Witnesses at the inquest said Polly, Annie and Kate had been known to sleep on the street-aka “sleep rough”-and didn’t have money for a room at a lodging house the night they were killed. “The final thing is the places where some of were found where homeless people slept,” Rubenhold continues. There was no sign that any of them had struggled before death and there were no reports of neighbors hearing women’s screams on the nights they died. The inquests found that all of the women died in reclining positions. But there were lots of other interesting things to come out of. “Jack the Ripper didn’t have sex with his victims,” Rubenhold says. It was an assumption steeped in the era’s prejudices about single, working-class women-why else would a woman be out on the street alone at night? But in reality, only Mary Jane and Elizabeth had ever earned money through sex work, and the evidence doesn’t indicate the killer solicited any of the women for sex. “For years, a lot of Ripperologists-people who study the Ripper case-have gone to great lengths to try to figure out what sexual positions these women would have been in…for them to have been killed like it says in the coroner’s inquests.”Īll this prurient interest has obscured what Rubenhold thinks is a more likely conclusion-that Jack the Ripper killed these women in their sleep.Īlthough Jack the Ripper may have murdered others, investigators later determined these murders were the ones most likely linked, and the women were dubbed the “canonical five.”Īt the time, the police and the media assumed these five women were all prostitutes, and that they must have encountered their killer as a client. “I think many people assume these were sexual crimes,” says historian Hallie Rubenhold, author of the new book, The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper. In addition to bringing them out of their killer’s shadow, these experts are challenging long-held assumptions about what really happened to these women before they died. After 130 years of feverish speculation about his identity, two female scholars are taking a closer look at these women. Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Kate and Mary Jane didn’t know each other in life, but they all had the same killer: Jack the Ripper. Article Details: A Surprising New Theory About Jack the Ripper's VictimsĪ Surprising New Theory About Jack the Ripper's Victims
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