The Ripper's Victims in Print

by Rebecca Frost

  Her alcoholism was what put her in the East End in the first place, separating her from both her husband and her children and forcing her to depend on the kindness of strangers through various workhouses. This is a woman who seemed unable to redeem herself no matter what options were presented to her because her priorities centered around the bottle instead of some higher form of salvation. Roland does credit her with a higher level of education than is commonly assumed of East End prostitutes, referencing a letter Polly wrote to her husband, but even the ability to read and write did not mean that she possessed the motivation or the character to stick with the domestic position that had been obtained for her. It would seem that no amount of help that came to Polly was enough to change her situation, since she herself would have needed to change, as well.

  Annie Chapman, on the other hand, was not able to reject all attempts at help since it seems none were offered her. The fact that “she looked as if life had knocked her around a bit”16 was likely because it had: out of her three children, there was one dead, one institutionalized, and one placed in a home for cripples. Her husband had reportedly drunk himself to death, and Roland reports that it seems Annie had set out to do the same. In stark contrast to Polly, Annie’s marriage is not shown to end because of her drinking. Instead it seems that she was only separated from her husband through his death, and that the heavy drinking of the parents is understandable considering the fates of the children. Annie’s situation is sympathetic and relatable instead of pathetic and distant.

  It is Elizabeth Stride who might come off as pathetic, not only being a foreigner who left her home country in order to escape the blows of her parents’ death and a stillborn baby but also emerging from a short-lived marriage and ending up on the street. Still Elizabeth manages to remain “slim and pretty, a more attractive prospect than the dowdy bawds with whom she shared a pitch,”17 prostituting herself only when she could not earn enough money as a cleaner. Her looks put her in clear contrast with Polly and Annie, as well as the fact that she is not an alcoholic and thus her drinking could not have caused her marriage to fail. This is an Elizabeth who is trying to make the best of a bad situation to the point where she even borrowed a clothes brush before going out to solicit for the night, as though the men who sought out East End prostitutes might be more inclined to favor the slim and pretty Swede if her clothes were also as clean as she could get them. This is the plight of a woman who, apparently through no fault of her own, has suffered multiple losses in life and yet pays attention to the small details that likely go unnoticed by those around her.

  Catherine Eddowes is not pathetic and not even relatable. She is simply released from her cell, not entirely sober, and sets off into the night to her death. Clearly drinking put her in the wrong spot at the wrong time and meant she crossed paths with the Ripper, but if the bottle had cost her anything else in life—or if there was even anyone to miss her—Roland does not mention it.

  Being younger than the other women, Mary Jane Kelly is also the prettiest—even more so than Elizabeth, perhaps because she had not been occupying the East End for quite as long. She had been sharing various lodgings with her boyfriend, Joe Barnett, although the couple preferred to spend their rent money on alcohol and be forced to move, multiple times over. It seems that, when they drank, they also fought, and this “volatile”18 relationship left Mary Jane alone in her rented room, with no man to protect her and the need to go out soliciting for customers in an attempt to pay off some of what was owed.

  Whether or not Barnett can be blamed for leaving her, it would seem that he was not the sole cause of her drinking, since she was drunk on her last night. Granted, she may have turned to the bottle for solace in what might have felt like a hopeless situation, or for courage to go out and sell herself, but Roland suspects that the Ripper chose her as his victim precisely because she was not sober. He speculates that other women who were out and about that night, in full control of their facilities, avoided the Ripper because of their intuition, “whereas Mary Kelly was too drunk to have heeded hers.”19 It was once again not the responsibility of the Ripper to not have murdered, but the responsibility of his victims to have recognized him for what he was and gotten out of his way. It would seem that the punishment for drink, as well as for prostitution, was death.

  The question of redemption is thus posed in relationship to the murdered women and not to the murderer himself. It seems that the women—prostitutes and alcoholics—would have been able to have been redeemed, had they simply tried harder or wanted it more. Giving up alcohol would have meant more money in their pockets for food and shelter, and having shelter would have meant that they would not have been on the street at the same time as the Ripper. Having an income that did not require occasional or continual prostitution would also have worked in their favor, both from a moral standing and to have kept them off the street. These women thus put themselves perfectly in the path of the Ripper’s knife, so their deaths were bought and paid for through the choices they made in life. Whether or not the Ripper is capable of—or in need of—redemption is not discussed.

  Vulnerable Victims

  In his 2009 book Jack the Ripper: Quest for a Killer, M. J. Trow makes the interesting move of connecting his Ripper suspect with the murdered women outside of the murders themselves. When Trow provides readers with the women’s backgrounds, he mentions where Robert Mann was and how old he was at the time of their births. Even though the Ripper and his victims are separated by miles and will not cross paths for decades, Trow cannot introduce the women without reminding readers of his true focus. Even though he condemns prior authors from either turning the Ripper narrative into entertainment or for presenting situations and people involved falsely, part of his means of grounding his own narrative in fact comes from this continual turning back to remind readers of where the young Ripper was and what he was up to when his victims were born.

  Trow connects the Ripper not only to his victims, but also to twentieth century serial killer Ted Bundy, making multiple references to the man who was executed for his crimes over a century after Mary Kelly’s death. Bundy was, after all, a suave killer, much as the Ripper was assumed to have been. This assumption seems to have been based mostly on the fact that the Ripper was not caught, and Trow’s description of Robert Mann does not impress readers with the idea of the same charisma. His observation that Bundy would not have been identified as a stereotypical serial killer by those who passed him on the street, however, does hold for Mann, although perhaps not for the same reason. As a law student, with his clean-cut good looks, Bundy seemed above reproach; workhouse inmate Mann would have been overlooked as being too dull and ordinary.

  The observation that “the Ripper’s victims were considerably more vulnerable than any killed by Gacy or Bundy”20 is certainly a means by which to separate Mann from the more recent serial killer. In part due to his looks and his education, Bundy was not perceived as a threat and was thus able to approach college co-eds who were meant to have been given the proper background and tools to prevent themselves from becoming victims. Mann is not a threat because of charisma and appearance, but rather because he is deemed as too low to be much of one. He is an inmate at a workhouse and thus has no money and no education, placing him in opposition to Bundy. Bundy’s victims were mainly young women who had been living comfortable middle-class lives and could afford to go to college, thus making them women whose absence would be noted and lamented much more quickly than missing Victorian prostitutes.

  When Trow brings John Wayne Gacy into discussion, he includes another segment of the victim population. Instead of college co-eds or prostitutes, Gacy murdered boys and young men. They were usually hitchhiking or in search of a job, which allowed Gacy to convince them to get into his car or come to his house. Trow states that the women murdered in Whitechapel were even more vulnerable than the young men and boys Gacy killed in the 1970s, although this claim seems to be more complicated than it first appears. True, the
number of victims of the Ripper changes depending on the narrative, but Gacy was convicted of thirty-three murders, which is more than have been attached to the Ripper. The East End—and indeed the world—was made aware of the Ripper murders at speed, thanks to newspaper reports, meaning that readers could both learn the identity of the murdered women and be aware that there was a threat. Women who had no other source of income were still forced to walk the streets, but their plight came under discussion and it was reported that many began to carry knives. Even if they did not know what the Ripper looked like, they knew enough to be on the lookout.

  Gacy’s victims, on the other hand, responded to a seemingly jolly man offering them a ride or a job. This was a man who, by the time he was caught, had buried twenty-nine bodies on his property and tossed four more into the river because he was running out of space. Because he chose to murder runaways and hitchhikers, many of them were not reported as missing and their deaths were unknown until the property was excavated and the remains began to be identified. Even though Gacy murdered more people, the fact that he hid their bodies instead of leaving them to be found means that the horror of his actions was only uncovered after the disappearance of his final victim, whose family missed him immediately.

  This is not to say that the East End prostitutes were not a vulnerable population, since they clearly were, but that they are not the only vulnerable category of victims. The five murdered women in Whitechapel were identified with varying degrees of difficulty in the days after their murders, but they were still given names, and their loved ones were made aware of their fates. Although some printed responses suggested that murdered prostitutes deserved their deaths, others came forward to protest the current conditions of the East End and suggest various ways and means—not all of them practical—to protect the women. The Ripper murders have been pointed to as a locus for social change, as though the murderer himself might have been a reformer, whereas a discussion almost a century later of murdered boys and homosexuality did not produce the same effect. The media flocked to the Gacy murders, yes, and certainly turned them into a spectacle, but the question of whether the Ripper victims or Gacy’s victims were more vulnerable does not have a clear-cut answer.

  The vulnerability of the Ripper’s victims comes from their occupation, which stems from their common history of failed relationships and alcoholism. Polly is once again unable to seize “[h]er one chance—as it turned out her last”21 to set her life straight, but she fails at being a maid just as she failed at being a wife and mother, due largely to alcohol. Eliza Ann Smith—also called Annie Chapman, or simply Annie—may have only begun drinking because one of her children was born crippled and another died, but alcohol still cost Annie her marriage and likely fed her temper. Although Liz Stride may not have been an alcoholic herself, the man she took up with after the failure of her marriage certainly was and Michael Kidney, like Annie, had a fierce temper. Kate Eddowes faired better in that her long-term relationship with John Kelly seemed steady in spite of the bottle, although Trow’s description of a “relatively loyal and happy”22 couple is at odds with his initial description of Kelly merely as Kate’s “sometimes lover.”23 Finally Mary Kelly, despite her presumably superior position, seemed to share Annie’s temper as well as her love of alcohol, since “drink turned her from a quiet woman into a terrifying harpy.”24 Both prostitution and alcoholism made these women vulnerable, frequently placing them in the company of strange men and thus overlooked by the supposedly better classes.

  What set Bundy’s victims apart was that so many of them came from those supposedly better classes. They were young, good-looking, and the sort of women said to have their whole lives ahead of them. They were also, unlike Gacy’s choice of victim, generally white and heterosexual. This placed Bundy’s victims on a level above Jack the Ripper’s, increasing Bundy’s risk when he murdered them and thus elevating Bundy in the pantheon of serial killers. The Ripper’s victims, like many of Gacy’s, were ignored and dismissed as having no future or no means of improving themselves. The fact that society has already begun to ignore them is a large part of what makes the East End women such likely victims, especially when two aspects of their lives seem to have been their own personal choices: prostitution and alcohol. Whether these are tantamount to hitchhiking and homosexuality is still up for debate.

  “By no means unique”

  Trow is by no means the only author to make the point that aspects of the murdered women’s lives did indeed mean that they were more likely to fall prey to the Ripper’s knife. It is a concept that serial killer expert Steven Egger defines as the “less-dead,” an idea be has been refining since first proposing it in 1994. For Egger, the less-dead category encompasses “the marginalized members of society”25 who are overlooked in life and most often described as having put themselves in harm’s way. He includes such populations as hitchhikers, the homeless, and prostitutes, although race and sexual preference are also likely categories. These groups are ignored, if not exiled, and therefore less-alive when living, making them less-dead when murdered. What M. J. Trow describes when he labels the Whitechapel women as “vulnerable” fits into this category of the less-dead, and he is not alone in this assessment.

  After more than a century of discussion about the Ripper narratives, it is perhaps difficult for authors to continue to present the murder victims in new and individual ways. Although it is common enough to take a few provable facts about a suspect and build up a life story around him in order to prove that he could have been the Ripper, the interest in the victims lies in their bodies and what clues can be gathered from them in order to point to that killer. Thus, while the basic facts of their lives might be dutifully repeated, there is not necessarily enough information to provide readers with distinct personalities or identities of the murdered women. A number of books from the twenty-first century, therefore, are notable for this study only in that they echo Egger’s assessment of the less-dead similarly to Trow, putting the idea in their own words.

  In his 2011 book Jack the Ripper and the Case for Scotland Yard’s Prime Suspect, Robert House ferrets out the life of the mysterious Aaron Kosminski, one of the three possible suspects named by Sir Melville Mcnaghten. Since the Mcnaghten notes were made public in the middle of the twentieth century, researchers have been attempting to track down the three he named and make their argument for or against them. House has uncovered more information about the Polish Jew and apparent hairdresser who spent the last decades of his life in an insane asylum.

  While House does indeed provide each murdered woman with a chapter in her name, the majority of each chapter concerns itself with the discovery of her body and the resulting investigation. House is, after all, concerned with making the case that Kosminski could have encountered each woman on the night of her death and enacted both the murders and the mutilations involved, and this argument needs only the women’s bodies and descriptions of their wounds. Indeed, when he reaches the murder of Kate Eddowes, House simply declares that she “was another fairly typical East End prostitute.”26 It would seem that all five of these women were typical, since none of them stand out in the usual ways as being most pathetic, or the biggest liar, or the prettiest. They are simply five women whose names are known and connected because of Jack the Ripper.

  In their 2013 book The Complete and Essential Jack the Ripper, Paul Begg and John Bennett take this a step further when they point out that “these women were by no means unique in the mighty city that was London.”27 This is the realization that occurs to the public, both in London itself and the wider world, after Annie Chapman was murdered. Not only were the murdered women not unique in and among themselves, but they belonged to a wider pool of women whose situations were very much like their own. This was the realization that led to responses ranging from praise for the Ripper for cleaning up the streets—which in itself was an overstatement, considering the number of prostitutes in the East End alone—on the one hand and social reform on the oth
er.

  Begg and Bennett also take the time to reflect on the state of Ripper narratives and express their concern with the state of recent critique. They acknowledge that many of these narratives have fallen prey to decades of myth making and that, by the anniversary of the murders, Ripper narratives were “essentially commemorating the century of a fictional creation”28 and not of a real man who murdered and mutilated real women. These myths surround the figure of the Ripper and allow for the dismissal of his victims, and the authors further argue that these, like other serial killer tales, direct their focus in ways that do not touch on the actual reactions to the murders. At this distance, both emotionally and chronologically, readers have been directed to focus more fully on the mystery of the Ripper’s identity instead of on the true fates of his victims.

  This is a tendency that Begg and Bennett do not lay solely on authors writing during or after the anniversary of the murders. Rather, they suggest that “there simply had to be a reason for the Whitechapel murders in order for people to attempt to come to terms”29 with them. This search for an explanation that would lead to closure is made easier if the murdered women are considered as a homogenous group instead of distinct individuals. First, it allows for distance even in those living through the murders, holding the women at arm’s length instead of personifying them and presenting readers with the complete horror of their deaths. And secondly, placing the murdered women into a single group allows for the explanation that the killer held something against that group. If the Ripper’s victims were all prostitutes and by no means unique, then he clearly held something against that specific class of people. He was not even alone in his negative feelings—the Ripper simply took common public reaction a step too far.