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Welcome to the Serial Killer Podcast. The podcast dedicated to serial killers. Who they were, what they did, and how. I am your Norwegian host, Thomas Warburg Thun. I must say it feels very good to once more travel to the good old United Kingdom. And my favorite era, the late 1880s.
Spending too much time in the frozen wasteland of Siberia is not recommended, even for a Norwegian such as myself. So, tonight, we find ourselves once more with cobblestones beneath our feet and thick smog around us as we chase the enigmatic killer and terror of Whitechapel, Jack the Ripper.
If you haven't listened to part one and two of this series, please do so now. It is important to understand the whole story from the beginning in order to properly appreciate this episode.
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You're wearing a long blue coat and strengthened tall hat, which protects you from blows to the head, and you can use it to stand on, to look over walls. Guns are a rarity in this area, and your only weapon is a truncheon, although you also carry a whistle to raise the alarm if necessary.
In order to protect yourself from the muck, dirt, grime, open sewer, and long hours walking your beat, you have on a pair of sturdy, properly nailed leather boots. You're walking along alone one bleak late September night in the district of Whitechapel.
Through the smog, you suddenly hear a woman screaming and men shouting. You quickly head towards a two-story building with some commercial signs on it and a very narrow alleyway beneath a wagon wheel. The street was called Burner Street and was in the Whitechapel district off Commercial Road.
It was populated by mostly Polish and German tailors, cobblers, and other modest craftsmen. The International Working Men's Educational Club was located at No. 40 Burner Street and was a socialist club made up of mostly Russian and Polish Jews.
The front of the club opened up to the street, but there was also a kitchen door around the side in Dutfield's yard, a gated and extremely dark passageway closed off the yard, but the gate was often left open into the late hours of the evening, while members of the club were still present.
On Saturday nights, the club usually hosted free talks that packed the building full of people. The evening of the 29th, between 50 and 100 people had shown up for a talk called Why Jews Should Be Socialists, and dozens of men had stuck around after the talk to socialize and sing.
At 1 a.m., thus the date now being the 30th of September, the steward of the club, Louis Diemschutz, steered his pony and two-wheeled barrow into the passageway between number 40 and 42. The party was still roaring inside, and light and sound dimly illuminated the alley.
When the pony shed to the left, almost knocking the passage wall, Diemschutz halted to investigate. He saw what he recognized as a woman, lying on the ground facing away from the center of the passage. Before investigating any further, Diemschutz became worried about his wife and rushed inside to check on her.
Surprised by his frantic inquiries, the men inside assured the steward that Mrs. Dimshutz was fine, and asked what the problem was. "'There's a woman lying in the yard,' he said. "'But I cannot say whether she's drunk or dead. Many have since speculated that the pony was actually scared because it saw a man duck swiftly into the shadow of the alley.'"
Others claim, not unreasonably so, that had Diemschutz stayed in the passageway rather than rushing indoors, he might have caught sight of the Ripper himself. A young tailor named Isaac Kozabrodzki accompanied Mr. Diemschutz outside, while Mrs. Diemschutz stood in the doorway of the kitchen and watched. When Mr. Diemschutz shone the light of his candle on the woman's face,
Mrs. Deem should sow blood trickling up from the body into the yard along the gutter, clotting into a pool near her pallid face. "'I screamed out in fright,' she said, and the members of the club, hearing my cries, rushed downstairs in a body out into the yard. The group of men dispersed into the neighborhood, crying out for police.'
They went up Fairclough Street and back down again, coming into contact with a horsekeeper named Edward Spooner, who came along to investigate what had happened. I could see that her throat was fearfully cut, Spooner told reporters. There was a great gash in it, over two inches wide.
Meanwhile, Police Constable Henry Lamb was walking with another constable on his commercial road beach, and being alarmed by the commotion, they soon arrived at the crime scene. Lamb arrived at around 1.10 a.m., and then went to summon Dr. Frederick William Blackwell.
The doctor's assistant, Edward Johnston, beat him to the scene and found the woman all warm except the hands. Her neck had almost completely drained of blood. Dr. Blackwell arrived to investigate at about 1.15 a.m., and the square was full of investigators and police for the next several hours.
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With a background as a doctor, Bernardo had become a street minister and also went on to open a famous house for impoverished young boys. On the 26th of September, 1888, Dr. Bernardo was visiting the lodging house at 32 Flower and Dean. There was a group of women sitting in the lodging house kitchen, looking thoroughly frightened and talking about the Whitechapel murders.
One woman sat at the table crying, We're all up to no good. No one cares what becomes of us. Perhaps some of us will be killed next. The doctor tried as best he could to comfort the women, but thought little of the incident. That is, until he less than a week later stood before Elizabeth Stride's lifeless body. Before I continue...
I'd like to pause a bit on the method of which Elizabeth Stride had been killed. Two distinct elements make Stride's murder unique among the canonical five. First, there were no mutilations to her abdomen in the way that there were on the bodies of the other four victims. Second, the cause of death was not determined to be strangulation, as there were no marks of strangulation on her body.
Elizabeth was found in possession of two pocket-handkerchiefs, a thimble, and a piece of wool attached to a card. A red flower was pinned to the dark jacket she wore. She was also found clutching a package of cachus, which were used to sweeten the breath. These cachus were still in the package and not scattered around as they would have been if she had been suddenly knocked to the ground.
Dr. George Phillips and Dr. Frederick Blackwell agreed that the cause of death was blood loss from the left carotid artery due to the wound on her throat. The gash to the throat was consistent with the wounds of the other Ripper victims, including a clean, deep knife wound of about six inches that moved from left to right.
Some have speculated that it is possible the murder could have been performed with a different knife, specifically a shoemaker's knife, than the previous two. In fact, doctors conceded that this was a possibility. However, it is also possible the same weapon were used on Nichols and Chapman that was used on Long Liz.
Puzzlingly, though, Dr. Phillips and Inspector Reed mentioned in their reports that there were no signs of blood splatter that would indicate she had been killed while standing. In fact, Police Constable Lamb indicated in his testimony that she looked as if she had been gently laid down.
"'Phillips claimed there were no trace of malt liquor, "'anesthetics, or narcotics in Stride's stomach. "'Therefore, drugging or drunkenness "'cannot account for Stride having gone down without a struggle. "'If I were to speculate...
I don't know.
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This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. As a family man with three kids, I know firsthand how extremely difficult it is to make time for self-care. But it's good to have some things that are non-negotiable. For some, that could be a night out with the boys, chugging beers and having a laugh. For others, it might be an eating night.
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Visit BetterHelp.com slash SerialKiller today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash SerialKiller. Dear listener, The Ripper might very well have posed as a man looking to buy sexual favors and had gotten on top of Elizabeth, acting as if he was about to have sex with her.
Instead of engaging in lovemaking, however, he used his position to pin Elizabeth down and slash her throat savagely. Having her throat cut is probably on the list of top five most painful ways to die. The others being burned alive, skinned alive, death by a thousand cuts, and hung drawn and quartered. The throat is extremely sensitive to pain.
which is why just a small nick from a razor blade while shaving can sting quite a bit if it happens on the throat instead of on your chin. When the throat is cut with a knife, adrenaline is pumped into the victim as a defense mechanism. This causes the victim to be hyper-alert, and the sensation of pain is multiplied. When cut deep, as Jack usually did,
The esophagus is cut, causing the victim to drown in blood at the same time as she is bleeding to death from the severed artery. No one heard Elizabeth scream, and this might be due to Jack surprising her and cutting her throat and vocal cords before she managed to let out anything but a gasp. So who was Elizabeth Stride?
Records of her are spotty at best, with many gaps in her story and some misleading falsehoods. Most of what is known about her is from public records, as well as the relatively sparse inquest testimony of the few people who were close to her. The Ripper's third victim was born Elizabeth Gustavsdotter on the 27th of November, 1843.
Her parents were Gustav Eriksson and Beate Karlsdotter, Swedish farmers living on a farm called Stora Tumlehed near Gothenburg. Elizabeth moved to Gothenburg city in 1860 in domestic service of a man named Lars Olofsson.
By the time 1865 arrived, she had fallen on some hard times, and the police registered her as a prostitute. She gave birth to a stillborn baby girl on the 21st of April, and later that year was also treated twice for venereal disease and infection.
On the 7th of February 1866, Elizabeth applied for a transfer to the Swedish parish in London, and in July is logged in the London registry as an unmarried woman. Her later paramour, Michael Kidney, went back and forth as to why she had come to London in the first place. First, he had said that it was to see the country.
but later claimed that she had come over as a domestic servant. Interviewee Charles Preston corroborated the second opinion and said that she came from Sweden in the service of a foreign gentleman. Elizabeth married John Stride on the 7th of March, 1869, at the age of 26. They moved to East India Dock Road. The two operated a coffee shop together on Poplar.
moving from their first location to another one on the same street. In 1875, the business was taken over by a man named John Dale. Little is known about the Strides' marriage, aside from their co-ownership of the coffee shop. Kidney said that Elizabeth claimed to have given birth to nine children in her life, but there are no surviving records of the children born from the Strides' marriage.
In 1878, a saloon steamship called the Princess Alice crashed into the Bywell Castle steamer on the Thames River. Between 600 and 700 people were killed in the disaster.
When asking for financial assistance at the Swedish church in 1878, Stride claimed that the accident had killed her husband and children and that she had also suffered an injury to her palate while struggling to escape. Investigators have determined that this was a complete fabrication.
In fact, John Stride was actually alive and well in 1878 and did not pass away until dying of a heart disease in 1884. This lie would lead us to believe that Elizabeth was having troubles in her marriage that led to a separation from her husband.
In that case, she used the Princess Alice story to cover up her separation and to garner more sympathy so that the church would give her more money. Regardless of Elizabeth's deceit, the clerk of the church, Sven Olsen, remarked at the inquest that at the time she had been in very poor circumstances.
The last time Elizabeth was listed in a census as living with her husband was 1881, but after that, they no longer lived together. From then on, Long Liz, as she was known around Whitechapel, split her time between different workhouses and lodging houses.
From December of 1881 through January of 1882, she was treated for bronchitis in the Whitechapel infirmary, and then went straight into the adjoining Whitechapel workhouse. She continued to char and made some money sewing as well. Stride, like Chapman, was likely just a casual prostitute, only soliciting when she was really hard up for money.
for a bed for the night and needed a quick threepence. Another way that Liz procured funds was by borrowing it from her on-again, off-again lover, Michael Kidney. She lived with him on and off as well, at his home on Devonshire Street. He is one of the addresses that she reported to the Swedish church, in addition to several lodging houses in the area. The two had a tumultuous relationship.
and Elizabeth would often live apart from Kidney in lodging houses for several days or weeks before returning. All that is really known of their relationship between Kidney and Liz Stride is from police records and from Kidney's testimonies at the inquest. Kidney claimed that the reasons for her disappearances from his home were due to her drinking benders.
Long Liz did, in fact, appear before the magistrate court eight times for drunk and disorderly conduct in the two years leading up to her death. Compounded with her troubles with booze is the fact that there was likely physical abuse in the relationship. Domestic abuse was rampant in Victorian Whitechapel,
And Liz did charge Kidney with assault in 1887. She failed to appear at the Thames Magistrate Court, however, and the case was dropped. Before we continue with the show, here is a brief word from my sponsor, Madison Reed. It is no secret that your humble host appreciates the beauty of great hair. And the future of at-home hair color is here with Madison Reed.
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From Wednesday the 26th of September through her death on the morning of the 30th, Liz had been staying at the lodging house at 32 Flower and Dean Street. A fellow lodger, Catherine Lane, testified that Elizabeth told her she had had words with Kidney, and that that was the reason for staying at the lodging house.
During her time there, she made money from the house deputy, Elizabeth Tanner, by cleaning rooms. On the day of her death, she had earned six pence for cleaning two rooms of the lodging house, after which she went out. Newspapers reported a story told by two laborers that were not interviewed during the inquest, J. Best and John Gardner.
The two said they saw Elizabeth Stride at about 11 p.m. as they were entering a pub on Settles Street called the Bricklayer's Arms. She was in the company of a man who was about five feet, five inches tall. They said that he had had a thick black moustache with no beard and was wearing a morning coat and a billycock hat.
The two found him to be respectable-looking, and so were surprised to see that he and the woman were shamelessly hugging and kissing near the doorway of the pub. After unsuccessfully trying to get the man to come in with them for a drink, they said to stride, "'That's Leather Apron getting round you.' After that, they said, the couple was off like a shot away from the pub."
Forty-five minutes later, William Marshall was standing on his doorstep at No. 68 Burner Street, between Christian and Boyd Streets.
Across the street he saw a woman that he claimed was dried, talking to a man that Marshall described as a stout man of about five feet, six inches tall, wearing a black cutaway coat, dark trousers, and a cap that was like something a sailor would wear. As he walked by, he heard the man say, "'You would say anything but your prayers.'"
at which the woman laughed. During the inquest, Marshall said that the man looked to be educated and had had the appearance of a clerk. The next testimony came from Police Constable William Smith and was regarded as one of the more reliable ones both by the inquest. Smith saw stride with a man in Burner Street at 12.35 a.m.,
Across the street from the International Workingmen's Educational Club, Police Constable Smith said the man had a dark complexion and a dark moustache, wearing a cutaway coat and dark trousers, and carrying a parcel wrapped in newspaper. Smith described the man as looking respectable, and both the man and the woman was looking sober.
He also took note of the rose she was wearing on her jacket, which matched the one that was discovered on Stride after her death. Due to Stride's limited social network, she took the longest to identify. She was identified by the end of the week and laid to rest that following Saturday, the 6th of October, at East London Cemetery in
Playstow, London, E13. No friends or family were available to lay stride to rest. The undertaker, Mr. Hawks, paid for a small funeral with funds from the church. Her grave, number 15509, can still be seen today. And so ends part three of my series on Jack the Ripper. Doing this podcast is a labor of love.
And I couldn't have done it without my loyal listeners. This podcast has been able to bring serial killer stories to life, especially thanks to those of you that support me via Patreon. You can do so at theserialkillerpodcast.com slash donate. There are especially a few patrons that have stayed loyal for a long time.
Your monthly contributions really help keep this podcast thriving. You have my deepest gratitude.
Next week, we continue our exploration of serial killers. So, as they say in the land of radio, stay tuned. I have been your host, Thomas Weyborg Thun. And if you like my show, you are going to love the producer's guide on Podcast One.
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