Speaker 1: Pushkin. This episode discusses death by suicide. If you're suffering
Speaker 1: emotional distress or having suicidal thoughts. Support is available, for example,
Speaker 1: from the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. Following the barbaric murder
Speaker 1: of Mary Jane Kelly, the Ripper seems to disappear. The
Speaker 1: weeks stretch into months, then years. When the dead bodies
Speaker 1: of women are discovered in the locality and they are
Speaker 1: found with dismal regularity, Police surgeons search them for any
Speaker 1: knife wounds akin to the Ripper's trademark savagery. Might this
Speaker 1: cut signify the Ripper's return? Might that slash? The medical
Speaker 1: experts bicker and no consensus is reached. So what lies
Speaker 1: behind the wholt the Ripper killings? Has he fled even emigrated?
Speaker 1: Has he been imprisoned on another charge? In a house
Speaker 1: close to where Kate Edo's perished, a doctor is signing
Speaker 1: a certificate. Henry James Sacara judges its high time local
Speaker 1: butcher Jacob Leviy be returned to a lunatic asylum. Levy
Speaker 1: has been confined in such an institution before only coming
Speaker 1: home to the family butcher shop in eighteen eighty seven,
Speaker 1: but his continued erratic behavior is causing alarm. The man
Speaker 1: raves and restlessly wanders the streets at night. Secara notes
Speaker 1: he also talks of committing violent acts with the stroke
Speaker 1: of a pen. The doctor consigns Levy to an asylum.
Speaker 1: Has Secara in fact caged the Ripper. Some will make
Speaker 1: that very case. The crimes of Jack the Ripper cast
Speaker 1: long and disturbing shadows, setting in motion events that will
Speaker 1: cause great anguish to the families of the dead and Sully,
Speaker 1: the reputations of many perfectly innocent bystanders. The hurt, shame,
Speaker 1: and suspicion doesn't end in the eighteen eighties. Worryingly, it
Speaker 1: endures to this very day. I'm Hallie rubin Holt. You're
Speaker 1: listening to Bad Women. The Ripper retold, a series about
Speaker 1: the real lives of the women killed by Jack the Ripper,
Speaker 1: and how we got their stories so wrong. One side,
Speaker 1: money plenty, and friends too by the scar Then fortune
Speaker 1: smiled upon me. I naw one, pass myde not convert.
Speaker 1: The body of Annie Chapman, the coachman's wife cursed by
Speaker 1: alcohol addiction, was discovered early on Saturday, the eighth of
Speaker 1: September eighteen eighty eight. Perhaps a police constable was then
Speaker 1: dispatched to inform her siblings. Perhaps he knocked at the
Speaker 1: door as the Presbyterian teetotalers were preparing to leave for
Speaker 1: Sunday services, or maybe the first the Smith familyhood of
Speaker 1: Annie's fate came in the newspapers, which called their sister
Speaker 1: a woman of low life. Early reports referred to her
Speaker 1: as a poor creature. They spoke too of her drinking,
Speaker 1: and while they admitted that dark Annie's primary occupation was
Speaker 1: selling fabric chair coverings in the market, there is little
Speaker 1: room for doubt that her earnings were eked out by
Speaker 1: less creditable courses. The Daily News went on to say
Speaker 1: that the corpse discovered in the grubby yard of Hanbury
Speaker 1: Street had been mutilated in a manner too horrible for description,
Speaker 1: but then went on to describe much of the horror anyway.
Speaker 1: Annie's siblings couldn't bear to tell their elderly mother that
Speaker 1: the daughter she had lost to alcoholism had now been killed,
Speaker 1: or that her murder had been so gruesome. They also
Speaker 1: smothered their shock and grief before the two children Annie
Speaker 1: had left in their care. They would never know what
Speaker 1: fate had befallen their mother a shroud of silence was
Speaker 1: drawn over Annie Chapman's story. It would remain in place
Speaker 1: for generations. I know that my dad didn't know about it.
Speaker 1: I'm pretty sure my grandfather didn't know about it either.
Speaker 1: This is Neil Smith, the great great grandson of Annie's
Speaker 1: youngest brother, Fonton Smith. He only discovered his connection to
Speaker 1: the White Chapel murders when he googled his family tree
Speaker 1: and all sorts of Ripper links appeared. I'm fairly certain
Speaker 1: that Fontin himself probably had not talked about it to
Speaker 1: his direct family because of a probably the trauma and
Speaker 1: the distress of having your sister murdered from one thing,
Speaker 1: but also the stigma attached to the Ripper case. She
Speaker 1: was an alcoholic, she had a broken marriage, and there
Speaker 1: was the implication from the press and the police that
Speaker 1: she was a sex worker, whether that was true or not.
Speaker 1: And so all of these things would have been an
Speaker 1: anathema to a Victorian, aspiring middle class man or I
Speaker 1: thought so, I can understand completely. White would have been
Speaker 1: hushed up. As the man of the family. The worst tasks,
Speaker 1: those that required a public face, fell to Fonton, and
Speaker 1: so it was he who identified the torn ragged body
Speaker 1: of his elder sister, and stood before the coroner to
Speaker 1: testify at her inquest. I last saw her alive about
Speaker 1: a fortnight ago in Commercial Street, where I met her promiscuously.
Speaker 1: I gave her two shillings. She did not say where
Speaker 1: she was living nor what she was doing. She said
Speaker 1: she wanted the money for a lodging. Fonton may well
Speaker 1: have been the last of the siblings to see Annie alive,
Speaker 1: and he may also have lent her money more often
Speaker 1: than he cared to admit, either to the public or
Speaker 1: to his own teetotaling family. When it came to helping
Speaker 1: Annie out, he would likely have been a softer touch
Speaker 1: than his siblings and goold for standing her a drink
Speaker 1: or two. For like his sister, Fonton Smith was an alcoholic.
Speaker 1: Fonton buckled under the horror of Annie's murder, and as
Speaker 1: he fell, he grabbed for the one thing he knew
Speaker 1: would provide him with immediate, though fleeting relief, the bottle.
Speaker 1: Within a month of the harrowing ordeal of his sister's death,
Speaker 1: he had suffered a breakdown after stealing money from his
Speaker 1: employer to buy drinks. He lost his job as a
Speaker 1: warehouse manager. Friends intervened and found him another position, but
Speaker 1: Fonton's misery followed him there too. One day, unable to cope,
Speaker 1: he filled himself with alcohol and his pockets with his
Speaker 1: employer's funds. Then he abandoned his wife and two children
Speaker 1: and disappeared. A week later, the family received a letter
Speaker 1: from the city of Gloucester, where Funton had walked into
Speaker 1: a police station and surrendered himself. At the foot of
Speaker 1: his confession, he wrote, Oh, my darling wife, it's all
Speaker 1: the cursed drink. For God's sake, don't let the children
Speaker 1: touch it. He was taken back to London, found guilty,
Speaker 1: and sentenced to three months hard labor at Millbank Prison,
Speaker 1: with the chimes of nearby Big Ben marked out the
Speaker 1: excruciating the slow passage of time for inmates. Upon his release,
Speaker 1: Thornton resolved to start his life afresh, taking his wife
Speaker 1: and children across the Atlantic to settle in the dust
Speaker 1: and heat of Texas. Neil grew up learning the same
Speaker 1: Ripper stories as the rest of us, the stories that
Speaker 1: denigrate the women. He was amazed to uncover his links
Speaker 1: to Annie and found the discovery caused a shift in
Speaker 1: his thinking. Despite the fact that obviously I never met Annie,
Speaker 1: She's still not a very distant relative. I definitely identified
Speaker 1: with her and imagine that she might have felt to
Speaker 1: some of the same things that I feel, which normally
Speaker 1: you don't really think about that with somebody who lived
Speaker 1: one hundred and fifty years ago. It certainly brought her
Speaker 1: to life for me, and it did make me identify
Speaker 1: with her and feel very sorry about what happened to her.
Speaker 1: But Neil's empe heightened by his connection to Annie's story,
Speaker 1: isn't shared by everyone. They'd fallen on hard times a
Speaker 1: lot of time because of their own doing, not because
Speaker 1: anybody had made them homeless, not because you know, 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: I told Neil what former policeman Trevor Marriott had said
Speaker 1: about Annie, that she was to blame for her own
Speaker 1: poverty and homelessness, that she chosen the bottle over her family.
Speaker 1: That's basically like the Victorian attitude if you like that
Speaker 1: alcoholism and mental health problems were a weakness. Obviously she
Speaker 1: didn't choose this way of life. Unfortunate, she had a
Speaker 1: disease to have. The attitude is it's unsympathetic and it's
Speaker 1: just wrong. Basically, I think Trevor's unsympathetic attitude has annoyed
Speaker 1: many listeners. Some of you have even asked us not
Speaker 1: to air any more of his views. But Trevor isn't
Speaker 1: just a Victorian throwback or a modern outlier. There are
Speaker 1: Trevors all around us, and we might all embody Trevor
Speaker 1: at times too. We would like to assume that the
Speaker 1: world is a just place, that you know, truly awful
Speaker 1: bad things don't happen to good people, right. Laurie Santos
Speaker 1: as a professor of psychology at Yale University, and she's
Speaker 1: describing a common cognitive bias that explains why we often
Speaker 1: find it so easy to feel detached from women like
Speaker 1: Annie and also quick to shift the blame onto them.
Speaker 1: We kind of want to believe that if we do
Speaker 1: the right thing, good things will happen to us. But
Speaker 1: it also leads to this insidious rationalization, which is like,
Speaker 1: when you see a bad thing happen to a person,
Speaker 1: your first instinct is to assume, well, maybe there was
Speaker 1: some reason there, right, Maybe it just didn't happen by chance.
Speaker 1: Laurie says a classic example of this is when someone
Speaker 1: leaves their purse in their car and then that car
Speaker 1: gets broken into. Your first instinct is would be like, well,
Speaker 1: maybe it's kind of her fall that she left the
Speaker 1: person the car to justify like why wasn't it your
Speaker 1: a car that got broken into? Or a friend tells
Speaker 1: you like, oh my gosh, my sister just found out
Speaker 1: she has liver cancer. Your first instinct often isn't like empathy.
Speaker 1: It's like, well, I wonder if she drank too much
Speaker 1: or didn't take care of herself. According to Laurie, this
Speaker 1: type of thinking emerges in children as young as four,
Speaker 1: so it makes sense that it's still with us as adults.
Speaker 1: It's a quick knee jerk response. If you tell little
Speaker 1: kids kid versions of the stories we wouldn't talk about,
Speaker 1: you know, Jack the Ripburn serial killer murders to little kids.
Speaker 1: But simple things like Joe was walking to school and
Speaker 1: he got pooped on by a bird, the kids will
Speaker 1: start justifying, well, you know, maybe Joe did something wrong
Speaker 1: or he's a bad person. Right, he can't just be unlucky.
Speaker 1: There has to be some reason for this, right, Our
Speaker 1: brains start unconsciously looking for evidence that there might be
Speaker 1: some reason in there that it's a justice or perhaps
Speaker 1: the Smith's siblings did just this in September eighteen eighty
Speaker 1: eight and convinced themselves that Annie the drinker, Annie the
Speaker 1: arrant mother, Annie the lowlife, had somehow invited her own murder.
Speaker 1: Putting this cognitive bias under the microscope. Stopping to think
Speaker 1: that victims might actually be blameless is uncomfortable. As a woman.
Speaker 1: It's hard for me to believe that, you know, I
Speaker 1: could just be the victim of violence. So I have
Speaker 1: to say, well, there must be something that that other
Speaker 1: woman who's a victim of violence did to deserve it.
Speaker 1: You know, that protects me. That's a whole host of
Speaker 1: mental gymnastics. That's me rationalizing, but it has this benefit,
Speaker 1: which is it protects me from a really scary belief.
Speaker 1: Maybe there's no reason that I'm not the victim of violence.
Speaker 1: Maybe there's no reason that I happen to, you know,
Speaker 1: not grow up as poor as some of the women
Speaker 1: you're talking about, or poor as some of the people
Speaker 1: in the modern day. Like it's just an accident. I
Speaker 1: don't really deserve it. It's just kind of unfair. There
Speaker 1: are many other figures caught up in the tangled web
Speaker 1: of the Ripper myth who deserve our empathy. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm so very compelled by the story, unfascinated, and it's
Speaker 1: just it's a very sad and gut wrenching story. Really.
Speaker 1: Hannah Jones is the great great granddaughter of Jacob Leave.
Speaker 1: Some people have said Jacob was the Ripper. He worked
Speaker 1: near Whitechapel as a butcher, and one expert witness thought
Speaker 1: the Ripper displayed a butcher's skill with a knife. The
Speaker 1: Ripper was also often described as a madman, and Jacob
Speaker 1: had experienced mental health problems and spent time in asylums.
Speaker 1: In the notes from his first admission in eighteen eighty six,
Speaker 1: there is a brief mention of violent behavior. In the
Speaker 1: notes from his second admission in eighteen ninety, it says
Speaker 1: that he feels that if he is not restrained, he'll
Speaker 1: do some violence to someone. Also that he feels compelled
Speaker 1: to do act's contrary to the dictates of his conscience
Speaker 1: by a power he cannot withstand. Basically, those are the
Speaker 1: comments which excite ripparologists. The theory cobbled together from these
Speaker 1: scant notes is that Jacob contracted syphilis as the consequence
Speaker 1: of a moral transgression, that is, after sex with a
Speaker 1: prostitute afflicted with grievous symptoms. When the disease began to
Speaker 1: attack his brain, he wrotted bloody vengeance on any woman
Speaker 1: he believed to be soliciting in his neighborhood. Syphilis retribution
Speaker 1: theories like this are common because they're convenient. They satisfy
Speaker 1: that cognitive buy as we have. They let us relax
Speaker 1: into thinking that the women determine their own downfalls. They
Speaker 1: also bring some order to what are otherwise senseless crimes.
Speaker 1: Of course, it all relies on the women being prostitutes
Speaker 1: and Jacob being a syphilis ravaged monster, and there's no
Speaker 1: shortage of books, web pages, and even video games portraying Jacob.
Speaker 1: Is just that Hannah has stumbled across several horrific depictions,
Speaker 1: but has kept them from her relatives. I think if
Speaker 1: my grandfather were to see that, he would be quite upset,
Speaker 1: and he has every right to be upset. Once you
Speaker 1: dig deeper into the Jewish Butcher's life and approach his
Speaker 1: plight with empathy, the true and more tragic story of
Speaker 1: Jacob Levee emerges more after this short break. Jacob Levy
Speaker 1: was born in East London in eighteen fifty six. At fifteen,
Speaker 1: he was recorded on the census as a butcher, a
Speaker 1: family trade he likely began learning at around the age
Speaker 1: of twelve or thirteen. Jews in London were a small
Speaker 1: minority and subject to wider society's deep suspicion. As Jacob
Speaker 1: grew into a young man, the influx of Eastern European
Speaker 1: Jews fleeing murder and persecution and then settling around Whitechapel
Speaker 1: became something of a national panic. The foreign Jews of
Speaker 1: no nationality whatever are becoming a pest and a menace
Speaker 1: to the poor, native borne Eastender. One visitor to the
Speaker 1: streets around Jacob's home declared there was nothing English about
Speaker 1: the place, only foreign faces, foreign shops, foreign talk, against
Speaker 1: a backdrop of vast continental upheaval domestic calamity struck. The
Speaker 1: Levy family deceased had bet heavily on the races, and
Speaker 1: on the arrival of the news of the result, he
Speaker 1: appeared very desponding. A doctor was called, but life had
Speaker 1: been extinct some time. Jacob's older brother, Abraham, took his
Speaker 1: own life, possibly because of a debt incurred on Derby Day,
Speaker 1: a highlight of the racing calendar and attempting focus for
Speaker 1: expert and novice gamblers alike. It was young Jacob who
Speaker 1: forced open his brother's locked door and discovered the body.
Speaker 1: Jacob soon married his close neighbor Sarah, and by eighteen
Speaker 1: eighty one they had moved into rooms in a house nearby,
Speaker 1: with their two children and a servant girl who likely
Speaker 1: lived in to cater to their family on the Sabbath
Speaker 1: when their Jewish faith forbade them from working. Jacob eventually
Speaker 1: took the helm of his aunt's butchering business, and he
Speaker 1: and Sarah had two more children, but misfortune loomed for
Speaker 1: the growing young family. In March eighteen eighty six, Jacob
Speaker 1: was arrested for the theft of a side of beef
Speaker 1: from a neighboring butcher and tried at the Old Bailey,
Speaker 1: a famous court was some of England's most serious and
Speaker 1: notorious cases are heard. Jacob seems to have entered into
Speaker 1: odd early morning negotiations with his neighbor's employees, encouraging them
Speaker 1: to pass him a fourteen pound piece of meat. As
Speaker 1: a policeman watched from across the road. A young shopboy
Speaker 1: handed over the contraband I ran into leave his shop,
Speaker 1: caught hold of him with the meat in his hand,
Speaker 1: and asked what he was going to do with it.
Speaker 1: He said, we are only having a lark. I am
Speaker 1: going to weigh it. I said, I did not believe it,
Speaker 1: and then took him to the station, where he repeated
Speaker 1: that it was only a lark. In court, the neighbor
Speaker 1: seemed puzzled by the theft. It was clearly no practical joke.
Speaker 1: He wasn't on joking terms with Jacob, but nor were
Speaker 1: they rivals. The value of the meat was paltry, and
Speaker 1: Jacob was by no means poor, Nor could he quite
Speaker 1: believe a fellow butcher would stoop to common theft, saying
Speaker 1: that the Jewish authorities would not give a man a
Speaker 1: license unless he had an excellent character. The judge did
Speaker 1: indeed direct the jury that Jacob Leavy was of good character,
Speaker 1: but the butcher was found guilty and the jurors did
Speaker 1: not recommend he be shown mercy. He was sentenced to
Speaker 1: twelve months hard labor, but just weeks after his arrival,
Speaker 1: in prison, the authorities began to suspect a root cause
Speaker 1: for his peculiar foray into petty crime. He is in
Speaker 1: a state of melancholia cries without adequate cause. Jacob was
Speaker 1: transferred to a lunatic asylum. His admissions file details his
Speaker 1: mental decline. He is very despondent from the fact that
Speaker 1: he attempted suicide at jail and that a brother committed suicide,
Speaker 1: and insanity is hereditary in his family. I consider him
Speaker 1: suicidal and insane, and yet his health appears to have
Speaker 1: quickly improved. In eighteen eighty seven, he was deemed to
Speaker 1: be of sound mind and fit for discharge. He returned
Speaker 1: to his wife an expanding family. Sarah and Jacob would
Speaker 1: have eight children in total, but Jacob's mental health continued
Speaker 1: to decline, with devastating consequences. Sarah struggled to keep the
Speaker 1: butchers shop afloat, lamenting that Jacob was ruining the business.
Speaker 1: He couldn't be trusted with money, ordered goods indiscriminately, and
Speaker 1: continued to steal other people's wares too. More worryingly, he
Speaker 1: often had difficulties sleeping and mysteriously wandered off for hours
Speaker 1: at a time. He raved and feared that someone was
Speaker 1: trying to do him harm. Such symptoms weren't uncommon among
Speaker 1: men of Jacob's age and social class, says Jennifer Wallace,
Speaker 1: an expert on the history of psychiatry at Imperial College London.
Speaker 1: There was a sense that insanity, as they termed it,
Speaker 1: was increasing at the time, and there were various suggestions
Speaker 1: put forward for that, from people having to adjust to
Speaker 1: the new type of life of the late nineteenth century,
Speaker 1: where you've got lots of developments, you've got new technologies,
Speaker 1: lots of exciting things that could also be very disruptive
Speaker 1: and new and anxiety making to people. The Victorians had
Speaker 1: massively expanded the provision of care for those they termed lunatics,
Speaker 1: but families were reluctant to see the head of a
Speaker 1: household entered these new asylums if it could at all
Speaker 1: be delayed. There was the stigma of mental illness, but
Speaker 1: also the practicalities of losing a male breadwinner. Sarah Levy
Speaker 1: was no exception. She seems to have kept Jacob at
Speaker 1: home during his erratic behavior with little or no medical support.
Speaker 1: Perhaps she hoped that the husband and provider of old
Speaker 1: would be surface. I think it would be very difficult.
Speaker 1: And you get a real sense of this sometimes when
Speaker 1: you read the statements of families and friends where they
Speaker 1: talk about things like the family business being very badly
Speaker 1: affected because a man who runs the business, for instance,
Speaker 1: he's buying hundreds and hundreds of creates of something way
Speaker 1: more than they need, and he's overspent. He's put the
Speaker 1: family into financial trouble. They also might be quite unpredictable,
Speaker 1: so they might wander, they might do unusual things like
Speaker 1: go into the street and start to get undressed. So
Speaker 1: there is an element of public disorder there as well,
Speaker 1: and a concern about what other people are seeing. In
Speaker 1: the summer of eighteen ninety, Sarah Levy perhaps bowed to
Speaker 1: the inevitable. Jacob's behavior was apparently too much to bear,
Speaker 1: and a doctor was called, I the undersigned Henry James
Speaker 1: Sequira to hear my certify. I personally examined Jacob Leavy
Speaker 1: and came to the conclusion that he is a person
Speaker 1: of unsound mind and a proper person to be taken
Speaker 1: charge of and attained under care and treatment. Jacob was
Speaker 1: returned to an asylum. Facts indicating insanity observed by myself
Speaker 1: at the time of examination. Known patient several years formally
Speaker 1: shrewd businessman, now quite incapable of carrying on same, giving
Speaker 1: wrong change and money back for things bought. Says he
Speaker 1: feels as something within him impelling him to take everything
Speaker 1: he sees, feels that if he is not restrained, he
Speaker 1: will do some violence to someone complains of hearing strange noises.
Speaker 1: The doctors treating Jacob eventually concluded that he was suffering
Speaker 1: from a condition they called general paralysis of the insane.
Speaker 1: The classic general paralytic patient and tended to be somebody
Speaker 1: of about Jacob's age, in their mid thirties, who had
Speaker 1: been perhaps declining for a little while, and then seemed
Speaker 1: to have had a crisis, often unable to keep working,
Speaker 1: and that tended to be the event that made men
Speaker 1: end up in the asylum when they could no longer
Speaker 1: provide for their families. At the time, general paralysis was
Speaker 1: for the most part believed to be linked to advanced
Speaker 1: vinereal disease, so the final stage of untreated syphilis, when
Speaker 1: it has lain dormant for many years and then spread
Speaker 1: to the brain. Patients experienced a range of symptoms as
Speaker 1: the infection attacked the nervous system. Elizabeth Stride, for example,
Speaker 1: may have begun to suffer from seizures towards the end
Speaker 1: of her life, but sufferers might see any number of
Speaker 1: upsetting and debilitating effects. So it would have things like
Speaker 1: an unusual walk, people would stagger, they would look as
Speaker 1: though they were drunk. Perhaps they would be unable to
Speaker 1: do things like button their shirt, so those finer movements
Speaker 1: of the fingers would often start to disappear. They would
Speaker 1: also have facial issues that would make the diagnosis perhaps
Speaker 1: quite obvious to some doctors, where they was said to
Speaker 1: be an unusual mask like appearance to the face and
Speaker 1: perhaps a droopiness. Perhaps also unequal sized pupils as well,
Speaker 1: But the mental symptoms were equally varied but also said
Speaker 1: to be quite specific. So one of the classic signs
Speaker 1: of general paralysis was the so called delusions of grandeur,
Speaker 1: where patients thought that they had a lot of money,
Speaker 1: are they knew somebody very famous, and this would often
Speaker 1: get them into trouble, and this might be the thing
Speaker 1: that caused them to be, for instance, picked up by
Speaker 1: the police and sent to the asylum in the first place.
Speaker 1: Many of Jacob's symptoms correspond to the disorder, but Jennifer
Speaker 1: is wary of this diagnosis. The fact that alo symptoms
Speaker 1: exist and tally with general paralysis isn't enough to say
Speaker 1: that this actually was general paralysis. Doctors at the time
Speaker 1: were really debating whether general paralysis was being conflated with
Speaker 1: other conditions, particularly with things like brain tumors and with alcoholism,
Speaker 1: and even some more unusual things like lead poisoning. So
Speaker 1: it was something that because of its wide range of symptoms,
Speaker 1: it looked like a lot of things, and a lot
Speaker 1: of other things looked like it as well. Jacob had
Speaker 1: been treated and discharged from an asylum once before. Sarah
Speaker 1: must have hoped that he might return to the butcher
Speaker 1: shop cured of his ranting, erratic ways and worrying nocturnal wanderings.
Speaker 1: She was to be cruelly disappointed. The ripper be told
Speaker 1: will return shortly. When Jacob arrived at Stone House, an
Speaker 1: asylum recently built in the style of a Tudor palace
Speaker 1: on the outskirts of London, he was at first well behaved.
Speaker 1: He is loquacious and apparently does not feel his position
Speaker 1: at all. There is a nonchalance in his manner which
Speaker 1: is most unfitted today's condition. He suffered some initial bouts
Speaker 1: of insomnia, but these subsided, and he also demonstrated an appetite.
Speaker 1: In fact, he was said to eat with keen relish.
Speaker 1: The daily life of a patients if they were well
Speaker 1: enough to get out of bed, and they were not
Speaker 1: in a state where they had been secluded for any reason,
Speaker 1: they would probably find themselves sitting in a day room,
Speaker 1: which might be quite sparse in terms of its entertainments,
Speaker 1: or they might have access to things like a library,
Speaker 1: so they would have games, books, the chance to walk
Speaker 1: in the grounds outside. Perhaps many asylums also put on
Speaker 1: entertainments like plays. There were also a few football teams
Speaker 1: and sports teams in asylums. Jacob himself seemed to have
Speaker 1: been active. The hospital had its own farm and he
Speaker 1: worked here daily. At one point Sarah made the journey
Speaker 1: out along the Thames to visit him. By this point,
Speaker 1: we certainly shouldn't necessarily think of the asylum in terms
Speaker 1: of this very gothic, dark, dirty institution where the flaws
Speaker 1: are covered in straw. These are quite clinical environments, and
Speaker 1: many of the asylums are very self consciously scientific, where
Speaker 1: they are aware of things like the need to keep
Speaker 1: places disinfected. But of course you would have patients who
Speaker 1: might have problems like incontinents or self harm that would
Speaker 1: lead to hygiene issues, to infection issues that would need
Speaker 1: to be taken into account as well. So for all
Speaker 1: their scientific ambition, asylums like the one would Jacob was confined,
Speaker 1: could still be grim. The wards might be raucous and disorderly,
Speaker 1: and patients weren't necessarily separated by illness type. There were
Speaker 1: opportunities to mix and form friendships, but there would also
Speaker 1: be some patients who were very ill, very alone in
Speaker 1: those places. Life for those with general paralysis could be
Speaker 1: particularly bleak. If you were somebody who was in a
Speaker 1: rather reduced and bad state, you would probably be confined
Speaker 1: to bed, you would be too frail, You would probably
Speaker 1: be largely left alone for most of the day on
Speaker 1: award with other people who were in a similar very
Speaker 1: sick condition. Although Jacob was said to be well behaved,
Speaker 1: his delusions as to his own importance still continued, such
Speaker 1: as it being in his power to give great grants
Speaker 1: of land and money. Jacob started suffering attacks of giddiness
Speaker 1: and faintness, and would dissolve in tears, though he could
Speaker 1: give no reason for his crying. He then suffered seizures.
Speaker 1: Eventually he could no longer dress or undress himself, and
Speaker 1: he had to be spoon fed. He also fell and
Speaker 1: suffered bruising, though he fiercely resisted the doctors when they
Speaker 1: tried to examine him further. And then on July twenty ninth,
Speaker 1: eighteen ninety one, his pulse cannot be counted at wrist.
Speaker 1: He gradually sank and died at seven fifty two pm.
Speaker 1: Sarah was now left alone in the struggle to support
Speaker 1: their eight children. Hannah Jones marvels at her great great
Speaker 1: grandmother's fortitude. She would go to some department stores in
Speaker 1: central London and she would pick up offcuts of dress
Speaker 1: materials and then she would go and sell them in
Speaker 1: the local market. I believe actually she actually tried to
Speaker 1: keep the butchery business going for some time while Jacob
Speaker 1: was ill, because on one of the sense says she's
Speaker 1: listed as a butcher. So it was very hard. I mean,
Speaker 1: her son, my great grandfather, I know, he was in
Speaker 1: a children's time for a little while during his childhood,
Speaker 1: so yeah, and there were times so I guess she
Speaker 1: couldn't plug the gaps, but she did in the end,
Speaker 1: and most of them grew up and had big families
Speaker 1: at their own. The timeline for Jacob's confinement and death
Speaker 1: very roughly coincide with the end of the Whitechapel murders,
Speaker 1: and his mental state in eighteen eighty eight prior to
Speaker 1: being institutionalized is one of the central planks of the
Speaker 1: accusation that he was Jack the River, driven to violent
Speaker 1: madness by syphilis. Jennifer Wallace thinks there is no certainty
Speaker 1: Jacob even had this venereal disease. More interestingly, she also
Speaker 1: argues his mental illness likely rules him out as the killer.
Speaker 1: A lot of the doctors at the time who work
Speaker 1: on this they talk about these patients being childish, about
Speaker 1: them being clumsy, and also about them being somewhat automatic
Speaker 1: in their movements, where they are really just going through
Speaker 1: the motions of life and have often regressed in some way,
Speaker 1: rather than being somebody who is very calculating and planning things.
Speaker 1: They don't attempt to hide what they are doing, and
Speaker 1: that seems to be a very common feature of that condition,
Speaker 1: and in fact, one of the key writers on general
Speaker 1: paralysis in this period. William Julius Mickel he thinks it's
Speaker 1: incredibly rare for general paralytics to become involved in something
Speaker 1: like murder, and he actually emphasizes that these are people
Speaker 1: who are more likely to be victims of crime than perpetrators,
Speaker 1: because they are very easily led into things because of
Speaker 1: their delusions. I find it unlikely personally that he would,
Speaker 1: with general paralysis at that stage, have been able to
Speaker 1: commit all of those murders, do them in a methodical way,
Speaker 1: and seal them, and for that not to come out
Speaker 1: when he was in the asylum. As well. Painting a
Speaker 1: poor and sick man like Jacob Leavie as a calculating
Speaker 1: and deliberate murderer means ignoring obvious aspects of his appalling condition.
Speaker 1: Adding to the mix the idea that he was taking
Speaker 1: revenge on all prostitutes because a whore had given him syphilis,
Speaker 1: and we've returned to that cognitive bias that Laurie Santos
Speaker 1: raised earlier, the desire to blame the blameless for their misfortunes,
Speaker 1: to dismiss it all as bad things happening to bad people.
Speaker 1: I'd hope to end this series on an optimistic note,
Speaker 1: since I appreciate it's been sad in some parts and
Speaker 1: maddening in others, and what that ending should be crystallized
Speaker 1: during my conversation with Laurie about empathy. When my journey
Speaker 1: was searching the five victims of Jack the Ripper began,
Speaker 1: all I knew was that they were prostitutes, and even
Speaker 1: that was wrong. I could barely tell you their names,
Speaker 1: let alone where they were born, who they married, what
Speaker 1: triumphs they enjoyed, what defeats they suffered. I soon grew
Speaker 1: to know them, like them, and of course empathize with them.
Speaker 1: I saw beyond the surface to the real women beneath
Speaker 1: the awful labels of drunk, vagrant or whore. But I
Speaker 1: found that my empathy wasn't confined to the ghosts of
Speaker 1: eighteen eighty eight. I told Laurie about walking down a
Speaker 1: London street one night and seeing a homeless woman begging
Speaker 1: with her child. I'm sure I've walked by countless women
Speaker 1: like her in the past, but now I simply couldn't
Speaker 1: pass her by. She told me a story about how
Speaker 1: she fell into arrears on her rent and her landlord
Speaker 1: threw her out with her child. And I was staggered
Speaker 1: because this was literally a story right out of the
Speaker 1: nineteenth century and right there, right in that same place.
Speaker 1: And so I think writing about these women, well, writing
Speaker 1: about poverty, writing about individual's experiences, really makes you see
Speaker 1: more of the universal human experience, which I think is
Speaker 1: the great power of what history should be. It should
Speaker 1: be about making a human connection through time, understanding who
Speaker 1: we are as human beings. This is the kind of
Speaker 1: thing that I think can be so powerful about a
Speaker 1: podcast like yours, right is it's kind of like naturally
Speaker 1: allowing us to sort of flex our empathy muscles. If
Speaker 1: we can empathize with some women who died many, many
Speaker 1: years ago, who've been in circumstances who are very unlike ours,
Speaker 1: it's kind of a way to kind of boost our
Speaker 1: empathy for other people today. So we've reached the end
Speaker 1: of the river retold. I'm hopeful that by acquainting ourselves
Speaker 1: with Polly, Annie, Elizabeth Kate, and Mary Jane, we've all
Speaker 1: flexed our empathy muscles, and with our preconceptions and prejudices challenged,
Speaker 1: perhaps we're now primed to show greater understanding and compassion
Speaker 1: to others. We might simply dismiss as bad women. After
Speaker 1: we completed all the taping for this series, Hannah Jones
Speaker 1: sent us a voice message. She'd been mulling over her
Speaker 1: interview and my questions on whether she was angry about
Speaker 1: the lack of sympathy her great great grandfather has been
Speaker 1: shown sitting alone. Hannah went back to the documents detailing
Speaker 1: Jacob's decline and Sarah's battle to keep their family afloat,
Speaker 1: and then she hit the record button. I think most
Speaker 1: people in my family would consider it a bit precious
Speaker 1: and bit predentious to be upset and outraged about a
Speaker 1: relative that died one hundred and thirty years ago. But
Speaker 1: reading those notes again with fresh eyes, I have to
Speaker 1: admit it did make me cry. And I suppose the
Speaker 1: way that we think about the past, it does color
Speaker 1: how we see people in the present, too, So I
Speaker 1: wanted to add I have no idea whether Jacob ever
Speaker 1: acted on his urges to do violence. We're never going
Speaker 1: to be anywhere close to knowing who Jack the Ribbon was.
Speaker 1: But if people do remember and talk about Jacob, I
Speaker 1: think they should also remember that he was somebody with
Speaker 1: a conscience who worried and felt conflicted. He wants round
Speaker 1: a solvent business. He had high hopes for his family.
Speaker 1: As a teenager, he suffered a horrific trauma when he
Speaker 1: found his older brother who died by suicide at the
Speaker 1: end of his life. He was all alone and in
Speaker 1: pain and confused, and he was only thirty five. So
Speaker 1: I just wanted to say that he should be remembered
Speaker 1: as a real person and not just somebody who might
Speaker 1: tenuously of ben Jack the Ripper. All right, thank you,
Speaker 1: that's it. Bad Women The Ripper Retold is brought to
Speaker 1: you by Pushkin Industries and me Hallie rubin Hold, and
Speaker 1: is based on my book The Five. It was produced
Speaker 1: and co written by Ryan Dilley and Alice Fines, with
Speaker 1: help from Pete Norton and Courtney Guerino. Pascal Wise Sound
Speaker 1: designed and mixed the show and composed all the original music.
Speaker 1: He was accompanied by Ellie Wilson on the violin and
Speaker 1: Berry Wise and Oliver Vessey on the piano. You also
Speaker 1: heard the voice talents of Soulboyer, Sarah Bows, Ben Crowe,
Speaker 1: Melanie Gutridge, Gemma Saunders, Rufus Right and Robin Wise. Bad
Speaker 1: Women The Ripper Retold was recorded at Warders Studios in
Speaker 1: London and sound engineered by Tom Berry, Dave Smith and
Speaker 1: Alicia Cunningham. The show also wouldn't have been ospel without
Speaker 1: the work of Milabelle, Jacob Weisberg, Jen Guerra, Heather Fane,
Speaker 1: Carlie mcgliori, Maggie Taylor, Nicole Morano, Letalmullard, Eric Sander and
Speaker 1: Niela Lucan, with special thanks to my agents Sarah Ballard
Speaker 1: and Ellie kron An. Additional thanks to Frank McGrath and
Speaker 1: Poppy Damon