Bad Women: The Blackout Ripper

Kate Eddowes was murdered in a dark London square in the dead of the night. What had she been doing there? It seems improbable that she was selling sex... and the more likely explanation totally upends the idea that Jack the Ripper posed as a "John" to launch brutal his attacks.

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Kate Eddowes rejected the drudgery of conventional working class life and left the factory and hearth to roam the open road. She travelled the country, performing and selling songs she had written with her partner. But her existence was far from carefree and her lover turned violent. Eventually, Kate ended up penniless in Whitechapel - and an easy target for the Ripper.

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Elizabeth Stride was supposedly seen by several eyewitnesses in her final hours. They also saw a man with her. At last, Jack the Ripper had a face. These descriptions are the bedrock of many well known theories about the killer’s true identity. But can they be believed? And was the Ripper even responsible for Elizabeth’s murder?

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Swedish farmer’s daughter Elizabeth fell pregnant out of wedlock. The authorities considered her no better than a prostitute and subjected her to myriad physical and emotional humiliations. After she lost the baby, Elizabeth fled Sweden - embarking on a life of deceit that would end in her vicious murder on the streets of Whitechapel.  

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Annie Chapman’s murder sparked fears that a crazed killer was on the loose in London, prompting the burgeoning newspaper industry to flood Whitechapel with reporters. Those journalists wrote the first draft of Jack the Ripper’s history, and much of it survives in the story we tell today. But can we really believe those newspaper reports?

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Annie Chapman and her husband were making good on their ambitions to live a comfortable, respectable life. Only... Annie drank. Under pressure from her husband’s employer, Annie was sent away - and she fell deeper and deeper into the bottle. This addiction - and society's disgust with women who drank - also pushed Annie closer and closer to her killer.  

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Standing over the corpse of Polly Nichols, police officers decided that in life she had been a prostitute. There's no evidence Polly ever sold sex, so why did the authorities reach this conclusion? And do the prejudices that warped the police hunt for the Ripper survive to this day?

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Polly Nichols had a husband, a young family and lived in a brand new home built by a philanthropic millionaire. Then she walked out on it all. Why?

Surviving without a husband was almost impossible for a lone women, so Polly began a slow spiral into desperate poverty that would eventually put her in the path of her killer, Jack the Ripper.

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London on August 6th, 1888 is one of the greatest cities on Earth, but the Whitechapel neighborhood is a byword for poverty, violence, and vice. Jack the Ripper will slaughter his victims here.

Join Hallie Rubenhold on a tour of this slum - with its busy markets, rowdy pubs, filthy lodging houses, and crowded police cells - and meet the real women who will soon cross paths with the Ripper.

Jack the Ripper's victims were prostitutes murdered while selling sex on the streets of Whitechapel - that's what historian Hallie Rubenhold thought when she started researching the crimes. She was wrong.  

As she looked into the case, she discovered much of the familiar Ripper story is totally false. But by challenging that myth and trying to tell the true stories of the murdered women, Hallie attracted a storm of criticism...