HistoryExtra https://www.historyextra.com/people/jack-the-ripper Thu, 19 Mar 2026 18:27:20 GMT en hourly 1 History's most notorious crime scenes: from Lizzie Borden's lair to HH Holmes's 'murder castle' https://www.historyextra.com/membership/historys-most-notorious-crime-scenes-from-lizzie-bordens-lair-to-hh-holmess-murder-castle/ Sun, 22 Mar 2026 15:30:10 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/historys-most-notorious-crime-scenes-from-lizzie-bordens-lair-to-hh-holmess-murder-castle/ What is it about places marked by murder and violence that continue to pique our interest, long after the crimes have been committed? Caitlin Blackwell Baines uncovers the history behind some of the world's most morbid locations – from a crumbling Slovakian castle to Jack the Ripper’s Whitechapel 1. Canterbury Cathedral, Kent, United Kingdom

Founded in AD 597, Canterbury Cathedral is Britain’s oldest and most important religious complex: the ‘mother church’ of the Anglican faith and seat of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

With its soaring 250-foot central tower and 13,000 square feet of stained-glass windows, the cathedral draws more than a million visitors each year – some who come to worship, others simply to marvel at its serene majesty. Such a setting would seem an unlikely place for a murder, but, ironically, that murder has been a big part of the pull for the past 850 or so years.

The victim was Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, who, on the night of 29 December 1170, was hacked to death in the cathedral’s northwest transept. Once a royal favourite – Henry II’s chancellor and closest confidant – Becket ran afoul of the monarch soon after being ordained in 1162. By refusing to uphold the king’s authority over that of the church in the following years, the archbishop effectively sealed his fate.

“Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” Henry is reported to have ranted to his courtiers. Interpreting this as a kind of kingly hit order, four of his knights stole away under the cover of night, travelling in secret from Normandy to Canterbury, where they accosted Becket as he entered the cathedral.

At first, the knights attempted to arrest the cleric, but when he refused to accompany them, a violent scuffle broke out. As Becket desperately clung to a column, the knights slashed at him with their swords, eventually striking a fatal blow to the top of his head, spraying blood and gore across the cathedral floor.

The gruesome crime shocked the whole of Christendom, quickly transforming victim into martyr, and crime scene into pilgrimage site.

2. Čachtice Castle, Slovakia

You’ve probably heard of Castle Dracula, the seat of the titular character in Bram Stoker’s classic horror novel. But have you heard of Čachtice Castle? It is the setting for a real-life horror story far more frightening than anything dreamed up in Gothic fiction.

Now a crumbling ruin, teetering on a rocky outcrop in the Trenchin region of western Slovakia, the castle was once home to Countess Elizabeth Báthory – purportedly the most prolific female serial killer in history.

Čachtice Castle began its existence as a 13th-century fortress built to defend the western border of the Kingdom of Hungary. Over the centuries, it was expanded and transformed into a stately home. Passing through several hands, it eventually came into the possession of nobleman Francis Nádasdy II, who, in 1575, gifted it to his 14-year-old bride, Elizabeth Báthory, as a wedding present.

By all accounts, the marriage of Francis and Elizabeth was a happy one. Home life at Čachtice Castle, on the other hand, was not exactly the picture of domestic bliss. With Francis frequently away on military campaigns against the Ottoman Turks, Elizabeth was left behind to manage the family’s household and vast estates, and in her husband’s absence, the countess seems to have taken up an unusual hobby: the torture and murder of her servants.

Her many victims – a revolving door of peasant girls recruited from nearby villages – were variously cut, burnt, bitten, beaten, starved and even frozen to death. Posthumous rumours that Báthory bathed in the blood of her prey to preserve her youth have never been proven, but the available evidence suggests that her actions went far beyond that of a harsh mistress.

• Read more | Elizabeth Báthory: a 17th-century 'serial killer'

She was a sadistic killer whose position of power and relative isolation at Čachtice Castle allowed her to operate unchecked for over two decades. During this time, she is estimated to have killed as many as 600 young women and girls.

Had the cruel countess stuck to her original victim pool of poor servants, she may have escaped capture. Indeed, it was only when several young noblewomen invited to the castle to attend a gynaeceum (finishing school) went missing that the authorities finally took notice.

In December 1610, Čachtice Castle was raided on the orders of King Matthias II. Báthory was seized during a post-Christmas feast – and not, as it was later claimed, in the middle of a murder. Owing to her high station, however, she managed to avoid trial (and inevitable execution) and was instead placed on house arrest in her castle. She died there four years later.

3. LaLaurie Mansion, New Orleans, United States

Sadistic slave-owning socialite Delphine LaLaurie might just be New Orleans’ answer to Countess Báthory. If ever you travel to the city, you will inevitably hear of the notorious madame and her house of horrors. It is a stately three-storey French empire-style townhouse located on Royal Street in the heart of the historic French Quarter, the city’s main tourist district.

On 10 April 1834, the mansion caught fire, attracting a large crowd of curious onlookers. At the time, the LaLaurie Mansion was renowned for its lavish interiors and decadent soirees – as well as for something more sinister.

Rumour had it that the mistress of the manor treated her slaves exceptionally cruelly – which spoke volumes, given that most slave-owners thought nothing of whipping their workers at the time. These rumours would soon prove to be true.

When concerned members of the community entered the house to help extinguish the flames, they made a horrific discovery. According to reports, behind the padlocked door of the attic, they found “seven slaves more or less horribly mutilated… suspended by the neck, with their limbs apparently stretched and torn from one extremity to another”. So shocking was the scene that the once-respected society hostess was run out of town by an angry mob.

Nearly 200 years later, the legend of Madame LaLaurie lives on as one of the darkest chapters in the city’s pre-Civil War history. Though privately owned and publicly inaccessible, the present-day LaLaurie Mansion (rebuilt three years after the fire) still manages to draw hordes of tourists, who come to gawk at its paradoxically elegant exterior.

4. 13 Miller's Court, London, United Kingdom

No list of historical true crime would be complete without an entry on Jack the Ripper, the pseudonymous serial killer responsible for the brutal slayings of at least five women in London's Whitechapel district between August and November 1888.

Easily the most infamous unsolved murders in global history, there’s no shortage of Ripper-related content out there: books, films, TV shows, websites – and even historical walking tours offering the opportunity to follow in the mysterious murderer’s footsteps. Of course, there’s not much for the modern Ripper tourist to see.

The gritty East End streets that comprised the killer’s hunting grounds were long ago transformed as part of a series of early 20th-century improvement projects designed to eradicate the scourge that was the Whitechapel slums. But before this modern uplift, at least a few intrepid explorers were able to visit the crime scenes and view them much as the killer would have done.

• Read more | He's the Victorian serial killer you've never heard of – and we may now know who he was

On 20 December 1890, The Birmingham Mail published the account of one journalist’s journey through Jack the Ripper’s East London. The highlight of his adventures in so-called ‘Murderland’ was a trip to 13 Miller’s Court – the site of the last (and most ghastly) of the canonical Ripper murders.

It was inside this squalid one room tenement that, just two years earlier, Mary Jane Kelly – a sex worker in her mid-20s – was found mutilated beyond all recognition. According to the journalist, “for a long time after the murder [the room] was vacant. Nobody would take it, owing to the rumour that it was haunted by Jack’s victim”.

But, by the time of the journalist’s visit, it was occupied by “an old crone” and her “bedridden husband” who, for the “drop of half-a-crown” would show visitors the “ghastly relics of the crimes”. These included “a huge crimson stain” on the floor, “the fading imprints of a bloody hand on the wall”, and some pencil scratched graffiti purportedly left behind by the killer.

Such “ghastly relics” were ultimately destroyed when, in 1928, the property was demolished to make way for the rebuilding of Spitalfields Market.

5. 'Murder Castle', Chicago, United States

At around the same time that Jack the Ripper was roving the streets of Victorian London, another pseudonymous serial killer was wreaking havoc across the pond in Chicago. Operating under the alias ‘HH Holmes’, Herman Webster Mudgett was a conman posing as a pharmacist, who, between the years of 1891 and 1894, lured as many as 200 men and women to their deaths.

But where the Ripper seemingly killed for the sheer thrill of it, Holmes had ulterior motives – namely money. Most of his victims were the unwitting targets of insurance schemes and romance scams.

And unlike his British counterpart, who committed all but one of his crimes outdoors, the nefarious ‘Dr Holmes’ preferred the privacy of his own home: 601–603 West 63rd Street, a sprawling three-storey structure, aptly dubbed the ‘Murder Castle’ by the Windy City press.

Having been gutted by fire shortly after his arrest in the autumn of 1894, Holmes’s ‘Murder Castle’ is a bit of an enigma. According to contemporary reports, it possessed a labyrinthine layout, replete with secret passageways, soundproof rooms and a network of chutes and trapdoors purportedly designed for the fast disposal of dead bodies.

But was it purpose-built for murder? The oft-repeated story that Holmes hired new building crews each week to ensure that no single person knew the property’s layout is likely apocryphal. Instead, he was probably attempting to cheat his contractors out of fair pay. Holmes’s astonishingly high body count may too have been exaggerated – he confessed to 27 murders, of which only nine have been confirmed.

6. The Lizzie Borden House, Fall River, Massachusetts, United States

230 Second Street, Fall River, Massachusetts. At first glance, this modest clapboard cottage hardly stands out in a city where the streets are lined with Victorian buildings – many of them far grander than this home. But this is actually Fall River’s most famous landmark: the Lizzie Borden House.

Almost all Americans know of the alleged crimes of the accused axe-murderer Lizzie Borden. Outside of America, however, Lizzie is perhaps less well-known. And yet, most will be familiar with this little ditty:

Lizzie Borden took an axe

Gave her mother forty whacks.

She gave her father forty-one.

Andrew Borden now is dead,

Lizzie hit him on the head.

Up in heaven he will sing,

On the gallows she will swing.

But if all you know of Lizzie is the morbid nursery rhyme, you don’t know much. On the morning of 4 August 1892, Lizzie Borden, the 32-year-old daughter of Andrew Borden, a wealthy yet miserly property developer, allegedly killed her stepmother, Abby, using a hatchet.

Lizzie struck 18 (not 40) blows to Abby’s head in an upstairs bedroom. When her father returned home from work for a mid-morning nap on the parlour sofa, Lizzie killed him with a more conservative 11 whacks as he slept.

• Read more | These are four of the most brutal Victorian murders. Were women really the perpetrators?

The second verse gets it wrong too. Lizzie was acquitted of the murder charges in 1893, thus escaping the gallows. She then lived out the rest of her days in a larger, more luxurious home purchased with her father’s fortune – worth about $9.5 million (£7.5 million) in today’s money.

And if we are to believe the reports of thrill-seeking tourists, Andrew is hardly singing up in heaven. He’s moaning right here on earth, forever stuck in his former home, now known as the Lizzie Borden House, a murder-themed bed and breakfast since 1996. Ghost-hunting guests claim to have encountered Andrew, Abby, their family maid Bridget – and even Lizzie herself – in the house.

7. The Ipatiev House, Yekaterinburg, Russia

The fall of the House of Romanov, the imperial family that ruled Russia from 1613 to 1917, irrevocably shaped the history of their country – and indeed, the world. As anyone with even the faintest recollection of their secondary school history lessons will recall, the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II and subsequent execution of his entire family laid the foundations for the first socialist state in history.

What most of us will be less familiar with is the house that hosted that fall: the Ipatiev House, a fairly unassuming former merchant’s home in the city of Yekaterinburg.

Built in the 1880s for mining industrialist Ivan Redikortsev, the two-storey neoclassical manor would have been perfectly in keeping for a man of Redikortsev’s station, just as it was for subsequent owners: gold-dealer IG Sharaviev and military engineer Nikolai Nikolayevich Ipatiev.

But for a family who had once resided in some of the most resplendent residences in Russia – including the 2.5-million-square-foot Winter Palace in St Petersburg – it was something of a downgrade.

In the spring of 1918, Tsar Nicholas, his wife Tsarina Alexandra, their five children and household staff were moved into the house, where they would spend 78 days confined to just four upper-storey rooms.

Under the watchful eye of Bolshevik guards, the prisoners were occasionally permitted time outdoors – though the house’s modest grounds with their oppressively high fences would have paled in comparison to the Tsarina’s private garden at the Winter Palace.

Finally, on 17 July, the family was ordered to the Ipatiev’s basement where they were executed by firing squad. Meanwhile, the house itself wouldn’t fall until 1977 when it was demolished under the orders of the Soviet government. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Church on the Blood was erected on its site, with a cross marking the exact location of the Romanov murders.

8. Sowden House, Los Angeles, United States

Like many old Hollywood mansions, Sowden House is steeped in a long and colourful history. Constructed in 1926 for its namesake, artist John Sowden, for nearly a century the property has played host to lavish parties, film crews and fashion shoots. It’s featured in Oscar-winning films like LA Confidential and The Aviator, and reality TV programmes like America’s Next Top Model.

But did it also bear witness to one of the most notorious unsolved murders in American history? On the night of 14 January 1947, did the enigmatic ‘Black Dahlia’ take her final breath in the bowels of this 5,600-square-foot fortress of luxury? Maybe…

Located in Los Feliz, a hillside community east of Hollywood, Sowden House is one of countless mansions in this upscale district. Yet, even in a sea of swanky properties, it sticks out – partly owing to its unusual appearance.

Composed of giant concrete blocks configurated and carved in designs meant to mimic an ancient Maya step pyramid, the house is perhaps the most iconic example of the Mayan Revival Movement of the early 20th century. It is widely regarded as the pinnacle of achievement for architect Lloyd Wright (not to be confused with his more famous father, Frank Lloyd Wright).

Surprisingly, however, none of these things are what Sowden is best known for. Its main claim to fame is for being the former home of one Dr George Hodel, a prominent LA physician and prime suspect in the 1947 slaying of Elizabeth Short – a 22-year-old budding starlet (christened the ‘Black Dahlia’ in the press on account of her raven hair), whose mutilated and dismembered body was found in a vacant lot, six and a half miles south of Sowden House.

Aside from his surgical skill and supposed sadomasochistic interests, there’s actually very little to connect Hodel to the crime. Still, legions of armchair detectives are convinced of his guilt. His own son, Steve Hoddel – a 30-year veteran of the Los Angeles Police Department – is adamant that the Dahlia’s dismemberment took place in the basement of his childhood home.

Caitlin Blackwell Baines is an art historian and author who specialises in Georgian art and architecture. She is the author of How to Build a Haunted House: The History of a Cultural Obsession (Profile Books, 2025)

]]> He's the Victorian serial killer you've never heard of – and we may now know who he was https://www.historyextra.com/membership/hes-the-victorian-serial-killer-youve-never-heard-of-and-we-may-now-know-who-he-was/ Wed, 18 Feb 2026 15:30:47 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/hes-the-victorian-serial-killer-youve-never-heard-of-and-we-may-now-know-who-he-was/ By 1889, Jack the Ripper’s grisly murders had sparked terror across London. So when a woman’s headless, mutilated body was found near the Thames, a coded alert was dispatched to police: “Another Whitechapel.” But her killer wasn’t Jack. Lucy Worsley investigates the horrifying crimes of the ‘Thames Torso Murderer’ In the final years of the 1880s, it truly wasn’t safe for women to venture out alone onto the streets of London. Extraordinary though it seems, there was not one but two serial killers on the loose in the same corner of the capital.

We’ve all heard of Jack the Ripper, the notoriously brutal criminal who cut the throats of at least five women in and around Whitechapel – and, in doing so, triggered a firestorm of speculation over his identity that continues to rage to this day. But another murderer was plying his grisly trade along the banks of the Thames. He is the scariest Victorian serial killer you’ve probably never heard of – a man who became known as the ‘Thames Torso Murderer’.

Because the Ripper slayings attract so much attention, that contemporary killer has been almost completely forgotten. There may be several reasons for this. The Ripper victims were all identified, the killings took place in a shorter time within a close community, and there were various ‘clues’ and ‘sightings’. In addition, the Ripper was clearly motivated by a hot rage against women. The Torso killer, much colder and better at planning, seems less knowable. Yet though he had a very different character and method, his crimes against women were every bit as shocking.

In both cases, studying the evidence for their crimes and the lives of their victims reveals a wealth of information about life on the fringes of society in 1880s London, the most populous city in the world at the time. And now, nearly 140 years since the first of the Thames Torso Murders was committed, the culprit in this very cold case has – to my satisfaction, at least – at last been identified. The evidence I’ll lay out here, which I share in my new BBC Two series, would not stand up in a court of law. But researchers using modern techniques and, in particular, analysing large sets of data, have come up with a compelling theory.

Gruesome discovery

On 10 September 1889, a woman’s body was found by a police constable in Whitechapel, beneath railway arches bordering Pinchin Street, placed there in the early hours of the morning. Those arches are still there; in fact, you can still walk along many of the streets, riverbanks and water-stairs that form the backdrop for this story, which unfolded mainly in central London, along the Thames between Tower Bridge and Battersea Bridge.

Distressingly, only the torso was discovered beneath the arches; the legs and head had been removed.

• Read more | Nell Darby's historical cold cases: murder in the year of the Ripper

She was the fourth such mutilated victim to turn up. Three more, also women, had already been found in and around the Thames. Each had been dismembered, their severed limbs and other body parts being discovered piecemeal by horrified members of the public. There was a torso in the river at Rainham, Essex in 1887, followed by more remains left in the city. Then, in 1888, parts were dumped at spots around Whitehall. The torso of that victim was carefully placed for discovery in the unfinished new headquarters of the Metropolitan Police, which looks very much like jeering at authority: ‘catch me if you can.’ And in June 1889, various remains from another victim were found, mostly in and around Battersea. None of the women’s heads were located.

Why did police conclude at the time that all were victims of one killer? As well as the strange disposal of body parts along the Thames, there was a common method to the way the bodies were cut up. The Irish pathologist Dr Marie Cassidy, one of our experts in the series, points out that such dismemberment was slow, skilled work that must have been done in a place of privacy, perhaps a house or workshop.

But a new factor in the fourth case was the placing of the torso away from the river and – perhaps not coincidentally – on territory by then deemed to ‘belong’ to the Ripper. Perhaps the Thames Torso Murderer was jealous of the media attention that ‘Jack’ had attracted. Perhaps he even wanted to taunt the Ripper by working on ‘his’ patch.

A recent Dockers’ Strike, which saw 75,000 workers walk off the job, had prompted the deployment of 2,000 extra policemen into the East End. So the torso in Pinchin Street must have been placed in the railway arches very quickly and precisely between half-hourly police patrols. Carrying a torso through the streets was risky: the killer must have had nerves of steel. But this was his pattern: he’d managed to place the torso of his second victim in the middle of a busy building site without being detected.

The fourth murder was a little different, though, maybe because the third hadn’t gone to plan. Clearly contrary to the killer’s intentions, that victim was identified. One of the body parts had been wrapped in fabric from a distinctively checked coat. The friends of a woman who’d gone missing came forward to say they’d recognised descriptions of the garment as one belonging to Elizabeth Jackson.

Elizabeth’s life story demonstrates something that was probably true of the other victims, too: that women living precariously on the fringes of society were very vulnerable. Poor Elizabeth was pregnant without being married. She had left her job in domestic service and became estranged from her Catholic family, turning to the workhouse rather than asking them for support. In the last days of her life she had been sleeping rough by the river. She had a friend called ‘Ginger Nell,’ who was described at the time as “an unfortunate”, which means she probably sold sex. Ginger Nell warned Elizabeth to look out for bad men down by the river. It was wise advice that proved sadly prescient.

• Read more | These are four of the most brutal Victorian murders. Were women really the perpetrators?

The identity of the person who’d killed Elizabeth and her unborn child, along with the three other unnamed victims, remained a mystery. The case stumped those investigating at the time. Modern analysis of the police surgeons’ reports shows that they didn’t do a bad job of seeking clues from the human remains, but they lacked two advantages we have today: the science of psychological profiling, and the ability to search large sets of data.

A history of violence

The person who I believe has identified the Thames Torso Murderer is researcher and author Sarah Bax Horton. She decided that the killer must have had a close connection to the Thames, where so many body parts were found. She also thought that he likely had a history of violent crimes against women. Her real act of genius, though, was to search the online database of British newspapers within the timeframe of the four murders, looking for crime stories containing mentions of the river Thames and violence against women. Among the names emerging from her search, one stood out: James Crick (1862–1907).

Crick, Bax Horton’s research reveals, was a waterman, ferrying passengers across the Thames in his skiff. His boat could have provided the private place that the murderer required in which to kill and dismember his victims. Crick operated from Horselydown Old Stairs leading to the water near Butler’s Wharf. These water-stairs are now a hotspot for tourists and Instagrammers because they offer a wonderful view of Tower Bridge. At the time of the murders in the 1880s, the bridge was still under construction. Enabling rapid river crossings, it would eventually steal watermen’s livelihoods.

Crick was first mentioned in the papers for an alleged assault against his wife, Rosina. He’d kicked her, causing her to scream loudly enough to bring the police to their house. Rosina said that her husband was often mysteriously missing at night. But he was not convicted of any crime. Basically, Rosina wasn’t believed.

Next came a report that Crick had been accused of raping 31-year-old Jessie Miller. She had a low-skilled job folding paper for the book trade, she was separated from her husband, and she was short of money. On 1 July 1889, the Shah of Persia arrived in London aboard his yacht to visit Britain’s royal family, his progress up the Thames being observed by huge crowds. On this festive day, Crick tempted Jessie into his boat with the offer of a free ride. He then “did ravish and carnally know” Jessie in his boat, but she jumped into the water and escaped. Again she was not believed in court – and, again, Crick got off.

Three of the Thames torsos had been discovered before Jessie’s ordeal. The fourth was discovered that September in Pinchin Street, across the river from Horselydown Old Stairs. That October, a 39-year-old named Sarah Warburton, whose poorly paid job was to sew fur trimmings onto clothes, had the misfortune to accept a lift in Crick’s boat. An illiterate mother of three, Sarah was, like Jessie before her, separated.

On this occasion, though, Crick’s luck failed. To assault Sarah, he took his skiff to an out-of-the-way spot alongside a steamer moored underneath the half-finished Tower Bridge. But she hit him on the head with an iron bolt and fled, screaming, onto the ship’s deck. There she was heard by a passing police boat, and Crick was apprehended by Inspector Charles Ford as he tried to row away. At last, James Crick was convicted.

I suspect that was only because Sarah’s witness statement was backed up by that of a Metropolitan Police inspector. With his support, her testimony, so bravely given and so cleverly recovered by Sarah Bax Horton, was enough to put Crick behind bars. And once he was in prison, the bodies stopped appearing along the Thames. Chillingly, Sarah also reported something Crick had said to her during the attack: “I intend to settle you, as I have done other women that have been found in the Thames.” Was that a confession? I believe so.

• Read more | Hallie Rubenhold: “To most people, the women killed by the Ripper are just corpses. I want to tell a different story”

Unmarked graves

What became of the victims? Elizabeth Jackson was given a pauper’s burial in Brookwood Cemetery, Surrey, the largest graveyard in the world at the time. The torso found in Whitehall was also buried at Brookwood; neither grave is marked. The woman found in Pinchin Street was buried in the East London Cemetery, where she didn’t even get a funeral. Records do roughly indicate where their bodies lie, and these burial grounds are moving places to visit. In death, we can give these women the remembrance and respect they deserve.

I believe that the Thames Torso Murderer claimed more victims than the four we know. If he truly was James Crick, then his abused wife, Rosina, and his rape targets Jessie and Sarah were also his victims. Rosina and Sarah managed to get on with their lives. The unfortunate Jessie did not. After a spell in the workhouse, she died at the age of 43 as “a drunkard and an unfortunate under the wheels of an omnibus”. She was a casualty not only of a terrible man but also of a society offering no safety net for women who fell on hard times.

Three in the frame

Which of these men might have committed the Thames Torso Murders?

Jack Fairclough was a one-time partner of Elizabeth Jackson, and possibly the father of her child. They lived an itinerant life together, building up debts, and witnesses report that Jack had “unnaturally used” her. The police were obviously interested in this itinerant stonemason and army deserter, but Jack could prove that, at the time of Elizabeth’s death, he’d been away from London looking for work.  James Hardiman was a cats’ meat man, a door-to-door pet-food salesman who worked with a barrow that would have been ideal for transporting a torso through London’s streets. The body of Ripper victim Annie Chapman was found in his mother’s backyard in Hanbury Street, Whitechapel, leading some to speculate that Hardiman was both Jack and the Thames Torso Murderer. However, their methods of killing seem too different.

James Crick was a waterman who rowed passengers on the Thames in his boat Ally Sloper. Crick had the physical strength to commit the crimes. He also had the perfect means of distributing the body parts by water, and his boat could have provided a place where he could have dismembered the bodies out of sight. He had a history of violence against women, too. After Sarah Warburton, the target of his final identifiable rape attempt, gave testimony at trial, he was convicted and imprisoned – and the killings on the river ceased. (He was released in 1902, and died in 1907.) Crick, then, must be considered the prime suspect.

This article was first published in the February 2026 issue of HistoryExtra magazine

]]> Hallie Rubenhold: “To most people, the women killed by the Ripper are just corpses. I want to tell a different story” https://www.historyextra.com/membership/hallie-rubenhold-jack-ripper-victims-five-book-interview-history-baillie-gifford-prize/ Wed, 20 Nov 2019 08:00:19 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/hallie-rubenhold-jack-ripper-victims-five-book-interview-history-baillie-gifford-prize/ Hallie Rubenhold talks to Ellie Cawthorne about her book The Five, which recently won the 2019 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction and aims to set the record straight on the lives of Jack the Ripper's five victims Social historian Hallie Rubenbold has won the £50,000 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction for her book The Five, which explores the lives of Jack the Ripper's victims. 

Here she talks to Ellie Cawthorne about why their side of the story matters...

Your book explores the lives of Jack the Ripper's victims, rather than focusing on their deaths. Why did you feel it was important to tell this side of the story?

Because it is virtually untold. For many, Jack the Ripper is just a bit of fun. They enjoy dressing up as him for Halloween, or laughing and screaming when he jumps out at the London Dungeon, but they don’t really take on board the victims and their experiences. To most people, the women Jack the Ripper killed are just corpses.

• The Ripper of our nightmares: 5 theories about Jack the Ripper’s identity
• Your guide to Jack the Ripper

But I wanted to tell a different story – not of these five women’s murders, but of the daily reality of their lives in Victorian England. I don’t believe the actual moments of murder are relevant to that.

The Jack the Ripper case has been widely commercialised and even glamorised. What do you think is behind this obsession?

These murders are considered to be the classic unsolved crime, and people are fascinated by that prospect. It has become a kind of parlour game to see whether we can crack the case once and for all.

From a historical point of view, however, the body of evidence that surrounds the crimes is riddled with problems. In terms of the surviving documentation, the closest we will ever get to effectively bringing the Ripper to trial is the coroner’s inquest. That gathers together all of the witnesses and is a sort of compilation of everything there is to know about the murders. But the evidence is very flawed – for example, the coroner’s documents are missing for three of the five women, meaning that we have to rely on newspaper transcripts. But I found that if you look at 10 different newspapers, you will find 10 different versions of what a witness said at the inquest.

• Podcast: East End crime
• 6 notorious unsolved crimes from history

I think that people have been afraid to admit that the available historical documentation is deeply, deeply flawed. I don’t think we will ever solve the murders, so we need to put that idea to bed.

What can you tell us about the lives of these five women?

Together, the women’s stories took me to some very dark places – they include homelessness, alcoholism, domestic abuse and even sex trafficking.

With the exception of Mary Jane Kelly, they were all in their 40s when they died, and all came from working-class backgrounds. The assumption is that “they were all prostitutes who came from Whitechapel”. But what’s really interesting is that none of them actually hailed from Whitechapel, and they were all led there by very different life experiences. So it rather irked me that they have been lumped together like that.

Was life as a working-class Victorian woman unremittingly grim?

In the 19th century, being both poor and a woman was a terrible combination.

If a woman was very poor, she could work as a charwoman, labour in a sweatshop, take on piecemeal home-work, or become a domestic servant. But all of these tasks were incredibly arduous and the hours were very long. The best of that bad bunch was a life in service, where a woman could rise through the ranks if she worked extremely hard. Even so, it was a life of drudgery and hardship.

• The trouble with Prince Eddy: Britain’s fascinating ‘lost’ king
• Victorian London’s East End: what can a foul murder tell us about life in the city?

Victorian society operated on the proviso that women were never designed to be breadwinners. The types of work available to them were very poorly paid – they were never intended to support a family. Women were expected to be wives, mothers and caregivers, not the head of a household. If a woman’s husband or father got ill, died or abandoned her, she often couldn’t bring in enough money to sustain her family. The cards were stacked against her.

Life could be very precarious, and the state safety net was awful. The workhouse was designed to punish people – you would be shamed, it was a terrible existence. It was either that, or ending up on the street.

• Listen | Hallie Rubenhold on the women killed by Jack the Ripper

Did any of the women's stories capture your imagination in particular?

This was the most emotive book I’ve ever written, and all of the women’s stories touched me in different ways.

One that was deeply tragic was that of Annie Chapman. Although she came from a working-class background, Annie had the opportunity to escape the grasp of grinding poverty and move into the lower middle classes. Her husband worked as the head coachman on a country estate, and the family were putting money aside for their daughters to go to decent schools: they were moving up in society. But Annie was a chronic alcoholic, which threw everything off course. Poverty was so truly awful at the time, and to have defeated that fate only to slip back into it is incredibly sad.

Elizabeth Stride’s story is also absolutely fascinating. She found herself caught up in state-sanctioned prostitution in Sweden, before being ‘rescued’ by a woman who took her on as a servant. Elizabeth eventually emigrated to London, where she worked for a wealthy family and married a carpenter. The strength of character that she demonstrated as an immigrant was extraordinary.

How did you go about reconstructing their lives?

We’re fortunate because there were a number of newspaper interviews done with people who knew the victims, so you start with those fragments and corroborate them with other documents like death records or censuses. I could wax lyrical about censuses, because the information you can glean from them is amazing. You can get a very finite picture of who lived in a house and what a neighbourhood was like. Other extremely illuminating sources are Charles Booth’s poverty maps, which graph the geographies of poverty in the capital.

Getting a sense of London’s smells, sights and sounds is actually fairly easy, because 19th-century social investigators and journalists penned prolific amounts of marvellous, colourful material describing the city. When you immerse yourself in all of that, you get a much stronger sense of how people would have lived in that environment, and what psychological state they would have had to have been in to endure it.

• Dark secrets of the Victorian Underworld: did hardened criminals stalk Britain’s cities?
• Podcast: Victorian murder scandal

All five of these women – whether correctly or not – were labelled as prostitutes. Did this shape how their murders were discussed?

I set out to write this book because I wanted to explore Victorian sex work. And who are the most famous prostitutes of the 19th century? The victims of Jack the Ripper. Yes, both Elizabeth Stride and Mary Jane Kelly had worked as prostitutes, but what surprised me was that in the other three cases, I could not find any hard evidence to suggest that the women had been sex workers at all.

I think that this misunderstanding has arisen because of a tendency to take everything that the Victorian establishment said about these women at face value. At that time, society saw all dispossessed women as prostitutes. The fact that a poor woman was an addict or out on the street at night was enough to assume she was a sex worker. The concept of homelessness was conflated with that of street prostitution. But I’ve tried to pick apart those two strands to look more accurately at what happened to women when they found themselves in compromised circumstances. At least three of the victims were known to be homeless, and did not have enough money on them for the doss house on the nights they were killed. They were also found in places that rough sleepers were known to frequent, and were killed in reclining positions with no struggle or noise. The fact that we have chosen to ignore these facts for 130 years is very interesting.

There’s also a lot to be said about the fact that Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes all lived with men out of wedlock. In some cases they were still married, but since they were separated from their husbands (something that was surrounded by great shame), they couldn’t support themselves financially. In order to survive they had to shack up with other men. Even though these were often monogamous relationships, they were branded adulteresses and whores.

If you look at the lists of women who were admitted into refuges for ‘fallen women’ at this time, they fell into a number of categories – women who had worked as prostitutes, women who were mistresses, women who were victims of rape and women who were victims of incest. Any woman who had sex outside of marriage was seen as damaged goods. She was like Eve – she had eaten the forbidden fruit and acquired knowledge that was detrimental to her status as a woman.

Do moral judgments still shape the way these women are viewed?

To a certain degree, yes. Whether we are willing to admit it or not, our society still carries a prejudice against sex workers. There is an idea that women who are ‘bad’ deserve to be punished, and that sex workers are somehow lesser women; they are ‘sub-women’. That really hasn’t changed much since the 1880s.

• In pictures: objects of crime
• The ‘born criminal’? Lombroso and the origins of modern criminology

Take, for example, the Suffolk Murders case of 2006. During the trial, the judge asked the jury to lay aside their prejudices about the victims selling sex or taking drugs, because regardless of what they did in life, they did not deserve to be murdered. The fact that a judge still had to say that relatively recently is absolutely shocking.

The book has already sparked a reaction from 'Ripperologists'. Are you gearing up for a fight?

There is a strong sense of ownership of the material by that said group of people, and I think this is why they are unhappy that somebody from outside the community is writing a book about their subject.

But I also think that it’s a shame people are so worried and concerned. If my book makes people question what they consider to be truths, then a good thing has been done.

Hallie Rubenhold is an author, social historian and historical consultant. In November 2019, her book The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper (2019) won the £50,000 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction. Her previous books include The French Lesson (2016), The Covent Garden Ladies (2005), which inspired the ITV series Harlots, and Lady Worsley's Whim (2008), which was adapted into The Scandalous Lady W for BBC Two.

This article was first published in the April 2019 edition of BBC History Magazine

]]> Your guide to Jack the Ripper https://www.historyextra.com/period/victorian/your-guide-to-jack-the-ripper/ Fri, 31 Aug 2018 04:50:57 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/period/victorian/your-guide-to-jack-the-ripper/ Who was Jack the Ripper? Here, Clive Emsley and Alex Werner reveal the life and times of the Victorian murderer, and tell you everything you need to know about the yet unsolved murder cases The murders

Within just a few short weeks, the Ripper slashed and mutilated five prostitutes in London’s East End

Shortly before 4am on 31  August 1888, a cart driver found the body of Mary Ann ‘Polly’ Nichols in Buck’s Row, close to Bethnal Green. She was on her back. Her skirt had been pulled up round her waist. Her throat had been slashed so deeply that she had nearly been decapitated, and there were deep cuts to her abdomen. This was the first of the Whitechapel Murders that are commonly attributed to Jack the Ripper.

Just over a week later, at about 6am on 8  September, the body of Annie Chapman was discovered in a yard in Hanbury Street. Her injuries were similar to those of Polly Nichols, but some of her internal organs had also been cut away and removed; her small intestines lay by her right shoulder.

On 30  September came ‘the double event’. Elizabeth ‘Long Liz’ Stride was found first, but her injuries were not as severe as those of the earlier victims; the assumption was that the killer had been disturbed during his butchery. And if that was the case he had quickly found a second victim. Catherine Eddowes was killed soon after, and not far from Stride. Her intestines had been ripped out and the killer had taken away her left kidney and uterus.

Saturday 10 November was the day of the Lord Mayor’s Show in London. What should have been one of the highlights of the capital’s social calendar was marred by the revelations of a fifth, even more horrendous murder. Whereas the previous victims had been killed in the street, Mary  Kelly’s  body was found on a bed in a shabby lodging house in Miller’s Court. Indoors, the killer had been able to take his time. Kelly was savagely mutilated and body parts and internal organs were left on a table beside the bed.

Other killings were linked with Jack the Ripper – both at the time and in later years – but these five murders are now generally acknowledged as the sum total of his grisly work. All of them took place in a confined area of London’s East End – much less than a square mile. All of the victims were poor women, and each one of them had worked, or was still working, as a prostitute.

Jack the Ripper was not the first serial killer. He was not the first notorious sexual predator, nor was he the first killer or sexual assailant to cause a panic far beyond his area of activity. But Jack was never caught. And it is this that has probably been central to the fascination that continues to surround him.

Contemporaries of the murders, and people ever since, have filled in the blanks to suit themselves. They’ve used the killings to develop theories about the state of society and the potential for male violence, and even to live out their own personal fantasies of Jack.

The big question: who was Jack?

The finger has been pointed at a succession of possible Jacks, including Joseph Barnett, a Billingsgate porter and former lover of Mary Kelly, and HRH the Duke of Clarence, Queen Victoria’s eldest grandson, who died young in 1892 following a life of sexual excess.

The novelist Patricia Cornwell spent considerable sums trying to prove her theory that Jack was the artist Walter Sickert, basing her claims on his paintings of a nude woman and a man in a house in Camden.

Other suspects have included school teacher Montague Druitt, whose body was fished from the Thames shortly after the last murder; Aaron Kosminski, a Polish hairdresser; and Michael Ostrog, a mad Russian doctor. Another doctor, Thomas Neill Cream, has also been accused. Cream committed seven murders on both sides of the Atlantic between 1877 and 1892 and his victims were often seeking abortions or were prostitutes. Cream was executed for murder in England but his instrument of choice was strychnine, not a knife.

Could Jack have been Jill?

Some contemporaries even suggested that the killer was a woman. Jill the Ripper seems unlikely given that such extreme violence has almost always been perpetrated by men. But only 15  years before the Whitechapel Murders, Mary Ann Cotton had been executed in Durham Gaol. She was convicted of poisoning her seven-year-old stepson, though another 20 family members, including her mother and three husbands, also appear to have been her victims.

The Revd Lord Sidney Godolphin Osborne, an earnest, evangelical paternalist, wrote a series of letters to The Times during the period of the murders. He lamented the gulf between rich and poor, and equated Whitechapel with a huge cesspit. He also suggested that “female hands” might be behind the murders, since the unfortunates of the district were well known for their jealousy, their violence, and for possessing the strength necessary for such action.

Was Jack a foreigner?

Others suggested that Jack was a foreigner. They were convinced that no Englishman would do such things. The press conjured with images of Indian thugs (bandit worshippers of the goddess Kali, crushed by the British in the 1830s), of Malays running amok, of North American Pawnees “drunk with blood” and of atrocities from “the wilds of Hungary”. The recent influx of Jews to Britain, fleeing oppression in Eastern Europe, combined with the undercurrent of anti-Semitism in Britain to foster the belief among many that a Jew was the killer. The Star newspaper almost found itself defending a libel suit when it named John ‘leather apron’ Pizer, a Jewish boot maker, as the killer.

The idea that Jack was Jewish received some support from a chalk inscription found on a wall close to part of Catherine Eddowes’s bloodstained apron. There were several versions of what the inscription said, the most syntactically correct being: “The Jews shall not be blamed for nothing”. Sir Charles Warren, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, ordered that it be washed off for fear that it might provoke anti-Semitic disorder.

The murders echoed the false, but popular medieval fears that Jews ritually killed Gentile children. There were also wild stories of Jews who, after sex with Gentile women, needed to purge themselves with the blood of those women.

Such stories sparked panics in other parts of Europe during the 19th century, many in the 1890s. The Berlin-based Association against anti-Semitism counted 79 between 1891 and 1900; about half were in the Austro-Hungarian empire and another fifth in imperial Germany.

Among the best-known is the accusation of the murder of a five-year-old boy levelled at a Jewish butcher, Adolf Buschoff, in the Rhenish town of Xanten. There was little evidence, but the authorities found themselves forced to try him. Buschoff was acquitted but he, and most of the Jews in Xanten, thought it best to quit the town for good.

Did life imitate art?

The Whitechapel Murders came just two years after Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. A stage version, with Richard Mansfield in the roles of the physician and his monstrous alter ego, opened to packed audiences just a few weeks before the murders.

To many, the killings suggested that fiction had become reality and this led to the play being taken off in October – and Mansfield himself has been identified as a possible Jack. Moreover, Stevenson’s book contributed to the idea that Jack was a toff in top hat and silk cape. Perhaps he too was a doctor – for some, the manner in which organs were removed from the victims suggested a knowledge of anatomy. The way in which he, or someone else, played with the police, sending them letters ‘From Hell’, also pointed to a man of ability.

Did Jack write the letters ‘from Hell’?

Hundreds of letters were sent to police and the press purporting to be written by the murderer. The two letters signed by Jack the Ripper are, like almost everything about the killer, shrouded in controversy.

There is evidence to suggest that they were indeed written by Jack – one of them mentioned slicing off part of a future victim’s ear, something that was done to Catherine Eddowes after the letter was sent.

Newspapers printed the letters and the police took them sufficiently seriously to post facsimiles of them in the metropolis. But some senior police officials later suggested that the letters were the work of a journalist keen to add yet more sensation to the story. After all, the killer may have cut off Eddowes’s ear after reading the facsimile letters.

Was Jack an original?

Jack the Ripper is among the most infamous murderers in criminal history. Yet he is far from unique, both as a savage attacker of women and a serial killer – as the following cases prove:

The London monster

"The wound that he made in this young lady’s hip,
Was nine inches long, and near four inches deep;
But before that this monster had made use of force,
He insulted their ears with obscene discourse."

From March 1788 to June 1790 a ‘Monster’ terrorised London. Some 50 women were abused, cut and stabbed in the street and young Welshman, Rhynwick Williams, an artificial flower maker, was eventually arrested and tried at the Old Bailey for the crimes.

Following a legal dispute about what the offence actually entailed Williams was found guilty and sentenced to six years’ imprisonment – an exceptionally long sentence by the standards of the late 18th century.

The Ratcliffe Highway murders

On the night of 7 December 1811, Timothy Marr, a linen draper, was found battered to death in his shop on the Ratcliffe Highway in East London. Battered and stabbed close by were his wife, their four-month-old baby and the shop-boy. Two weeks later John Williamson, publican of the Kings Arms in New Gravel Lane just off the Ratcliffe Highway, was also murdered with his wife and maidservant.

John Williams, a young seaman, was arrested on suspicion of the murders and allegedly committed suicide in Coldbath Fields Prison. Doubts about his guilt remain, but he was buried at a crossroads with a stake through his heart.

In the 120 years since the Whitechapel Murders, the spectre of Jack the Ripper has returned to haunt the public’s imagination on numerous occasions. No more so than when a hoaxer sent police letters claiming to be the Yorkshire Ripper and calling himself ‘Jack.’ Two other cases from the 20th  century are worth noting for their contrasts to the Jack the Ripper murders and for showing how quickly they can be forgotten:

The Halifax slasher

During the early part of the 20th  century there were several instances of men creeping up behind girls and cutting off the long plaits that were the fashion of the day. Once or twice there were also much more serious slashings. The best known occurred in Halifax in 1926 and 1927, and again in 1938.

On the latter occasion the local newspaper, the Courier, offered a £25 reward for the arrest of “The Halifax Slasher”. The community mobilised behind the police: women armed themselves with hat-pins and men with a variety of weapons. The panic was over in a matter of days, however, when several of the victims confessed to self-inflicted wounds.

The blackout ripper

In the second week of February 1942, four women were found strangled and savagely mutilated in their Soho flats. Later that week there were attacks on two other women, but the attacker ran off on the first occasion when he was disturbed and on the second because his victim fought back successfully.

The attacker, Gordon Frederick Cummings, a cadet officer in the RAF, was easily and quickly identified. He was tried for murder at the Old Bailey the following April, found guilty and executed in June.

Did the press sensationalise the murders?

Lurid violence had long been popular with the media. Papers made much of ‘last dying speeches’ at public executions, which invariably came headed with a bloodthirsty image of the felon’s crime.
When newspapers first became popular in England during the 18th  century, editors quickly recognised the value of crime and violence to maintain or boost sales. Victorian papers had a range of titles devoted to sensational stories and ’orrible murders and, from the 1860s, increasingly used bold and eye-catching headlines.

One of the leading practitioners of sensationalist journalism at the time of the murders was WT Stead, editor of the Pall Mall Gazette. In 1885 Stead’s reforming zeal, and desire to sell papers, led him to launch a campaign to combat child prostitution. It was a success, but it landed Stead in gaol.

Interestingly, Stead refused to print all the gory details of the mutilations inflicted on the Ripper’s victims; instead he used the case to call for a ‘Court of Conscience’ among the media. But other journalists and newspaper editors took full advantage of the murders to shock and thrill their readers. While Stead urged restraint, they used the coroner’s inquests to push at the boundaries of what was considered decent in the descriptions of both the injuries and the women’s bodies.

At the same time, the press speculated extensively on the identity of the killer and the nature of the city in which he operated. London was the centre of an empire; it was the capital of what the British still liked to think of as the workshop of the world, and of a nation with a legal and constitutional system that was a model for the world. The Whitechapel Murders encouraged Liberal elements in the press to probe the darker corners of this dazzling metropolis and to urge social reform. As explained above, it also encouraged nationalist elements to conclude that only a foreigner could commit such heinous crimes.

It is worth emphasising here that the 19th‑century British press was not unique in the way that it revelled in violent crime. In 1894 a Madrid-based socialist newspaper protested at the way in which the press was less interested in education than in satisfying “gross appetites by providing… spiced up fare”. In France, popular papers such as Le Petit Parisien and Le Petit Journal filled their pages with grisly accounts of offenders like Jean-Baptiste Troppmann, who slaughtered the entire Kinck family of husband, pregnant wife and six children, and Albert Soleilland, who raped and murdered an 11-year old girl.

Papers everywhere were illustrated with drawings of knives flashing, guns blazing and blood splashing. In fact, it wasn’t until the early 20th  century that such graphic accounts began to disappear from European newspapers – either as a result of the carnage of the First World War, or the increasing use of photography.

What was the East End like at the time of the Ripper?

Drunkenness and prostitution were rife in an area characterised by abject poverty, says Alex Werner

The East End was a vast, densely inhabited working-class district. At Aldgate, the eastern extremity of the City of London, the road forked into two highways: Whitechapel Road, dating to Roman times, linked London to Colchester; and the Commercial Road, built in the early 19th  century, connected the docks at Blackwall and Poplar with the City.

Off these two major London thoroughfares, in Whitechapel and Spitalfields, there existed a labyrinth of narrow courts and alleyways with many lodging houses and small workshops. Immigrants had settled here for centuries; in the 17th and 18th  century, Huguenots, the Irish, Jews and Germans had all made the East End their home. During the late 1880s they were joined by thousands of Jews escaping oppression in Central and Eastern Europe, many of whom settled in the vicinity of Middlesex Street (Petticoat Lane) and Wentworth Street.

Even before the brutal murders of 1888, a spotlight had been thrown on the abject poverty of east London. Journalists painted a lurid picture of the area, stressing its criminality and moral degradation. In such a world, drunkenness was common, offering some form of escape and, on the streets and behind doors, it often led to violence. Prostitution was also widespread, as poor women sold their bodies to pay for alcohol, tobacco or a bed for the night.

Charities descended on the area and tried to help those most in need. Slums were cleared and artisans’ dwellings erected. As well as bringing ‘the word of God’, religious organisations like the Salvation Army took ‘practical Christianity’ to the East End. They built night shelters, ran dispensaries and soup kitchens, and visited slum-dwellers in their homes.

Employment in the nearby docks and markets was often casual or seasonal in nature. Thousands of men, women and children toiled away for long hours and for little pay in the sweated trades, ruthlessly exploited by sub-contractors. In fact, the low pay and appalling conditions at Bryant & May’s match factory drove its matchgirls to strike in the summer of 1888. Meanwhile, periods of economic depression, such as in 1886 and 1887, resulted in mass unemployment and the threat of starvation.

Some improvements to Whitechapel and Spitalfields followed Jack the Ripper’s crimes. Slums like Flower and Dean Street were cleared and replaced by model dwellings; common lodging houses declined and with them, prostitution and crime. In the 1890s London County Council began to replace slums with purpose-built council housing. However, poverty and overcrowding persisted, and in 1901 Dorset Street was still widely being described as “The Worst Street in London”, much to the fury of local inhabitants.

Alex Werner is co-curator of the Museum in Docklands exhibition, Jack the Ripper and the East End

Did the police investigate thoroughly?

Sections of the press, particularly the papers linked to Liberal and Radical politics, were highly critical of the police and the “defective detectives” for failing to find Jack. Yet the police probably did all that was possible. Forensic science was still in its infancy, and it was to be over 10 years before fingerprints were used as evidence in court – always assuming that any fingerprints could have been found and identified at any of the murder scenes.

The police presence was increased in the district where the murders occurred, and men in plain clothes circulated both in the hope of collecting information and preventing further attacks.
The police were urged to use bloodhounds to track the killer, yet such experiments were not particularly successful. The advocates of the bloodhounds insisted that they were still the answer, and sections of the press found yet another stick with which to beat the police.

Part of the problem was the reluctance of the police to give information to the media; it was to be another 40 years before a press bureau was established at Scotland Yard. And with no official intelligence to feed on, the press were drawn to the wilder and more sensational theories which, of course, helped to sell newspapers.

General Sir Charles Warren, the relatively new commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, did not help matters. Much of the press condemned his decision to remove the graffiti from the wall near the site of Eddowes’s murder on the grounds that he had denied the investigation the only genuine clue left by the killer. Whether this was true, of course, remains an open question.

Warren had a distinguished military career both before and after his time as commissioner. He was also an archaeologist of some significance and, in his final years, he was an eager supporter of Baden Powell’s Boy Scout Movement.

He had been appointed to the police in March 1887 to restore the force’s morale and public confidence in the aftermath of rioting in and around Trafalgar Square following a demonstration against unemployment. When trouble appeared likely again in Trafalgar Square in November 1887, Warren responded with ruthless efficiency deploying troops to back up his police in a violent confrontation that resulted in one fatality and many injured, and that became known as Bloody Sunday. Among Liberals and Radicals, his behaviour revived fears that the police were becoming militarised. He also clashed with the Home Office over the manner in which he should command his police.

The final straw came just after the last of the Whitechapel Murders when Warren published an article outlining his ideas, condemning the press and criticising government action. The permanent under secretary at the Home Office declared him to be “in a state of complete insubordination” and Warren’s resignation followed soon after.

Probably any commissioner would have had difficulty in dealing with the Ripper murders, but a tactless soldier like Warren was not the ideal man for the job.

The continuing fascination

The fascination with Jack and his killings spread far beyond Britain. The late 19th-century French press was obsessed with murders by human “monsters” and “ogres” and ‘Jack l’Eventreur’ remains a well-known figure in France.

Lulu, the femme fatale of the German playwright Frank Wedekind’s Earth Spirit (1895) and Pandora’s Box (1904) – as well as of GW Pabst’s film Pandora’s Box and Alban Berg’s opera Lulu – is killed by Jack. George Grosz, the celebrated artist of the seamy and violent side of Weimar Germany, had himself photographed as Jack. And the notion of a stealthy, unknown killer with a knife, preying on the weak and vulnerable – especially young women – has been meat and drink to the cinema ever since it began.

Jack the Ripper was the first celebrity serial killer who appeared to threaten people that were unknown to him. Had he been caught, his notoriety would probably never have been so great. It is the blank of who he really was that adds to the fascination and enables everyone, of every age, to remake him anew.

This article was first published in the March 2008 issue of BBC History Magazine 

]]> The Ripper of our nightmares: 5 theories about Jack the Ripper's identity https://www.historyextra.com/period/victorian/jack-the-ripper-identity-theories-nightmares/ Thu, 09 Aug 2018 11:00:24 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/period/victorian/jack-the-ripper-identity-theories-nightmares/ The killer was an immigrant… a doctor… a mad midwife… Queen Victoria's grandson. Anne-Marie Kilday and David Nash consider what five theories about Jack the Ripper's identity can tell us about society's greatest fears over the past 130 years  

Outcast Rippers

The Whitechapel killings awoke fears of the predatory immigrant

Between August and November 1888, five women were murdered and mutilated in the warren of streets that made up Whitechapel in London’s East End, some with their throats cut, faces slashed and organs removed.

Even from a distance of 130 years, the bare facts of the Jack the Ripper killings make for unsettling reading. But for the residents of the Victorian capital, the case was far more visceral. In their midst was a criminal, or group of criminals, capable of committing the most gruesome of crimes. The question at the front, centre and back of Londoners’ minds was: who was responsible? And the answers they came up with give us an insight into popular fears at the time and for subsequent generations.

Want to read more articles from our September 2018 issue? Find the full issue here, including:

• Medieval medicine: killer or cure? (subscription)
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Given the sheer brutality of the crimes, it was perhaps inevitable that many Britons concluded that they must be the work of an evil that had entered Victorian society from the outside. This meant that a number of marginal figures from London’s ethnic minorities found themselves in the frame.

Both Michael Ostrog, a Russian, and Aaron Kosminski, a Polish Jew, were cited as suspects in a contemporary memorandum penned by the Metropolitan Police chief constable Melville Macnaghten. Ostrog had lived a precarious life as a thief and confidence trickster before winding up in the south of England in 1888, where his latest appearance in court was notable for him displaying signs of insanity.

Aaron Kosminski was also described as insane – and as a misogynist – and had been confined to an asylum. He strongly resembled a man seen near Mitre Square, the scene of one of the murders – that of Catherine Eddowes – on 30 September 1888.

Kosminski wasn’t the only Jew to arouse suspicions. Jacob Levy was also placed by witnesses at Mitre Square and was apparently seen with Eddowes on the night she died. When it was revealed that Levy was a Spitalfields butcher, skilled in the ritual slaughter of animals, his fate as a Ripper suspect was sealed.

Suspicions that one of Ostrog, Kosminski or Levy was the culprit may well have been justified. But there’s little doubt that the men were also victims of a wave of prejudice that had been precipitated by the influx of thousands of Eastern Europeans into London in the early 1880s, fleeing persecution in their native lands. Their arrival brought to the surface widespread fears of the predatory ‘outsider’, a stereotype that the police – and even government officials – found hard to resist.

The Ripper under your nose

It wasn't long before suspicion for the killings fell on members of a 'dangerous' underclass

It’s impossible to separate the Jack the Ripper murders from the district in which they were committed. Whitechapel was remarkably small, densely populated, overcrowded and submerged in poverty. It was a magnet for prostitutes driven to their profession by destitution. And, in popular fears at least, it provided the perfect backdrop for diabolical crimes committed by the desperate and dangerous – an underclass who could strike anyone from frighteningly close proximity.

The theory that the killings were the work of a local man – a criminal with a good knowledge of the labyrinthine streets of Whitechapel – has long proved an attractive one. And modern crime mapping techniques suggest that the theory may have some merit.

Local men certainly feature prominently in the rollcall of suspects. One such was Joseph Barnett, born and raised in Whitechapel, and a Billingsgate fish porter. He was the erstwhile boyfriend of Ripper victim Mary-Jane Kelly (whose mutilated body was found in her bed on 9 November 1885) and was supposedly unhappy that Kelly was a prostitute. It’s been alleged that Barnett killed other prostitutes as a means of warning his girlfriend off that occupation and, when she failed to take the hint, murdered her too.

Charles Allen Lechmere was a local meat-cart driver who discovered the body of Polly Nichols in a street called Buck’s Row on 31 August. Recent research has shown that, in his statement to police, Lechmere gave a false name: Charles Cross. Lechmere’s working route passed several Ripper murder sites, and the other victims were killed near to where he or his mother lived. What’s more, Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes were both murdered on 30 September 1888 (in the so-called ‘double event’) – Lechmere’s first night off work for months.

Another Whitehall resident, David Cohen, has long aroused suspicion – not just for regular displays of violent tendencies towards women but also because his incarceration in Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum coincided with the cessation of the murders.

• Read more | Spring-Heeled Jack: the fire-breathing phantom that terrorised Victorian England

The royal Ripper

Why Queen Victoria's grandson found himself in the frame

What if Jack the Ripper wasn’t a predatory and solitary killer? What if his crimes were the cold and calculated act of a collective conspiracy? Such fears often surface at times when the establishment’s reputation is being called into question. This is exactly what happened during the counter-cultural 1960s and 1970s, which saw government ministers being disgraced in the Profumo and Lord Lambton affairs, as well as a growing suspicion of the power of secretive organisations with links to local government and the police.

Given this climate of distrust, it’s hardly surprising that a number of theories emerged during this period linking the Jack the Ripper killings to some of the most powerful figures of the late Victorian era – among them members of the royal family.

Queen Victoria’s grandson, ‘Eddy’, the Duke of Clarence and Avondale, has long proved a fruitful suspect. One theory has it that in the second half of 1888, the famously dissolute prince was seized by a syphilis-induced psychosis that led him to murder the five Ripper victims.

A second theory – that Eddy’s crimes precipitated an elaborate cover-up – proved equally alluring. In this version of events, Eddy ran away to the East End, where he married a Catholic woman Annie Crook and fathered a child with her. Faced with a scandal that could potentially bring down the monarchy, shadowy establishment figures forcibly split up the couple and masterminded the elimination of the five female acquaintances who knew the truth.

As it would have required the involvement of stealthy agents of clandestine power, the theory that the establishment engineered a cover-up spoke to popular prejudices about secretive organisations such as the Freemasons. It also enabled macabre (and sensational) ritualised activities, performed in the act of murdering each of the five women, to be woven into the conspiracy.

Read more:

• Your guide to Jack the Ripper
• 6 notorious unsolved crimes from history
• A brief history of capital punishment in Britain

The medical Ripper

Many Britons were all too willing to believe that a doctor had blood on his hands

They moved freely about the urban underworld. Their professional need for corpses stimulated a vibrant clandestine market in dead bodies for dissection. And their callous treatment of defenceless female patients – especially the forced examination of prostitutes – had made them popular folk devils. Doctors may enjoy a healthy reputation today, but in the 1880s, many Britons were all too receptive to accusations that the Ripper was drawn from their ranks.

One of the first medics to come under suspicion was Dr D’Onston Stephenson. He was believed to have contracted venereal disease from prostitutes and to be a Satanist – giving him the perfect motive for removing his victims’ internal organs. Stephenson was also a magician, which served to explain his regular escape from detection.

The American quack-doctor Francis Tumblety was named as a suspect by one senior Victorian policeman – and, given that Tumblety was a violent misogynist with a penchant for collecting body parts, that’s hardly a surprise.

He was a violent misogynist with an unstable personality and a penchant for collecting body parts

Queen Victoria’s surgeon Sir William Gull, who had been close to the monarchy since the early 1870s, has also been cited as a Ripper suspect, either as a lone assailant or as part of a wider conspiracy.

In the years since the Ripper case, the healer turned murderer narrative has been culturally reinforced in the popular mind by the cases of Dr Crippen and Dr Harold Shipman.

Outlandish Rippers

Why no theory is too eccentric in the hunt for the Whitechapel murderer

Perhaps nothing better reflects society’s evolving obsession with Jack the Ripper than the rise of the ‘Ripperologist’, the individual who has made it their mission to provide the ‘definitive solution’ to the murders.

Ripperologists often go to extraordinary lengths in search of originality in what is a crowded field. This has meant that practically anyone with a pulse and the merest hint of eccentricity, who lived in and around London in 1888, has come under suspicion for the crimes. However, some have been more ‘suspect’ than others.

Read more:

• Victorian London’s East End: what can a foul murder tell us about life in the city?
• Podcast: East End Crime

Francis Thompson, a poet with radical religious views, has been posited as the killer because the crimes were all committed on Catholic saints’ days. This theory is hamstrung by the fact that, according to the religious calendar, most days celebrate the death of one particular Catholic martyr or another.

In 1939, the author William Stewart suggested that we should be looking for a ‘Jill the Ripper’, most likely a bloodthirsty, mad midwife. Stewart wasn’t the first person to posit this theory: Frederick Abberline, an inspector for the Met at the time of the killings, had suggested that the murderer could be a woman after a witness reported seeing a female figure leaving Mary-Jane Kelly’s residence. However, he concluded that it was more likely that the killer dressed in women’s clothes as a way of pacifying potential victims.

In 1996, the author Richard Wallace suggested that Jack the Ripper was none other than Lewis Carroll, on the basis that the world-famous novelist left anagrams in his novels confessing to the killing spree in 1888.

Of course, the poetic licence and exposure these more eccentric theories have enjoyed has only been possible because, in the case of the Jack the Ripper murders, so few hard facts exist.

Professor Anne-Marie Kilday and Professor David Nash both teach about Jack the Ripper and the Victorian Underworld at Oxford Brookes University

This article was first published in the September 2018 edition of BBC History Magazine

]]> 6 notorious unsolved crimes from history https://www.historyextra.com/membership/notorious-unsolved-crimes-history-princes-in-tower-great-train-robbery-jack-ripper-newgate-monster/ Wed, 08 Aug 2018 09:10:16 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/notorious-unsolved-crimes-history-princes-in-tower-great-train-robbery-jack-ripper-newgate-monster/ Who was Jack the Ripper? What happened to the princes in the Tower? And who organised the Great Train Robbery? Here, Stephen Halliday reveals some of history’s most puzzling unsolved crimes…  

Who was the Newgate Monster?

In May 1788, a doctor’s wife, Maria Smyth, complained that she had been indecently assaulted by a man in Fleet Street. The attacker, she claimed, had stuck a sharp knife into her bottom and fled.

In the days and weeks that followed, many other women reported similar assaults. The culprit, soon named ‘The Monster’, became the subject of a play of the same name which attracted audiences drawn to the spectacle of seeing the hind parts of young actresses assailed by sharp instruments.

One victim identified a florist named Rhynwick Williams as her assailant, although there was no other evidence against him (despite extensive further enquiries and a detailed search of his lodgings). A trial ensued, during which Williams’s employer testified to his good character. A Bow Street Runner also stated that he had seen Williams in Weymouth, some 130 miles from London, on a day on which one of the assaults took place.

Read more:

• A brief history of capital punishment in Britain
• Victorian London’s East End: what can a foul murder tell us about life in the city?

Despite this rather impeccable alibi, Williams was found guilty of the assaults – he was convicted of “damaging garments” – and sent to Newgate prison for six years. He was treated as a celebrity by his gaolers, who charged visitors to view him living in a comfortably furnished cell. He also continued his floristry in prison by making artificial flowers which were then sold to the public at a premium to reflect his celebrity status. Upon his release from prison in 1796, he married and had a son before disappearing from history.

There seems little doubt that Williams was innocent of the crimes. So who was the real bottom-fixated ‘Monster’?

What happened to the princes in the Tower?

On 9 April 1483, King Edward IV died. He left behind two sons: 12-year-old Edward, who was proclaimed Edward V, and his nine-year-old brother Richard, Duke of York.

Before his death, the king had declared that his brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester, should become Lord Protector of the realm. It was a role that Richard happily assumed, accommodating the two young boys within the forbidding walls of the Tower of London, ostensibly for their protection. But Richard then declared himself king [Richard III], arguing that the two princes were illegitimate because it was alleged that Edward IV’s marriage to Elizabeth Woodville was invalid. Conveniently enough, the boys later disappeared and were assumed dead throughout Richard’s reign.

In 1485, Richard was killed at the battle of Bosworth by an army led by Henry Tudor (who became Henry VII, the first Tudor king). Three decades later, Sir Thomas More, in his History of King Richard III, claimed that Richard had orchestrated the assassination of the two princes to protect his title to the throne.

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• 6 myths about Richard III
• The princes in the Tower: why was their fate never explained?
• Did Richard III murder the princes in the Tower? You debate

More purported that Sir James Tyrell, a trusted ally of Richard, had confessed to organising the murder of the boys on the king’s orders. It was suggested that the heinous crime had been carried out in the Tower of London by two of Richard III’s men, Miles Forrest and John Dighton. According to More, Forrest sought sanctuary in the monastery of St Martin’s le Grand (later the headquarters of the Post Office) where, in More’s words, he “rotted away piecemeal”.

But was Richard III responsible? At the time of the boys’ disappearance, Richard was already well-established as king, and indeed many other individuals had reasons for wanting the boys out of the picture. A strong case has been made for Henry VII’s mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, who knew that her son’s rather weak blood claim to the throne could be challenged by either of the boys. [Henry Tudor was the son of Margaret Beaufort – the great-great-granddaughter of Edward III – and Edmund Tudor, half-brother of Henry VI. As such, Henry was a potential candidate for the throne through his mother’s side.]

In the words of historian Leanda de Lisle: “None of these theories, however, has provided a satisfactory answer to the riddle at the heart of this mystery: the fact the boys simply vanished.”

Who set up the Great Train Robbery? Who attacked the driver?

On 8 August 1963, the Glasgow to London Royal Mail Train was stopped on the East Coast Main Line and relieved of £2.6 million pounds. The robbery provoked mayhem in official circles and attracted admiration in unlikely quarters. The novelist Graham Greene, for example, wrote to The Times to enquire: “Am I one of a minority in feeling admiration for the skill and courage behind the Great Train Robbery?”

During the robbery, one of the thieves struck the train driver, Jack Mills, on the head with a metal bar. The blow was delivered with a force sufficient enough to end his career, and Mills later died of leukaemia in 1970.

Most of the culprits involved in the robbery were caught and 11 of them were sentenced to gaol terms of up to 30 years (though two of the perpetrators, Charles Wilson and Ronald Biggs, later escaped from prison and none served their full terms). However, two questions still require an answer: who struck the train driver? And who organised the robbery?

Before his death in 2012, James Hussey, an experienced train robber, confessed to striking the driver. However, it has since been suggested that Hussey was protecting the identity of the real assailant who is still at large.

A number of figures have been put forward as the brains behind the operation. Was it British criminal Buster Edwards, who was a member of the gang who committed the robbery? Or was it a mysterious unidentified figure known variously as ‘Mister Three’ or ‘Alf Thomas’?

And who told the gang to change the date of the robbery from 7 to 8 August, when the train would be carrying more money? Could it have been a figure referred to as ‘The Ulsterman’? The train robber Gordon Goody, before his death in Spain in 2016, stated that the informant had been Patrick McKenna, a Belfast-born postmaster who had concealed his identity in meetings with those planning the robbery and received a share of the booty.

McKenna died many years ago having shown no signs of affluence to his family, who were astonished at Goody’s revelation. Had McKenna been overcome by remorse at the fate of Jack Mills and given his ill-gotten gains to good causes? We will probably never know for sure what happened, but we can speculate.

Who killed Jill Dando?

The TV presenter Jill Dando was born in Somerset in 1961. After training as a journalist, she joined the BBC in her native West Country and presented news programmes before moving to Songs of Praise. In 1995 she joined Nick Ross as presenter of Crimewatch, appealing for information that could lead to the conviction of offenders.

Four years later, in April 1999, Dando was shot dead as she entered her home in Fulham, West London. The gunman appears to have forced her to the ground and placed the muzzle of a revolver to her head before shooting her. Her cry was heard by a neighbour, who observed a white male – about six feet tall and around 40 years of age – walking from the scene.

The manner of Dando’s execution – one shot discharged by a muzzle in close proximity to her head – suggested she had been murdered by a professional killer. However, the bullet that killed her appeared to have been fired from a converted replica or decommissioned gun – an unlikely weapon for an experienced hitman. Following an appeal on Crimewatch, a local man named Barry George was charged with the murder and convicted in 2001, partly as a result of firearms residue found in his clothing. The conviction was overturned in 2008 following a retrial.

Other possibilities have since been considered: was Jill killed by a former boyfriend? A criminal caught following a Crimewatch appeal? A deranged admirer? Was it a case of mistaken identity? Or, more ‘exotically’, was the perpetrator a Serbian warlord who was enraged by Jill Dando’s appeal for Kosovan refugees oppressed by Serb forces or seeking revenge for the NATO bombing of a Serbian radio and TV broadcasting station in Belgrade?

Each theory has its adherents, but no convincing evidence has been found to form the basis of a new investigation. As such the case file remains open, and we will probably never know who the murderer was.

Who killed PC Keith Blakelock?

On 6 October 1985, PC Keith Blakelock was among a group of police sent to Broadwater Farm housing estate in Tottenham to protect firefighters extinguishing a fire started during a riot. The disturbance followed the death of Cynthia Jarrett, an elderly African-Caribbean woman who had died of heart failure following a police raid at her home on the housing estate the previous day.

Upon their arrival at Broadwater Farm, violent rioters attacked the police, and PC Keith Blakelock stumbled and fell. He was set upon by the mob and killed by more than 40 knife wounds. The police charged 28-year-old Winston Silcott, a British citizen of African-Caribbean origin, with the murder.

Silcott was convicted in 1987 alongside two others – Engin Raghip and Mark Braithwaite – and sentenced to imprisonment. He was acquitted in 1991 when forensic tests revealed that evidence statements had been tampered with (although he remained in prison until 2003 due to his conviction for another, unrelated murder).

Despite further investigations, the murderer of Keith Blakelock remains at large today. Given the nature of the killing and the potential for multiple witnesses, his identity could be known to many.

Who was Jack the Ripper?

We end our tale of criminals who escaped justice with the most notorious of all: Jack the Ripper.

Between August and November 1888, five women were murdered in Whitechapel, East London. The murders occurred in a small area of Whitechapel and were characterised by extreme violence towards the victims which involved severe knife wounds and, in some cases, disembowelling.

Multiple theories concerning the criminal’s identity have been put forward – here are just some of the leading candidates:

Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence (also known as Prince Eddy)

The most exotic ‘suspect’ of all was Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence, the eldest son of the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII) and second in line of succession to the throne as grandson of Queen Victoria. Disappointingly for those seeking the Ripper’s identity, an examination of the Court Circular [an official record of past royal engagements] reveals that Albert was dining with the queen when he should have been roaming the streets of Whitechapel, knife in hand.

Read more:

• 11 shocking moments in history
• Your guide to Jack the Ripper
• Podcast: East End crime

Jill the Ripper

Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, occasionally ventured into the real world of crime and suggested that the culprit was in fact ‘Jill the Ripper’: possibly a midwife who would be trusted be the female victims and could move about with blood on her clothing without attracting suspicion.

Aaron Kosminski

In his memoirs, Sir Robert Anderson, the assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police at the time of the Ripper murders, wrote that a Polish Jew had been identified as the most likely culprit but without evidence acceptable by a court. Aaron Kosminski, one of many Polish Jews living in the East End at the time, was identified as the Ripper by two investigating officers, one of them writing Kosminski’s name in the margin of Anderson’s memoir. In 1891 Kosminski was admitted to Colney Hatch lunatic asylum. He was later transferred to Leavesden Asylum, and died there in 1919.

James Maybrick

Maybrick was a Liverpool cotton merchant. His role in the case was based upon a diary, published in the 1990s, in which he ‘confessed’ to the murders. But examination of the diary revealed a number of factual errors in the ‘confessions’; handwriting which bore no resemblance to that of Maybrick himself; and ink of a kind that was not available until the 1970s.

Stephen Halliday is a writer, lecturer and broadcaster with a particular interest in Victorian London. He is the author of The Little Book of Crime and Punishment (History Press, 2014), from which much of the information in this article is taken

]]> 11 shocking moments in history https://www.historyextra.com/period/victorian/11-shocking-moments-in-history/ Tue, 08 May 2018 09:12:49 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/period/victorian/11-shocking-moments-in-history/ From the Salem witch trials to the bombing of Hiroshima, history is full of dates that shook the world and continue, decades and centuries later, to astound. Using eyewitness testimony – letters, diaries and archive interviews – the BBC oral history radio and TV programme Witness retells these watershed moments. Here, we round up 11 of the most shocking  

The execution of Anne Boleyn

On the morning of 19 May 1536, Henry VIII’s second wife, Anne Boleyn, became the first English queen to be publicly executed. Charged with adultery, incest and conspiring the king’s death, Anne was beheaded on a scaffold erected on Tower Green, within the walls of the Tower of London. Her death, says historian Suzannah Lipscomb, “is so familiar to us that it is hard to imagine how shocking it would have been”.

Anne and Henry had been married for little more than three years at the time of her death. For her, Henry had left his wife of nearly 24 years and the mother of his child (the future Mary I), and broken with the Catholic Church. By the spring of 1536, however, Henry’s affection had waned and he was hotly pursuing Anne’s lady-in-waiting, Jane Seymour.

Along with five courtiers, including Anne’s brother, George, Anne was arrested and imprisoned in the Tower of London in early May 1536. Mark Smeaton, William Brereton, Francis Weston and Henry Norris were tried and found guilty of adultery with the queen, and of conspiring the king’s death, while Anne and her brother were found guilty of high treason. By 19 May, all six convicted had been executed.

Reporting on Anne’s execution in 1536, Eustace Chapuys, the Spanish ambassador to Henry’s court, wrote: “No one ever shewed more courage or greater readiness to meet death than she did”.

Today, nearly 500 years after her execution, historians cannot agree why Anne had to die. This episode of Witness explores Anne’s final hours and considers why she was executed…

To listen, click here.

The building of the Berlin Wall

For almost 30 years the Berlin Wall separated Germany's communist east from the US-friendly west. Constructed overnight on 12–13 August 1961 by the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), the wall’s official purpose was to stop western “fascists” from entering east Germany and undermining the building of a socialist state. In reality, however, it served to prevent mass defections from east to west.

Berliners awoke on 13 August to find themselves cut off from family, friends, work and in some cases even their homes – it was now impossible to get from east to west. The makeshift wall was soon replaced by a 12ft-tall, 4ft-wide reinforced concrete barrier, heavily guarded and lined with booby traps. In total at least 171 people were killed trying to get over, under or around the Berlin Wall, which stood until 9 November 1989.

To find out more, click here.

The sinking of the Titanic

On the night of 14 April 1912, the supposedly unsinkable RMS Titanic collided with an iceberg and sank on her maiden voyage. Of the 2,208 people aboard ship – the largest vessel in the world at the time – only 712 survived. It took just two-and-a-half hours for the huge vessel to sink, and amid freezing temperatures many people are likely to have died within minutes of entering the water.

The extent of the devastation was not known until several days later – reporting on the disaster on 16 April, the Daily Mail’s headline read “Titanic sunk. No lives lost”. The tragedy, says Titanic expert Dr Aidan McMichael, was greeted at first “with shock and disbelief, and then immense sorrow at the scale of the loss of life. How could a ship dubbed unsinkable by the media have met its end so tragically?”

The Great Fire of London

September marks the 350th anniversary of the Great Fire of London, a blaze that destroyed more than 65,000 homes and 13,000 buildings including the Royal Exchange and the original St Paul’s Cathedral.

The fire began in the early hours of Sunday 2 September 1666, at the house of Thomas Farynor (aka Farrinor), the king's baker, in Pudding Lane, near London Bridge. Helped by a strong easterly wind coupled with dry and dusty air, the fire raged for three days, by the end of which 100,000 people had been made homeless.

Officially only a handful of people died in the fire but the true toll is likely to have been much higher.

This Witness episode brings together the first-hand accounts of diarist Samuel Pepys and schoolboy William Taswell, who watched the fire devastate the city. We also hear from Meriel Jeater, an expert from the Museum of London.

To listen, click here.

The first man in space

On 12 April 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to journey into space, making a 108-minute orbital flight in his Vostok 1 spacecraft.

Dressed in a bright orange spacesuit and a helmet inscribed with ‘CCCP’ painted in red (which marked him as a Soviet citizen so that he would be recognised after parachuting to safety following ejection from the spacecraft), the 27-year-old Gagarin set off with the word “Poyekhali!” (Let’s go!).

Sergei Khrushchev, the son of Nikita Khrushchev, who was the Soviet premier at the time of Gagarin's flight, told BBC News in 2010: “When we look at the response of the Muscovites, where everyone was in the streets, on the roofs of buildings and in the windows, I would compare this celebration with the May 9 victory day (the end of the Second World War for the Soviet Union)”.

In this episode, Witness explores how the young cosmonaut became an instant worldwide celebrity and a poster boy for Soviet technological achievement.

To listen, click here.

The Salem witches

Between June and September 1692, some 19 men and women were found guilty of witchcraft and executed in the small religious community of Salem, Massachusetts, in northeastern America. A horror that shocked the world, the Salem witch trials have spawned hundreds of films, books, scholarly articles and plays, including Arthur Miller’s acclaimed 1953 work The Crucible.

The executed men and women were convicted on the spurious evidence of a group of young village girls who claimed to have been bewitched. Paranoia, fed by ongoing family feuds and attacks by Native Americans, developed into a wave of hysteria that quickly spread throughout colonial Massachusetts. Another 150 men, women and children were accused in the spring of 1692, and were only spared the gallows by confessing.

To find out more, click here.

The outbreak of the First World War

Fought by more than 30 nations on a geographical scale never seen before, the First World War was arguably the first truly global conflict. It claimed the lives of more than nine million soldiers and an unknown number of civilians, and, says the Imperial War Museum, “forever altered the world’s social and political landscape”.

Britain declared war on Germany on 4 August 1914 after weeks of tension following the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, in Sarajevo on 28 June. Over the coming months, as Europe descended into war, it became clear the war would not be “won by Christmas”.

Using archive recordings of eyewitnesses from Germany, France, Britain and Belgium, this episode of Witness tells the story of the start of a war that would devastate a generation.

To listen, click here.

Jack the Ripper

Within just a few weeks in 1888, a serial killer dubbed ‘Jack the Ripper’ mutilated and killed five prostitutes in London’s East End. Panic gripped the city as police hunted for the killer and speculation was rife as to his – or her – identity. Was Jack a doctor, a Jew, a foreigner, a butcher? Was Jack in fact Jill? One theory even linked the murders to Queen Victoria's grandson, Prince Albert Victor.

Yet despite interrogating dozens of suspects the police failed to convict anyone of the murders, and to this day the killer’s identity remains a mystery.

Here, using contemporary accounts, Simon Watts describes how Jack the Ripper stalked the streets of Victorian London.

To listen, click here.

Tutankhamun’s tomb

Perhaps the greatest archaeological discovery of all time, in 1922 British archaeologist Howard Carter and his team found the intact tomb of an Egyptian pharaoh of the 18th Dynasty: Tutankhamun.

The only unplundered tomb of a pharaoh yet found in the Valley of the Kings, the tomb was filled with artefacts including statues and artwork – so many, in fact, that it took 10 years to catalogue them.

The 1922 discovery, says art critic Alastair Sooke, sparked a global frenzy for ancient Egypt. “A craze for Egyptian exoticism convulsed the West, infiltrating both high and low culture across the fields of music, fine art, fashion, film and furniture design.”
Carter became a worldwide celebrity, touring America in 1924 to deliver lectures about his finds.

This Witness episode explores Carter’s detailed record of his discovery.

To listen, click here.

The bombing of Hiroshima

On 6 August 1945, America dropped a nuclear bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, killing around 135,000 people. Within the first three seconds, says expert Stephen Walker, thousands were incinerated as the temperature at the burst-point reached 60 million degrees centigrade – 10,000 times hotter than the sun’s surface.

The attack was followed three days later by a second atomic bomb dropped on the city of Nagasaki, which killed at least 50,000 people, although according to some estimates as many as 74,000 died.

Many of the survivors suffered symptoms of radiation sickness, which include vomiting, fever, fatigue, bleeding from the gums, thinning hair, diarrhoea and, in the worst cases, death.

Here, Witness presents a first-person account from the BBC archives, of a young Japanese schoolgirl who survived the Hiroshima attack.

To listen, click here.

The 'execution' of Oliver Cromwell

Arguably one of the most remarkable moments in history, in 1661 the body of Oliver Cromwell was exhumed from Westminster Abbey to be ‘executed’ for treason.

Just two-and-a-half years earlier, in November 1658, Cromwell had been given a state funeral at Westminster. An officer in the Roundheads (parliamentary army) at the outbreak of the Civil War in the summer of 1642, Cromwell went on to become one of the conflict’s key figures and played a leading role in Charles I’s trial and subsequent beheading. Following the king’s execution a republic was declared, known as the Commonwealth of England.

How, then, did Cromwell's body come to be dug up and symbolically executed? Witness investigates....

To listen, click here.

Witness from the BBC World Service is available on BBC iPlayer. To find out more, click here.

This article was first published by History Extra in May 2016

]]> East End crime https://www.historyextra.com/membership/east-end-crime/ Mon, 22 Jan 2018 09:33:43 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/east-end-crime/ John Bennett delves into the dark history of disorder and lawlessness in London’s East End From Jack the Ripper to the Kray twins, historian and tour guide John Bennett explores four centuries of crime and disorder in the London neighbourhood.

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