Speaker 1: Pushkin. It's the coldest of cold cases. A murder of
Speaker 1: the most brutal kind was committed in the neighborhood of
Speaker 1: Whitechapel in the early hours. But by whom and with
Speaker 1: what motive is at present a complete mystery. In the
Speaker 1: fall of eighteen eighty eight, woman after woman after woman
Speaker 1: was murdered in the dark backstreets of poverty stricken East London.
Speaker 1: This poor creature was taken into the yard and butchered.
Speaker 1: Are nearly finded away at what I saw. The killer
Speaker 1: struck and then disappeared, leaving the police baffled. All that
Speaker 1: was certain was the awful severity of the wounds inflicted
Speaker 1: on the women. The poor woman's throat was cut, the
Speaker 1: inside of her body was lying beside her. She was
Speaker 1: quite ripped open. The murders were so violent that the
Speaker 1: killer earned a nickname known the world over, armed down
Speaker 1: on halls and are shap Quinn ripping them. Even today,
Speaker 1: his name ranks among the cruelest and most notorious of
Speaker 1: serial killers, Jack the Ripper. This podcast isn't about Jack
Speaker 1: the Ripper, at least, it's not about the Jack the
Speaker 1: ripboat you've heard of. I can pretty much guarantee that
Speaker 1: up until now, everything you've been told about The Ripper,
Speaker 1: that original serial killer, that knife wielding victorian bogeyman is wrong.
Speaker 1: But don't feel bad about that. I too was none
Speaker 1: the wiser when I started researching a book about the
Speaker 1: events in Whitechapel in eighteen eighty eight. My name is
Speaker 1: Hallie Rubinholt and I'm a historian. More specifically, I'm a
Speaker 1: historian of prostitution. In the seventeen and eighteen hundreds, I'd
Speaker 1: enjoyed some success with a book on the sex trade
Speaker 1: and Brothels of George in London. It got picked up
Speaker 1: and made into a TV series called Harlots. So I
Speaker 1: was casting around for a promising follow up project. And
Speaker 1: who were the most infamous prostitutes in all of history?
Speaker 1: The victims of Jack the Ripper? Of course, can you
Speaker 1: tell me one fact that you know about Jack the Ripper?
Speaker 1: They never got caught. Oh God, he's rumored to be
Speaker 1: a butcher? Was I think he was like quite good
Speaker 1: at killing people? And who did he kill? Prostitutes? He
Speaker 1: killed prostitutes. Before I began my research, no author had
Speaker 1: attempted to really build out the worlds of these women
Speaker 1: to fully put their lives into context. The last movements
Speaker 1: on the days they were killed had been painstakingly researched
Speaker 1: and rehearsed. But what about the other days and years
Speaker 1: of their lives? Who were they and how did they
Speaker 1: cross paths with a killer? Hello? Love? Yeah, you don't
Speaker 1: like a sport. As I browsed the books and films
Speaker 1: out there, I noticed that wherever the Ripper's five victims
Speaker 1: were mentioned, they were usually characterized as society's waste. Yeah
Speaker 1: so bad, I writ led as filthy, ruined, pitiful, drink
Speaker 1: sodden whores. You don't fasible pain of Dulia. I'm cutting
Speaker 1: the price tonight. Polly Annie, Elizabeth Kate, and Mary Jane
Speaker 1: were so reduced, so simplified, that they were little more
Speaker 1: than cartoon characters. You can have it for not believe
Speaker 1: you want to. I began excavating their lives from start
Speaker 1: to finish, and what I found out amazed me. So
Speaker 1: what is the original story the cartoon version of a
Speaker 1: very real and very awful murders? Brie? Well, it goes
Speaker 1: something like this. It's August eighteen eighty eight in the
Speaker 1: vile slums of London's East End. This is a bleak
Speaker 1: and squalid warren. Criss crossing thoroughfares are smothered by thick,
Speaker 1: noxious fog, and the streets swarm with prostitutes, thieves, and drunks.
Speaker 1: Life here is an endless grind of illness, crime and poverty.
Speaker 1: It's nighttime and prostitute Polly Nichols is out soliciting. She's
Speaker 1: been drinking and she just needs one more client to
Speaker 1: pay for her bed. That night, a gentleman approaches Crown.
Speaker 1: He's wearing a hat and a cape, a doctor perhaps.
Speaker 1: Polly takes him to a quiet side street, which is
Speaker 1: where he attacks her over and he stabs him, and
Speaker 1: he cuts her throat, then he vanishes into the night.
Speaker 1: Over the coming months, four more prostitutes are murdered by
Speaker 1: the diabolical Whitechapel fiend. Annie Chapman is found with her
Speaker 1: throat cut, her uterus and part of her bladder excised.
Speaker 1: Elizabeth Stride and Kate Edo's are murdered on the same night.
Speaker 1: The ripper carves out and steals away Kate's left kidney
Speaker 1: and part of her womb. Finally, in November, he claims
Speaker 1: the life of pretty Mary Jane Kelly. The youngest of
Speaker 1: the victims, and he evisceerates her. What remains of Mary
Speaker 1: Jane is unrecognizable. The city is paralyzed by fear and
Speaker 1: the police are baffled. Suspects are pursued and then dropped.
Speaker 1: A taunting letter of confession is sent to the press.
Speaker 1: The author revels in the crimes, promises more, and signs
Speaker 1: off as Jack the Ripper. The name sticks and a
Speaker 1: terrible legend is born. So much has been written about
Speaker 1: Jack the Ripper and who he might have been. There
Speaker 1: are endless books about his crimes. I assume that there
Speaker 1: would be an agreed narrative running through that catalog, some
Speaker 1: undisputed hard evidence, like an archeologist I dug and I dug.
Speaker 1: But instead of a sturdy bedrock of written records, I
Speaker 1: just met with more sand. Police and court records were
Speaker 1: lost or incomplete. The case records that did exist contain
Speaker 1: things that just didn't add up, and the rest of
Speaker 1: the story was filled in with reports taken from newspapers
Speaker 1: which took certain liberties with the truth. To put it mildly, so,
Speaker 1: the famous Jack the Ripper story that you just heard
Speaker 1: is built on nothing. It's propped up by hearsay and
Speaker 1: by the work of true crime enthusiasts and amateur sleuths
Speaker 1: who all think they'll crack the case. It's true that
Speaker 1: Jack was never caught, but fantastical theories about his identity
Speaker 1: have flourished. Perhaps he was a barber, Maybe he was
Speaker 1: an abortionist or a surgeon. Perhaps he wasn't Jack at all,
Speaker 1: but Jill. At one point, Queen Victoria was even implicated.
Speaker 1: I realized that for generations we've been passing down pure myth,
Speaker 1: and someone needed to set the record straight. While I
Speaker 1: couldn't trust much of what had been written about their killer,
Speaker 1: I did manage to uncover a wealth of material about
Speaker 1: the women themselves, and they weren't at all what I
Speaker 1: was expecting. Each woman was at one time what Victorian
Speaker 1: society would have regarded as respectable. Almost all of them
Speaker 1: had been married, All but one of them would mothers.
Speaker 1: None of them came from London's notorious East End. Each
Speaker 1: woman's life was extraordinary and unique. They began life as
Speaker 1: the daughters and wives of carpenters, gentlemen's valets, coachmen, and soldiers.
Speaker 1: They glimpsed Queen Victoria and were neighbors of Charles Dickens.
Speaker 1: They were talented, rebellious, brave, and kind hearted. Their individual
Speaker 1: journeys threw up all kinds of intriguing questions. But to me,
Speaker 1: there was also a larger mystery to be solved here.
Speaker 1: How did these mothers, wives and daughters end up as beggars,
Speaker 1: street walkers, addicts, and eventually as murder victims. What was
Speaker 1: to blame for their fates? That's why this series is
Speaker 1: called bad Women. The Ripper retold. I strongly disagreed that
Speaker 1: they were bad women. It wasn't their fault that they
Speaker 1: ended up poor and vulnerable in Whitechapel, or that they
Speaker 1: were targeted by a serial killer. And the more I
Speaker 1: learned about what really led to their deaths, the angrier
Speaker 1: I got. But more of that when we return The
Speaker 1: White Trouble murders might have taken place more than one
Speaker 1: hundred and thirty years ago, but how we think about
Speaker 1: them still matters. Getting this story wrong is hurting people
Speaker 1: even today. We'll start recording Grace. First of all, I
Speaker 1: want to say, it's just so I'm so pleased that
Speaker 1: I've got you. Thank you for envirotingment. Oh, it's absolute pleasure.
Speaker 1: Oh the SNS at the door. This is Grace. Oh God,
Speaker 1: hang on, somebody's at the door. Do you want to go?
Speaker 1: Go get the door. Don't worry. She's a graduate and
Speaker 1: works for a charity. She loves dogs. She's also a
Speaker 1: sex worker. Now I think it's next door. Don't worry.
Speaker 1: Abou sure. Sorry. We've been messaging each other on social
Speaker 1: media since she read The five, my book about the
Speaker 1: murdered women. Another sex worker recommended the book and I
Speaker 1: was like, well, I don't know anything about Jack the Riffer.
Speaker 1: I remember learning about it when I was at school
Speaker 1: and it was always the old archaic. Oh, these prostitutes
Speaker 1: were murdered, and that's all I knew. I didn't really
Speaker 1: know anything else, so I thought, well, I probably shouldn't
Speaker 1: know because I'm a sex worker. It was quite eye opening,
Speaker 1: but also disheartening. As Grace worked her way through my research,
Speaker 1: she was struck by the lack of sympathy. The dead
Speaker 1: women were shown. These women sort of deserved it or
Speaker 1: did they expect to happen? You know, they were poor,
Speaker 1: they were prostitutes. But I'm still really shocked by these attitudes.
Speaker 1: And I just thought, well, nothing exchanged, nothing has changed.
Speaker 1: Up until today, the idea that Jack was killing disreputable
Speaker 1: women has made it easier for us to make light
Speaker 1: of his violence and even to treat his murders as
Speaker 1: a source of entertainment, which in turn makes us more
Speaker 1: callous when women like Grace experienced violence. Today, if you
Speaker 1: continue to dehumanize the woman, and you'd continue to put
Speaker 1: them down as the prostitute, it's almost seen as acceptable
Speaker 1: to do this because it's perfectly fine. The killer sex worker. Oh,
Speaker 1: who cares, you know, let's just glorify the murderer, because
Speaker 1: actually just sex worker, and it's all part of history,
Speaker 1: it isn't. These things persist and you're basically victim blaming
Speaker 1: us and saying it's our fault, when actually it's the
Speaker 1: opposite way around. Men are violent in society, but they
Speaker 1: choose sex workers because we are the most vulnerable, We
Speaker 1: are the most visible, and people feel they can get
Speaker 1: away with it, so they do it. We've never really
Speaker 1: faced up to this part of the Jack the Ripper myth.
Speaker 1: By being so uninterested in their lives, by feeling even
Speaker 1: to double check the details, we push the murdered women
Speaker 1: into the background, and given the killer center stage. Jack
Speaker 1: the Ripper has never left us. Jack the Ripper has
Speaker 1: seeped into our culture, and we don't really seem to
Speaker 1: want to get rid of him. That's right, joined historian
Speaker 1: Matthew Sweet. He also worries that we've sanitized these ghastly
Speaker 1: murders and cozied up to the killer. Jack himself is
Speaker 1: jolly Jack. He's a kind of ghost that we've made
Speaker 1: sort of friends with. He's a party entertainer. He'll come
Speaker 1: on and he'll give us a bit of a thrill. Somehow,
Speaker 1: it's fine for children to consume stories about him. He's
Speaker 1: a sort of bogey man. And I think that this
Speaker 1: could only have happened because we have absolutely no idea
Speaker 1: who he was, and so into that vacuum spills our
Speaker 1: fears and our fantasies and our perverse pleasures too. But
Speaker 1: somehow it's all totally acceptable because it's a parlor game.
Speaker 1: Jack the Ripper has become the oddest of things, a
Speaker 1: socially acceptable serial killer. And the more you know about
Speaker 1: his victims, the more that seems really wrong. Fine, Jack
Speaker 1: River a commemorative con and Zacano classes Thank you, rush
Speaker 1: Oh Chapter for Teddy Bear. Even though no one really
Speaker 1: knows what he looked like. You can buy Jack the
Speaker 1: Ripper Halloween costumes, and he's printed on all manner of
Speaker 1: merchandise too, from mugs to coloring books and T shirts.
Speaker 1: How much is the T shirt? Okay, right, it's all
Speaker 1: I can dream quite clear. If you haven't seen it,
Speaker 1: it really is the worst, big trush on the tour.
Speaker 1: Every now and again the tour is still happily flock
Speaker 1: from all over the world to visit the sights of
Speaker 1: the murders. That's Mary Kelly. He's gotten off face the killer.
Speaker 1: I went under cover to join one guided tour and
Speaker 1: stand at the spots where each of the women bled
Speaker 1: to death. That is five was as bad as I
Speaker 1: feared it would be. Blackling in between our At the
Speaker 1: end of the tour, after more than an hour of
Speaker 1: gleefully describing the women's wounds, the guide even tried to
Speaker 1: sell me a book. It detailed his own theory of
Speaker 1: who the killer was and how he evaded the tection.
Speaker 1: I politely declined. I currently have over a hundred books
Speaker 1: about Jack the Ripper. Rebecca Frost is an expert on
Speaker 1: true crime literature and specifically on how we talk and
Speaker 1: write about Jack the Ripper. In most of these books,
Speaker 1: people are upset that he was never caught. They are
Speaker 1: not upset that women were murdered. People want to know
Speaker 1: the killer. They want to understand the killer. They want
Speaker 1: to know what drove him to it, and people are
Speaker 1: really fascinated by the fact that he got away with it.
Speaker 1: Nobody's concerned about the women. That's the problem in the
Speaker 1: great game of unmasking the murderer. The victims only add
Speaker 1: to what we know about Jack. They are bits of
Speaker 1: evidence that might flesh out his identity. It's that half
Speaker 1: an hour contact between them and the killer that makes
Speaker 1: them interesting. They're intertwined with this person who used them
Speaker 1: for his own devices and his own pleasure in his
Speaker 1: own way. They had no say in this whatsoever. And
Speaker 1: that is how you're known for the rest of eternity.
Speaker 1: With advances in forensic technology, interest has been rekindled in
Speaker 1: the women as handy sources of DNA to help identify Jack.
Speaker 1: I'll tell you about a bizarre and upsetting plan to
Speaker 1: dig up their corpses another time, but I quickly want
Speaker 1: to mythbust one of the sillier scientific stunts you might
Speaker 1: have seen. If you've watched any TV show about the
Speaker 1: White Chapel murders, you're bound to have noticed people in
Speaker 1: white lab coats and latex gloves taking swab samples from
Speaker 1: a beautiful, dark Paisley shawl. This crops up in nearly
Speaker 1: every documentary. Scientists at King's College, London are analyzing the
Speaker 1: material on the chance that the killer's DNA may have
Speaker 1: transferred to the shawl and survived. This time, it's a
Speaker 1: show called American Ripper and Jeff mudget is having his
Speaker 1: DNA compared to samples from the shawl. Waiting for these
Speaker 1: results has been really nerve racking, because if the killer's
Speaker 1: DNA remained on the victim's shawl from the night of
Speaker 1: her murder, this is the evidence that could prove once
Speaker 1: and for all that my aunt's sister h Holps was
Speaker 1: Jack the Ripper. The shawl was supposedly found by a
Speaker 1: policeman near the body of one of the Ripper's last victims.
Speaker 1: The murder of Catherine or Kate Edo's was particularly vicious,
Speaker 1: and the fabric is said to be covered in her blood.
Speaker 1: The police officer kept the shawl as a souvenir, and
Speaker 1: it's been handed down through the generations of his family.
Speaker 1: This could well be the only piece of physical evidence
Speaker 1: left that contains the DNA of both a victim and
Speaker 1: the nameless Ripper. It's said that scientific analysis has already
Speaker 1: pointed to a suspect, a Whitechapel barber, at long last,
Speaker 1: solving the mystery. Where do I start? There's all sorts
Speaker 1: of issues with this. My friend Professor Tory King as
Speaker 1: a leading expert on genetics. She's successfully identified human remains
Speaker 1: dating back centuries and centuries, and she's less than impressed
Speaker 1: with the shawl. Things to consider, even just at the outset,
Speaker 1: I think, is the provenance of this shall. Is it
Speaker 1: even anything to do with Katherine Edo's or Jack the Ripper,
Speaker 1: or any of those cases. I can't find any documents
Speaker 1: saying Katherine was found with a shawl, particularly not one
Speaker 1: is fine and delicate as the one in question. Did
Speaker 1: the killer drop it unlikely, and the policeman said to
Speaker 1: have taken it wasn't even part of the unit investigating
Speaker 1: Katherine's death. The next thing to think about is contamination.
Speaker 1: Because this has been in the family for many, many generations,
Speaker 1: It's going to have been handled by numerous people. A
Speaker 1: family heirloom, unfolded and taken out to show friends and
Speaker 1: relatives and curious journalists and excited TV producers over and
Speaker 1: over and over again. Isn't exactly a forensic scientist dream
Speaker 1: fine and the DNA supposedly linking Katherine the all in
Speaker 1: the murderous barber. It was reported that the sample contained
Speaker 1: a mutation shared by the suspect and passed down to
Speaker 1: his descendants that was unbelievably rare, so case closed. Then
Speaker 1: the barber did it and left traces of his mitochondrial
Speaker 1: DNA mutation three one four dot one C, an identifying
Speaker 1: mark almost as unique as a fingerprint. It's not. It's
Speaker 1: three one five dot one C, which is very, very
Speaker 1: very common in the population, something like over ninety percent
Speaker 1: in Europe. It's very very common. The shoal is just
Speaker 1: one blind alley in this case. There are many others
Speaker 1: I'll share with you in this series, but I've told
Speaker 1: you about this one because I want you to start
Speaker 1: questioning what you've been told about Jack the Ripper and
Speaker 1: the qualifications of the people doing the telling. Jack the
Speaker 1: Ripper is one of these cases that does seem to
Speaker 1: bring out certain things in some people. Personally wouldn't have
Speaker 1: touched this for the barge pole. By the end of
Speaker 1: this series, I'll have shown you why I think the
Speaker 1: case will never be solved. The interesting part that but
Speaker 1: we can all learn from is why these women died.
Speaker 1: They weren't killed because they'd engaged in any particular trade
Speaker 1: or activity. They were in harm's way simply because they
Speaker 1: were women and because they were poor. Jack the Ripper
Speaker 1: may have killed these women, but Victorian society was the accomplice.
Speaker 1: That's the new story I'm going to tell you, and
Speaker 1: it's the one that's made me a lot of enemies.
Speaker 1: The Ripper told will return shortly. It seems I've committed
Speaker 1: three unforgivable crimes. I've revealed that quite a lot of
Speaker 1: what we're told about Jack the Ripper is wrong. I've
Speaker 1: laid out why the case will never be solved, and finally,
Speaker 1: I've shown a light on the lives of the victims
Speaker 1: and asked why no one else has really bothered to
Speaker 1: do so before. That's made a lot of people very angry.
Speaker 1: She's ignored sources to present her own theories, and when questioned,
Speaker 1: has behaved in a very non professional and arrogant way.
Speaker 1: Just my opinion, of course, quasi feminist claptrap taking those
Speaker 1: poor women's lives out of context. I think Rubinholt can
Speaker 1: benefit from growing a thicker skin like the White Chapel
Speaker 1: victims would have needed. The reason a lot of the
Speaker 1: Jack the Ripper story that gets served up is wrong
Speaker 1: is because of people like that. When it comes to
Speaker 1: the examination of most other historical events, from the American
Speaker 1: Revolution to the Great Depression, the people publishing the books
Speaker 1: and speaking at conferences tend to be qualified historians, economists,
Speaker 1: or archaeologists. Rightly or wrongly, most professional historians have avoided
Speaker 1: studying the White Shovel murders, and given the abuse I've suffered,
Speaker 1: I can't exactly blame them. That means most of the
Speaker 1: books and articles have been written by amateurs who are
Speaker 1: often obsessed with the blood and gore. They call themselves ripparologists.
Speaker 1: I do believe that if you call yourself a riparologist,
Speaker 1: you probably should get a real job. This is Ginger Frost,
Speaker 1: a professor at Samford University in Alabama. That is not
Speaker 1: a job. Trying to figure out who Jack the Rippery
Speaker 1: is Number one, You're not going to do at a
Speaker 1: number two who cares At this point if we put
Speaker 1: a name on it, would it change it? Would it
Speaker 1: make any real difference. The important thing to think about
Speaker 1: is the position of women and the level of poverty
Speaker 1: in the East End, and the difficulties of the police
Speaker 1: in the nineteenth century. Their forensics were terrible. Those are
Speaker 1: the kinds of things you can learn about this, not
Speaker 1: endlessly trying to chase some name to put on this guy.
Speaker 1: He's not that interesting. Believe me, Ginger, I've tried to
Speaker 1: make these very points in public. It's simple. Have you
Speaker 1: got any suspects I don't care. I don't care. Often
Speaker 1: when I give talks about the five women, I have
Speaker 1: ripparologists coming along to tell me I'm wrong. There is
Speaker 1: professional prostitution customer. You need to read mine. On the
Speaker 1: other hand, some ripparologists confine themselves to being nasty about
Speaker 1: me and my work and Facebook groups and on Twitter.
Speaker 1: Threads have appeared on online forums too, attacking me personally
Speaker 1: and tearing into my research. One of those threads is
Speaker 1: now over two hundred pages long. And don't bother trying
Speaker 1: to amend the Wikipedia page on the murders. Any reference
Speaker 1: to my work gets deleted straight away. My personal favorite, though,
Speaker 1: is a podcast rippercast. It compared me to a Holocaust denier.
Speaker 1: People have course to flawed methodologists, like those adopted by
Speaker 1: people who thinked deny the Holocaust. We had below the
Speaker 1: threshold for historical responsibility at that point. One prominent repparologist,
Speaker 1: a retired policeman called Trevor Marriott, is particularly upset that
Speaker 1: in my work I don't describe every cut and slash
Speaker 1: of the actual murders. It thanks a false picture of
Speaker 1: the Ripper mystery and the Rapper investigation. In fact, Trevor
Speaker 1: got very angry on Twitter just before International Women's Day.
Speaker 1: He was annoyed about what he saw as feminism creeping
Speaker 1: into his hobby. I have no flawed view of women,
Speaker 1: he tweeted, other than you need us men because vibrators
Speaker 1: can't cut the grass. It was a jokingly comical off
Speaker 1: the cuff remark, which, in my opinion, has got blown
Speaker 1: up beyond the proportion. The comment was made that in
Speaker 1: relation to a man in a that normally in relationships
Speaker 1: it's the men that cut the grass. Trevor and many
Speaker 1: other reparologists seem to see themselves as gatekeepers, the owners
Speaker 1: of the facts. About Jack the ripper. I trespassed on
Speaker 1: their territory and dared to talk about the women, and
Speaker 1: to add insult to injury. I didn't even ask their permission.
Speaker 1: I think the response she's received is fully justified. Perhaps
Speaker 1: if Hallie Ha'd have taken the time to speak to
Speaker 1: somebody like me or somebody else that is fairly knowledgeable
Speaker 1: about these crimes, it may well have given her a
Speaker 1: much wider perspective. Even if you do have the patients
Speaker 1: to engage with riparology, it can be like banging your
Speaker 1: head against a brick wall. I think I changed my email,
Speaker 1: and I also left Facebook. We decided to cut loose
Speaker 1: and that was it. Neil Sheldon's written about the women too,
Speaker 1: and his work has been a useful resource for me.
Speaker 1: He spent twenty eight years in the riparology community before
Speaker 1: leaving it. He remembers going to an exhibition about the
Speaker 1: murders and getting into an argument with another ripparologist about
Speaker 1: how victims like Kate Edo's were being represented. He said,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, but I really cannot see how the victims
Speaker 1: have been ignored. There are several pages from Edo's inquest
Speaker 1: papers on display, including the list of Edo's possessions. Now,
Speaker 1: as far as I'm concerned, that suggests that what he
Speaker 1: believes is that Edo's life story can be summed up
Speaker 1: by the fact that she had a kidney removed and
Speaker 1: that she was mutilated. That to me sums up a
Speaker 1: lot of how reparology people feel just unbelievable. I tell
Speaker 1: you all this not to get even with my critics,
Speaker 1: but so that you know why the story of the
Speaker 1: White Couple murders has been so badly told up until now.
Speaker 1: The people telling it often don't know what they're doing.
Speaker 1: They aren't very good at historical research, and they often
Speaker 1: flunk when they try to involve science. Remember the shawl
Speaker 1: and the rare not rare DNA very very very common.
Speaker 1: And also, and it pains me to say it, I
Speaker 1: get the feeling that a lot of the people who
Speaker 1: are deeply interested in Jack the Ripper aren't all that
Speaker 1: keen on women. For me, the worst aspect was just
Speaker 1: the sort of casual misogyny of it all, the ranking
Speaker 1: of the victims. It's just the way they talked about them.
Speaker 1: Like Neil Melanie Clegg also fled riproology, and yes, you
Speaker 1: heard her right, She says some rippologists rank the murder
Speaker 1: victims in order of their physical attractiveness. The reason I
Speaker 1: left ripprology was actually just someone who made a really
Speaker 1: disgusting rape joke on Facebook, and that was for me
Speaker 1: the final straw. I presume that's why a lot of
Speaker 1: the story has never been told, right, Why the women
Speaker 1: and the vital part they play in this fascinating historical
Speaker 1: event have been misrepresented or forgotten. The only people telling
Speaker 1: the story wanted it that way. They didn't think the
Speaker 1: women were worthy effort. I mean, the public face is
Speaker 1: all the tours, the conference, the articles, they've all written, books,
Speaker 1: they really underline the fact that it's an academic thing
Speaker 1: that they could all be, you know, proper historians, if
Speaker 1: any of them are gone to school. But the undercurrent
Speaker 1: is very prurient and it's just awful. They do talk
Speaker 1: a lot about, oh, you know, maybe we should have
Speaker 1: more women in ripparology and staff, but you know, most
Speaker 1: reasonable women just aren't gonna stick around for that sort
Speaker 1: of thing. So that's the myth out of the way,
Speaker 1: and now we'll turn to the real job at hand.
Speaker 1: I'm going to introduce you to Polly Annie, Elizabeth Kate,
Speaker 1: and Mary Jane You'll learn how these five very different
Speaker 1: individuals navigated a world which was inherently hostile to women
Speaker 1: and the underclass. They weren't angels, but neither were they
Speaker 1: the labels that Victorian society and our own culture has
Speaker 1: hung on them. You'll meet a cast of historians, criminologists,
Speaker 1: crime writers and more who will help me reveal how
Speaker 1: laws around wages, health, divorce, and addiction put these women,
Speaker 1: and in fact all women, at a huge disadvantage. I'll
Speaker 1: show you where things have changed and where things are
Speaker 1: still frustratingly the same. The stories of these women will
Speaker 1: blow your mind, and I promise you this, after hearing them,
Speaker 1: you will never see the case of Jack the Ripper
Speaker 1: in quite the same way again. You can start right away.
Speaker 1: Episode two is available to download. Now, come with me
Speaker 1: back to Whitechapel on an August day in eighteen eighty eight,
Speaker 1: when Jack the Ripper's campaign of terror is about to begin.
Speaker 1: Bad Women the Ripper Were Told is brought to you
Speaker 1: by Pushkin Industries and me Hallie Ribbinhold, and is based
Speaker 1: on my book The Five. It was produced and co
Speaker 1: written by Ryan Dilley and Alice Fines, with help from
Speaker 1: Pete Norton. Pascal Wise sound designed and mixed the show
Speaker 1: and composed all the original music. You also heard the
Speaker 1: voice talents of Soul Boyer, Melanie Guttridge, Gemma Saunders, and
Speaker 1: rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have been possible without
Speaker 1: the work of Mia La Belle, Jacob Weisberg, Gen Guerra,
Speaker 1: Heather Fane, Carlie Migliori, Maggie Taylor, Nicole Morano and Daniella
Speaker 1: La Khan were special thanks to my agents Sarah Ballard
Speaker 1: and Ellie Karn.