June 29, 2026

CROWN V COLONY — Jack the Ripper: The Killer London Never Caught, and the Five Women History Forgot

Show Notes
Transcript

Independence Day week begins where the whole genre began. Garret Fisher launches CROWN V COLONY — five days of the United Kingdom's most notorious crimes — in the gaslit fog of Whitechapel, 1888. Over roughly ten weeks of terror, a killer the newspapers christened Jack the Ripper murdered five women in London's East End: Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly — the "canonical five." This episode walks through the Autumn of Terror, the split-jurisdiction investigation led by Inspector Frederick Abberline, the taunting "Dear Boss" and "From Hell" letters most experts now believe were hoaxes, the bloody Goulston Street graffiti that police scrubbed away before it could be photographed, and the century of suspects from a Polish barber to a member of the royal family. It also takes on the disputed 2007 shawl DNA claim naming Aaron Kosminski — and the descendants now fighting for a new inquest. But the real subject isn't the killer. It's the five women history decided to forget.

Join our new FB groups page here. Take the poll!

Join the Daily Crime & Justice community on social media! We're building a passionate group of true crime enthusiasts who love diving deep into the most shocking cases in America.
Follow us on Facebook and Instagram by searching "Daily Crime & Justice" on either platform.

You'll get exclusive behind-the-scenes content, breaking news updates on cases we're covering, and early alerts when new episodes drop. Our social media is where Garret Fisher's hottest takes live, including reactions that don't make it into the show.

But more importantly, it's where YOU come in. Share your theories, debate the verdicts, and connect with fellow listeners who are just as obsessed with justice as you are. Did the jury get it right? What questions do you still have? Your comments and insights often shape future episodes.

We cover the trials that matter, but our community makes the conversation unforgettable. Come for Garret's signature cynical commentary, stay for the incredible discussions with thousands of true crime fans who get it.

WEBVTT

1
00:00:03.200 --> 00:00:13.679
Caalaroga Shark Media. Good morning, It's Monday, June twenty ninth,

2
00:00:13.759 --> 00:00:16.239
and this is Daily Crime and Justice.

3
00:00:16.399 --> 00:00:17.440
I'm Garrett Fisher.

4
00:00:17.760 --> 00:00:19.519
Before we get into it, I want to tell you

5
00:00:19.559 --> 00:00:22.719
about something special we're doing all week long. For two

6
00:00:22.800 --> 00:00:26.399
years now, this show has brought you America's worst, the

7
00:00:26.519 --> 00:00:29.600
verdicts that stopped the country cold, the monsters who made

8
00:00:29.640 --> 00:00:32.359
the front page, the trials none of us could look

9
00:00:32.359 --> 00:00:36.079
away from. Well, this week, the Colony is returning the

10
00:00:36.119 --> 00:00:40.240
favor its Independence Day week and to market. We're crossing

11
00:00:40.240 --> 00:00:44.439
the Atlantic five days, five of the most notorious criminal

12
00:00:44.479 --> 00:00:47.560
cases in the history of the United Kingdom. We're calling

13
00:00:47.640 --> 00:00:50.840
it Crown versus Colony. For a couple hundred years, the

14
00:00:50.840 --> 00:00:53.640
Crown sat in judgment over us. This week we put

15
00:00:53.679 --> 00:00:56.240
the Crown's worst on the stand. And there is no

16
00:00:56.359 --> 00:00:59.520
better place to start than where this entire genre was born.

17
00:01:00.119 --> 00:01:04.680
The Fog, the gaslight, the knife in the Dark, London,

18
00:01:04.959 --> 00:01:08.239
eighteen eighty eight, the case that gave the world its

19
00:01:08.280 --> 00:01:11.359
first modern monster and never gave it a single.

20
00:01:11.200 --> 00:01:12.120
Day of justice.

21
00:01:12.959 --> 00:01:16.319
This is the story of Jack the Ripper. But more

22
00:01:16.359 --> 00:01:19.079
than that, and I mean this, it's the story of

23
00:01:19.120 --> 00:01:21.760
five women whose names you ought to know far better

24
00:01:21.799 --> 00:01:29.680
than his. The Autumn of Terror. Picture the East end

25
00:01:29.719 --> 00:01:33.319
of London in the autumn of eighteen eighty eight, Whitechapel,

26
00:01:34.079 --> 00:01:36.840
a square mile of narrow streets and gas lamps and

27
00:01:36.959 --> 00:01:40.959
overcrowded lodging houses packed wall to wall with the poorest

28
00:01:40.959 --> 00:01:45.079
people in the richest city on earth. Outside this district,

29
00:01:45.200 --> 00:01:47.599
London was the capital of an empire that ruled a

30
00:01:47.719 --> 00:01:51.000
quarter of the planet. Inside it, family slept four and

31
00:01:51.159 --> 00:01:54.239
five to a room. Children went hungry, and women with

32
00:01:54.359 --> 00:01:56.760
nowhere else to go, sold what they could to scrape

33
00:01:56.799 --> 00:01:59.519
together the price of a bed for the night. And then,

34
00:01:59.840 --> 00:02:04.640
over about ten weeks, somebody started killing those women, cutting

35
00:02:04.719 --> 00:02:08.919
their throats, mutilating their bodies in the dark, and disappearing

36
00:02:08.960 --> 00:02:12.960
before anyone heard a sound. The newspapers called it the

37
00:02:13.039 --> 00:02:15.719
Autumn of Terror, and for once the headline was not

38
00:02:15.759 --> 00:02:21.039
an exaggeration. People were genuinely afraid to walk home. Vigilance

39
00:02:21.039 --> 00:02:24.479
committees patrolled the streets, and a killer moved through the

40
00:02:24.479 --> 00:02:27.560
panic like he owned it. Here's the thing I want

41
00:02:27.599 --> 00:02:30.960
you to hold onto, though, because the legend has buried it.

42
00:02:31.800 --> 00:02:34.400
We talk about Jack the Ripper like he's a character

43
00:02:34.840 --> 00:02:38.000
a top hat and a doctor's bag, fog swirling a

44
00:02:38.080 --> 00:02:41.280
villain in a story. He was not a character. He

45
00:02:41.400 --> 00:02:43.840
was a man who murdered real people. And the reason

46
00:02:43.840 --> 00:02:46.639
he was never caught, the reason he could keep doing it,

47
00:02:46.719 --> 00:02:49.599
comes down to one ugly truth about who his victims were.

48
00:02:50.520 --> 00:02:52.879
For more than a century, the women he killed got

49
00:02:52.879 --> 00:02:57.680
reduced to a single word, prostitutes, as if that explained them,

50
00:02:57.840 --> 00:02:59.960
as if that closed the file on a human life.

51
00:03:00.800 --> 00:03:04.639
And it did something convenient, didn't it It let respectable

52
00:03:04.719 --> 00:03:08.520
victorian society file these murders under unfortunate and move on,

53
00:03:09.159 --> 00:03:11.759
because the victims were the kind of women nobody was

54
00:03:11.800 --> 00:03:15.759
supposed to miss. Modern historians have pushed back hard on that.

55
00:03:16.400 --> 00:03:19.520
The historian Halle Rubinholt, in her work on these women,

56
00:03:19.840 --> 00:03:22.520
argues that the evidence they were all selling sex is

57
00:03:22.680 --> 00:03:26.439
thin to nonexistent for several of them. What's clear is

58
00:03:26.560 --> 00:03:30.400
what they actually were. They were mothers, they were wives,

59
00:03:30.680 --> 00:03:34.840
they were daughters. They were women who'd been married, raised children,

60
00:03:35.039 --> 00:03:38.439
held jobs, and then fallen through every crack of society

61
00:03:38.479 --> 00:03:42.520
with no safety net could offer drink, grief, poverty, a

62
00:03:42.639 --> 00:03:45.840
husband who left or died, and at the bottom of

63
00:03:45.879 --> 00:03:48.719
that fall was a four pence bed in a Whitechapel

64
00:03:48.759 --> 00:03:51.120
doss house, and on the nights they couldn't make the

65
00:03:51.199 --> 00:03:54.599
fourpence the street. That's why they were out at three

66
00:03:54.599 --> 00:03:57.680
and four in the morning, not because they were reckless,

67
00:03:57.919 --> 00:04:01.000
because they had nowhere to sleep. And the man who

68
00:04:01.080 --> 00:04:04.520
killed them understood that better than the police did. He

69
00:04:04.599 --> 00:04:08.159
knew nobody was watching these women, nobody was paying attention

70
00:04:08.280 --> 00:04:11.639
to them. That wasn't a coincidence in the case. That

71
00:04:11.879 --> 00:04:16.240
was the whole design of it. The Canonical five investigators

72
00:04:16.279 --> 00:04:19.839
eventually linked five murders to the same hand. Historians call

73
00:04:19.920 --> 00:04:23.360
them the canonical five, and even that is debated because

74
00:04:23.399 --> 00:04:26.000
the killer was never caught and the police file held

75
00:04:26.000 --> 00:04:29.399
eleven Whitechapel murders in total. But these five are the

76
00:04:29.439 --> 00:04:32.680
ones the evidence ties together. So let's do the thing

77
00:04:32.720 --> 00:04:35.959
this case almost never does. Let's say their names. Mary

78
00:04:36.000 --> 00:04:40.639
Ann Nichols, known to everyone as Polly, forty three years old.

79
00:04:41.120 --> 00:04:43.959
She'd been married, had five children, and her life had

80
00:04:43.959 --> 00:04:47.319
come apart over years of separation and drink. On the

81
00:04:47.399 --> 00:04:49.920
night of August thirty first, she didn't have the four

82
00:04:50.000 --> 00:04:52.279
pence for her bed. She told a friend not to

83
00:04:52.319 --> 00:04:55.720
worry she'd have the money soon. She liked her new bonnet.

84
00:04:56.360 --> 00:04:58.959
About an hour later, she was found in Buck's Row

85
00:04:59.040 --> 00:05:03.800
with her throat. She is generally considered the first Annie

86
00:05:03.920 --> 00:05:08.839
Chapman forty seven years old, sick, frail, dying slowly of

87
00:05:08.879 --> 00:05:11.439
a lung disease, and still out trying to earn her

88
00:05:11.480 --> 00:05:15.199
doss money because she had no other option. She was

89
00:05:15.199 --> 00:05:17.800
found on September eighth in the backyard of a house

90
00:05:17.800 --> 00:05:20.920
on Hanbury Street in the early morning, with people sleeping

91
00:05:21.040 --> 00:05:22.920
just feet away on the other side of the wall.

92
00:05:23.720 --> 00:05:26.680
After Annie, the unnies in the East End tipped over

93
00:05:26.759 --> 00:05:30.319
into outright panic. Then came the night they called the

94
00:05:30.439 --> 00:05:35.240
double Event. September thirtieth. Elizabeth Stride, forty four years old,

95
00:05:35.319 --> 00:05:38.480
a Swedish immigrant who'd lost her husband and children years before,

96
00:05:38.920 --> 00:05:42.040
was found first in a yard off Berner Street. Her

97
00:05:42.079 --> 00:05:45.240
wounds were less extensive than the others, and many believed

98
00:05:45.240 --> 00:05:48.639
the killer was interrupted, that someone came along and he

99
00:05:48.800 --> 00:05:52.319
slipped away into the dark before he was finished, because

100
00:05:52.399 --> 00:05:55.199
less than an hour later, less than a mile away,

101
00:05:55.439 --> 00:05:59.800
he killed again. Catherine ed Owls, forty six years old.

102
00:06:00.120 --> 00:06:02.879
She'd actually been in police custody that very night, picked

103
00:06:02.959 --> 00:06:05.319
up for being drunk and was released from the station

104
00:06:05.480 --> 00:06:08.360
an hour before she died. Because she'd sobered up, she

105
00:06:08.439 --> 00:06:11.560
walked out and into Miter Square and into the worst

106
00:06:11.600 --> 00:06:11.839
of it.

107
00:06:12.399 --> 00:06:14.079
Two women in under an hour.

108
00:06:14.560 --> 00:06:16.759
The city woke up the next morning and understood it

109
00:06:16.800 --> 00:06:20.160
was dealing with something it had never seen before. And then,

110
00:06:20.360 --> 00:06:23.879
after a few weeks of nothing, the last one, Mary

111
00:06:24.000 --> 00:06:28.399
Jane Kelly, the youngest, around twenty five years old, the

112
00:06:28.439 --> 00:06:31.160
only one, killed indoors in her own rented room in

113
00:06:31.199 --> 00:06:34.600
Miller's Court, which gave the killer time and privacy he'd

114
00:06:34.680 --> 00:06:37.759
never had on the street. What he did there was

115
00:06:37.800 --> 00:06:39.839
the worst of all of it, and I'm not going

116
00:06:39.879 --> 00:06:42.319
to walk you through it, because she was a person.

117
00:06:42.040 --> 00:06:43.199
And not a horror prop.

118
00:06:44.079 --> 00:06:47.279
Mary Jane Kelly is generally believed to be the final

119
00:06:47.360 --> 00:06:51.040
canonical victim after her, the murders, at least the ones

120
00:06:51.079 --> 00:07:03.600
we can tie to him, simply stopped. The investigation was

121
00:07:03.680 --> 00:07:07.120
led on the ground by Inspector Frederick Aberline, a detective

122
00:07:07.160 --> 00:07:09.920
who knew Whitechapel as well as anyone on the force,

123
00:07:10.360 --> 00:07:12.680
and he and his men were up against a problem

124
00:07:12.720 --> 00:07:15.839
they had no tools to solve. There were no fingerprints

125
00:07:15.839 --> 00:07:21.120
and evidence yet no DNA, obviously, no cameras, no real forensics.

126
00:07:21.759 --> 00:07:24.639
Detective work in eighteen eighty eight meant knocking on doors

127
00:07:24.680 --> 00:07:28.360
and hoping somebody saw something, and the jurisdiction was split,

128
00:07:28.439 --> 00:07:32.480
which didn't help. The Metropolitan Police covered most of the murders,

129
00:07:32.560 --> 00:07:36.360
but Miter Square, where Catherine ETOs died, fell under the

130
00:07:36.399 --> 00:07:40.759
separate City of London police, two forces, two sets of records,

131
00:07:40.959 --> 00:07:45.519
one killer slipping between them. Then the letters started, hundreds

132
00:07:45.600 --> 00:07:48.959
of them sent to the police and the newspapers. Most

133
00:07:48.959 --> 00:07:53.360
were cranks and hoaxers, but three became famous. The first,

134
00:07:53.720 --> 00:07:56.879
the Dear Boss letter, arrived at a London news agency

135
00:07:56.879 --> 00:08:00.160
in late September, taunting the police and signing off the

136
00:08:00.240 --> 00:08:04.120
name nobody had used before, Jack the Ripper. The press

137
00:08:04.160 --> 00:08:06.160
printed it, and that was the moment a string of

138
00:08:06.160 --> 00:08:10.680
squalid murders became an international legend. Most experts today believed

139
00:08:10.720 --> 00:08:13.959
that letter was written by a journalist, someone who understood

140
00:08:14.040 --> 00:08:17.600
exactly how to sell newspapers. He may have invented the

141
00:08:17.600 --> 00:08:20.360
most famous criminal alias in history out of thin air.

142
00:08:21.079 --> 00:08:23.040
There was a postcard a few days later in the

143
00:08:23.079 --> 00:08:25.720
same hand, and then there was the one sent to

144
00:08:25.800 --> 00:08:29.480
George Lusk the head of the local vigilance committee. It

145
00:08:29.519 --> 00:08:32.080
came with half a human kidney preserved in a box.

146
00:08:32.440 --> 00:08:35.200
The letter was headed from Hell and claimed the writer

147
00:08:35.320 --> 00:08:38.279
had fried and eaten the other half. Whether that one

148
00:08:38.320 --> 00:08:41.960
was genuine nobody has ever proven. And then there's the

149
00:08:42.000 --> 00:08:44.600
piece of this case that tells you everything about the

150
00:08:44.639 --> 00:08:45.960
world these women lived in.

151
00:08:46.759 --> 00:08:48.039
On the night of the double.

152
00:08:47.799 --> 00:08:50.840
Event, a scrap of bloodied apron from Catherine Etto's was

153
00:08:50.879 --> 00:08:53.759
found in a doorway on Gulston Street and chalked on

154
00:08:53.759 --> 00:08:54.399
the wall above.

155
00:08:54.440 --> 00:08:56.080
It was a line of writing.

156
00:08:55.759 --> 00:08:59.600
That seemed to blame Jewish residents for the killings. Whitechapel

157
00:08:59.639 --> 00:09:02.879
had a lot large Jewish immigrant community and tensions were

158
00:09:02.919 --> 00:09:07.120
already dangerous, so the police Commissioner, Sir Charles Warren made

159
00:09:07.159 --> 00:09:10.720
a decision. Before the message could even be photographed, he

160
00:09:10.759 --> 00:09:13.320
had it scrubbed off the wall. He was afraid it

161
00:09:13.320 --> 00:09:16.120
would spark a riot, an anti Jewish pagram in the

162
00:09:16.120 --> 00:09:17.000
streets of London.

163
00:09:17.320 --> 00:09:17.879
He may have been.

164
00:09:17.879 --> 00:09:20.440
Right to worry, but he also wiped out a piece

165
00:09:20.440 --> 00:09:22.879
of evidence in the most notorious murder case of the

166
00:09:22.919 --> 00:09:26.559
century before anyone could properly examine it. That tells you

167
00:09:26.639 --> 00:09:29.480
how thin the line was, how frightened the city was

168
00:09:29.919 --> 00:09:33.600
Everyone's a suspect. Because the case was never closed, it

169
00:09:33.639 --> 00:09:36.600
became a vacuum and people have been pouring theories into

170
00:09:36.639 --> 00:09:40.000
it for one hundred and thirty seven years. Over the decades,

171
00:09:40.039 --> 00:09:42.759
the list of named suspects has run from the plausible

172
00:09:42.960 --> 00:09:46.879
to the genuinely absurd. A member of the royal family,

173
00:09:47.159 --> 00:09:51.200
a famous painter, even at the silliest end, the author

174
00:09:51.320 --> 00:09:54.840
of Alice in Wonderland. None of that has any serious

175
00:09:54.840 --> 00:09:57.799
evidence behind it. It's the kind of thing that happens

176
00:09:57.799 --> 00:10:00.480
when a mystery gets big enough that everyone wants their

177
00:10:00.519 --> 00:10:03.679
candidate to be the answer. The names that actually came

178
00:10:03.720 --> 00:10:08.080
from the investigation are narrower. In eighteen ninety four, a

179
00:10:08.120 --> 00:10:11.480
senior Scotland yard official named Melville mcnagden wrote a memo

180
00:10:11.559 --> 00:10:16.159
listing three men police had genuinely considered. A barrister named

181
00:10:16.159 --> 00:10:19.639
Montague Druett, who killed himself shortly after the final murder,

182
00:10:20.279 --> 00:10:23.799
a Russian khan man and petty criminal named Michael ostrog

183
00:10:24.440 --> 00:10:28.440
and a Polish immigrant living in Whitechapel named Aaron Kozminsky.

184
00:10:28.720 --> 00:10:31.200
And it's that last name that has come roaring back

185
00:10:31.240 --> 00:10:32.399
to life in our own time.

186
00:10:33.279 --> 00:10:34.840
Aaron Kozminsky was.

187
00:10:34.840 --> 00:10:38.679
A barber, a Polish Jewish immigrant, around twenty three years

188
00:10:38.720 --> 00:10:40.120
old at the time of the murders.

189
00:10:40.639 --> 00:10:43.120
He lived right in the heart of Whitechapel. He knew

190
00:10:43.159 --> 00:10:43.879
those streets.

191
00:10:45.120 --> 00:10:47.360
A few years after the killings, he was committed to

192
00:10:47.399 --> 00:10:50.440
an asylum after threatening his own sister with a knife,

193
00:10:50.840 --> 00:10:54.600
and he spent the rest of his life institutionalized, dying

194
00:10:54.679 --> 00:10:58.399
in nineteen nineteen. Two of the most senior police officers

195
00:10:58.440 --> 00:11:01.240
connected to the case privately believed he was the man.

196
00:11:01.519 --> 00:11:05.320
They never charged him, And then in our century came

197
00:11:05.360 --> 00:11:09.759
the shawl. A businessman, an amateur investigator named Russell Edwards,

198
00:11:09.759 --> 00:11:12.600
bought a silk shawl at auction in two thousand and seven,

199
00:11:13.039 --> 00:11:15.320
a shawl claimed to have been taken from the scene

200
00:11:15.360 --> 00:11:18.879
of Catherine Edows's murder by a police officer who kept

201
00:11:18.879 --> 00:11:22.799
it as a grim souvenir. Edwards had it tested, and

202
00:11:22.879 --> 00:11:26.240
the scientists working with him said they'd extracted DNA from

203
00:11:26.240 --> 00:11:29.480
the shawl that matched a living descendant of Catherine Edos

204
00:11:29.480 --> 00:11:32.279
on one side and a living descendant of Aaron Kozminsky

205
00:11:32.360 --> 00:11:34.639
on the other. In a book and then in a

206
00:11:34.679 --> 00:11:37.720
peer reviewed paper, Edwards declared the case solved.

207
00:11:38.639 --> 00:11:38.879
Jack.

208
00:11:38.919 --> 00:11:42.440
The ripper, he said, was Aaron Kozminsky. I'm gonna be

209
00:11:42.480 --> 00:11:45.559
honest with you, though a lot of very serious scientists

210
00:11:45.600 --> 00:11:48.919
are not buying it, and their objections matter. There's no

211
00:11:49.039 --> 00:11:52.320
documented chain of custody proving that Shawl was ever actually

212
00:11:52.360 --> 00:11:54.759
at the crime scene, or that it belonged to Catherine

213
00:11:54.919 --> 00:11:57.879
Edos at all. It changed hands and sat in private

214
00:11:57.919 --> 00:12:01.600
collections for over a century with endless chances to pick

215
00:12:01.679 --> 00:12:05.080
up stray DNA from anyone who touched it. The kind

216
00:12:05.120 --> 00:12:09.399
of DNA they tested mitochondrial DNA can reliably rule a

217
00:12:09.399 --> 00:12:11.960
person out, but it can't really single one person in

218
00:12:12.399 --> 00:12:15.000
because thousands of people in London at the time would

219
00:12:15.039 --> 00:12:18.919
have shared that same genetic signature. The journal that published

220
00:12:18.919 --> 00:12:22.600
the study later attached a formal expression of concern to it.

221
00:12:23.039 --> 00:12:26.480
So no, as far as the scientific community is concerned,

222
00:12:26.559 --> 00:12:30.759
this case is not closed when we come back. Descendants

223
00:12:30.759 --> 00:12:32.960
of the victims are now fighting to drag this case

224
00:12:33.000 --> 00:12:36.120
into a modern courtroom, more than a century too late,

225
00:12:36.679 --> 00:12:40.120
and it raises the only question that's ever really mattered here,

226
00:12:40.559 --> 00:12:43.080
What does justice even look like for five women in

227
00:12:43.080 --> 00:12:46.279
the world threw away, Stay with me, say their names.

228
00:12:53.320 --> 00:12:57.480
Welcome back to daily Crime and Justice. Here's where this

229
00:12:57.519 --> 00:13:00.879
old case becomes a live one again. Right now, the

230
00:13:00.919 --> 00:13:03.840
descendants of these victims are pushing for a new inquest.

231
00:13:04.360 --> 00:13:07.480
A descendant of Catherine Etto's named Karen Miller has been

232
00:13:07.559 --> 00:13:10.840
leading the call, asking the courts to formally examine the

233
00:13:10.879 --> 00:13:14.559
evidence and legally name the killer. And whatever you think

234
00:13:14.600 --> 00:13:17.360
of the DNA, the reason she gives for doing it

235
00:13:17.440 --> 00:13:20.320
is the truest thing anyone has said about this case

236
00:13:20.360 --> 00:13:23.159
in one hundred years. She points out that the name

237
00:13:23.279 --> 00:13:26.639
Jack the Ripper became a brand, an icon, a character

238
00:13:26.639 --> 00:13:30.240
people dress up as, and in becoming that he swallowed

239
00:13:30.240 --> 00:13:33.639
the women whole. We remember the monster, and we forgot

240
00:13:33.720 --> 00:13:36.720
the people he murdered, the women who, in her words,

241
00:13:37.080 --> 00:13:40.000
never got justice in the first place. She wants the

242
00:13:40.039 --> 00:13:43.360
real name in a real court, not for him, but

243
00:13:43.399 --> 00:13:46.360
for them, and that, to me is the whole point

244
00:13:46.399 --> 00:13:49.279
of starting this week here, because the Ripper case is

245
00:13:49.320 --> 00:13:52.480
the original sin of true crime. It's the moment we

246
00:13:52.559 --> 00:13:55.159
decided that the killer is the story and the victims

247
00:13:55.200 --> 00:13:55.919
are the scenery.

248
00:13:56.320 --> 00:13:58.480
We built a tourist industry on these murders.

249
00:13:58.879 --> 00:14:02.440
There are walking tours through Whitechapel tonight there are mugs

250
00:14:02.440 --> 00:14:05.320
and t shirts and five women bled to death in

251
00:14:05.360 --> 00:14:07.840
the dark, so that could exist. And most people on

252
00:14:07.879 --> 00:14:10.279
those tours could not give you a single one of

253
00:14:10.320 --> 00:14:13.120
their names. So let me give you something the legend

254
00:14:13.200 --> 00:14:16.399
never will. Mary Anne Nichols liked her new bonnet and

255
00:14:16.440 --> 00:14:17.519
thought her luck was turning.

256
00:14:17.559 --> 00:14:18.519
The night she died.

257
00:14:19.000 --> 00:14:21.639
Annie Chapman was dying anyway, and went out into the

258
00:14:21.639 --> 00:14:26.000
cold for four pennies because she had no choice. Elizabeth

259
00:14:26.039 --> 00:14:29.120
Stride had crossed an ocean from Sweden and lost everyone

260
00:14:29.159 --> 00:14:32.600
she loved before she ever reached that yard. Catherine Etto's

261
00:14:32.600 --> 00:14:34.919
had just been let out of a police cell, sober,

262
00:14:35.200 --> 00:14:39.120
almost safe, an hour from home. And Mary Jane Kelly

263
00:14:39.240 --> 00:14:41.720
was barely twenty five years old, with her whole life

264
00:14:41.759 --> 00:14:46.360
supposedly still ahead of her. Real women, not props, not

265
00:14:46.480 --> 00:14:49.039
a riddle for clever men to solve. Over one hundred years.

266
00:14:49.879 --> 00:14:53.480
Jack the Ripper was never tried, never convicted, never made

267
00:14:53.519 --> 00:14:57.120
to answer for any of it. He died, whoever he was,

268
00:14:57.360 --> 00:14:59.879
an old man or a forgotten one, with the war

269
00:15:00.000 --> 00:15:04.159
world none the wiser, and accountability, as I always tell you,

270
00:15:04.480 --> 00:15:07.519
doesn't have a legal department. It doesn't wait around for

271
00:15:07.559 --> 00:15:11.200
a verdict that's never coming. Sometimes the only justice left

272
00:15:11.279 --> 00:15:13.720
is to refuse the killer the thing he wanted most,

273
00:15:14.320 --> 00:15:20.519
the attention, so we give it to them instead. Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine,

274
00:15:20.759 --> 00:15:26.440
Mary Jane, somebody has to say your names. A few

275
00:15:26.480 --> 00:15:29.799
honest notes on this one, because it's history, and history

276
00:15:29.840 --> 00:15:33.879
is messy. The Whitechapel murders were never solved, no one

277
00:15:34.000 --> 00:15:36.919
was ever tried or convicted, and everything you've heard about

278
00:15:36.919 --> 00:15:41.399
the killer's identity remains theory, not fact. The DNA case

279
00:15:41.480 --> 00:15:45.759
naming Aaron Kozminsky is genuinely disputed by forensic scientists over

280
00:15:45.799 --> 00:15:49.639
the shawl's unproven chain of custody, possible contamination, and the

281
00:15:49.679 --> 00:15:52.320
limits of the testing used, and the study drew a

282
00:15:52.360 --> 00:15:55.080
formal expression of concern from the journal that published it,

283
00:15:55.799 --> 00:15:59.799
treat it as one contested claim, not a conclusion. The

284
00:16:00.080 --> 00:16:03.080
famous letters, including the one that coined the name Jack

285
00:16:03.159 --> 00:16:06.600
the Ripper, are widely believed by experts to be hoaxes,

286
00:16:07.039 --> 00:16:11.000
possibly press inventions. Even the count of five victims is

287
00:16:11.000 --> 00:16:15.399
debated among historians. The police file listed eleven Whitechapel murders

288
00:16:15.440 --> 00:16:18.759
in all, and the victims. Exact ages and life details

289
00:16:18.840 --> 00:16:21.759
vary from source to source, and the long repeated claim

290
00:16:21.799 --> 00:16:25.559
that all five women were prostitutes has been seriously challenged

291
00:16:25.600 --> 00:16:29.279
by modern research. We've named everything we're confident in and

292
00:16:29.320 --> 00:16:34.440
flagged everything we're not. That's Crown versus Colony Day one.

293
00:16:35.240 --> 00:16:37.879
Tomorrow we stay in England, but we trade the gaslight

294
00:16:37.919 --> 00:16:41.240
for something far more modern and somehow even darker. A

295
00:16:41.399 --> 00:16:44.559
husband and wife, an ordinary terrorist house at twenty five

296
00:16:44.600 --> 00:16:47.799
Cromwell Street in Gloucester and a family home that turned out.

297
00:16:47.679 --> 00:16:48.840
To be a graveyard.

298
00:16:49.320 --> 00:16:52.159
Fred and Rose West The House of Horrors tomorrow on

299
00:16:52.279 --> 00:16:55.559
Daily Crime and Justice. If this one got under your

300
00:16:55.559 --> 00:16:57.759
skin the way it's supposed to, do me a favor,

301
00:16:58.120 --> 00:17:00.720
share this episode, Tell a friend who loves a good

302
00:17:00.720 --> 00:17:03.159
crime story that we're doing the UK all week and

303
00:17:03.240 --> 00:17:06.400
send them today. Word of mouth is the whole game,

304
00:17:06.599 --> 00:17:09.799
and it's how this show grows. And if you're listening

305
00:17:09.799 --> 00:17:12.559
on Spotify, drop a comment and tell me who you

306
00:17:12.720 --> 00:17:16.119
think the Ripper really was, or better yet, tell me

307
00:17:16.200 --> 00:17:18.680
which of those five women you'd never heard name before

308
00:17:18.720 --> 00:17:22.319
today I read them wherever else you're listening on YouTube

309
00:17:22.359 --> 00:17:24.720
or anywhere else, leave us a rating. While you're there,

310
00:17:25.640 --> 00:17:29.039
I'm Garrett Fisher. This has been daily crime and justice.

311
00:17:29.440 --> 00:17:32.680
Five women, one coward who hid in the dark. We

312
00:17:32.839 --> 00:17:35.000
just said their names, and we'll say them again.

313
00:17:35.440 --> 00:17:36.079
Do better.