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Welcome to Serial Killer Podcast. The podcast dedicated to serial killers. Who they were, what they did and how. This episode is brought to you by Shudder. The premium streaming video service from AMC Networks.
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I am your Norwegian host, and tonight, dear listener, we travel far away from the Australian outback and go north to London. But we travel to America as well, and even take a peek at Scotland, because tonight we do not walk behind Red Jack as he cuts his bloody path through the alleys of Whitechapel.
Five victims are murdered, each one suffering a more gruesome death than the others. But then the killings stop. Jack dissipates as he was simply a terrible mirage. His hunting cap and leather apron, his top coat and sturdy leather boots all vanish and the footsteps and muffled screams echo no more.
The police are left none the wiser, and an outraged public screams for answers. Who was Jack, and will he ever come back? So, let us together look at a gallery of rogues and gentlemen who are all suspects in the most famous serial killer case of all time.
The Serial Killer Podcast now has well over 8 million downloads. I am humbled by this. And to be honest, I never thought the show would grow so large. I could not have made this show without the support of my loyal patrons. I am very thankful for your support. And to my dear listeners who haven't visited my Patreon yet, I have some very interesting news.
My Patreon is now far more customized to meet the feedback I have gotten from you. There are now several new Patreon tiers that you can join, and they are as follows. The first tier is $1, and by donating that, you are an official TSK patron and an active contributor to this show's very existence.
The second tier is $5. And with that, I will personally recognize your patronage by thanking you on my Facebook page at facebook.com slash the SK podcast. Another brand new tier is the $10 tier.
where you can ask me any question in writing you wish, and I will read the question on the podcast and answer it. At $15, I personally thank you for your contribution on the show, and of course, you can also send in questions that I will answer.
For the truly dedicated serial killer aficionados out there, I have two new tiers. For $50, I will personally call you and personally thank you and chat with you a bit. Finally.
If you want the ultimate TSK experience, for $200 I will arrange for up to an hour of personal conversation one-on-one with you regarding any topic you wish. So, to donate and choose from these tiers, go to patreon.com slash the serial killer podcast now.
When we travel away from Australia, instead of flying towards England, let us take a stop in the United States of America. It was in America that the serial killer phenomenon really took off in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and your humble host thinks this might not entirely be accidental.
In a future series, I will be covering the world-famous case of H. H. Holmes and his murder hotel. There is a fantastic book by Eric Larson by name of The Devil in the White City, and in it, he gives an excellent rendering of who H. H. Holmes was.
One thing that emerges from reading Larson's book is that Holmes was probably a genius, or at least very intelligent. He was also utterly insane and a complete psychopath who reveled in the torture and murder of young women. During the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago, H. H. Holmes ran his murder castle, part hotel, part torture chamber.
The hotel featured soundproof rooms, secret passages, gas chambers, and incinerators. Holmes would invite lone travelers to stay at the hotel, whereupon he would torture and kill them before dissolving their bodies in acid or burying them in lime pits. A theory is that in 1888, Mr. Holmes took a trip to London
and would therefore have had the opportunity to commit the Whitechapel murders. Although Jack would leave his tortured victims' bodies on display for the world to see, H. H. Holmes did everything he could to hide his crimes. One can explain this as a typical escalation of his modus operandi. He found that while ripping in London, the police were too close to catch him,
And if he wanted to continue his exploits, he needed to figure out some more foolproof way of dissecting and ripping young women at his leisure in peace and quiet. The primary pusher of the theory that H. H. Holmes was Jack the Ripper is Holmes' great-great-grandson, Jeff Mudgett.
and he stars in a History Channel documentary about his theory. To call him biased is, by any definition, an understatement, and he offers little concrete evidence other than the facts that both Holmes and Jack were serial killers. No one has ever confirmed H. H. Holmes ever travelled to London in 1888.
He was actively building his murder hotel by that time, and documents show contractors sued him for failure of payment. If we really stretch it, he might have made a brief visit to London for the sole purpose of slashing prostitutes before returning to complete his murder hotel, but this seems extremely far-fetched and unlikely. As the police saying goes...
90% of the time, the husband or boyfriend did it. Joseph Barnett was Mary Kelly's lover. However, at the time of Kelly's death, they had quarreled, and Barnett had moved out of the home where her mutilated body was discovered in November of 1888. He was interviewed at the time by Inspector Aberlein, the famous Ripper detective.
and was ruled out as a suspect. Later historians, however, put forward the theory that after he lost his job as a fish-porter, Mary Kelly began to support them both via prostitution, which Barnett hated. He began to kill prostitutes in order to frighten her into quitting, and when this failed, he killed her in a fit of anger.
Some say that Barnett resembled the general physical description of the Ripper, and he acknowledged speaking to Mary on the night of her death. But when it comes to physical descriptions of the Ripper, there are too many variants to simply state Barnett's description fits.
Some witnesses say the Ripper looked like a Jew, which back in the anti-Semitic age of 1888 usually meant curly hair, crooked back, a large crooked nose, darker skin, and small of stature.
Barnett was not Jewish. He was not especially small for his time. He did not have dark hair and actually looked very much like the archetypical Victorian Englishman, with a bowler hat, cravat, and finely groomed blonde moustache. On the other hand, other witnesses do describe Jack as looking precisely like Barnett,
especially his height, at around five foot seven, his medium build and fair complexion. However, witnesses who saw Mary enter her home with the murderer would have known and recognized Mr. Barnett, and though he was interviewed, he was never seriously considered as a suspect.
Barnett's life after the Kelly murder remains a mystery until 1906, when he was given a new porter's license at Billingsgate, and he was living at 18 New Gravel Lane, Shadwell, with his brother Daniel. The following year, his license recorded him as living at 60 Red Lion Street, Shadwell, and in 1908, Tench Street, Wapping.
In 1919, he is recorded on the electoral register as living at 106 Red Lion Street, Shadwell, with a Louisa Barnett, who is listed as his wife, although no documentary evidence has surfaced to confirm they were married or had any children. The couple remained at this address until their deaths. Louisa died on the 3rd of November, 1926.
These records of Barnett living a quiet suburban life after the killings does not rhyme with the actions of a frenzied serial killer like Jack. The Ripper escalated his crimes, with his final kill being the most graphic and gruesome of them all. When a serial killer displays such modus operandi, they usually do not stop until caught.
A typical, more contemporary example is Ted Bundy, killed more and more frequently with ever more gruesome kills, culminating in the rape and murder of a 12-year-old little girl before he was apprehended. Joseph Barnett died aged 68 on the 29th of November 1926.
cause of death being edema of the lungs and bronchitis. Prince Albert Victor, Queen Victoria's grandson, had been involved in a number of scandals involving prostitution
And, in 1889, it was rumored that the Prince was a visitor to 19 Cleveland Street, where a number of high-born gentlemen, including earls and dukes, were paying to consort with young boys. Many witnesses were spirited out of the country when the scandal broke.
and somewhat fortuitously the prince himself was sent on a lengthy tour of the empire making him unavailable for interrogation however it was not until long after his death that his name became linked to the whitechapel murder investigation it is suggested that he carried out the murder after contracting syphilis from a prostitute
or that the killings were a conspiracy to cover up his secret marriage to a shop-girl, and the subsequent birth of the prince's illegitimate child. There is no evidence to support either theory.
No one has been able to produce a marriage certificate or birth certificate, and the only thing that has been established is that Prince Albert Victor was definitely out of the country when some of the murders occurred, probably trying to avoid another scandal.
Royalty consorting with prostitutes is nothing new, and royalty being secretly gay is not exactly unheard of. This combined with the fact that the prince has a solid alibi for one of the murders makes it quite unlikely that blue blood ran in Jack's veins.
Charles Lechmere, sometimes known as Charles Cross, was a thirty-nine-year-old driver for Pickford's Meat Company when he discovered the body of Polly Nichols lying in an alleyway. It has been suggested that far from being the first person to find the body, Lechmere was, in fact, the last person to see her alive.
and that he had just brutally murdered her when another witness came across the scene, and Lechmer was obliged to invent a story to explain his presence there. However, other than finding of the body, there is little to suggest that he might be the murderer.
The most suspicious thing about him seems to have been the fact that he used more than one name, but that appears to have been common at this time. Cross was the name of his stepfather. The second witness arrived only moments after Lechmere, and he testified that the woman was still breathing, though faintly, when he saw her.
This being so, it is doubtful that Lechmer would have had time to commit a murder, clean himself up, and hide the weapon before being discovered. It is quite common to suspect the first person to discover a murder victim, but simply being at the wrong place at the wrong time is no evidence for murder.
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For others, it might be an eating night. For me, one non-negotiable activity is researching psychopathic serial killers and making this podcast. Even when we know what makes us happy, it's often near impossible to make time for it. But when you feel like you have no time for yourself, non-negotiables like therapy are more important than ever.
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Visit BetterHelp.com slash Serial Killer today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash Serial Killer. Frederick Deeming, said to be extremely close to his mother.
After she died, Deeming got a job as a sailor, contracted an illness, and suffered delusions that his mother's spirit was giving him instructions to commit strange and violent acts, including the murder of two wives and four of his children. After the murder of his first wife and his children in Liverpool,
Deeming moved to Australia, where his second wife also died. At the time of his arrest, he had proposed to another woman, who no doubt considered herself lucky to have escaped him. The Whitechapel murders occurred in a port district, and therefore he may have been familiar with the area.
deeming, also admitted at one time, to contracting syphilis from a Whitechapel prostitute, saying that he would have killed her if he had had the chance. He reportedly confessed to being Jack before his execution. However, it is very much possible that the confession was made to delay the hanging with the hope he would be extradited home.
I have not managed to find any conclusive evidence that Deeming was in London during the crucial period of the Ripper murders. There is, however, some evidence that he was in South Africa, taking part in a diamond swindle at the time, making it impossible for Jack to be Frederick. Aaron Kosminski is a much more likely prospect than Deeming.
He is named as a suspect at the time of the murders, though there was never enough evidence to charge him. Kosminski knew the area and had, I quote, a great hatred of women with strong homicidal tendencies. He was also a barber with ready access to very sharp knives, and he was Jewish.
After the murders of Catherine Eddowes and Elizabeth Stride, some graffiti was found at Goulston Street, which suggested the ripper might be Jewish too. Remember, dear listener, the famous graffito text reading, The Jews are the men that will not be blamed for nothing.
Kosminski's name was brought up again when a shawl allegedly belonging to Eddowes was said to have had traces of semen that might have belonged to the killer, or not. The shawl was apparently stolen from the scene by a police officer as a gift for his wife, although it never appeared in the inventory of Eddowes' belongings.
The officer's wife never wore it, and it was handed down through the generations, untouched and unwashed, until it was sold at auction. None of these things is proof. DNA was actually taken from the shawl in 2014, and is claimed to belong to Kosminski. But this claim is disputed by authorities.
Also, after so many years with so many people having tampered with it, it can't be proven that the shawl actually belonged to Eddowes. Francis Craig was a journalist living in the East End of London. He had gotten himself into trouble a few years earlier when it was discovered that his reports were cribbed from those of a rival newspaper, and he was exposed as a plagiarist.
Despite this, he married Elizabeth Weston Davies, who turned out to be a prostitute, of which Craig claimed to be unaware. His wife later left him and changed her name to Mary Kelly. One plausible theory states that Craig tracked her down and killed her. If true, it is unclear why he also felt the need to kill the other victims.
Being a journalist, Craig would be very literate and might find extra pleasure in seeing his original work, his letters and descriptions of Jack's ripped victims published in all the papers of the world. The theory is given added weight by the manner of his own death. Craig cut his throat with a razor, leaving a note which read...
I have suffered a deal of pain and agony. This suggests a mind tormented with guilt and remorse. However, Craig did not die until 1903, some fifteen years after Mary's death, and his suicide note might also simply refer to his public humiliation as a plagiarist. In 1889...
William Henry Burry walked into a police station in Dundee, Scotland, and said, "'If you go along to my house in Princess Street, you'll find the body of a woman packed in a box and cut up.' Officers searched the property, which the couple had occupied since moving from London, and found Ellen Burry, who had been strangled and stabbed ten times.'
A long bladed knife and a length of rope were left next to the box. Barry said that he had been out drinking, and when he woke up the next morning, he found her dead on the floor, strangled with the rope. Not knowing if he had committed the crime or not, he was terrified that he would be accused of being Jack the Ripper. So he seized the knife and plunged it into her abdomen.
How that helped is not clear. He then hid the body in the trunk and immediately handed himself in. At the trial, two doctors determined that Ellen had been murdered by strangulation, with the stab wounds being inflicted post-mortem. The third doctor concluded that Ellen had taken her own life.
Burry's hangman tried to obtain a confession that Burry was also Jack the Ripper, without success. I, personally, find the theory that Burry was Jack to be very unlikely. His actions are that of a man in a panic after discovering having done something awful while blackout drunk, not that of a calculating and remorseless serial killer having fled to Scotland.
George Hutchinson was an unemployed laborer and former groom, described as being of military appearance and living at the Victoria Workingmen's Home, Commercial Street. At 6 p.m. on the 12th of November, 1888, he went to Commercial Street Police Station and gave the following statement to Sergeant Edward Bedham, 31H.
About 2 a.m., 9th, I was coming by Thrall Street, Commercial Street, and saw, just before I got to Flower and Dean Street, I saw the murdered woman Kelly, and she said to me, "'Hutchinson, will you lend me sixpence?' I said, "'I can't. I have spent all my money going down to Bromford.' She said, "'Good morning. I must go and find some money.' She went away toward Thrall Street.'
A man, coming in the opposite direction to Kelly, tapped her on the shoulder and said something to her. They both burst out laughing. I heard her say, All right, to him. And the man said, You will be all right for what I have told you. He then placed his right hand around her shoulders. He also had a kind of a small parcel in his left hand with a kind of strap around it.
I stood against the lamp of the Queen's Head Public House and watched him. They both then came past me, and the man hid down his head with his hat over his eyes. I stooped down and looked him in the face. He looked at me stern. They both went into Dorset Street. I followed them. They both stood at the corner of the court for about three minutes. He said something to her.
She said, "'All right, my dear. Come along, you will be comfortable.' He then placed his arm on her shoulder and gave her a kiss. She said she had lost her handkerchief. He then pulled his handkerchief, a red one, out and gave it to her. They both then went up the court together. I then went to the court to see if I could see them, but could not.'
I stood there for about three quarters of an hour to see if they came out. They did not, so I went away. Description. Age about thirty-four or thirty-five. Height five foot six, complexion pale, dark eyes and eyelashes, slight moustache, curled up each end, and hair dark.
Very shirley-looking dress, long dark coat, collar and cuffs, trimmed astrakhan, and a dark jacket under. Light waistcoat, dark trousers, dark felt hat, turned down in the middle. Buttoned boots and gaiters with white buttons. Wore a very thick gold chain, white linen collar, black tie with horseshoe pin.
Respectable appearance. Walked very sharp. Jewish appearance. Can be identified. End quote. Inspector Frederick Aberlein later questioned Hutchinson regarding the statement you just heard. I have interrogated him this evening, and I am of opinion his statement is true.
He informed me that he had occasionally given the deceased a few shillings, and that he had known her about three years. Also that he was surprised to see a man so well-dressed in her company, which caused him to watch them." George Hutchinson had since become a controversial witness, and issues have been raised about several aspects of his statements.
"'Why did he wait three days before volunteering his information? "'He knew of the murder the very next day, "'so not to come forward sooner raises suspicion. "'It seems very strange to wait so long "'outside in the unpleasant night fog of London, "'just to see if someone he only knew as an acquaintance "'would come out again.'
In truth, little is known about George Hutchinson other than the brief personal details given in 1888. Author Melvin Fairclough interviewed a Reginald Hutchinson who claimed that his father, George William Topping Hutchinson, was the man who knew Mary Kelly.
He claimed his father was born on the 1st of October, 1866, employed as a plumber, and that he knew one of the victims and was interviewed by police at the time. Finally, dear listener, I urge you to remember back to one of my very earliest podcast episodes, the one called The Atlanta Ripper. In it, I cover one of the most notorious serial killer cases in the Deep South,
and I also tried to don an American Southern accent, with extremely poor results, and I will never use that again. The Atlanta Ripper showed very similar traits as Jack. His kills started with simple murders, but then escalated to brutal slayings, where the victim's head was completely obliterated by a railway pin, combined with her throat being ripped to shreds.
The Atlanta Ripper was never caught, and the most common theory is that the killer was black, due to the fact that he only killed black people. However, judging from the modus operandi of the Atlanta Ripper, it is very similar to Jack's, and it occurred only 23 years after the Whitechapel murders.
If Jack was in his twenties when he killed in Whitechapel, he would only be in his mid-forties if he had travelled to Atlanta and continued killing there. One thing really pokes holes in this theory, however. There are two surviving witnesses to the Atlanta Ripper. Both say the man who attacked them was tall, well-dressed, and clearly African-American.
All witness sightings of the Ripper in Whitechapel identify the Ripper as being white, and there are no witness testimonies telling of any black people in the vicinity of the Whitechapel crime scenes. Black people were very rare in London back in 1888, and it would most probably be reported to investigators if any black persons were observed in the area.
In addition to the men I have talked about in this episode, there are many more names that are being forwarded as suspects, and new names seem to come up with regularity in the media. The fact of the matter is this. We will never know for sure who killed the canonical five Ripper victims.
None of the forensic evidence gathered at the time still exists in police storage. And naturally, there exists no DNA samples from any suspects or victims to compare. Even if new letters were uncovered where a person writes a personal confession to all the murders, massive doubt would immediately be raised as to its validity.
just as is the case with the known ripper letters. Jack's true identity will in all probability be forever lost. But his crimes and acts still cast their shadow on today's society. And if you are listening to this while walking on cobblestones between tall grey brick houses in an alley, I dare say the thought of Jack at your back
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And so ends the saga of Jack the Ripper. It's been a fantastic ride to guide you, dear listener, for seven episodes through the cobblestones of Whitechapel. And I hope you enjoyed it too. I really recommend traveling to London and visiting Whitechapel. There are several really excellent Jack the Ripper guided tours operating daily there. And I would go after the sun has set, if I were you.
Next week, we continue our trek in the Australian outback. So, as they say in the land of radio, stay tuned. This podcast had not been possible if it hadn't been for my dear patrons that invest in this show via Patreon. My special thanks go out to those of you that have stayed loyal for a long time. Those of you I would like to give an extra heartfelt thank you to are...
Sandy, Amber, Christina, Charlotte, Claudette, Evan, Joe, Lisbeth, Maud, Mickey, Philip, PJ, Sarah, and Troy. Your monthly contributions really helps keep this podcast thriving. You have my deepest gratitude. If you wish to have your name read here on podcast...
Go to patreon.com slash the serial killer podcast now and choose the $15 tier option now and I'll make sure to include you in this very exclusive club. I have been your host, Thomas Vabog Thun, and if you like this show, you're going to love Pluto TV.
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