholls, and their separation. We followed her
Speaker 1: to the workhouse and working as a maid for a
Speaker 1: well to do couple, the Cowdrey's, a position she left abruptly.
Speaker 1: Polly absconded from the Cowdrey's home with good she could pawn.
Speaker 1: This pocketful of change lightly kept her out of the workhouse.
Speaker 1: By this point it was July eighteen eighty eight. She
Speaker 1: landed in Whitechapel, spending a few weeks at Wilmot's, a
Speaker 1: women only doss house, which would have been the safest
Speaker 1: lodgings available to her. Here she shared a room with
Speaker 1: three others, including one Ellen Holland. Polly and Ellen would
Speaker 1: occasionally split the price of a double bed. Ellen was
Speaker 1: the only person who appears to have formed anything like
Speaker 1: a friendship with Polly, and what we know of her
Speaker 1: in the final week, it's largely thanks to Ellen's testimony. Polly,
Speaker 1: she said, was melancholic. At this time. She was drinking,
Speaker 1: but she also kept herself to herself, as though some
Speaker 1: great trouble was weighing on her mind. In the woman
Speaker 1: who slept beside her, Ellen observed a personality folding in
Speaker 1: on itself, private, alienated and grieving. On the night of
Speaker 1: August thirty first, Ellen bumped into Polly on a dark
Speaker 1: Whitechapel thoroughfare. It was around twelve thirty am, and Polly
Speaker 1: was intoxicated. She'd spent the evening at a nearby pub,
Speaker 1: The Frying Pan, and she'd drunk away any money for
Speaker 1: a bed at the Doss house. She tried her luck,
Speaker 1: all the same, She'd told Ellen, but the deputy lodging
Speaker 1: housekeeper wasn't in the habit of handing up beds to
Speaker 1: penniless drunks. She had sent her on her way, not
Speaker 1: in shouts. Be off with you, Polly laughed and issued
Speaker 1: a sharp retort, also get my doss money. See what
Speaker 1: Johnny Barney I've got now. Those fourteen words would soon
Speaker 1: take on a life of their own. They would be
Speaker 1: translated into a tacit admission that she was a prostitute
Speaker 1: looking for a paying client. Two hours elapsed and Ellen
Speaker 1: encountered Polly again, this time slumped against a wall. Polly,
Speaker 1: is that you. Ellen tried to convince Polly to return
Speaker 1: with her to Wilmot's comeback with me, but she would
Speaker 1: not be persuaded. Polly stated she had made and then
Speaker 1: spent her lodging money three times over that day. It's
Speaker 1: likely she begged for this money. The clock on Whitechapel
Speaker 1: Church was striking half past two when the pair parted.
Speaker 1: Ellen watched her friend sway off into the darkness, unsteady
Speaker 1: on her feet. Perhaps Polly felt her way through the night,
Speaker 1: leaning on walls in an effort to balance herself. Fingers outstretched,
Speaker 1: she groped for a place that might become bed. She
Speaker 1: passed flat fronted brick cottages, which offered no convenient nooks
Speaker 1: or porches. Then the curb dipped and the wall became
Speaker 1: a gait set slightly back from the road. Perhaps Polly
Speaker 1: slid down to rest. Perhaps her heavy head slumped and
Speaker 1: her eyes eventually shut asleep took over. William Nichols was
Speaker 1: to see his estranged wife one last time. He had
Speaker 1: quickly assembled an outfit for the occasion, a black coat,
Speaker 1: tie and hat. It had been three years since he
Speaker 1: last encountered Polly, and police inspector Frederick Aberleine warned William
Speaker 1: that he might struggle to recognize her. The color visibly
Speaker 1: drained from William's face as the coffin lid was removed.
Speaker 1: The fatal gash across Polly's throat had been stitch closed,
Speaker 1: but her body was still mutilated by the long and
Speaker 1: terrible cuts and flicked did in the moments after her death.
Speaker 1: I forgive you as you are, said William to the
Speaker 1: body of the woman who, at eighteen had once been
Speaker 1: his girlish bride, who had borne six of his children.
Speaker 1: I forgive you an account of what you've been to me.
Speaker 1: The authorities investigating this strange and disturbing killing showed Polly
Speaker 1: less compassion in death than her estranged husband. In their notes,
Speaker 1: the first detectives on the scene wrote definitively that Polly
Speaker 1: was living the life of a prostitute. This baseless assumption
Speaker 1: warped the investigation from that moment on. Initially, just two
Speaker 1: possibilities were put forward. The first, this murder had been
Speaker 1: committed by a gang storting money from prostitutes. The second,
Speaker 1: a lone and crazed prostitute killer was behind this crime.
Speaker 1: Either way, the authorities in the press were convinced of
Speaker 1: one thing. Polly Nichols was selling sex that night. They
Speaker 1: thought that Whitechapel was full of women like Polly, and
Speaker 1: her involvement in this sordid and illegal trade had got
Speaker 1: her killed. This supposition then colored how the evidence was
Speaker 1: viewed and how the witnesses were questioned. It also seemed
Speaker 1: into the press reports on this crime. It is still
Speaker 1: the bedrock of the familiar Jack the Ripper murder story
Speaker 1: and the basis for endless theories about the identity of
Speaker 1: the killer. Trevor Marriott, for instance, believes that a visiting
Speaker 1: German sailor named Carl Fagenbaum is behind these crimes. You
Speaker 1: heard from Trevor in episode one. He's a retired detective
Speaker 1: used to working murder cases and a ripparologist. The London
Speaker 1: docks were very close to Whitechapel, and where you've got docks,
Speaker 1: you've got merchant salman who go ashore while the boat's
Speaker 1: in dark. And merchant seman are always matched with looking
Speaker 1: for prostitutes, and of course Whitechapel was rife with prostitutes.
Speaker 1: Faginborn had apparently confessed to having issues with women. Every
Speaker 1: so often, he had this urge to kill and mutilate women.
Speaker 1: Trevor isn't an expert on Victorian prostitution, but to his
Speaker 1: detective's brain, the pieces fall into place. Faginbonn wanted to
Speaker 1: find a woman to kill. Prostitutes made convenient victims. Prostitutes
Speaker 1: throng the streets of Whitechapel, and Polly was also in Whitechapel.
Speaker 1: Prostitution is the oldest occupation, isn't it. He's been around
Speaker 1: for many, many years, since time immemorial. And obviously you
Speaker 1: read between the lines. Obviously, when you've got someone like
Speaker 1: Polly Nichols that's wandering around at nighttime, drunk in an
Speaker 1: area that is known for prostitution, you know you can
Speaker 1: draw your own conclusions. Here's where I hit a snag.
Speaker 1: As far as Polly Nichols is concerned. There really is
Speaker 1: no proof of her selling sex. And if this part
Speaker 1: of the familiar Jack the Ripper story is inaccurate, is
Speaker 1: any of it? I get so deeply uncomfortable when people
Speaker 1: try to say, you know, these women were prostitutes. Julia
Speaker 1: Late is a historian at Birkbeck University of London and
Speaker 1: an expert on the city's sex trade. She says the
Speaker 1: evidence that Polly Nichols was a prostitute is flimsy at best.
Speaker 1: Given the evidence we have. We're just so reliant on
Speaker 1: the voices of male police officers to tell us who
Speaker 1: women were, and that fundamentally rankles me. I think just
Speaker 1: because a police officer wrote something down doesn't make it true.
Speaker 1: One of the things that always made me think this
Speaker 1: Jack the prostitution narrative doesn't quite add up is that
Speaker 1: the geography is slightly wrong. Julia says the vast majority
Speaker 1: of women who made their living selling sex would have
Speaker 1: been working not endowned Heel Whitechapel, but in the richer
Speaker 1: west end of London, which is where all the good
Speaker 1: customers were. It's where most of the nightlife was. But also,
Speaker 1: even if they were selling sex in the East End,
Speaker 1: they would have been working on busy thoroughfares, not in
Speaker 1: back alleys. And I know that the argument is, oh,
Speaker 1: they took the customer to this back alley, but it's
Speaker 1: just too flimsy. It's the very very wee hours of
Speaker 1: the night. Most women who were selling sex would have
Speaker 1: been home by that point. The main night crowd would
Speaker 1: have dissipated. There wouldn't have been much work, There wouldn't
Speaker 1: have been much reason to hang around continuing to solicit.
Speaker 1: What's more, women who were regularly selling sex would have
Speaker 1: had more money than Polly Nichols. They wouldn't be scrounging.
Speaker 1: They turned to sex works so that they didn't need
Speaker 1: to scrounge. The amount of money that even a very
Speaker 1: quote unquote low class prostitute, and I'm using the parlance
Speaker 1: of the time, there the amount of money that they
Speaker 1: could make dwarfed any other occupation they could perform. It's
Speaker 1: very suspicious to me that Polly is having such difficulty
Speaker 1: making ends meet if she's also supposed to be selling
Speaker 1: sex because she just have more money. What about the
Speaker 1: document that Polly was a so called casual prostitute selling
Speaker 1: sex just occasionally to make ends meet or put a
Speaker 1: roof over her own head in hard times. Well, this
Speaker 1: was a concern of police at the time. In mixed
Speaker 1: sex lodging houses, unmarried couples would rent rooms together, a
Speaker 1: phenomenon that the authorities regarded to be unconditionally a form
Speaker 1: of prostitution. What women might do is solicit a client.
Speaker 1: Perhaps I should keep my language more formal, because they
Speaker 1: may not have seen it as soliciting a client. They
Speaker 1: were probably far more likely to have seen it as
Speaker 1: meeting a man who will pay for the double room.
Speaker 1: You just need to have sex with them, and then
Speaker 1: you get a nice warm bed to sleep in at
Speaker 1: no cost to yourself. But the thing is, on the
Speaker 1: night she died, Polly Nichols wasn't in a nice, warm
Speaker 1: bed in a lodging house with a man. And if
Speaker 1: this kind of casual prostitution was the norm for her,
Speaker 1: why did she prefer the single sex accommodation at Wilmot's.
Speaker 1: Polly nichols staying at an all female lodging house is
Speaker 1: already a very clear sign that she almost certainly was
Speaker 1: not engaging in selling sex. Because women who are selling
Speaker 1: sex in the East End used those lodging houses as
Speaker 1: spaces to perform sex acts, that was their workspace. The
Speaker 1: ripper retold will return shortly. Determining who exactly was and
Speaker 1: who exactly wasn't selling sex in the eighteen eighties can
Speaker 1: be tricky. The term prostitute was applied so broadly so
Speaker 1: as to make any precise assessment of their numbers impossible.
Speaker 1: It was a sweeping label, often used interchangeably with homeless
Speaker 1: or vagrant. Society assumed that women who lived without male
Speaker 1: protection or a roof over their heads would do anything
Speaker 1: for food, drink, or a bed, especially sell sex. The
Speaker 1: eighteen twenty four Vagrancy Act further muddied the Waters. It
Speaker 1: was an Armnibus Act that was used to give police
Speaker 1: powers to control what they thought was proper behavior or
Speaker 1: improper behavior on the street. The law included an ill
Speaker 1: defined clause that brought any prostitute behaving in a riotous
Speaker 1: and disorderly manner within its remit. The police used this
Speaker 1: phrase indiscriminately against any woman on the streets whom they
Speaker 1: wished to move on or arrest. Police case files sometimes
Speaker 1: record disorderly prostitutes without actually describing behavior that might have
Speaker 1: warranted such a description. The burden of evidence is completely negated.
Speaker 1: It's basically saying we had her name in a notebook,
Speaker 1: and she was on the street, and we decided that
Speaker 1: she was disorderly, so we used this really quite loose
Speaker 1: law to either arrest her or find her or move
Speaker 1: her on. The law was also open to abuse. Women
Speaker 1: did sell sex in Whitechapel in eighteen eighty eight, but
Speaker 1: we also know that the Whitechapel police inflated the scale
Speaker 1: of the trade to enhance their own reputation for tackling
Speaker 1: crime each division. Whitechapel was considered the most corrupt police
Speaker 1: division in London at the time. They were using prostitution
Speaker 1: arrests all the time to kind of up their numbers,
Speaker 1: as we would say in the present day. The arrest
Speaker 1: of Elizabeth Cass offers a great example of this. Cass
Speaker 1: was a dressmaker in London's wealthy West End. One evening,
Speaker 1: after leaving work, she was window shopping and she paused
Speaker 1: to admire a pair of gloves. She came to the
Speaker 1: attention of police Constable Endicott, who claimed he had seen
Speaker 1: her soliciting on the street several times before that evening
Speaker 1: and had written her description down in his handy little
Speaker 1: police notebook. Under general practice at the time, policeman arrested
Speaker 1: a soliciting prostitute on the third occasion that they saw her,
Speaker 1: providing that she was annoying passers by. According to Endicott,
Speaker 1: he had already seen cast twice. No matter what Elizabeth
Speaker 1: Cass was doing, no matter how she had been labeled,
Speaker 1: accurately or inaccurately, she certainly wasn't annoying anybody. She was
Speaker 1: just standing on the street. So Endicott arrested her. And
Speaker 1: this could have played out the way that it played
Speaker 1: out for hundreds of other women, which is that they
Speaker 1: accepted their fate understood they didn't really have any ground
Speaker 1: to stand on, paid a fine and got out of
Speaker 1: the police court as quickly as possible. But Elizabeth Cass
Speaker 1: played it differently, not least because she had a really
Speaker 1: supportive employer. Cass's employer, a well known dressmaker and female
Speaker 1: business owner, came to her defense. She stormed into the
Speaker 1: police station, claiming that her employee had been wrongfully arrested
Speaker 1: and threatening to call for an investigation into the matter.
Speaker 1: In fact, an investigation was called, and it was found
Speaker 1: that PC Endicott had no grounds on which to arrest
Speaker 1: Elizabeth Cass, that he in fact was going to be
Speaker 1: brought up on perjury charges, which she was. He was
Speaker 1: found not guilty of perjury, but he was dismissed from
Speaker 1: the police, which is just an incredible moment, I think.
Speaker 1: And in this case, you just see just how fragile
Speaker 1: the definition of prostitute is. You see how thin the
Speaker 1: evidence is, because it's not that the evidence against Elizabeth
Speaker 1: Cass was any thinner than any other woman who had
Speaker 1: been arrested. It wasn't that she was annoying people less.
Speaker 1: It was simply that she called them on it, and
Speaker 1: other women who didn't have the same access to support, didn't.
Speaker 1: They just pled guilty. So the vast majority of arrests
Speaker 1: for prostitution proceed and end in a finer imprisonment, not
Speaker 1: because the women are proven to be prostitutes, are proven
Speaker 1: to be soliciting to the annoyance of other people, but
Speaker 1: because they plead guilty because it's the easiest way for
Speaker 1: them to get out of the police court as quickly
Speaker 1: as possible. In the months between the exoneration of Elizabeth
Speaker 1: Cass and the White Chapel murders, arrests of women as
Speaker 1: common prostitutes plummeted. Constables were told not to use the
Speaker 1: word unless a woman willingly identified herself as a prostitute,
Speaker 1: an order officers clearly ignored when they wrote their reports
Speaker 1: over the corpse of Polly Nichols. But it was a lull,
Speaker 1: not a change of heart. London's Police commissioner soon said
Speaker 1: even sterner instructions for his officers to arrest women, and
Speaker 1: the courts no longer asked for any corroborating evidence that
Speaker 1: a suspect had caused an annoyance. The policeman's would was
Speaker 1: now enough to convict, And it turns the legislation against
Speaker 1: quote unquote common prostitutes into you're on a police register
Speaker 1: as being a prostitute and you were on the street,
Speaker 1: that's the heart of the offense. After eighteen eighty eight
Speaker 1: and so now nothing would protect a stigmatized woman from
Speaker 1: that kind of police attention. The police were also enforcing
Speaker 1: a code of social and moral norms. A woman without
Speaker 1: a house and a family, a woman who lived with
Speaker 1: a man outside of marriage, and a woman who was
Speaker 1: a victim of rape were considered one and the same.
Speaker 1: Any woman who had sex outside of marriage under any
Speaker 1: circumstances could be called a whore and a prostitute. And
Speaker 1: I think that's something that's really easy to forget from
Speaker 1: our late twentieth early twenty first century perspective. Anybody who
Speaker 1: stepped out of line, any woman who stepped out of line,
Speaker 1: was liable to be labeled a prostitute. So when the
Speaker 1: Jack the Ripper murders or what were then called the
Speaker 1: Whitechapel murders started happening, it was very easy to impose
Speaker 1: that narrative they were prostitutes and therefore they were killed
Speaker 1: because that's what happens to unrespectable women. That's their trajectory.
Speaker 1: That's their story. This is what you expect to happen
Speaker 1: to a woman who behaves this way. Reading the newspaper
Speaker 1: reports of the coroner's inquest a legal proceeding to determine
Speaker 1: the cause of death, it seems that the police and
Speaker 1: the authorities had a dim view of Paully Nichol's character.
Speaker 1: In open court, Polly's grieving father was asked, was she fast?
Speaker 1: To be fast implies promiscuity or debauchery. No, I never
Speaker 1: heard of anything of that sort. She used to go
Speaker 1: with some young women and men that she knew, but
Speaker 1: I never heard of anything improper. During her testimony, Ellen
Speaker 1: Holland was asked if she knew what her former roommate
Speaker 1: did for a living. Ellen claimed she did not. Did
Speaker 1: you consider she was very clean in her habits? Oh? Yes,
Speaker 1: she was a very clean woman. The idea that Polly
Speaker 1: was both fast and unclean seemed to be confirmed by
Speaker 1: her defiant parting words after she had been denied a
Speaker 1: bed at the lodging house. I'll so get my doss money.
Speaker 1: See what Johnny Barney I've got now. These words have
Speaker 1: been used sometimes to hint, sometimes to assert that Polly
Speaker 1: Nichols made money by selling sex. Some interpret her remark
Speaker 1: as a boast that her head gear would make her
Speaker 1: more attractive to potential clients. The police reference to her
Speaker 1: jolly bonnet is opaque if indeed she even uttered those words,
Speaker 1: and there is no guarantee that she did. She could
Speaker 1: have meant any number of things. I think the most
Speaker 1: likely thing she meant is that she was going to
Speaker 1: beg because while society thought there were eighty thousand prostitutes,
Speaker 1: the police estimated there are about eight thousand in London,
Speaker 1: and if you look at the estimated number of beggars,
Speaker 1: it's way higher. So just statistically speaking, it's more likely
Speaker 1: she was referring to panhandling or begging than mercenary sex.
Speaker 1: Polly may equally have been indicating a plan to palm
Speaker 1: the bonnet. We know that the Cowdreyes, the couple for
Speaker 1: whom she briefly worked, had given her a bonnet, and
Speaker 1: that when she absconded from their home, she took this
Speaker 1: with her. For women who had chaotic or unstable living
Speaker 1: situations like Polly Nichols, you wore your credit and so,
Speaker 1: and she said, look what a jolly bonnet I have
Speaker 1: she may have been intending to pawnet so that she
Speaker 1: could get toss money, or she may have been referring
Speaker 1: to the fact that she obtains the bonnet through begging
Speaker 1: for it or trading for it, or pawning for it
Speaker 1: on another day. Like so many other details surrounding Polly's
Speaker 1: final hours, the truth behind the fabled Jolly bonnet remark
Speaker 1: is now unknowable, but one hundred and thirty years on,
Speaker 1: it is still cited as proof that Polly was a
Speaker 1: prostitute and killed by a man who bought her time
Speaker 1: and body for a few pennies. The sworn evidence of
Speaker 1: her father and of her friend is totally ignored, But
Speaker 1: julia Our tendency to label women like Polly prostitutes speaks
Speaker 1: volumes like why has the testimony of somebody who knew
Speaker 1: Polly quite well been disregarded in favor of policemen who
Speaker 1: had never seen her before except as a dead body.
Speaker 1: I mean, the only explanation is that we're more comfortable
Speaker 1: with this narrative, the narrative of the fallen woman. She
Speaker 1: steps out of line, she has sex out of wedlock,
Speaker 1: perhaps she has a baby out of wedlock. She has
Speaker 1: a difficult relationship with a man, she's abandoned or she
Speaker 1: abandons him, and the narrative is that she's supposed to die,
Speaker 1: either throwing herself in the Thames because she's so distraught
Speaker 1: at how far she's fallen, or she's supposed to die
Speaker 1: of disease, or her body's supposed to be racked by syphilis,
Speaker 1: or she's supposed to be a victim of violence, because
Speaker 1: that's what happens to women like that. Before I delved
Speaker 1: into the archive, I'd assume that the case for Polly
Speaker 1: being a prostitute was iron clad, But as I look
Speaker 1: deeper and deeper, firm evidence failed to materialize. In fact,
Speaker 1: other more likely interpretations of her murder presented themselves. But
Speaker 1: sharing my findings with the world put me into conflict
Speaker 1: with people who have made careers and staked their reputations
Speaker 1: on the Ripper being a killer of Wolls. Documentary makers,
Speaker 1: to her guides, authors and self styled ripparologists all start
Speaker 1: from the same point. Jack the Ripper posed as a
Speaker 1: john who took as prostitute victims to a quiet place
Speaker 1: to slaughter them. My research has picked away at the
Speaker 1: foundation of that myth, undermining the whole edifice, and many
Speaker 1: riparologists aren't happy. Some think I'm a liar, some compare
Speaker 1: me to a Holocaust denier, and almost all simply refuse
Speaker 1: to listen. I don't think she's dishonest. I'm not going
Speaker 1: to say she's dishonest. All I'm saying is that what
Speaker 1: she has written and why she wrote it as a
Speaker 1: matter for her to live with us. That why she
Speaker 1: has written misleading facts in the book, The Ripper Retold
Speaker 1: will return shortly. Retired police detective Trevor Merritt still thinks
Speaker 1: I'm wrong when we talk about prostitutes. There is overwhelming
Speaker 1: evidence from both official police files and sworn in quest
Speaker 1: testimony from witnesses that these women were prostitutes and it's recorded,
Speaker 1: but she won't accept that fact. I'm the she in
Speaker 1: question here. Trevor's ebook, The Real Truth includes a section
Speaker 1: that states I've deliberately misinformed my readers and omitted vital facts.
Speaker 1: As Trevor has repeatedly told me on social media. I
Speaker 1: didn't want to engage with him in person, so my producer,
Speaker 1: Alice spoke with him. Holly Nichols, there is still in
Speaker 1: existence in police files details that shows her being recorded
Speaker 1: as a prostitute. So that's the first thing that she
Speaker 1: readily doesn't accept. Now matter how much you fudge it up,
Speaker 1: these women were recorded as being prostitutes, and there was
Speaker 1: enough evidence produced from witnesses to show that they engaged
Speaker 1: in prostitution, albeit perhaps just to survive. But if you're
Speaker 1: selling your body for money, you are by clear definition
Speaker 1: prostituting yourself. So do you think police records can ever
Speaker 1: be wrong? Well, I suppose there is always that argument.
Speaker 1: But why would they record somebody as being a prostitute
Speaker 1: as being wrong? Why would somebody stand up and give
Speaker 1: swan testimony in a court that these women were prostitutes
Speaker 1: and that's how they live from day to day. For Trevor,
Speaker 1: my work in the archives, which I've cross referenced with
Speaker 1: what we actually know a Victorian prostitution and police attitudes
Speaker 1: towards it, is invalid Online. He's accused me of playing
Speaker 1: the feminist card. Her book has seemed to attracted a
Speaker 1: large proportion of female readers, and you know, I think
Speaker 1: it's sad that those female readers, no matter what cause
Speaker 1: they want to take up, they've been misled by some
Speaker 1: of the things that Hallie has published in her book
Speaker 1: some of the things which she will not readily acknowledge
Speaker 1: as being misleading, and unfortunately these female readers have placed
Speaker 1: her high on a pedestal. In effect, do you have
Speaker 1: a sense of why women might identify with Halle's work
Speaker 1: or hear things in it that seem valuable. Well, Obviously,
Speaker 1: as I've said, she's attracted a host of feminist followers
Speaker 1: who constantly thrive on the police that all females have
Speaker 1: been subjected to oppression, hardship, and abuse both past and present.
Speaker 1: So I can only assume that the bookers hit a
Speaker 1: nerve with them and that's what they want to go with. Really,
Speaker 1: from their perspective, Trevor, who remember conducted murder investigations as
Speaker 1: a serving detective, has very little sympathy for poly Nichols,
Speaker 1: a woman living a hard life with society stacking the
Speaker 1: odds against her at every turn. For Trevor, poly Nichols
Speaker 1: was the architect of her own demise. They'd fallen on
Speaker 1: hard times a lot of time because of their own doing,
Speaker 1: not because anybody had made them homeless, not because anybody
Speaker 1: had made them poor, not because anybody had made them
Speaker 1: walk the streets at night it was of their own doing,
Speaker 1: because clearly these women in the past, many of them
Speaker 1: had husbands, many of them had partners, and they themselves
Speaker 1: chose to lead the lives that they were living at
Speaker 1: the time. Women like Polly were victims of unfair divorce laws,
Speaker 1: impossible barriers to securing jobs and housing, and subject to
Speaker 1: extreme prejudice if they failed to remain within the tight
Speaker 1: boundaries of what was expected of a wife and mother.
Speaker 1: Trevor boards no truck with any of this. They were
Speaker 1: the ones that chose to leave their husbands, or their
Speaker 1: husbands chose to leave them because of their behavior. There
Speaker 1: are two sides to all of this. And Howe seems
Speaker 1: to want to portray the picture of these poor, unfortunate women.
Speaker 1: But they're poor unfortunate because a lot of the time
Speaker 1: they brought it on themselves, you know, And is there
Speaker 1: any excuse for that. Trevor would really prefer that I
Speaker 1: restricted myself to the subject he thinks is most important
Speaker 1: the identity and motives of Jack the Ripper. Bringing up
Speaker 1: the lives of the women rather annoys him, especially if
Speaker 1: it calls into question his pet theory about the murders.
Speaker 1: You know, I think it's all getting blown up out
Speaker 1: of all proportion. To be fair, I've found that many
Speaker 1: people heartily agree with Trevor. I find their lack of
Speaker 1: interest and their lack of curiosity both puzzling and troubling.
Speaker 1: It's not just that they haven't learned from the injustices
Speaker 1: of the past. It's as if they don't want to
Speaker 1: learn from them, and they don't even want to hear
Speaker 1: about them. Trying to get my head around this, I
Speaker 1: came across the work of the New York Times best
Speaker 1: selling author Gillian Lauren. Gillian's writing introduced me to a
Speaker 1: term that has helped me fathom the hostility I faced
Speaker 1: for trying to tell the real stories of the Whitechapel women.
Speaker 1: That term is the less dead victims who don't attract
Speaker 1: the ssidies, interest or sympathy. So less dead is actually
Speaker 1: not my invention. It was by a criminalist, Stephen Egger,
Speaker 1: and what it means is that essentially there's priority given
Speaker 1: to human beings. For instance, in the eighties, there were
Speaker 1: seven serial killers in South la and women were turning
Speaker 1: up in dumpsters every morning. The cops would call in
Speaker 1: a homicide as one eighty seven. No humans involved. We
Speaker 1: found her in a dumpster. It's a nobody. We found
Speaker 1: somebody under tires, no humans involved, And we're very often
Speaker 1: categorized as overdoses. I don't think a lot of people
Speaker 1: go and decide to overdose with their skirts over their
Speaker 1: head under a pile of tires. The less Dead applies
Speaker 1: to poll Nichols and the other White Chapel victims, just
Speaker 1: as it applies to some people killed today. The deaths
Speaker 1: may be divided by many decades, but all these victims
Speaker 1: united by society's indifference to their plight. It's so easy
Speaker 1: to sort of dismiss women and also assume that you
Speaker 1: know everything about them by saying their prostitutes. Someone's a prostitute,
Speaker 1: you know everything about them already. Someone's a drug addict,
Speaker 1: you know everything about them already. You know if somebody's poor,
Speaker 1: you know everything about them already. And the truth is
Speaker 1: that you don't. Jillie and I are doing something very
Speaker 1: similar with our research. In her book and documentary series,
Speaker 1: She's explored the lives of the women murdered by Samuel Little.
Speaker 1: Little claimed to have murdered as many as ninety three
Speaker 1: people in towns and cities all across the United States,
Speaker 1: women of color, marginalized women, prostitutes, addicts, sometimes not. They
Speaker 1: all had such different stories. These women were very much
Speaker 1: the less dead. Their disappearances dating back to the nineteen
Speaker 1: seventies were often barely investigated, let alone investigated as murders.
Speaker 1: Years later, in prison, Little drue haunting pictures of the
Speaker 1: individuals he said he had killed. The FBI is still
Speaker 1: seeking information to help connect victims with these confessions. Little
Speaker 1: was convicted in twenty fourteen, at the age of seventy four,
Speaker 1: for the murders of three women in the nineteen eighties,
Speaker 1: but throughout his life he was repeatedly charged with theft, fraud, rape,
Speaker 1: and assault. Repeatedly the authorities let him go. They didn't
Speaker 1: try hard, they didn't care. And at the same time
Speaker 1: there were prosecutors and defense attorneys who were putting notes
Speaker 1: in the files saying, I believe this guy is good
Speaker 1: for many murmurs in this So why do you think
Speaker 1: there was this hesitation. I mean, this guy was killing
Speaker 1: and killing and killing, and you know he was caught
Speaker 1: and let go and caught and let go. So is
Speaker 1: it because we believe that, for example, homeless people are expendable,
Speaker 1: that sex workers are expendable, is that it is that
Speaker 1: the reason the white Yale College student who is murdered
Speaker 1: on spring break is the most dead, or the governor's
Speaker 1: daughter is the most dead. It's easy to say, like,
Speaker 1: we have these baton institutional biases against prostitutes, women of color,
Speaker 1: drug addicts, and I can say that all day long,
Speaker 1: and really I think it's about power. They didn't have
Speaker 1: any they didn't have any money, they didn't have any power.
Speaker 1: There are obvious parallels between Little's crimes and the White
Speaker 1: Chapel murders, but talking to Julian, I was struck by
Speaker 1: one detail a court hearing that reminded me of the
Speaker 1: treatment women like Polly would have received an eighteen eighty
Speaker 1: eight when dealing with those in authority. Laylah McClain and
Speaker 1: Hilda Nelson and pascuagal And, Mississippi were both attacked by
Speaker 1: Samuel Little. Eight years after Layla and Hilda escaped his clutches,
Speaker 1: they attended court to testify against him. Hilda was eight
Speaker 1: months pregnant. She took one look sam and she yearnated
Speaker 1: on the floor and they made her clean it up,
Speaker 1: and then they asked them to leave. They didn't even testify.
Speaker 1: Following his conviction, Gillian interviewed Little about his crimes extensively.
Speaker 1: She even elicited new confessions from him. Her focus was
Speaker 1: never on little psychology or motivations, but on the people
Speaker 1: that he harmed and killed. Gillian, herself, as a survivor
Speaker 1: of sexual assault and a violent partner, once attempted to
Speaker 1: strangle her. Now she feels she has a responsibility to
Speaker 1: tell victim's stories. The responsibility is a universal one and
Speaker 1: a larger one, and I will continue to feel a
Speaker 1: responsibility to these victims and a relationship with them for
Speaker 1: the rest of my life. Little's murder victims, overlooked, ignored, ridiculed,
Speaker 1: and religned by society, were raced before they died. Gillian
Speaker 1: tells me, like they were dead already. Small wonder then,
Speaker 1: that when they came to harm at Little's hands, society
Speaker 1: looked the other way. It's an idea that resonates with me.
Speaker 1: Society had killed Polly Nichols before her actual death too.
Speaker 1: Over a hundred years later, we continue to dismiss vulnerable people,
Speaker 1: to treat them as disposable, insisting that Polly Nichols was
Speaker 1: a prostitute is part of this process. It overlooks and
Speaker 1: so erases the complexity of her existence. It effaces her humanity,
Speaker 1: and so makes her vicious murder slightly more palatable. The
Speaker 1: notion that the victims were only prostitutes and so deserving
Speaker 1: of their fate seeks to perpetuate the belief that there
Speaker 1: are good women and bad women, madonnas and whores. It
Speaker 1: suggests that there is an acceptable standard of female behavior,
Speaker 1: and that those who deviate from the standard are fit
Speaker 1: to be punished and unworthy to be mourned. Whenever a
Speaker 1: woman steps out of line and contravenes the feminine norm,
Speaker 1: whether today social media or on the Victorian street, there
Speaker 1: is a task understanding that someone must put her back
Speaker 1: in her place. Will return to this idea again and again,
Speaker 1: as we unpicked the threads that hold the jack the
Speaker 1: Ripper lift together. Only by bringing his victims back to life,
Speaker 1: by permitting them to speak and attempting to understand their experiences,
Speaker 1: can we silence the ripper and what he represents bad women?
Speaker 1: The Ripper were told is brought to you by Pushkin
Speaker 1: Industries and me Hallie Ribbinhold, and is based on my
Speaker 1: book The five. It was produced and co written by
Speaker 1: Ryan Dilley and Alice Fines, with help from Pete Norton.
Speaker 1: Pascal Wise sound designed and mixed the show and composed
Speaker 1: all the original music. You also the voice talents of
Speaker 1: Soul Boyer, Melanie Gutridge, Gemma Saunders, and rufus Wright. The
Speaker 1: show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of
Speaker 1: mil LaBelle, Jacob Weisberg, Jen Guera, Heather Fane, Carlie Migliori,
Speaker 1: Maggie Taylor, Nicole Morano and Daniella Lacan were special thanks
Speaker 1: to my agents Sarah Ballard and Ellie Karen