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

0:03 Caalaroga Shark Media. Good morning, It's Monday, June twenty ninth, and this is Daily Crime and Justice. I'm Garrett Fisher. Before we get into it, I want to tell you about something special we're doing all week long. For two years now, this show has brought you America's worst, the verdicts that stopped the country cold, the monsters who made the front page, the trials none of us could look away from. Well, this week, the Colony is returning the favor its Independence Day week and to market. We're crossing the Atlantic five days, five of the most notorious criminal cases in the history of the United Kingdom. We're calling it Crown versus Colony. For a couple hundred years, the Crown sat in judgment over us. This week we put the Crown's worst on the stand. And there is no better place to start than where this entire genre was born.

1:00 The Fog, the gaslight, the knife in the Dark, London, eighteen eighty eight, the case that gave the world its first modern monster and never gave it a single. Day of justice. This is the story of Jack the Ripper. But more than that, and I mean this, it's the story of five women whose names you ought to know far better than his. The Autumn of Terror. Picture the East end of London in the autumn of eighteen eighty eight, Whitechapel, a square mile of narrow streets and gas lamps and overcrowded lodging houses packed wall to wall with the poorest people in the richest city on earth. Outside this district, London was the capital of an empire that ruled a quarter of the planet. Inside it, family slept four and five to a room. Children went hungry, and women with nowhere else to go, sold what they could to scrape together the price of a bed for the night. And then, over about ten weeks, somebody started killing those women, cutting their throats, mutilating their bodies in the dark, and disappearing before anyone heard a sound. The newspapers called it the Autumn of Terror, and for once the headline was not an exaggeration. People were genuinely afraid to walk home. Vigilance committees patrolled the streets, and a killer moved through the panic like he owned it. Here's the thing I want you to hold onto, though, because the legend has buried it.

2:31 We talk about Jack the Ripper like he's a character a top hat and a doctor's bag, fog swirling a villain in a story. He was not a character. He was a man who murdered real people. And the reason he was never caught, the reason he could keep doing it, comes down to one ugly truth about who his victims were. For more than a century, the women he killed got reduced to a single word, prostitutes, as if that explained them, as if that closed the file on a human life. And it did something convenient, didn't it It let respectable victorian society file these murders under unfortunate and move on, because the victims were the kind of women nobody was supposed to miss. Modern historians have pushed back hard on that.

3:16 The historian Halle Rubinholt, in her work on these women, argues that the evidence they were all selling sex is thin to nonexistent for several of them. What's clear is what they actually were. They were mothers, they were wives, they were daughters. They were women who'd been married, raised children, held jobs, and then fallen through every crack of society with no safety net could offer drink, grief, poverty, a husband who left or died, and at the bottom of that fall was a four pence bed in a Whitechapel doss house, and on the nights they couldn't make the fourpence the street. That's why they were out at three and four in the morning, not because they were reckless, because they had nowhere to sleep. And the man who killed them understood that better than the police did. He knew nobody was watching these women, nobody was paying attention to them. That wasn't a coincidence in the case. That was the whole design of it. The Canonical five investigators eventually linked five murders to the same hand. Historians call them the canonical five, and even that is debated because the killer was never caught and the police file held eleven Whitechapel murders in total. But these five are the ones the evidence ties together. So let's do the thing this case almost never does. Let's say their names. Mary Ann Nichols, known to everyone as Polly, forty three years old.

4:41 She'd been married, had five children, and her life had come apart over years of separation and drink. On the night of August thirty first, she didn't have the four pence for her bed. She told a friend not to worry she'd have the money soon. She liked her new bonnet. About an hour later, she was found in Buck's Row with her throat. She is generally considered the first Annie Chapman forty seven years old, sick, frail, dying slowly of a lung disease, and still out trying to earn her doss money because she had no other option. She was found on September eighth in the backyard of a house on Hanbury Street in the early morning, with people sleeping just feet away on the other side of the wall.

5:23 After Annie, the unnies in the East End tipped over into outright panic. Then came the night they called the double Event. September thirtieth. Elizabeth Stride, forty four years old, a Swedish immigrant who'd lost her husband and children years before, was found first in a yard off Berner Street. Her wounds were less extensive than the others, and many believed the killer was interrupted, that someone came along and he slipped away into the dark before he was finished, because less than an hour later, less than a mile away, he killed again. Catherine ed Owls, forty six years old. She'd actually been in police custody that very night, picked up for being drunk and was released from the station an hour before she died. Because she'd sobered up, she walked out and into Miter Square and into the worst of it.

6:12 Two women in under an hour. The city woke up the next morning and understood it was dealing with something it had never seen before. And then, after a few weeks of nothing, the last one, Mary Jane Kelly, the youngest, around twenty five years old, the only one, killed indoors in her own rented room in Miller's Court, which gave the killer time and privacy he'd never had on the street. What he did there was the worst of all of it, and I'm not going to walk you through it, because she was a person. And not a horror prop. Mary Jane Kelly is generally believed to be the final canonical victim after her, the murders, at least the ones we can tie to him, simply stopped. The investigation was led on the ground by Inspector Frederick Aberline, a detective who knew Whitechapel as well as anyone on the force, and he and his men were up against a problem they had no tools to solve. There were no fingerprints and evidence yet no DNA, obviously, no cameras, no real forensics.

7:21 Detective work in eighteen eighty eight meant knocking on doors and hoping somebody saw something, and the jurisdiction was split, which didn't help. The Metropolitan Police covered most of the murders, but Miter Square, where Catherine ETOs died, fell under the separate City of London police, two forces, two sets of records, one killer slipping between them. Then the letters started, hundreds of them sent to the police and the newspapers. Most were cranks and hoaxers, but three became famous. The first, the Dear Boss letter, arrived at a London news agency in late September, taunting the police and signing off the name nobody had used before, Jack the Ripper. The press printed it, and that was the moment a string of squalid murders became an international legend. Most experts today believed that letter was written by a journalist, someone who understood exactly how to sell newspapers. He may have invented the most famous criminal alias in history out of thin air.

8:21 There was a postcard a few days later in the same hand, and then there was the one sent to George Lusk the head of the local vigilance committee. It came with half a human kidney preserved in a box. The letter was headed from Hell and claimed the writer had fried and eaten the other half. Whether that one was genuine nobody has ever proven. And then there's the piece of this case that tells you everything about the world these women lived in. On the night of the double. Event, a scrap of bloodied apron from Catherine Etto's was found in a doorway on Gulston Street and chalked on the wall above. It was a line of writing. That seemed to blame Jewish residents for the killings. Whitechapel had a lot large Jewish immigrant community and tensions were already dangerous, so the police Commissioner, Sir Charles Warren made a decision. Before the message could even be photographed, he had it scrubbed off the wall. He was afraid it would spark a riot, an anti Jewish pagram in the streets of London.

9:17 He may have been. Right to worry, but he also wiped out a piece of evidence in the most notorious murder case of the century before anyone could properly examine it. That tells you how thin the line was, how frightened the city was Everyone's a suspect. Because the case was never closed, it became a vacuum and people have been pouring theories into it for one hundred and thirty seven years. Over the decades, the list of named suspects has run from the plausible to the genuinely absurd. A member of the royal family, a famous painter, even at the silliest end, the author of Alice in Wonderland. None of that has any serious evidence behind it. It's the kind of thing that happens when a mystery gets big enough that everyone wants their candidate to be the answer. The names that actually came from the investigation are narrower. In eighteen ninety four, a senior Scotland yard official named Melville mcnagden wrote a memo listing three men police had genuinely considered. A barrister named Montague Druett, who killed himself shortly after the final murder, a Russian khan man and petty criminal named Michael ostrog and a Polish immigrant living in Whitechapel named Aaron Kozminsky.

10:28 And it's that last name that has come roaring back to life in our own time. Aaron Kozminsky was. A barber, a Polish Jewish immigrant, around twenty three years old at the time of the murders. He lived right in the heart of Whitechapel. He knew those streets. A few years after the killings, he was committed to an asylum after threatening his own sister with a knife, and he spent the rest of his life institutionalized, dying in nineteen nineteen. Two of the most senior police officers connected to the case privately believed he was the man. They never charged him, And then in our century came the shawl. A businessman, an amateur investigator named Russell Edwards, bought a silk shawl at auction in two thousand and seven, a shawl claimed to have been taken from the scene of Catherine Edows's murder by a police officer who kept it as a grim souvenir. Edwards had it tested, and the scientists working with him said they'd extracted DNA from the shawl that matched a living descendant of Catherine Edos on one side and a living descendant of Aaron Kozminsky on the other. In a book and then in a peer reviewed paper, Edwards declared the case solved.

11:38 Jack. The ripper, he said, was Aaron Kozminsky. I'm gonna be honest with you, though a lot of very serious scientists are not buying it, and their objections matter. There's no documented chain of custody proving that Shawl was ever actually at the crime scene, or that it belonged to Catherine Edos at all. It changed hands and sat in private collections for over a century with endless chances to pick up stray DNA from anyone who touched it. The kind of DNA they tested mitochondrial DNA can reliably rule a person out, but it can't really single one person in because thousands of people in London at the time would have shared that same genetic signature. The journal that published the study later attached a formal expression of concern to it.

12:23 So no, as far as the scientific community is concerned, this case is not closed when we come back. Descendants of the victims are now fighting to drag this case into a modern courtroom, more than a century too late, and it raises the only question that's ever really mattered here, What does justice even look like for five women in the world threw away, Stay with me, say their names. Welcome back to daily Crime and Justice. Here's where this old case becomes a live one again. Right now, the descendants of these victims are pushing for a new inquest.

13:04 A descendant of Catherine Etto's named Karen Miller has been leading the call, asking the courts to formally examine the evidence and legally name the killer. And whatever you think of the DNA, the reason she gives for doing it is the truest thing anyone has said about this case in one hundred years. She points out that the name Jack the Ripper became a brand, an icon, a character people dress up as, and in becoming that he swallowed the women whole. We remember the monster, and we forgot the people he murdered, the women who, in her words, never got justice in the first place. She wants the real name in a real court, not for him, but for them, and that, to me is the whole point of starting this week here, because the Ripper case is the original sin of true crime. It's the moment we decided that the killer is the story and the victims are the scenery.

13:56 We built a tourist industry on these murders. There are walking tours through Whitechapel tonight there are mugs and t shirts and five women bled to death in the dark, so that could exist. And most people on those tours could not give you a single one of their names. So let me give you something the legend never will. Mary Anne Nichols liked her new bonnet and thought her luck was turning. The night she died. Annie Chapman was dying anyway, and went out into the cold for four pennies because she had no choice. Elizabeth Stride had crossed an ocean from Sweden and lost everyone she loved before she ever reached that yard. Catherine Etto's had just been let out of a police cell, sober, almost safe, an hour from home. And Mary Jane Kelly was barely twenty five years old, with her whole life supposedly still ahead of her. Real women, not props, not a riddle for clever men to solve. Over one hundred years.

14:49 Jack the Ripper was never tried, never convicted, never made to answer for any of it. He died, whoever he was, an old man or a forgotten one, with the war world none the wiser, and accountability, as I always tell you, doesn't have a legal department. It doesn't wait around for a verdict that's never coming. Sometimes the only justice left is to refuse the killer the thing he wanted most, the attention, so we give it to them instead. Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine, Mary Jane, somebody has to say your names. A few honest notes on this one, because it's history, and history is messy. The Whitechapel murders were never solved, no one was ever tried or convicted, and everything you've heard about the killer's identity remains theory, not fact. The DNA case naming Aaron Kozminsky is genuinely disputed by forensic scientists over the shawl's unproven chain of custody, possible contamination, and the limits of the testing used, and the study drew a formal expression of concern from the journal that published it, treat it as one contested claim, not a conclusion. The famous letters, including the one that coined the name Jack the Ripper, are widely believed by experts to be hoaxes, possibly press inventions. Even the count of five victims is debated among historians. The police file listed eleven Whitechapel murders in all, and the victims. Exact ages and life details vary from source to source, and the long repeated claim

16:21 that all five women were prostitutes has been seriously challenged by modern research. We've named everything we're confident in and flagged everything we're not. That's Crown versus Colony Day one. Tomorrow we stay in England, but we trade the gaslight for something far more modern and somehow even darker. A husband and wife, an ordinary terrorist house at twenty five Cromwell Street in Gloucester and a family home that turned out. To be a graveyard. Fred and Rose West The House of Horrors tomorrow on Daily Crime and Justice. If this one got under your skin the way it's supposed to, do me a favor, share this episode, Tell a friend who loves a good crime story that we're doing the UK all week and send them today. Word of mouth is the whole game, and it's how this show grows. And if you're listening on Spotify, drop a comment and tell me who you think the Ripper really was, or better yet, tell me which of those five women you'd never heard name before today I read them wherever else you're listening on YouTube or anywhere else, leave us a rating. While you're there, I'm Garrett Fisher. This has been daily crime and justice.

17:29 Five women, one coward who hid in the dark. We just said their names, and we'll say them again. Do better.