Speaker 1: Pushkin. No one living within earshot of the enclosed yard
Speaker 1: at twenty nine Hanbury Street reports hearing anything particularly untoward
Speaker 1: in the night. No scuffle, no cries, no screams. A
Speaker 1: neighbor thinks he hears someone say no. But when residents
Speaker 1: awake on Saturday, September eighth, they catch sight of Annie
Speaker 1: Chapman's body. A local tradesman goes to fetch a canvas
Speaker 1: sheet to throw over Annie and her horrific wounds. When
Speaker 1: he returns, the police have arrived and a crowd has gathered.
Speaker 1: Is that woman who sells her crochet work at the marketing?
Speaker 1: Thank you very much. The gentlemen of the press are
Speaker 1: not far behind. A painful sensation was created all over
Speaker 1: London today when it was known that early this morning,
Speaker 1: another shocking murder was perpetrated. Again. The victim is a woman. Again,
Speaker 1: there has been a fearful mutilation of the body. Journalists
Speaker 1: swarm Whitechapel, and soon the grim details of Annie's death
Speaker 1: are splashed across newspapers hundreds even thousands of miles away.
Speaker 1: The head of Annie Chapman had been nearly severed from
Speaker 1: her body by one stroke of a sharp knife, and
Speaker 1: her mangled remains have been disposed about her in a
Speaker 1: way that suggested a delight in the slaughter for the
Speaker 1: slaughter's sake. Panic grips the east End and it spreads.
Speaker 1: A murderer is on the loose, and he's not just
Speaker 1: roaming Whitechapel in print. He lurks in the homes of
Speaker 1: readers everywhere. But are they getting the facts or fiction?
Speaker 1: I'm ribbin Holt, you're listening to bad Women. The Ripper
Speaker 1: retold a series about the real lives of the women
Speaker 1: killed by Jack the Ripper and how we got their
Speaker 1: stories so wrong. One side, money plenty, and friends too.
Speaker 1: By the score. Then fortune smile upon me. Now one
Speaker 1: pass my time, Anny, and not well her lie seems
Speaker 1: to larn me. I'm com free root. The story of
Speaker 1: Annie Chapman's life is a tragedy. Interludes of hope and
Speaker 1: good fortune were crushed by the loss of her father
Speaker 1: to suicide, her siblings and children to sickness, and her
Speaker 1: husband and home to the shame of addiction. Lighted by alcoholism.
Speaker 1: Annie was penniless, alone and sick were tuberculosis when she
Speaker 1: curled up in a White Chapel yard That was where Jack,
Speaker 1: the ripper found her. There is nothing in Annie's story
Speaker 1: that might explain what happened after her body was discovered.
Speaker 1: A police officer writing up as initial report listed her
Speaker 1: occupation as guess what, prostitute. The police, who were inclined
Speaker 1: to call almost any woman out alone at night a prostitute,
Speaker 1: already had a theory the White Chapel murders were being
Speaker 1: committed either by a gang that was extorting money from
Speaker 1: prostitutes or by a lone killer on a murderous campaign
Speaker 1: to punish them. A grimly predictable move, they immediately linked
Speaker 1: Annie Chapman with the sex trade across the Atlantic. The
Speaker 1: New York Times even took up the story. The latest
Speaker 1: murder is exactly like its predecessor. The victim was a
Speaker 1: woman streetwalker of the lowest class. Annie's murder came right
Speaker 1: on the heels of Polly Nichol's death. These similar killings
Speaker 1: whipped the papers into a frenzy. The blood of the
Speaker 1: murdered women in the East End still cries for vengeance.
Speaker 1: If the murderer is still at large, and if, as
Speaker 1: there is every reason to suppose, he is a maniac,
Speaker 1: we may look for fresh deeds of blood at his hands.
Speaker 1: As the press reports multiplied, so too did theories about
Speaker 1: the murderer's identity. According to coverage of the autopsy, the
Speaker 1: killer had removed Annie's womb and part of a bladder,
Speaker 1: so some were certain that he had to be an
Speaker 1: expert with a knife. A shadowy figure called leather apron,
Speaker 1: a slipper maker, became the prime suspect. Leather workers, after all,
Speaker 1: used wickedly sharp knives to ply their trade, and a
Speaker 1: leather apron had supposedly been found in a yard near
Speaker 1: Annie's body. One newspaper gave the following description of him.
Speaker 1: He is five feet four or five inches in height.
Speaker 1: He's thick set and has an unusually thick neck. His
Speaker 1: hair is black and closely clipped, his age being about
Speaker 1: thirty eight or forty, He has a small black mustache.
Speaker 1: The distinguishing feature of his costume is a leather apron,
Speaker 1: which he always wears and from which he gets his nickname.
Speaker 1: His expression is sinister. His eyes are small and glittering.
Speaker 1: His lips are usually parted in a grin which is
Speaker 1: not only not reassuring, but excessively repellent. He's a slipper
Speaker 1: maker by trade, but does not work. His business is
Speaker 1: blackmailing women late at night. He has never cut anybody
Speaker 1: so far as is known, but always carries a leathern knife.
Speaker 1: Local leather worker John Piser was front and center in
Speaker 1: the leather apron theory. According to the Penny Illustrated Paper,
Speaker 1: Pyser was arrested and then released. He later gave a
Speaker 1: full account of his whereabouts at the time of both
Speaker 1: Annie and Polly's murders to the coroner, with a long
Speaker 1: list of those able to back his version of events.
Speaker 1: It is only fair to say that the witness's statements
Speaker 1: can be corroborated. The press swiftly backtracked on the significance
Speaker 1: of that leather apron discovery. A large knife stained with
Speaker 1: blood and a leather apron, it was at first reported,
Speaker 1: were discovered near the body. But this is not so.
Speaker 1: There was, it's true, an apron, but that belonged to
Speaker 1: a young man who lives in the house and uses
Speaker 1: it in his work. The apron theory had been attempting one.
Speaker 1: It played to powerful Victorian prejudices that a Jewish tradesman
Speaker 1: was bound to be behind the murders. Readers sitting at
Speaker 1: home in their parlors were soon coming up with their
Speaker 1: own replacement theories and writing into the papers to share them.
Speaker 1: Armchair detectives, it turns out, aren't just a modern phenomenon.
Speaker 1: I think that the murderer is not of the class
Speaker 1: of which leather apron belongs, but is of the upper
Speaker 1: class of society. Sir, I would suggest that the police
Speaker 1: should at once find out the whereabouts of all cases
Speaker 1: of homicidal mania which may have been discharged as cured
Speaker 1: from metropolitan asylums during the last two years. The slaughter
Speaker 1: ground of the East End abounds with lodging houses, each
Speaker 1: victim of the last six months being an inhabitant of
Speaker 1: one or other, and their murderer is probably at this
Speaker 1: moment sheltered in this alsatia of the East. The murderer
Speaker 1: is a leather worker. He's a rich man or an artist.
Speaker 1: He's a ruffian. He's an escaped lunatic. He's a doctor.
Speaker 1: He's a foreigner, an outsider, a jew. For some whoever
Speaker 1: he was, he was doing good work by murder during prostitutes,
Speaker 1: like a surgeon cutting out necrotic tissue. To the editor
Speaker 1: of the Times, Sir, the horror and excitement caused by
Speaker 1: the murder of the Whitechapel outcasts imply a universal belief
Speaker 1: that they had a right to life. If they had,
Speaker 1: then they had the further right to hire a shelter
Speaker 1: from the bitterness of the English knight. If they had
Speaker 1: no such right, then it was on the whole a
Speaker 1: good thing that they fell in with an unknown surgical genius, he,
Speaker 1: at all events, has made his contribution towards solving the
Speaker 1: problem of clearing the East End of its vicious inhabitants.
Speaker 1: I'm not actually interested in Jack the Ripper's identity. I
Speaker 1: never have been. But it's hard to research the lives
Speaker 1: of these women without coming across all of these theories.
Speaker 1: I wondered about the primary evidence that was out there,
Speaker 1: What gave rise to all of these theories. It had
Speaker 1: to be something incredible, right, So I looked. I looked,
Speaker 1: and I found nothing. Nothing credible. That is, the official
Speaker 1: transcripts of what were said at Annie's inquest, as well
Speaker 1: as most of the police documentation, hasn't survived. Pretty Much
Speaker 1: everything we think we know to day about Annie Chapman's
Speaker 1: time in Whitechapel and about her murder is drawn from
Speaker 1: the newspapers can we actually trust anything they say or
Speaker 1: was it all fake news. Let's start with some of
Speaker 1: the most simple details that the press got wrong. In
Speaker 1: the Observer and the Pall Mall Gazette, that friend of
Speaker 1: Annie Chapman's from Whitechapel, Amelia Palmer, is misnamed as Amelia Farmer.
Speaker 1: She's quoted as saying that Annie was not in the
Speaker 1: habit of frequenting the streets. Instead, Annie eked out a
Speaker 1: living by selling flowers, matches and decorative fabric covers for chairs.
Speaker 1: By contrast, the Star newspaper quotes Amelia as saying, quite
Speaker 1: the is it? I am afraid the deceased used to
Speaker 1: earn her living partly on the streets, And in the
Speaker 1: Daily News Amelia says Annie is out late. Sometimes we
Speaker 1: may see this as a euphemism for prostitution, or we
Speaker 1: may not. There are many reasons for such disparities in
Speaker 1: reporting in eighteen eighty eight, including physical distance between reporters
Speaker 1: and their subjects. There's a lot of different ways that
Speaker 1: news travels in the nineteenth century. There are many hundreds
Speaker 1: of newspapers just in England alone. Every town has its
Speaker 1: own newspapers, and usually several newspapers what obviously they can't
Speaker 1: do is have a journalist in every location. Historian Bob
Speaker 1: Nicholson is an expert in nineteenth century journalism. Newspapers across
Speaker 1: the world were hungry to report on the Ripper case,
Speaker 1: but without their own journalists on the ground in Whitechapel,
Speaker 1: they will clip directly from other newspapers. That's why you
Speaker 1: cut and pacers we now think about on computers is
Speaker 1: describing a literal historical practice done with citizen glue. And
Speaker 1: that's where you see word for word the same things
Speaker 1: appearing in newspapers on opposite sides of the country. Because
Speaker 1: they're part of this network of news, provincial editors had
Speaker 1: no way to query or fact check these reports. This
Speaker 1: helped inaccuracy blossom and spread. They are taking it on
Speaker 1: trust in much the same way that we do when
Speaker 1: we see these things online now, and it's so easy
Speaker 1: for misinformation to spread when things go viral or move
Speaker 1: around the internet. It's exactly the same in the nineteenth century.
Speaker 1: Once at context, at connection with the original source has gone.
Speaker 1: How do we know By eighteen eighty eight, the electric
Speaker 1: telegraph was being used to transmit information all over Britain.
Speaker 1: The Empire and beyond. As a result, the Whitechapel murders
Speaker 1: became a shared experience for millions. It's not just something
Speaker 1: that's happening in London and then trickles down many weeks
Speaker 1: later to the rest of the country. It's almost live.
Speaker 1: It's almost as rapid as we would experience with the
Speaker 1: Internet or with twenty four hour news. There are telegraph
Speaker 1: cables under the Atlantic Ocean two, which means that The
Speaker 1: New York Times could report on Annie Chapman's murder the
Speaker 1: day after her body was found. All day long, Whitechapel
Speaker 1: has been wild with excitement. The detectives have no clue.
Speaker 1: The London police force is probably the stupidest in the world.
Speaker 1: This technology was revolutionary. Distant events were suddenly much closer,
Speaker 1: the world smaller. When Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in eighteen
Speaker 1: sixty five, people in Britain were unaware of his death
Speaker 1: until a ship brought the news. Fast forward to Andrew
Speaker 1: Garfield shooting in eighteen eighty one, and journalists were telegraphing
Speaker 1: hourly updates across the ocean. Within the space of fifteen years,
Speaker 1: we go from America been a week and a half away,
Speaker 1: to a point where you can feel the pulse of
Speaker 1: a dying president in the Times every couple of hours.
Speaker 1: But rapid coverage of the Whitechapel murders also meant feverish,
Speaker 1: frenzied coverage. Every journalist was searching for a unique angle
Speaker 1: on the story. At this point, They've got to file
Speaker 1: that copy. They've got to get that story in within hours.
Speaker 1: Every day. You've got to feed the beast. That press
Speaker 1: needs a new story, It needs another fact, it needs
Speaker 1: another theory. Some journalists were cross differencing and corroborating their facts,
Speaker 1: but some were simply intent on filing the story that
Speaker 1: would sell, creating the perfect environment for rumors, guesswork, and
Speaker 1: mistakes to creep in. And all of this means that
Speaker 1: these newspapers simply cannot offer us a perfect representation of
Speaker 1: the events of eighteen eighty eight. The ripper retold will
Speaker 1: return shortly. The marketplace for and competition among newspapers also
Speaker 1: helps to explain the coverage of the Whitechapel murders. The
Speaker 1: eighteen eighties was the dawn of what at the time
Speaker 1: was described as the New journalism. Growing literacy rates and
Speaker 1: improved printing technologies had given rise to a new mass
Speaker 1: reading public. In Britain. It was also cheaper to produce newspapers.
Speaker 1: The government stopped taxing them, which meant you could buy
Speaker 1: a paper for a penny, placing them within most people's reach,
Speaker 1: and that public was clamoring for news. You had all
Speaker 1: that stuff together and it basically mounts to an enormous
Speaker 1: gold rush of people trying to get in on this
Speaker 1: new market, trying to be the ones who are going
Speaker 1: to sell a paper. And there are an astronomical number
Speaker 1: of papers in Britain at this time, in every town,
Speaker 1: and a lot of them are incredibly short lived. They'll
Speaker 1: last for a couple of weeks and then die. They're
Speaker 1: a bit like you know, blogs or podcast There are
Speaker 1: all sorts of the things now. Everybody's rushing in to
Speaker 1: get into that market, and some of them last, some
Speaker 1: of them make a hit, others, you know, wither away
Speaker 1: straight away. If you were in London in eighteen eighty
Speaker 1: eight and you walked up to a newsstand, you would
Speaker 1: see dozens of papers all covering the same story. Publishers
Speaker 1: had to compete. For some newspapers, like The Times, that
Speaker 1: all important selling point was accuracy. For others, it was sensationalism.
Speaker 1: The Times has been around since, you know, the seventeen eighties.
Speaker 1: By this point, why do people buy something else instead, Well,
Speaker 1: it's because it's more entertaining, it's because it represents their politics.
Speaker 1: When you cut that kind of public hysteria around the
Speaker 1: Whitechapel murders, where everybody's clamoring for information that intensifies, you've
Speaker 1: got to be the paper that has that latest discovery.
Speaker 1: You don't have that somebody else will. In some cases
Speaker 1: what filled the column inches with pure invention. Lurid illustrations
Speaker 1: were often given prominence over words. You could now illustrate
Speaker 1: a knife plunging into someone's chest, or draw the bodies
Speaker 1: of these women and print them on the front page.
Speaker 1: The most famous example of this was the Illustrated Police News,
Speaker 1: a lowbrow paper that served up extended a breathless coverage
Speaker 1: of crime. So they basically said, we know people like
Speaker 1: reading about crimes, Let's make an entire paper out of it.
Speaker 1: And the front page of the Police News was packed
Speaker 1: with lurid illustrations of whatever have been going on in
Speaker 1: the world of crime. That front page would be pasted
Speaker 1: in shop windows and crowds would gather to gork at
Speaker 1: the images. At one point, the illustrated Police News does
Speaker 1: it before and after of Annie Chapman's face, that is,
Speaker 1: before and after her murder, and even though no one
Speaker 1: really knew what the ripper looked like. The paper also
Speaker 1: depicts suspects, some of them mustachioed and wearing bowler hats,
Speaker 1: others hook nosed and bearded. An enormous amount of the
Speaker 1: paper's content was pure fabrication. They covered the White Shoper
Speaker 1: murders every week for months, and a lot of the
Speaker 1: images actually that you will now find if you search
Speaker 1: for images linked to the case, come from that newspaper.
Speaker 1: How we imagine the Whitehoper murders now has been shaped
Speaker 1: in an enduring way by those incredibly lurid, sensational illustrations
Speaker 1: that they produced. Papers such as The Police News had
Speaker 1: their critics even in eighteen eighty eight. Some in the
Speaker 1: establishment were convinced it was a corrupting force that glamorized
Speaker 1: violence and agitated legions of new readers. A lot of
Speaker 1: the things that we now see as being very modern
Speaker 1: anxieties over how information spreads, who has access to it,
Speaker 1: who gets to have a public platform, All of the
Speaker 1: things are being explored and played out in the nineteenth
Speaker 1: century too. What happens if you live in a society
Speaker 1: where suddenly millions of people are reading who weren't reading before.
Speaker 1: A lot of these people now have the vote who
Speaker 1: didn't have it before, And just like now, we might
Speaker 1: be worried about the influence of Facebook, how is that
Speaker 1: shaping our elections? In the eighteen eighties, people are also
Speaker 1: worried about how journalism might be changing the fabric of
Speaker 1: British politics and culture, because suddenly it's reaching people in
Speaker 1: a whole new way. Some newspaper owners relish the opportunity
Speaker 1: not just to make profits, but to push their own
Speaker 1: moral and social agendas. One pioneer of new journalism, WT Stead,
Speaker 1: talked about using newspapers to channel the steam of public
Speaker 1: opinion and thereby force social change. Although readership was opening
Speaker 1: up in the eighteen eighties, newspapers still tended to reflect
Speaker 1: middle class values and agendas. Reporters were generally drawn from
Speaker 1: society's more respectable wrongs, and they brought their class prejudices
Speaker 1: along with them. This is not the view of people
Speaker 1: who've lived in Whitechapel, who understand it, who are part
Speaker 1: of that community. These are papers from the West End,
Speaker 1: journalists who had stable homes, a good education. They're literate,
Speaker 1: they're working, and they're reporting on the lives of people
Speaker 1: who haven't had those opportunities. At all times, one who
Speaker 1: strolls through this quarter of town, especially by night, must
Speaker 1: feel that below his ken are the awful deeps of
Speaker 1: an ocean, teeming with life, but enshrouded in impenetrable mystery.
Speaker 1: As he catches here and there a glimpse of a
Speaker 1: face under the flickering, uncertain light of a lamp, the
Speaker 1: face perhaps of some woman bloated by drink and distorted
Speaker 1: by passion, he may get a momentary, shuddering sense of
Speaker 1: what humanity may sink to when life has lived apart
Speaker 1: from the sweet, health giving influences of fields and flowers,
Speaker 1: of art and music and books and travel, and intercourse
Speaker 1: with the educated and the cultured. And in many cases
Speaker 1: these are people who would ordinarily never go to Whitechapel.
Speaker 1: They would never go east. It is described in so
Speaker 1: many of these reports as if it's a foreign country.
Speaker 1: The comparison that Victorian reporters often make in their language
Speaker 1: is with deepest, darkest Africa. They see it as almost
Speaker 1: this kind of imperial frontier, another place inhabited by another people.
Speaker 1: The White Chapel of the newspapers as a one dimensional portrait,
Speaker 1: a place of social danger and destitution. But while many
Speaker 1: people in Whitechapel were poor and had no fixed address,
Speaker 1: others had permanent homes and open businesses and restaurants. The
Speaker 1: sun shined in White Chapel occasionally, right, people fell in love.
Speaker 1: They had all sorts of rich and complex lives. But
Speaker 1: in the press it's depicted as just a place that's dangerous,
Speaker 1: and a danger that might spill out into somewhere else.
Speaker 1: It's worth noting that these weren't the first murders and
Speaker 1: Whitechapel to be reported in the press. Previous stabbings, poisonings,
Speaker 1: and beatings were retold with relish. One paper even describes
Speaker 1: the Ripper killings as a culmination of horror. Jack the
Speaker 1: Ripper simply cemented White Chapel in the popular imagination as
Speaker 1: the archetypal hotbed of crime, murder, and disease. When the
Speaker 1: first journalists arrived to report on the White Chapel murders,
Speaker 1: they already knew the type of women they were likely
Speaker 1: to encounter there, they were almost certain to meet the
Speaker 1: fallen woman, who could be found in the popular fiction
Speaker 1: of the era, in the books of Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens,
Speaker 1: and George Elliott. All it takes is for a woman
Speaker 1: to slip up in some kind of way, to have
Speaker 1: an affair, or to to do anything that steps outside
Speaker 1: the boundaries of respectable living. She ends up dead in
Speaker 1: all of these things, in melodramatic paintings, in poetry, in stories,
Speaker 1: either her guilt drives her to throw herself off a bridge,
Speaker 1: or her continual sort of bad decision making, as they
Speaker 1: would put it, leads her into a situation where she
Speaker 1: might be murdered. By the time the White Chapel murders happened,
Speaker 1: people know this narrative. They've seen it a hundred times.
Speaker 1: Journalists naturally drew on these stereotypes to explain the deaths
Speaker 1: of the Ripper victims. These women would doubly outcast, doubly fallen.
Speaker 1: Not only were they out alone at night rather than
Speaker 1: by the hearth with a husband, they had also been
Speaker 1: exiled to hellish Whitechapel, a place beyond the pale. Crucially,
Speaker 1: these tropes for the needs and the agendas of newspaper proprietors.
Speaker 1: They could tease these events into narratives that would channel
Speaker 1: the steam of public opinion and force politicians to act.
Speaker 1: If you're interested in social reform, or if you're interested
Speaker 1: in trying to rescue sex workers, all of this plays
Speaker 1: into that, and the actual lived reality of these women
Speaker 1: become secondary to the kind of symbolic role they play
Speaker 1: in explaining the wider social problems. At the time, readers
Speaker 1: were also accustomed to murder reports that followed a set routine.
Speaker 1: The discovery of a crime was followed by the apprehension
Speaker 1: of the criminal, then there was a trial, and then
Speaker 1: in execution everything would be neatly wrapped up. What was
Speaker 1: quite different about the Whitechapel murders, of course, famously, is
Speaker 1: that we don't know who committed them, whether it was
Speaker 1: one person, multiple people, whether all the same person. We
Speaker 1: don't know. It's a void, it's a silence, and into
Speaker 1: it flooded all of the things that Victorians society was
Speaker 1: worried about, their fears, their anxieties, their politics. It fills
Speaker 1: that gap. It's a blank canvas on which they can
Speaker 1: paint all of these different priorities, anxieties, thoughts and feelings.
Speaker 1: So whether it's about anxieties about immigration in the East End,
Speaker 1: now you can speculate, could he be Jewish, Maybe he
Speaker 1: could be a doctor, what if he's an upper classman.
Speaker 1: It leaves this incredibly open space for people to speculate.
Speaker 1: In their speculation, journalists and their readers reveal truths not
Speaker 1: about Annie Chapman, but about themselves, their own prejudices, obsessions,
Speaker 1: predilections and fears. There are two things in parallel. Here
Speaker 1: we have the reality of the White Chapel murders and
Speaker 1: the reality of the lives that these women lived and
Speaker 1: what happened to them. And then we have something else
Speaker 1: happening in parallel, which is Jack the Ripper. If you
Speaker 1: need any more convincing that the Ripper was a myth
Speaker 1: spawned by the Victorian press, then look no further than
Speaker 1: the or of that immortal Moniker. In the wake of
Speaker 1: Annie's death, a letter written in blood red ink arrived
Speaker 1: at London's Central News Agency. In faltering sentences. It mopped
Speaker 1: the police investigation. The arrest and release of John Pyser,
Speaker 1: the Leather Apron suspect, prompted particular mirth. That joke about
Speaker 1: a leather apron gave me real fits. The author knew
Speaker 1: Piser was innocent because the author said that he was
Speaker 1: the killer. Grand work the last job was. It was
Speaker 1: signed by Jack the Ripper. The note was handed to
Speaker 1: Scotland Yard, but also swiftly published in the papers. The
Speaker 1: letter was boastful, graphic and callous. It was also apparently
Speaker 1: a hoax, a journalistic fabrication to keep the story going
Speaker 1: and sell more papers. But the catchy name of Jack
Speaker 1: the Ripper stuck, as did the letters. Meeting capsulation of
Speaker 1: the murders armed down on oars and our sharp quick
Speaker 1: ripping them, the Ripper be told, will be back in
Speaker 1: just a moment. Somehow, the stories told in the newspapers
Speaker 1: of eighteen eighty eight, with all of their competing, contradictory
Speaker 1: and confusing quotes, have over time haddened into the facts
Speaker 1: of the case, with no proper evidence from the case files,
Speaker 1: deeply flawed newspaper reports on the basis of all kinds
Speaker 1: of theories. Jack the Ripper was a German sailor, a
Speaker 1: royal doctor, a post Impressionist painter, a Polish barber. An
Speaker 1: absence of reliable evidence from primary sources has left gaps,
Speaker 1: and colorful invention has rushed into fill these empty spaces.
Speaker 1: It's not just cranks who are pumping out these theories.
Speaker 1: Foremost among Ripper sloths is the crime writer Patricia Cornwell,
Speaker 1: the creator of the forensic genius K Scarpetta. Her website
Speaker 1: says she sold over one hundred million books. She also
Speaker 1: has her own pet theory about Jack the Ripper's identity.
Speaker 1: The Ripper says Patricia was none other than German born
Speaker 1: painter Walter Sickert, and her evidence includes Sicott's own paintings,
Speaker 1: which depict violence against women. Patricia also says she spent
Speaker 1: roughly seven million dollars on her quest to solve the
Speaker 1: Ripper case. I'm not sure what this endless naming of
Speaker 1: suspects really achieves. In an effort to get my head
Speaker 1: around it, I sat down to watch a documentary that
Speaker 1: Patricia made back in two thousand and two, Patricia Cornwell
Speaker 1: Stalking the Ripper. It interweaves scenes of her real life
Speaker 1: investigation of Siccot the dramatization of the Whitechapel killings. One
Speaker 1: particularly gruesome scene focuses on the fifth victim, Mary Jen Kelly.
Speaker 1: So we've got a reenactment of a man walking down
Speaker 1: a dirty East end lane with lots of women selling
Speaker 1: their bodies, A laughing woman opening the door to her
Speaker 1: one room. This is Mary jan Kelly lighting a candle,
Speaker 1: and the ripper takes off his cloak and reveals himself.
Speaker 1: Oh oh dear, lots of blood, lots of stabbing, candle
Speaker 1: flickers the moon. Patricia is on a mission to bring
Speaker 1: justice to Jack the rippers victims. The only way she
Speaker 1: knows how to do that, she says, is to identify
Speaker 1: the person that committed these murders. At one point, she
Speaker 1: reconstructs what she believes would have been the action of
Speaker 1: the ripper's blade as it plunged through his victim's clothing.
Speaker 1: She does this on a kitchen table with sides of meat.
Speaker 1: Lay us a cloth and a knife, and I'm going
Speaker 1: to cut open a little bit here. Oh my god,
Speaker 1: gross out everybody. I'll stick a little bit of soft tissue,
Speaker 1: soft tissue in here. We'll put something yucky in here
Speaker 1: like this. Okay, Now what we're gonna do is she
Speaker 1: had on about six layers of clothing. Oh my god,
Speaker 1: this is insane. And all of these are natural fibers
Speaker 1: because they did not use Oh my god, Oh my god,
Speaker 1: this is what shocked me. She's piling meat on a
Speaker 1: table and then putting clothes over it, and she's going
Speaker 1: to stab through it. This is all through clothing. If
Speaker 1: this person cut through clothing as opposed to ripping through it,
Speaker 1: what is this telling us? This is telling us nothing.
Speaker 1: What are we learning from this? If I'm really honest,
Speaker 1: Patricia's documentary left me feeling quite confused. To me, this
Speaker 1: quest for justice, with its focus on blood and dead bodies,
Speaker 1: didn't seem to offer the victims any sort of dignity.
Speaker 1: Each woman was so much more than a stack of meat,
Speaker 1: and surely justice for each woman lies in knowing who
Speaker 1: she truly was. That documentary is roughly twenty years old.
Speaker 1: Since its release, Patricia has published a new book on
Speaker 1: Walter Sicket, but perhaps a position on justice for these
Speaker 1: victims has changed over time. Whenever Patricia talks about the Ripper,
Speaker 1: the world listens. A plan was forming in my mind,
Speaker 1: So I rang my producer, Alice. She's clearly interested in
Speaker 1: the victims and sees herself as being a kind of
Speaker 1: a voice for them. It's just you're approaching it from
Speaker 1: very different angles. I just disagree with her, and I
Speaker 1: respect her as a person. I don't understand. I mean,
Speaker 1: what this comes down to is I really really don't
Speaker 1: understand why she's taking this position on Jack the Ripper,
Speaker 1: what logic she's using. I don't understand the obsession. Does
Speaker 1: this documentary make you interested in talking to her? I
Speaker 1: want to know what justice really means in her perception,
Speaker 1: and I would also really like to see if I
Speaker 1: could help change her mind, or even if she'd be
Speaker 1: interested in meeting me halfway and maybe direct some of
Speaker 1: her efforts towards some sort of restorative justice for the victims.
Speaker 1: In other ways, some sort of interest in what the
Speaker 1: victims legacy is, because that is something we can do
Speaker 1: that is actionable today. In eighteen eighty eight, newspapermen hurriedly
Speaker 1: set down a version of the Whitechapel murders that was
Speaker 1: full of inaccuracies. But pick up a newspaper today and
Speaker 1: you'll still read the same old, recycled mistakes. Whenever Patricia
Speaker 1: Cornwell tells journalists she's closer to cracking the case, the
Speaker 1: victims are always described in a way which would have
Speaker 1: been totally familiar to a Victorian reader. If that's ever
Speaker 1: going to change, it require the help of people like Patricia,
Speaker 1: So I've decided I need to track her down. Bad
Speaker 1: Women The Ripper Were Told is brought to you by
Speaker 1: Pushkin Industries and me Hallie Rubbinhold and is based on
Speaker 1: my book The Five. It was produced and co written
Speaker 1: by 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 heard the voice talents
Speaker 1: of Soul Boyer, Melanie Guttridge, Gemma Saunders and Rufus Wright.
Speaker 1: The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work
Speaker 1: of Mia LaBelle, Jacob Weisberg, Jen Guerra, Heather Fane, Carlie Migliori,
Speaker 1: Maggie Taylor, Nicole Morano and Daniella La Khan were special
Speaker 1: thanks to my agents Sarah Ballard and Ellie Karen Do