The untold stories of the women Jack the Ripper killed

Our culture has a bizarre love affair with serial killers. We pore through their actions, searching for some essential insight into the nature of human evil. 

In doing so, we turn murderers into protagonists — and their victims into footnotes. 

Perhaps the most famous serial killer of all time is Jack the Ripper. 130 years after he terrorized London's East End, his legend still fascinates people around the world. His image adorns posters and T-shirts. Scholars and armchair detectives hunt tirelessly for his identity. 

"We have to ask ourselves why we have such a fascination with these serial killers, because they have become like rock stars," historian Hallie Rubenhold told The Sunday Edition's host Michael Enright.  

She said much more attention has been paid to solving the mystery of who the Ripper was, than to thinking about the women he killed. 

We've never really ... acknowledged that these were real people- Hallie Rubenhold

Their names were Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elisabeth Stride, Kate Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly. 

In her new book, The Five, Rubenhold set out to give them back their dignity. She devotes no time to the Ripper and his true identity, a question she considers irrelevant. Instead, she focuses her attention on the lives he cut short. 

"The Ripper gets bound up in the mythology of the late Victorian era, and we've never really pulled back from this and acknowledged that these were real people," she said. 

Rubenhold spoke to Enright about how moral judgment, poverty, violence and addiction shaped the lives of the Ripper's victims, how they ended up on the streets, and how she wants us to remember them today. 

Here are some highlights from their conversation. Rubenhold's comments have been edited for clarity and condensed.

Polly Nichols

"Polly Nichols was born the daughter of a man who made printing presses. She married another man involved in the printing trade, William Nichols. They were given a home in one of the first social housing initiatives in London. Unfortunately, her husband William started having an affair with a neighbour. Polly had to go into the workhouse, because there was no recourse for women who wanted to split up from their husbands in the 19th century who were poor. In order to show that she had [financial] need, she had to go into the workhouse, so he could be forced to pay her maintenance.

"The workhouse was really a place of shame. You had all your possessions taken off of you, you had to wear institutional clothes. You slept in dormitories. You were given absolutely appalling food that made you sick. You had very little access to water and you worked. They gave gruelling, demeaning work to do in order to earn your little bit of keep.

"The law also stipulated that if you found another male partner, which she did, the husband could cut the maintenance — which meant that she had nothing. So when that relationship fell apart, she was completely destitute. She was in and out of the workhouse and sleeping rough on the street, and eventually was found in this condition when she was killed."

Annie Chapman

"Annie was born into slightly better circumstances, just by virtue of the fact that her father was a trooper in the Queen's cavalry, a very prestigious regiment. Annie went on to marry a gentleman's coachman — quite a high-ranking position within a household. He got a job working in a country estate just outside of Windsor. They'd moved into the middle classes. 

"The unfortunate thing was that Annie was an alcoholic. She was placed in one of the first women's rehabilitation centres in England for a year to dry out. She came back, and then she relapsed. It was decided that it was in the best interests of the family for her and her husband to part; so she was sent back to her family in London. They were teetotallers, so that didn't work out. Eventually she left, and that's how she ended up in Whitechapel.

"She was staying in a lodging house or doss house, where you could pay for a bed … [On the last night of her life], she didn't have the money and the lodging housekeeper wouldn't extend her the credit. So with some hesitation, she left, to either try to go and find somebody to lend the money [or] to go and find a corner in which to curl up, which is where she was found when the Ripper came upon her."

Elisabeth Stride

"She was a farmer's daughter. She had to do what most girls her age did in Sweden, which was to go into the local town to get a job as a domestic service servant. We don't know what the circumstances were, but she had a relationship with a man who got her pregnant.

"At this time, a set of regulations was brought in in Sweden, [for] women who were working as prostitutes and women who were suspected of being prostitutes. When I say suspected, I mean single pregnant women, women who were out late at night. All you have to be proven to have is some sort of moral irregularity in your life, which means you go on this [public registry] list. You can't get respectable work, so you're forced into the sex trade, even if you're not in it. You have to go for weekly checks to make sure you don't have syphilis.

"On one of her checks, Elizabeth was not only found to be seven months pregnant, but she also had syphilis. She was sent to the venereal disease hospital. She miscarried her child. And eventually, she was handed over to the protection of a woman who was looking to reform her. She became a servant, and then this family is believed to have helped her to immigrate with another family to London. 

"She then worked in a very nice house in Hyde Park. Eventually, she met her husband, who was a carpenter. They went off to the East End to open a coffee house together. They fell on hard times. They ended up in the workhouse. He eventually died, and then she ended up on the streets."

Catherine Eddowes 

"Her father worked in the tin trade and Wolverhampton. He was a union agitator, and he got himself into some trouble when he encouraged brave men to come out on strike with him. He was sent to prison and the family was blacklisted, so they had to move to London and start over again. 

"Both her parents had died of tuberculosis by the time she was 15, so her elder sisters sent her back to the family in Wolverhampton to look after her. There she was given a job in a tin factory. It was terrible grueling work, and she hated it. She ran off to Birmingham and eventually threw her lot in with a man who was a travelling ballad salesman, and they travelled around the country selling ballads and chapbooks.

"Thomas Conway, her partner, was physically violent toward her. Eventually, they split up, but it took a while. She found another partner. But by then she was really quite heavily addicted to alcohol. She was living in Whitechapel when the Ripper found her."

Mary Jane Kelly

"She started out working in ... high-class sex work. She lived in Knightsbridge, which is the poshest part of London. But we don't know anything about where she came from, because Mary Jane Kelly told a lot of conflicting stories. So we don't know how she found her way into prostitution. 

"It's believed that she was trafficked to Paris at some point. She escaped and came back to London, and was lying low in the East End, because she couldn't come back to the West End. It was when she was in the East End that she was eventually found by the killer and slaughtered."

Click 'listen' above to hear the full interview.