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Speaker 4: You are now listening to True Murder, the most shocking
Speaker 4: killers in true crime history and the authors that have
Speaker 4: written about them, Gasey, Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker BTK. Every
Speaker 4: week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and
Speaker 4: infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host,
Speaker 4: journalist and author Dan Zufanski. Good Evening.
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Speaker 6: a ten percent discount. Jack the Ripper stocked the streets
Speaker 6: of London's East End from August through November of eighteen
Speaker 6: eighty eight, in what is dubbed the Autumn of Terror. However,
Speaker 6: the grizzly ripping of Paully Nichols on August thirty first
Speaker 6: was not the first unsolved murder of the year. The
Speaker 6: April murder of Emma Smith and the August murder of
Speaker 6: Martha Tabram both occurred on bank holidays. They baffled the
Speaker 6: police and press alike, and were assumed by the original
Speaker 6: investigators to have been the first murders in the series.
Speaker 6: Were they correct? In this provocative work of literary archaeology,
Speaker 6: author Tom Westcott places these early murders in their proper
Speaker 6: historical context and digs to on earth new evidence and
Speaker 6: hard facts not seen in over one hundred and twenty
Speaker 6: five years. The Bank Holiday Murders is the only book
Speaker 6: of its kind. It issues the tired approach of unsatisfying
Speaker 6: final solutions in favor of solid research, logical reasoning, and
Speaker 6: new information. The clues followed are not drawn from imagination,
Speaker 6: but from the actual police reports and press accounts of
Speaker 6: the time. The questions asked by Westcott are ones first
Speaker 6: suggested by the original investigators but lost to time until now.
Speaker 6: The answers provided are compelling and sometimes explosive. Among the
Speaker 6: revelations are new information linking the murders of Smith and
Speaker 6: Tabrum to the same killer or killers, Proof that the
Speaker 6: police did not believe key witnesses in either case, proof
Speaker 6: that at least one of these witnesses working with the murderer.
Speaker 6: New evidence connecting men of the victims that may lead
Speaker 6: to their actual slayers. Information on Emily Horsnell, the actual
Speaker 6: first Whitechapel murder victim. The hidden truth of leather Apron
Speaker 6: and its rule in unraveling the Ripper. Mystery proof of
Speaker 6: a corrupt police sergeant who forwarded the investigation was he
Speaker 6: protecting the Ripper. The book that we're featuring this evening
Speaker 6: is The Bank Holiday Murders, The true story of the
Speaker 6: First Whitechapel Murders, with my special guest, journalist and author
Speaker 6: Tom Wescott. Welcome to the program, and thank you for
Speaker 6: agreeing to this interview. Tom Wescott, Hello, can you hear me? Absolutely?
Speaker 6: Welcome to the program, Tom.
Speaker 7: Well, good, Thank you for having me, Dan, I appreciate it.
Speaker 6: Thank you very much. We had a you scheduled once
Speaker 6: upon a time, so I'm glad that we finally got
Speaker 6: you on here with this compelling book that again talks
Speaker 6: about Jack the Ripper. But you have a very very
Speaker 6: unique perspective on this. Before we start for our audience,
Speaker 6: and I did want to call you a ripperologist, because
Speaker 6: I don't really know who wants to be called that
Speaker 6: and exactly what that means, but exactly tell us your
Speaker 6: background involving all things Ripper and Jack the Ripper, And
Speaker 6: tell us your background and how, without giving anything away,
Speaker 6: how you came to write this book with this particular
Speaker 6: perspective surrounding Jack the Ripper.
Speaker 7: Sure, sure, well, I personally I don't shy away from
Speaker 7: the word ripperlogist. I don't feel any sort of negative
Speaker 7: connotation from it. I think for a time there, ten
Speaker 7: years ago or so, it was sort of a fringe,
Speaker 7: you know name, people shied away from it. But nowadays,
Speaker 7: because there's the journal of our field is called Ripperologist,
Speaker 7: and it's a highly highly respected journal. It's also free,
Speaker 7: you know, anyone can subscribe to it. So I'm proud
Speaker 7: of that title. I got into ripper Ology back in
Speaker 7: the nineties. Uh, just just by accident. I think it's
Speaker 7: you know, it says bug that bite you, is what
Speaker 7: it is. And I picked up a book in a
Speaker 7: used bookstore, a ripper book that happened to be misplaced
Speaker 7: in the horror fiction section, and which is what I
Speaker 7: went there looking for. It was a horror fiction book.
Speaker 7: And I found this nonfiction book on the Ripper and
Speaker 7: just grabbed it on a lark, and I went home
Speaker 7: and I read it, and I said, you know, is
Speaker 7: this really the solution? And and then I it was
Speaker 7: the burgeoning days of the internet. I looked on there
Speaker 7: found the Casebook website, which is the big Ripper website,
Speaker 7: one of two big Ripper websites, and saw there were
Speaker 7: all these other books. So I started checking them out
Speaker 7: at the library or buying them and uh, and it
Speaker 7: was just one thing after another. What happens when you
Speaker 7: do this? And and people who read ripper books will
Speaker 7: will recognize this in themselves. The more you read, the
Speaker 7: more naturally you're going to learn. You're going to remember details,
Speaker 7: and then you're going to notice when authors make mistakes
Speaker 7: or when they get a detail, you know, look at
Speaker 7: it from a different angle from someone else. And you
Speaker 7: start developing your own opinions and thoughts and ideas along
Speaker 7: the way, And next thing you know, you're researching those
Speaker 7: to see if you're right and they're wrong. And then
Speaker 7: that's kind of how this thing and it just snowballs
Speaker 7: from there until you know, eventually you've got a room
Speaker 7: of your house filled with Ripper books and magazines and
Speaker 7: old you know. One hundred and twenty six year old newspapers,
Speaker 7: and then at some point in my case, it was,
Speaker 7: you know, my research led me into certain avenues that
Speaker 7: were new because I didn't want to just be there's
Speaker 7: a lot of Ripper books out there that are crap.
Speaker 7: That's just there's so many of them that that's just
Speaker 7: by nature, there's going to be a portion of them
Speaker 7: that are just a waste of money. I personally think
Speaker 7: that's probably about seventy percent of the books out there
Speaker 7: into that category, and then another twenty percent are decent,
Speaker 7: you know, they're harmless, and then maybe five to ten
Speaker 7: percent are you know, really you gotta have them books.
Speaker 7: And so I wanted to put something out that fit
Speaker 7: into that five percent. Whether I succeeded or failed, you know,
Speaker 7: will be up to the individual perspective. I think I
Speaker 7: succeeded because the majority of stuff in my book does
Speaker 7: not appear in other books in terms of how I
Speaker 7: interpret it, and also new evidence presented that hasn't appeared
Speaker 7: in books before the first Ripper or the first Whitechapel Murder,
Speaker 7: which Emily Horsnell. I don't believe her name has ever
Speaker 7: appeared in a Ripper book until mine. So but anyways,
Speaker 7: there you go that. The short answer to your question
Speaker 7: is I got into it, not really by choice. It's
Speaker 7: just a bug that bit me and has stayed with me,
Speaker 7: and by accident and luck. More than anything else, I've
Speaker 7: stumbled on some things that I thought other people who
Speaker 7: interested in the case should know. And that's where this
Speaker 7: came from.
Speaker 6: You talk about in this book that you it's not
Speaker 6: a typical book in terms of final solution, in terms
Speaker 6: of wrapping up the entire mystery and saying conclusively, here
Speaker 6: is the killer, and here here it is. But in
Speaker 6: writing this book you also were looking at a different project.
Speaker 6: So tell us what who you were looking at in
Speaker 6: terms of a suspect. Talk about this chile Y brand,
Speaker 6: and tell us about how it morphed into looking at
Speaker 6: this person to the focus of the project here with
Speaker 6: the Bank Holiday murders.
Speaker 7: Well, one of the suspects who intrigues me more than
Speaker 7: anyone and who is not discussed in the Bank Holiday murders,
Speaker 7: I'll say that upfront, But his name is Charles Legrand.
Speaker 7: He is the subject of a future book of mine
Speaker 7: which myself and fellow researchers, primarily a lady named Debrah
Speaker 7: Arab has researched extensively over the last decade, but and
Speaker 7: he has never had a book dedicated to him. This guy,
Speaker 7: Charles Lagrant, in a nutshell, is a sociopath, psychopath, very dangerous.
Speaker 7: He was a pimp. He instigated himself into the Ripper
Speaker 7: investigation following the murder of Elizabeth Stride. He fabricated evidence
Speaker 7: through the police off track, almost certainly, wrote the what's
Speaker 7: called the from Hell Letter, and was cited by a
Speaker 7: certain member of Parliament as being the man most likely
Speaker 7: in London to have been Jack the Ripper. And yet
Speaker 7: you know, he didn't have a book about him. So
Speaker 7: I'm going to write that book because I've got a
Speaker 7: lot of cool stuff on him. But so anyways, I
Speaker 7: decided I'm going to write this book on Charles Lagrant.
Speaker 7: But before I my idea was this, I didn't want
Speaker 7: to do another suspect book. I never wanted to do that.
Speaker 7: So my idea was, I'm going to start at square one,
Speaker 7: the first murder, which at that time I thought was
Speaker 7: Emma Smith, and I'm going to research without bias scratch,
Speaker 7: starting at square one, and work my way forward through
Speaker 7: all the murders, putting Charles Legrand out of my mind,
Speaker 7: leaving myself open to any new avenues or interpretations, and
Speaker 7: lo and behold. You know, by the time I hit
Speaker 7: Martha Tabram, the second of the official Whitechapel murders, I'm
Speaker 7: noticing things, and chiefly surrounding this character Pearly Paul, who
Speaker 7: was allegedly a friend of Martha Tabram's. Things weren't adding
Speaker 7: up in her statement and in the evidence, and so
Speaker 7: I said, well, let me follow this. And I started
Speaker 7: following this, and it led me to the landlords, the
Speaker 7: guys who really held the power in the East end
Speaker 7: of London back in eighteen eighty eight, you know, probably
Speaker 7: more so. They had more sway over the public than
Speaker 7: the police did. So that's power. That's power right there,
Speaker 7: and so it led me back to them. I started
Speaker 7: looking at them and just kind of I said, wait
Speaker 7: a minute. What was supposed to be a couple chapters
Speaker 7: of a book is my notes and all of this
Speaker 7: were I'm like, I can't cover this in like two,
Speaker 7: you know, ten page chapters. I've got about two hundred
Speaker 7: pages in front of me. This is a book in
Speaker 7: its own right, and it needs to be considered in
Speaker 7: its own right aside from anything else I want to
Speaker 7: talk about. Those can wait for other books. And so
Speaker 7: that's that's I started. That's when I started writing The
Speaker 7: Bank Holiday Murders in a fever pitch back in October
Speaker 7: of twenty thirteen, and actually finished it in January of
Speaker 7: twenty fourteen, just a few months later, and then published
Speaker 7: it the following month. And at that time I thought, well,
Speaker 7: this is just this is just a little book, you know,
Speaker 7: it'll just devotees to the case we'll purchase it. And
Speaker 7: it's actually become It's done very well for me, actually
Speaker 7: surprisingly so over the last year, it's performed very well,
Speaker 7: and the feedback I've gotten has been tremendous and it's
Speaker 7: just been an utter joy, an utter joy for me.
Speaker 6: Well that's great, that's very deserved too. Let's set the stage.
Speaker 6: I know that a lot of people have read Ripper books,
Speaker 6: and probably a lot of the audience knows of the
Speaker 6: basic premise or the story behind the Ripper mythology and
Speaker 6: the basic story. But really what I found most fascinating
Speaker 6: about your book is how sucked in I got into
Speaker 6: this book due to the descriptions you have of the
Speaker 6: East end of London in eighteen eighty eight and surrounding years,
Speaker 6: and you talked about you alluded to the which is
Speaker 6: very very important to your whole story is the lodging houses.
Speaker 6: So tell us about the lodging houses, and tell us
Speaker 6: about the owners, some of the names like John McCarthy
Speaker 6: and some of the names of the lodging houses, and
Speaker 6: how it worked with people that were managers of those houses.
Speaker 6: Tell us, I want to really set the stage for
Speaker 6: to describe London at this time, what these people were
Speaker 6: living in, the circumstances. So tell us first with the
Speaker 6: lodging houses, and then we'll get to the character of
Speaker 6: some of these men and just the conditions that these
Speaker 6: people lived in in these lodging houses.
Speaker 7: Sure sure, well, First let me say thank you Dan
Speaker 7: for the kind words about the book. I certainly appreciate that,
Speaker 7: particularly coming from you and the landlords, or I call
Speaker 7: them the lords of Spittlefields. In my book, a certain
Speaker 7: section the East end of London where these murders occurred
Speaker 7: were essentially a slum land. Not all of it was.
Speaker 7: There were very respectable people who live there, hardworking people,
Speaker 7: but in the lodging houses. Just to put it into
Speaker 7: a context that a modern American could quickly grasp just think,
Speaker 7: you know, the projects, project housing. And today in our
Speaker 7: society the slum lords are the government because the government
Speaker 7: owns these housing, they run it, and they profit from it.
Speaker 7: But that wasn't the case in eighteen eighty eight line.
Speaker 7: The government did not step in and do anything at
Speaker 7: all for these people. So the landlords were essentially low
Speaker 7: rent businessmen who came in bought these old, dilapidated houses
Speaker 7: and rented out beds, not rooms, but beds. You might
Speaker 7: have a room with fifty beds in it all. You know,
Speaker 7: the sheets and the clothing may not get washed regularly.
Speaker 7: They're they're just completely covered in vermin and lice blood,
Speaker 7: you know, and that's what you're going to sleep in.
Speaker 7: And then you're going to track this and you're going
Speaker 7: to carry this to the next house with you, and
Speaker 7: it's just over and over and over again. There would
Speaker 7: be a communal kitchen with a fire where you could
Speaker 7: roast your potatoes. Surprisingly, people didn't really starve back then.
Speaker 7: Food was cheap and plentiful. It really was, you know
Speaker 7: what money. You know, you didn't really have to set
Speaker 7: aside too much money for the food. In fact, you
Speaker 7: could probably get a lot of it for free, because
Speaker 7: your money was going for beer. But wherever there is
Speaker 7: poverty and desperation, there will always be those who want
Speaker 7: to come in and capitalize on it and profit from it.
Speaker 7: And in this case it was the landlords who not
Speaker 7: only made money off of their rent because these were
Speaker 7: homeless people essentially who were coming and paying a nightly
Speaker 7: doss as it was called, to sleep in one of
Speaker 7: these beds, but you were also a fence for stolen property.
Speaker 7: These people would often say, Hey, Dan, I don't have
Speaker 7: money for my bed, but I have this that I
Speaker 7: stole today, So you would take that instead, and you
Speaker 7: would then sell that to the pawnshop or sell it
Speaker 7: through a pawn shop that you owned. A lot of
Speaker 7: these landlords also owned local pubs, and the East End
Speaker 7: of London was crawling with pubs at that time. Alcohol
Speaker 7: was the crack and the meth of its day. That's
Speaker 7: what everyone was addicted to in the East End. That
Speaker 7: was the predominant drug. So if you owned a pub boy,
Speaker 7: you were never out of money. And so were these
Speaker 7: bad men. Not all of them, A lot of them
Speaker 7: were a lot of them just maybe had less scruples
Speaker 7: than you or I would. But at the same time,
Speaker 7: the other way to look at it is if they
Speaker 7: weren't their running these homes, these people had nowhere to
Speaker 7: sleep because there was no one else to help them.
Speaker 7: The Salvation Army, which by the way, was given birth
Speaker 7: by Jack the Ripper more or less, it was beginning
Speaker 7: just at that very time, and they were just opening
Speaker 7: up rooms. And the Salvation Army was born from the
Speaker 7: East end of London eighteen eighty eight. And Jack the
Speaker 7: Ripper brought attention to the plight of the people in
Speaker 7: this area, and so everyone started giving money to the
Speaker 7: Salvation Army, and that's how it got its original funding
Speaker 7: and got its footing and became what we know today.
Speaker 7: So that's a little interesting tidbit. But all the victims
Speaker 7: of Jack the Ripper or the White Chapel murderer, you know,
Speaker 7: lived in these houses. And anyone who's read my book
Speaker 7: or goes to read it will notice that I discussed
Speaker 7: some startling coincidences. And I say that with quotation marks
Speaker 7: such as that the first you have a number of
Speaker 7: women in a row who are attacked and or murdered,
Speaker 7: who all lived in neighboring houses. Two houses on George
Speaker 7: Street numbers eighteen and nineteen. You have Emily Horse now murdered.
Speaker 1: You have.
Speaker 7: Oh, my mind's going blank on me, but another lady
Speaker 7: who's been attacked and survives but spends twenty days in
Speaker 7: the hospital, followed by Emma Smith murdered, followed by Martha
Speaker 7: Tabram murdered, all between November of eighteen eighty seven and
Speaker 7: August of eighteen eighty eight. So in that period, now,
Speaker 7: that's an awful lot. And you say, well, in a
Speaker 7: violent area like that. The thing is is murders were
Speaker 7: extremely in the East End of London. When you saw
Speaker 7: a murder, it was typically domestic. It was a man
Speaker 7: killing his wife nine times out of ten, that's what
Speaker 7: it was. Stranger murders such as this were exceedingly rare.
Speaker 7: And to have that many violent attacks and murders occur
Speaker 7: to women living in two neighboring houses, I thought, okay,
Speaker 7: that's just pushing coincidence a little too much. And I
Speaker 7: noticed one character who was living in one of these
Speaker 7: houses at the time was Parley Paul, which was a
Speaker 7: thirty five year old prostitute, manly looking husky. She was
Speaker 7: described suffered from chest complaints her whole life and just
Speaker 7: you know, basically a criminal well known to the police. Anyway,
Speaker 7: she presented herself to the police following the murder of
Speaker 7: Martha Taberman told a wild story which they believed at
Speaker 7: first but then came to understand was a lie. And
Speaker 7: the thing is is she went to the police and
Speaker 7: identified the body correctly. The body had not been identified
Speaker 7: yet as Martha Tabram, but somehow she knew that's who
Speaker 7: was murdered and already had a fake story made up.
Speaker 7: And I thought, okay, this is highly suspicious. This is
Speaker 7: something somebody does if they're wanting to either get themselves
Speaker 7: or someone else off the hook by casting the police
Speaker 7: as suspicion in a different direction, which is what she did.
Speaker 7: She tried to claim that Martha Tabram spent her last
Speaker 7: hours in the company of herself and two soldiers, and
Speaker 7: all these identity parades followed to try and find these men.
Speaker 7: Of course, they never existed, and that's what I discussed
Speaker 7: in my book. So then I have the question of okay,
Speaker 7: who was Pearly Pole lying to protect And that's what
Speaker 7: led me to the landlords. Now Pearly Paul moves from
Speaker 7: that house following the murder of Martha Tabram. She moves
Speaker 7: to another house, thirty five Dorset Street, and you know,
Speaker 7: within it a couple of weeks, Nichels is murdered. Who
Speaker 7: resides at thirty five Dorset Street, Paula Nichols being the
Speaker 7: first of the what's called the canonical Ripper victims. She's
Speaker 7: not the first White Chapel murder victim, She's the first
Speaker 7: Ripper victim, and then the next murder victim, Annie Chapman,
Speaker 7: also residing at thirty five Dorset Street. And so I said, okay, well,
Speaker 7: imagine you're Pearly Paul, and now you know what six
Speaker 7: women or I think we're up to six women either
Speaker 7: murdered or nearly murdered in less than a year, and
Speaker 7: you know them all, you live with them. And then
Speaker 7: it goes on from there because she also knew Mary Kelly,
Speaker 7: the final Ripper victim, and possibly probably was at least
Speaker 7: acquaintance with all of them. Now do I argue that
Speaker 7: Pearly Paul was the Ripper? Absolutely not. I do not
Speaker 7: believe for a moment that she was. I have no
Speaker 7: evidence that she could do any more than cuttle over bread.
Speaker 7: I know she was also unhealthy. Does she possibly know
Speaker 7: who the Ripper was or have an idea. Yeah, I
Speaker 7: think quite possibly so. I think quite possibly so. And
Speaker 7: that's the stuff I'm exploring in my book. It's not
Speaker 7: just another one of those ooh, look, I picked a
Speaker 7: name out of a hat. I'm going to write a
Speaker 7: book and make some money. It's a pure research piece,
Speaker 7: is what my book is. And because I couldn't identify
Speaker 7: one guy with a knife in his hand as being
Speaker 7: the most likely person associated with I don't end the
Speaker 7: book with that big reveal of here's the name of
Speaker 7: Jack the Ripper. Frankly, those books, I think they had
Speaker 7: their day in the eighties and early nineties, and you know,
Speaker 7: the serious students of the case we kind of scoff
Speaker 7: at him. Now, there are exceptions. There are suspect books
Speaker 7: like Rob House's book on Aaron Coosminsky, which are afforded
Speaker 7: a lot of respect. There's also a recent thing of
Speaker 7: looking at books coming out that look at suspects from
Speaker 7: the perspective of here's why this man was not Jack
Speaker 7: the Ripper. And that's too. I mean, I think that's
Speaker 7: that's really important in my research. Over the years, I've
Speaker 7: looked at all the suspects and pretty much eliminated almost
Speaker 7: all of them in my mind, but there are a
Speaker 7: few that I still say. Okay, I can't eliminate this guy,
Speaker 7: so that he has to stay and frame. And one
Speaker 7: of the things we all must remember too is Jack
Speaker 7: Ripper may not have been one man. He may have
Speaker 7: been two men working together, may have been two or
Speaker 7: even three men murdering separately and unrelated. But who are
Speaker 7: and were believed to have been the same person? Does
Speaker 7: that make sense what I'm saying?
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Speaker 7: And at the time, a suspect was brought forth to
Speaker 7: the police, but he had an alibi for one of
Speaker 7: the murders, and so they discounted him. Well, let's just
Speaker 7: say that that murder happened to not be an actual
Speaker 7: Ripper crime. It was a copycat that was similar, and
Speaker 7: so by providing an alibi for that one, he got
Speaker 7: off the hook for all of them. But he may
Speaker 7: have been responsible for one or more of the other murders.
Speaker 7: I don't necessarily personally believe that. I think that the
Speaker 7: five canonical Ripper victims were in fact killed by the
Speaker 7: same man or men. And I also think that the
Speaker 7: early murderers are related. I think that Emily Horsnell, Emma Smith,
Speaker 7: Martha Tabraum, and then the five canonical crimes are all related,
Speaker 7: possibly even some of the later murders, because the evidence
Speaker 7: just really suggests that that's the case. And that's again,
Speaker 7: that's kind of what I discussed in my book, and
Speaker 7: in upcoming books I will probably go into that in
Speaker 7: more detail as it relates to the actual Ripper murders.
Speaker 6: Okay, well, let's let's go back to Emma Smith, because
Speaker 6: you do start with Emma Smith and you talk about
Speaker 6: the unusual case. Again, Really, what this is is this
Speaker 6: instead of you know, uncovering this mystery and saying, without
Speaker 6: a without a doubt, here's the solution. There is a
Speaker 6: lot of mysteries in this book, so a lot of
Speaker 6: questions are raised in this and not necessarily be answered.
Speaker 6: But with an a Smith, you talk about how the
Speaker 6: police are notified a couple days after she is killed,
Speaker 6: and you talk about the decorum at the time for
Speaker 6: a medical doctor when he would be testifying in public.
Speaker 6: So tell us about the description of the murder m
Speaker 6: a Smith and how possibly in history, how you have
Speaker 6: unraveled how they might not have described the murder exactly
Speaker 6: the way it really did happen.
Speaker 7: Tell us about that well as far as the decorum
Speaker 7: of the doctors an inquest in eighteen eighty eight, and
Speaker 7: in that time, first of all, the coroner was not
Speaker 7: a medical doctor. That was an elected position. Anyone could
Speaker 7: run for the position of coroner. Oftentimes lawyers would win post,
Speaker 7: and so the coroners were never the doctors in question,
Speaker 7: but they would hold the inquest, the primary purpose of
Speaker 7: which was to determine the death and to record certain
Speaker 7: information that could be referred back to later to kind
Speaker 7: of just correl you know, correlate that information. And so
Speaker 7: in the case of Emma Smith, who was a middle
Speaker 7: aged alcoholic prostitute, she it was bank holiday night, which
Speaker 7: also for our American listeners, a bank holiday is, which
Speaker 7: is the title of the book. What that means is
Speaker 7: is like to think of a holiday when the banks
Speaker 7: are closed. Martin Luther King Day, President's Day, Christmas, those
Speaker 7: are bank holidays, and that's the term used in England.
Speaker 7: So but anyways, she was walking around, it was just
Speaker 7: it was just easter right at Easter time, on a
Speaker 7: bank holiday all the soldiers would get their pay and
Speaker 7: the sailors and they would be on leave and they
Speaker 7: would hit the East End pubs looking for beer and women.
Speaker 7: And so this was a time to make some money.
Speaker 7: So that's what she was out doing. Apparently quite a
Speaker 7: ways from home. She had walked quite a distance from
Speaker 7: home on a rainy, cold night. She was a couple
Speaker 7: miles from home, supposedly, and at some point she was
Speaker 7: set upon an attacked. Now, the story she told to
Speaker 7: her lodging housemates and to the doctor who tended to her,
Speaker 7: was that she was set upon by two or three
Speaker 7: men who she didn't recognize, one of whom was roughly
Speaker 7: nineteen years of age. They chased her, they abused her,
Speaker 7: they beat her, and then she walked home. What we
Speaker 7: know is that she was in a bad stated. She
Speaker 7: was hit across the head so bad that it split
Speaker 7: one of her ears, almost cutting half of the ear off.
Speaker 7: She had other injuries to her head. More importantly, a
Speaker 7: blunt instrument of some sort had been inserted inside of
Speaker 7: her and ruptured the sacks surrounding her internal organs, as
Speaker 7: well as the area of flesh. Well, I don't want
Speaker 7: to get too much into that it's pretty gross, but
Speaker 7: she was damaged pretty badly, bled profusely. She took her
Speaker 7: shawl off and put it between her legs to catch
Speaker 7: the blood. And she had to be talked into going
Speaker 7: to the hospital. Back then, you know, that was just
Speaker 7: a sheer terror too. We don't like going to the
Speaker 7: doctor today. Imagine back then, you know, when you know
Speaker 7: three people going to the hospital, one might come out alive.
Speaker 7: So she goes to the hospital. They check her in
Speaker 7: within for twenty four hours, she was dead of peritonitis
Speaker 7: which had set in. An infection had set into her
Speaker 7: eternal organs and killed her. But she had told this
Speaker 7: story to the doctor. Now, the question is wasn't true
Speaker 7: because she was a prostitute.
Speaker 1: But she did.
Speaker 7: First of all, when she went to the hospital, she
Speaker 7: had no idea her injuries were fatal. So would she
Speaker 7: lie to protect the person who really inflicted these injuries? Yes,
Speaker 7: women did that all the time. Would she lie to
Speaker 7: not have to admit she was a prostitute? Sure, because
Speaker 7: the doctor did question her. Are you sure you weren't soliciting?
Speaker 7: Did you solicit this brune? Oh no, no, I wasn't soliciting. Well, okay,
Speaker 7: and the thing is she said this happened at one
Speaker 7: point thirty am, but she didn't get to her back
Speaker 7: to her home until hours later. So what I believe
Speaker 7: happened is she was attacked and set upon, not necessarily
Speaker 7: by three people. Though she was rendered unconscious left for dead.
Speaker 7: I believe that whoever attacked her left her for dead,
Speaker 7: but she came awake and stumbled home and then was
Speaker 7: taken to the hospital where she died the next day,
Speaker 7: where she claimed she pointed out on the way to
Speaker 7: the hospital, she pointed out to her friends that's where
Speaker 7: I was attacked. Well, the police never found any blood
Speaker 7: there when they learned about it. The hospital authorities also
Speaker 7: did not report this to the police, nor did any
Speaker 7: of her friends. No one reported this to the police.
Speaker 7: The police did not find out about this until they
Speaker 7: received the summons from the coroner to appear at the inquest,
Speaker 7: and they were like at the inquest for what they're like, Well,
Speaker 7: this woman was murdered, and so the police were very frustrated.
Speaker 7: When they talked to the constables in the area. The
Speaker 7: constables all said, oh, I didn't see nothing. Well they
Speaker 7: should have. They should have seen this bloody woman walking
Speaker 7: around from wherever she was attacked to her home, and
Speaker 7: then a half mile from her lodging house to the hospital.
Speaker 7: There were constables everywhere, but none of them claimed to
Speaker 7: have seen her. I don't think their inspector believed that.
Speaker 7: But because there were no witnesses, no one was willing
Speaker 7: to talk, they never got anywhere in the investigation, and
Speaker 7: no one was ever arrested for it. And then you
Speaker 7: skip forward to August and you have the next bank holiday,
Speaker 7: and you have your next murder, and that's Martha Tavern
Speaker 7: and this time the killer or killers. But absolutely, I
Speaker 7: mean no doubt whoever attacked Emma Smith, whoever it was,
Speaker 7: had to have after the fact, realized how lucky they
Speaker 7: were to find out that the woman they left for
Speaker 7: dead was actually alive and had spoken to numerous people,
Speaker 7: and yet they were still not captured. So I think
Speaker 7: when that person took their next victim, they wanted to
Speaker 7: make absolutely certain before they left that that woman was
Speaker 7: that this could not happen again, and in Martha's case,
Speaker 7: they did that. They stabbed her thirty nine times, one
Speaker 7: of those wounds with a very long blade right through
Speaker 7: her heart. So she wasn't going to talk to anyone.
Speaker 7: But I'll go and stop because you're asking about Emma Smith.
Speaker 7: So did I answer that question? Should I? Or is
Speaker 7: there somebody? Well?
Speaker 6: What I wanted to bring up is an important figure
Speaker 6: in here too, or somewhat important figure is doctor Haslip. Yeah,
Speaker 6: and he's a surgeon that looks at Emma Smith and
Speaker 6: then he looks at Martha Tambrium as well. And there's
Speaker 6: a conclusion I thought was very very interesting, is the
Speaker 6: walking stick. So first they have a you have a
Speaker 6: description of a blunt instrument. So tell us about the
Speaker 6: blunt instrument. Doctor Haslip's conclusions and if he makes any
Speaker 6: connections between the two murders, tell us about him and
Speaker 6: his conclusions.
Speaker 7: And what he finds doctor Haslip. First of all, one
Speaker 7: thing is he he had nothing to do with Taburn
Speaker 7: Martha Taberam he whether or not he saw or I
Speaker 7: don't know, but he wasn't the doctor that tended to her.
Speaker 7: That was a doctor Colleen. But doctor Haslip happened to
Speaker 7: be the surgeon in charge at the London Hospital. Which
Speaker 7: what was remarkable to me is that he was twenty
Speaker 7: two years old and he was the surgeon in charge
Speaker 7: at that time that Emma Smith was brought in at
Speaker 7: the London Hospital twenty two years old, so times have changed.
Speaker 7: You would not seize that today. So but he, you know,
Speaker 7: he looked first of all, again when Emma Smith came in,
Speaker 7: he probably didn't assume her injuries were fatal. He only
Speaker 7: knew what he could see from the outside, and her
Speaker 7: injuries were all internal. Her potentially fatal ones were internal.
Speaker 7: She was lucid, she was conscious, She was probably not
Speaker 7: very forthcoming with what had happened to her down there,
Speaker 7: and he discovered that during the autopsy that he performed.
Speaker 7: But now when he took the stand at the inquest,
Speaker 7: he did not, nor should he have been expected to
Speaker 7: detail every injury that was inflicted upon her, because the
Speaker 7: purpose was to determine how she died, and he had
Speaker 7: to discuss that the injuries that you know were inflicted
Speaker 7: on her through her vagina and possibly through into her
Speaker 7: anus as well, because the skin that separated the two
Speaker 7: was completely was ripped, or was torn, not ripped, It
Speaker 7: was through just sheer blunt force. Whoever inflicted those injuries
Speaker 7: on I'm as Smith, it with just great force and
Speaker 7: presumably with a lot of anger. They really wanted to
Speaker 7: hurt this woman and so. But doctor Hasselip, you know,
Speaker 7: that's pretty much the extent of it, other than he
Speaker 7: appeared in the press following the murder of Pauli Nichols
Speaker 7: stating that he did believe the murders were related. He
Speaker 7: didn't say why, but he believed they were related.
Speaker 6: Now another characters is Inspector Edmund Reid, and you also
Speaker 6: have Chief Inspector John West, and you you just alluded
Speaker 6: to it. You thought that Edmund Reid found some of
Speaker 6: this story kind of incredible.
Speaker 7: Well, what we know for a fact, because Edmund Reid
Speaker 7: was an extremely well respected inspector, he kind of I
Speaker 7: think he went. I get the impression that that he went,
Speaker 7: he kind of did his own thing. He wasn't strictly
Speaker 7: by the book, and that were probably rubbed some of
Speaker 7: his superiors the wrong way, and then others loved him
Speaker 7: for it. He got results, though, but in the Ripper case,
Speaker 7: and obviously he didn't or was never caught. But in
Speaker 7: numerous interviews he gave years later, right upon his retirement,
Speaker 7: because only at retirement could he openly talk to the
Speaker 7: public about these cases. So once he retired, he spoke
Speaker 7: about them, and he was clear on the point that
Speaker 7: he believed the ripper was or that one man was
Speaker 7: responsible for like eleven murders or now I think he
Speaker 7: attributed nine murders to one man. And I don't know
Speaker 7: that I agree with him on all those and I
Speaker 7: don't agree with all of his conclusions and all of that.
Speaker 7: But what seems clear to me is that he did
Speaker 7: not believe the story that Emma Smith was killed by
Speaker 7: three men, and that's the story that Emma Smith allegedly
Speaker 7: told herself to the doctor and to her friends. He
Speaker 7: did not believe that. He believed that a single man
Speaker 7: who we know as Jack River killed Emma Smith. And
Speaker 7: I'm intrigued by that. Why would he throw out this
Speaker 7: from Mimmas Smith? What did he know? What did he learn?
Speaker 7: But it's not just what he knew about the people
Speaker 7: at the time, or I mean about these specific people
Speaker 7: in the specific incidents. It's what he knew about the
Speaker 7: East end of London, how it operated, how the lodging
Speaker 7: house is operated, and how people would lie to authorities.
Speaker 7: So my point being that here's the inspector in charge
Speaker 7: of the case and he doesn't buy him a Smith's story,
Speaker 7: So why should I and so I look at it
Speaker 7: from that perspective. I don't know that the story she
Speaker 7: told was false, but I have to consider that it
Speaker 7: may have been because Inspector Reid did. Does that make sense?
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Speaker 6: we last left off, Tom, we were talking about Edmund Reid.
Speaker 6: So tell us a little bit about how a little
Speaker 6: bit more about the invest Your investigation into some of
Speaker 6: the people that worked at these lodging houses very interesting,
Speaker 6: how you again you don't really come up to conclusions,
Speaker 6: but the conduct of some of these in these two stories,
Speaker 6: the Emma Smith and the Martha Tavern, that you do
Speaker 6: point out these inconsistencies with witnesses that came forward us
Speaker 6: a little bit more about what you allude to, basically
Speaker 6: is that talking about the bouncers and the muscle that
Speaker 6: were at these lodging houses, and the people that were managers,
Speaker 6: and some of the motivation for people to look the
Speaker 6: other way if they were to know somebody that were
Speaker 6: assaulting these women. Tell us a little bit more about
Speaker 6: that investigation into the likelihood that these lodging houses and
Speaker 6: the men that the center of them might have something
Speaker 6: to do with these murders.
Speaker 7: Well, you know, you have to put yourself in the
Speaker 7: place of a middle aged prostitute, because that's who these
Speaker 7: victims were, for the most part, were middle aged prostitutes
Speaker 7: in the East End of London. These were the most
Speaker 7: desperate of the desperate. Their options for anything money making
Speaker 7: extremely limited. But I also want to say, you know,
Speaker 7: the idea that they were full time prostitutes isn't necessarily true.
Speaker 7: I think these women would there were a lot of
Speaker 7: young attractive women prostituting themselves in the East End. They
Speaker 7: could charge more money, they would steal away the custom
Speaker 7: and so these middle aged women were also thieves and
Speaker 7: engaged in other criminal activities as well to make money
Speaker 7: and you know, to keep their room and all of this.
Speaker 7: But as the landlords, you held the power, not just
Speaker 7: because you owned the places they got food, you owned
Speaker 7: the places they drank, and you owned the places they slept.
Speaker 7: And through my research I identified a small small group
Speaker 7: of men, most of them Irish or of Irish descent,
Speaker 7: who were either great friends or interrelated by marriage. And
Speaker 7: I mean we're talking a real small group here of men.
Speaker 7: And all the victims across the board, all of them,
Speaker 7: every one of them came from the lodging houses owned
Speaker 7: by these men. Many of them lived in various lodging houses.
Speaker 7: Mary Kelly, I believe, lived in the same lodging houses
Speaker 7: that Emma Smith, Emily Horsnell, Martha Tabram, all of them
Speaker 7: stayed in. At one point Mary Kelly was living there
Speaker 7: as well. So I thought, what a curious connection this
Speaker 7: little group of men who also happened to be police informants,
Speaker 7: so they had a relationship with the police. They would
Speaker 7: and some of the police were on the police were
Speaker 7: on their payroll basically, you know. And again if you
Speaker 7: were a constable in that area that might have been.
Speaker 7: In some cases it was just out of sheer necessity
Speaker 7: because then is now the police in London didn't carry guns.
Speaker 7: They didn't carry you know, weapons, They had a truncheon
Speaker 7: at the time. But their life was made hell. It's
Speaker 7: not like today where you see a coppin you you know,
Speaker 7: we wouldn't think of walking up to a copin sitting
Speaker 7: on him or punching him or hitting him or chasing
Speaker 7: him down the street. But that's what he dealt with
Speaker 7: on a nightly basis in the East End of London.
Speaker 7: And it was made all the worse if you weren't
Speaker 7: willing to work with the guys who controlled all the
Speaker 7: criminals in the East and that being the landlords. If
Speaker 7: you did work with him, they worked with you, and
Speaker 7: they would give you tips, help you make a risks
Speaker 7: off the books. Of course, you could also make money
Speaker 7: from them through the gambling. You know, if you turned
Speaker 7: a blind eye to an illegal boxing match or some
Speaker 7: illegal gambling, hey, you know, you got a little piece
Speaker 7: on the back end. So all of that was going on.
Speaker 7: And so if you're a you know, a forty five
Speaker 7: year old woman alcoholic dependent upon you know, and here's
Speaker 7: the guy who runs the police in your neighborhood, then
Speaker 7: that man is close to God to you. So you're
Speaker 7: going to do whatever he says and however he says it.
Speaker 7: And so that's the kind of of power they had.
Speaker 7: So in the case of Emma Smith, one of the
Speaker 7: things that rubbed me wrong was the idea of how
Speaker 7: she came back to the lodging house and the deputy keeper,
Speaker 7: whose name was Mary Russell. She was basically the on
Speaker 7: site manager of the house, the owner, but the on
Speaker 7: site manager, and she says, oh, well, you know, we
Speaker 7: talked to him into going to the hospital and then
Speaker 7: we escorted her to the hospital. So I'm thinking, wait
Speaker 7: a minute, so this woman leaves the lodging house she's
Speaker 7: in charge of to walk this woman to the hospital.
Speaker 7: That doesn't sound right to me. She actually she can't
Speaker 7: do that. She's not allowed to do that and keep
Speaker 7: her job. What must have happened is the owner, Daniel
Speaker 7: Smith had to have been who lived nearby, would have
Speaker 7: been summoned to come over look at Emma and agree
Speaker 7: that Emma should go to the hospital, and then at
Speaker 7: that point would have told Emma, here's what you tell
Speaker 7: the doctor, and that's when the story would have been
Speaker 7: concocted as to what actually happened to Emma. And then
Speaker 7: Emma went to the hospital and told the doctor what
Speaker 7: she was told to tell him, again, not knowing her
Speaker 7: injuries were fatal or anything. She was going to heal
Speaker 7: and be out in a few days, and would have
Speaker 7: to return back to her normal life. In truth, Emma
Speaker 7: may have very well known exactly who attacked her, known
Speaker 7: his identity, but she couldn't say that because she'd have
Speaker 7: to deal with this person in a few days when
Speaker 7: she got out and came back. So, I mean, that's
Speaker 7: just the reality of the times and the place they
Speaker 7: lived in. But Daniel's name was kept out of it. Again,
Speaker 7: the same thing had just happened November with Emily Horsnell
Speaker 7: in the lodging house next door, owned by Daniel Smith's
Speaker 7: friend John Satchel, a young woman beat to death died
Speaker 7: of paraitonidis. Remarkably, no autopsy was performed. The coroners asked
Speaker 7: the cops are you planning to investigate this or like
Speaker 7: not really, we don't have a clue, and they're like, okay, well,
Speaker 7: if you're not going to investigate, then I'm not going
Speaker 7: to bother with the expense of having an autopsy performed.
Speaker 7: And it's shocking, but that's what happened, and as a result,
Speaker 7: her murder did not go down as a murderer. It
Speaker 7: was given a verdict of open and that's the only
Speaker 7: reason why she's not considered the first of the White
Speaker 7: Chapel murders is because officially she wasn't murdered, but realistically,
Speaker 7: the doctor stated, this woman was beat to death. She
Speaker 7: was kicked, beaten, her belly was extended, her organs were ruptured,
Speaker 7: and she was allowed to languish for days in the
Speaker 7: lodging house, not being taken to a doctor. Never was
Speaker 7: taken to a doctor. And then the only one who
Speaker 7: would speak up to tell her story was John Satchel.
Speaker 7: None of the lodgers who would have been the people
Speaker 7: she actually spoke with came forth and were because John
Speaker 7: wuldn't allow it. He was the one who appeared at
Speaker 7: the inquest. He was the one who said, oh, well,
Speaker 7: she said that she was beaten up by some strangers
Speaker 7: a few nights ago and that was the end of it.
Speaker 7: And the police are like, we're not touching it. And
Speaker 7: then this exact same thing happened with Emma, and so
Speaker 7: I'm like, Okay, something's going on here, you know, what
Speaker 7: is this? What's going on here? What's the I don't
Speaker 7: want to say cover up. I mean, since the JFK
Speaker 7: thing worked like conspiracy and cover up had taken on
Speaker 7: a real fringe meaning. But you know, realistically, what we're
Speaker 7: talking about here is more like a proto mafia. That's
Speaker 7: what the lodging housekeepers were, and that's that's a fact.
Speaker 7: You know, they were a group of guys kind of
Speaker 7: loosely organized. They ran the show, they ran a legal gambling.
Speaker 7: I'm not saying they were went around putting out hits
Speaker 7: on people. I don't think they These were certainly not
Speaker 7: mafia murders, these women who were butchered in the streets,
Speaker 7: But that doesn't mean that they weren't protecting somebody or
Speaker 7: protecting their own interests somehow by shielding the identity of
Speaker 7: the murder from police for whatever reasons. There is a
Speaker 7: lot of evidence that suggests something like that was going on.
Speaker 6: Well, that's going to be We're going to talk about
Speaker 6: Martha Tabram and a little bit more, you know, elaborate
Speaker 6: more on Pollypole's story and the extent of that, the
Speaker 6: belief in that story with inspector read you know, organizing
Speaker 6: an incredible lineup. So, but what I wanted to what
Speaker 6: I wanted to say was one of the more striking
Speaker 6: parts of your book. Again, just what I have this
Speaker 6: thought in my mind is that you know, we're in
Speaker 6: twenty and fifteen, and we think we understand the decay
Speaker 6: that has happened in our cities and in our countries,
Speaker 6: I guess. And we see all the news obviously, and
Speaker 6: I've sort of the lots of people kind of reveling
Speaker 6: in sort of the gore, I guess, in sort of
Speaker 6: graphic detail and sort of misery of others. I would say,
Speaker 6: but you know, in eighteen eighty eight, it wasn't that
Speaker 6: much different. It looked like marauding gangs and prostitutes with
Speaker 6: people really just you know, a widow that was had
Speaker 6: an alcohol problem ends up being on the street, like
Speaker 6: you say, the vermin that the sheets weren't washed for
Speaker 6: three months. They have a bounce re at a lodging house,
Speaker 6: and if they didn't have a lodging house, they would
Speaker 6: have slept rough, which means outside. Again, vulnerable to all
Speaker 6: these elements. And alcohol was a drug choice, but certainly
Speaker 6: people weren't real sedate drinking. This circle had all the
Speaker 6: problems inherent of today's society. I thought that was amazing
Speaker 6: that things, as much as they changed, don't change that much.
Speaker 7: Well, it was much worse then than it is now,
Speaker 7: and it was much worse. One hundred years before that
Speaker 7: than it was in eighteen eighty eight. And that is
Speaker 7: something when you study the past and you isolated a
Speaker 7: certain period of time, like I've done and other ripprologists done,
Speaker 7: because we tend to focus on the late Victorian period
Speaker 7: and particularly London, and a lot of funny things occur
Speaker 7: to you because you know, part of this comes. You know,
Speaker 7: we read hundreds and hundreds of newspapers from that time,
Speaker 7: and you're reading just about daily life, you know, not
Speaker 7: just about these murders, but just life in general, the
Speaker 7: good stuff, the bad stuff. And you know it's funny
Speaker 7: because people would be in the newspaper talking about, oh,
Speaker 7: kids these days, they don't have the respect that we
Speaker 7: had in our day, and blah blah blah, and all
Speaker 7: the in kids these days reading their penny dreadfuls and
Speaker 7: blah blah blah. And it's the exact same stuff that
Speaker 7: I find myself saying now, you know, kids these days,
Speaker 7: and that adults were saying when we were kids. And
Speaker 7: this goes back to the beginning of time. So it's
Speaker 7: actually a self perpetuating myth that there was something better
Speaker 7: about your generation than about the current generation. That is
Speaker 7: a self perpetuating myth in reality. If you want to talk,
Speaker 7: if I were a woman, I would much rather be
Speaker 7: alive today than back in eighteen eighty eight. When I
Speaker 7: mean the newspapers, you should read them. They were absolutely
Speaker 7: littered with nothing but domestic murder of the most brutal kinds,
Speaker 7: far in excess of what we see today. I mean
Speaker 7: a lot of people don't realize they're familiar with the
Speaker 7: term the rule of thumb. You always hear people say, well,
Speaker 7: the rule of thumb is blah blah blah. The rule
Speaker 7: of thumb is actually a law here in America that
Speaker 7: was in effect up well into the nineteen fifties that
Speaker 7: stated a man could beat his wife, but he had
Speaker 7: to use a switch that was no larger than his thumb.
Speaker 7: Then it became abuse. But if it was the size
Speaker 7: of his thumb or less, it was not abuse. And
Speaker 7: that was the rule of thumb. You know, we live
Speaker 7: in a society today, you know that talked that we
Speaker 7: our wife beat her t shirts and that's how okay
Speaker 7: it is in our minds. Still. Well, one hundred years ago,
Speaker 7: that was the norm. A woman couldn't own land, she
Speaker 7: couldn't divorce her husband unless she proved numerous things. You know,
Speaker 7: he had to be cheating on her and physically abusing her,
Speaker 7: and this and that, whereas a man could divorce his
Speaker 7: wife if he just kind of felt like it. That's
Speaker 7: you know. So are we better today than back then? Absolutely,
Speaker 7: and virtually almost every way you can think of, Not
Speaker 7: to mention dentistry.
Speaker 6: Let's get back to Martha Tabrum and Kirby Paul and
Speaker 6: what she said about the soldiers and the investigation that
Speaker 6: ensues into whether they could actually locate these soldiers, and
Speaker 6: any witnesses that knew anything about Martha Tabram that night.
Speaker 7: Well, Paul emerged as the most important witness in the
Speaker 7: Tabrum case. Actually, a few women came forth were they
Speaker 7: were shown a photo of Martha and identified her from
Speaker 7: that photo. A couple of women looked at it and
Speaker 7: thought she was one person, but they were mistaken. And
Speaker 7: then Pearley Paul came forth and said, that's Emma. Her
Speaker 7: name is Emma. She lives with me at thirty five
Speaker 7: or at nineteen George Street. And then another woman came
Speaker 7: forth and said, well, that's that's Martha Tabram. She used
Speaker 7: to live with me before she moved out, And they
Speaker 7: came to realize that Emma and Martha were the same person.
Speaker 7: That Martha had just taken the name Emma when she
Speaker 7: moved into nineteen George Street, which is also fascinating considering
Speaker 7: the woman murdered prior was named Emma. But Pearly Paul said, yeah,
Speaker 7: on the night of her murders, she and I were
Speaker 7: hitting the pubs and there were these two young soldiers,
Speaker 7: private and the corporal who escorted us around from pub
Speaker 7: to pub drinking, And just on the surface, this story
Speaker 7: is hard to believe because these, you know, were very unattractive,
Speaker 7: dirty East end women, and these young soldiers, with their paychecks,
Speaker 7: would have presumably gone for a younger, more attractive seke.
Speaker 7: And there were women like that all over the place,
Speaker 7: And even if they just wanted a quickie, that's that's
Speaker 7: not what Pearly Paul tells us happened. She tells us
Speaker 7: that they go around spending all their money in the bars,
Speaker 7: drinking and getting them drunk, and then go to their
Speaker 7: dark corners to have sex and presumably pay for that
Speaker 7: as well. But then so she tells them this, and
Speaker 7: so naturally the soldiers become prime suspects. They have to
Speaker 7: be found. They have to be a These were the
Speaker 7: last men known to be seen with Martha Tambern. So
Speaker 7: Inspector Reid has identity parades at the local barracks at
Speaker 7: the Tower of London Proley. Paula is brought in and
Speaker 7: she goes into the first one and she's like nah,
Speaker 7: and she's acting like she's all a hot shot and
Speaker 7: a superstar, and she's just like, no, they're not here,
Speaker 7: They're not here, and she goes, oh, I remembered something else.
Speaker 7: They had white bands on their caps, and he's like, oh, well,
Speaker 7: that's a totally different group of guardsmen. So he has
Speaker 7: to call Pimlico and have their soldiers on the ready
Speaker 7: and go down there for a viewing of them. And
Speaker 7: she just pretty much picks out the first two men
Speaker 7: she sees that's them, and of course, you know, and
Speaker 7: these men must have been sweating profusely, but their alibis
Speaker 7: checked out. They couldn't have been the soldiers, and Inspector
Speaker 7: read none of the cops believed her anymore. She then disappears. Oh,
Speaker 7: in between these two identity parades, she disappears off the map.
Speaker 7: She goes into hiding, saying I'm gonna go kill myself,
Speaker 7: but they track her down and kind of force her
Speaker 7: against the will to keep going to these identity parades.
Speaker 7: And so something something changed there for her. Who was
Speaker 7: she hiding from? What was she hiding from? Why was
Speaker 7: she thinking of killing herself? Why did she was she
Speaker 7: anxious to cooperate with the police one minute and then
Speaker 7: not the next, And she never answered. She also wouldn't
Speaker 7: do an interview with the press. There's not a single
Speaker 7: interview with her in the press. And keep in mind,
Speaker 7: they would have paid her a lot of money to
Speaker 7: do that, you know, she she could have had a
Speaker 7: bidding war from the various newspapers, and she didn't. I
Speaker 7: always thought that was interesting. She doesn't because so because
Speaker 7: some people have argued, well, she lied to get publicity,
Speaker 7: she was trying to get her name in the press.
Speaker 7: I'm like, well, then, then, why is she the only
Speaker 7: person associated with this case who was not interviewed, who
Speaker 7: refused interviews, who the press couldn't track down. They tried to,
Speaker 7: but she would refuse to speak to them. So no,
Speaker 7: none of this was for a ten and she had
Speaker 7: something else motivating her to light to the police, to
Speaker 7: throw them off the track. To make them think some
Speaker 7: soldier killed Martha. Well, if it wasn't a soldier, then
Speaker 7: who wasn't you know? And that's again what led me
Speaker 7: back to the lodging. I'm like, who holds this kind
Speaker 7: of sway over this woman? Well, the only person I
Speaker 7: could think of was her lodging housekeeper who she was
Speaker 7: close to, and his And then when she moves from
Speaker 7: his house to another house, it's one of his friend's houses,
Speaker 7: and it's the spitting distance of where Mary Kelly would
Speaker 7: later be murdered. You know, Parley Paul also happened to
Speaker 7: know Annie Chapman. One of Parley Paul's best friends beat
Speaker 7: up Annie Chapman a day or two before her murder.
Speaker 7: So there's all these little connections, these these threads running
Speaker 7: through it. That that I wish I had more answers
Speaker 7: than I did. That I in my book, I construct
Speaker 7: various scenarios, all of them. There's a lot of speculation
Speaker 7: in there, but it's all based on contemporary documentation, based
Speaker 7: on facts. It's based on the really the press reports
Speaker 7: and the police reports. I use a lot of both
Speaker 7: of those to build from, as well as just some
Speaker 7: kind of logical speculation where it's needed, but I hope
Speaker 7: that I got. I try to make an effort so
Speaker 7: that the reader knows when I'm giving them the facts
Speaker 7: as we know them and when I'm giving them speculations,
Speaker 7: so they can dispose of that if they choose to.
Speaker 6: Now we talked. We didn't talk about this, but this
Speaker 6: I think this is important because you do talk about
Speaker 6: that that there is some aspects of the Martha Tabron
Speaker 6: case that approved the most polarizing among ripperologists. And so
Speaker 6: let's get to the there are wounds to her neck,
Speaker 6: heart and sex organs, and so then tell us tell
Speaker 6: us about the description of the of the injuries, but
Speaker 6: also why this is most polarizing them ripperologist, this Martha
Speaker 6: Tabram case.
Speaker 7: Well, Martha, it's the is she or isn't she? That's
Speaker 7: the question. Is she a ripper victim or is she not?
Speaker 7: And it's like you could argue it either way, because see,
Speaker 7: her throat was not slip Jack the ripper got his
Speaker 7: name because he kept slicing women's throats. Martha Tablam was stabbed.
Speaker 7: Even her throat was stabbed, she was not. Her throat
Speaker 7: was not cut and so it's almost some people have
Speaker 7: described her murder as a frenzy killing because of the
Speaker 7: thirty nine stabs and all of this. Well, in my research,
Speaker 7: I you know, I looked a little closer at all
Speaker 7: this the same material, and I came away with a
Speaker 7: different idea of her murder. Surprisingly, she was almost nude
Speaker 7: when she was found. Her legs were thrust up in
Speaker 7: the same way Polly Nichols, where her skirts were thrown up,
Speaker 7: same as Polly Nichols. Her cloak was torn open, and
Speaker 7: apparently Taburam did not have a shirt on underneath. In
Speaker 7: her breasts were exposed. So she must have looked like
Speaker 7: a rape victim when she was found. Like the later victim,
Speaker 7: she had not been raped in the classical since. But
Speaker 7: there was a great deal of blood between her legs,
Speaker 7: and I thought, well, that's interesting, considering all the stab
Speaker 7: wounds are really on the upper part of her body,
Speaker 7: why was there so much blood between her legs? And
Speaker 7: so I studied everything a little closer and came away
Speaker 7: with the conclusion conclusion that like Emma Smith, she had
Speaker 7: been raped within and ad of an object, this time
Speaker 7: a sharp object, probably the same long bladed weapon that
Speaker 7: was that inflicted the wound to her heart. And therefore
Speaker 7: in my mind it clicked, you know, a question that
Speaker 7: people really were never asking. People are always asking, was
Speaker 7: Martha Taburn a Ripper victim? In other words, was she
Speaker 7: killed by the same person who killed Polly Nichols? A
Speaker 7: question I had was was she killed by the same
Speaker 7: person who killed Emma Smith? I wanted to go, you know,
Speaker 7: answer that backwards. And to me that pretty much proved
Speaker 7: conclusively that Emma Smith and Martha Tabram were murdered by
Speaker 7: the same people or person in very similar fashions. Although
Speaker 7: obviously Emma Smith was not stabbed or cut or anything
Speaker 7: like that that we know of, Martha Tabram most certainly was.
Speaker 7: And the reason I believe is because Emma Smith again
Speaker 7: survived her injuries, as did Emily Horsnell before her. So
Speaker 7: this person after Themma Smith was terrified of being identified
Speaker 7: so made sure that from that point forward his victims
Speaker 7: did not survive his attack. And that's why we see
Speaker 7: those injuries Martha Tabram in such a way. And in
Speaker 7: an upcoming book, I'm going to talk about Polly Nichols
Speaker 7: from a perspective no one else has looked at her
Speaker 7: before with some information that really hasn't been considered. But
Speaker 7: I do believe that at Tabrum and Nichols looking at
Speaker 7: the crime scene of it's the medical evidence in a
Speaker 7: new way. Their murders are actually more similarly similar than
Speaker 7: we currently believe, and they were in fact killed by
Speaker 7: the same person. But back to Tabraam and Smith, their
Speaker 7: murders occurred mere yards from one another. The locations were
Speaker 7: only yards apart. These are two women who lived although
Speaker 7: they never met, their lodging houses were next door to
Speaker 7: each other. I say they never met because Emma Smith
Speaker 7: had died long before Martha Tabram moved into that lodging house.
Speaker 7: She'd only lived there a few weeks before her murder.
Speaker 7: But the lodging houses were next door to each other,
Speaker 7: and they were both raped with inadamant objects and died
Speaker 7: from this attack. So then we have a question to
Speaker 7: ask ourselves. We have somebody who has killed Emily Horse Noew,
Speaker 7: Emma Smith, Martha Tabram, and then Martha Tabram's inquest is
Speaker 7: held one week the next weekend following the ending of
Speaker 7: her inquest, Polly Nichols's murder. So then the question is
Speaker 7: did the serial killer who killed these first three women
Speaker 7: just you know, disappear off the face of the earth
Speaker 7: in time for a new serial killer to emerge and
Speaker 7: start killing the same class of women in the same area,
Speaker 7: but in a more mature, refined method. Or are all
Speaker 7: these murders related either the same person as committing them
Speaker 7: all or is two different people but operating for the
Speaker 7: same influence. Those are the questions that I'm asking myself
Speaker 7: to this day, and that I ask it pretty much
Speaker 7: anything I'm writing.
Speaker 6: Tell us just a little bit about the rule of
Speaker 6: the Inspector Aberlein from Scotland Yard, and just tell us
Speaker 6: a little bit about his rule and his conclusions afterwards.
Speaker 7: Inspector Aberlein, why don't they talk about him at all
Speaker 7: in the book? I'm probably not an authority on that
Speaker 7: per se, but he is the most famous of the investigators,
Speaker 7: having been personified by the likes of Michael Caine in
Speaker 7: the nineteen eighty eight television mini series Jack the Ripper
Speaker 7: and then Johnny Depp in two thousand and one From Hell,
Speaker 7: and actually, even more recently, in the film The Wolf
Speaker 7: Man by Oh I Forget Hugo Weaving portrayed him right
Speaker 7: and just set the record straight. Contrary to the filmic
Speaker 7: depictions of him, he was not an alcoholic. He was
Speaker 7: not an absynthe addict, and he apparently was not a psychic,
Speaker 7: but that's how he's portrayed in film. But Inspector Aberlin,
Speaker 7: his beat for many, many many years was Whitechapel, the
Speaker 7: East End, and he was a very very capable investigator.
Speaker 7: He rose up the ranks and then Scotland Yard snagged
Speaker 7: him up and moved him into Scotland Yard. In fact,
Speaker 7: it was Inspector Reed was kind of moving up behind him,
Speaker 7: taking his old spots. So when the Ripper case happened,
Speaker 7: in fact it was following Martha Taberman before Polly Nichols
Speaker 7: Scotland Yard and got involved and said we need our
Speaker 7: White Chapel man Aberlen to go back there and help
Speaker 7: out on this. And so he was one of many
Speaker 7: inspectors and investigators involved in these, But I don't think
Speaker 7: of him as being the man in charge as he's
Speaker 7: betrayed in Hollywood. Certainly he was one of the men
Speaker 7: in charge, but his conclusions that came to him long
Speaker 7: after his retirement. He believed a fellow by the name
Speaker 7: of Severn Klozowski aka George Chapman was Jack the Ripper,
Speaker 7: and this man was a barber, he was a wife murderer.
Speaker 7: He would this man would POI would marry women, poison him,
Speaker 7: take their money. Okay, that's what this guy did. And
Speaker 7: he wasn't He wasn't Jack the ripper. So I Aberlen
Speaker 7: was mistaken on that point. Chapman's not that great of
Speaker 7: a suspect other than you know, I have to say
Speaker 7: this man was a murderer, so he possessed the instincts
Speaker 7: to kill, and he did live in the East End
Speaker 7: at the time, very close to these murderers, these murders.
Speaker 7: But there's nothing to suggest that he went out with
Speaker 7: a knife and killed me when he would poison women,
Speaker 7: a totally different method of dispatch. So but that's that
Speaker 7: was Aberlen's thoughts after retirement, was that he was the murderer.
Speaker 7: But it's more interesting is Aberlen's comments on other suspects
Speaker 7: and why he did, you know, like Aaron Kosminsky, he's
Speaker 7: been in the news the last year because of the
Speaker 7: Shawl and all that. He didn't think Aaron Kosminsky was
Speaker 7: the ripper. He didn't think the drowned aka doctor or
Speaker 7: you know, quote unquote doctor Montague John Drew it was
Speaker 7: the Ripper. He didn't obviously believe in any of those
Speaker 7: theories for one reason or another, but he did believe
Speaker 7: that George Chapman was the most likely person to have
Speaker 7: been the Ripper, and I would disagree with that, but
Speaker 7: I respect his thoughts.
Speaker 6: Now, one of the other really fascinating parts of your
Speaker 6: book is the you talk about and dissect the whole
Speaker 6: leather Apron story. So tell us about leather Apron, John
Speaker 6: Pizer and who accused him, and tell us the whole story.
Speaker 7: Well, leather Apron before the name Jack the Ripper came
Speaker 7: about in a letter written to a news agency. The
Speaker 7: press needed something to call this guy who was running
Speaker 7: around killing women, and the name leather Apron took hold
Speaker 7: because some of the women in the neighborhood, particularly the
Speaker 7: women who lived at eighteenth Thrall Street, which was Polly
Speaker 7: Nichols's final address, told of a strange cobbler, you know,
Speaker 7: a shoemaker who would wander around being me or he's
Speaker 7: just kind of crazy, and they'd make fun of him
Speaker 7: and calling him leather Apron because he wore a leather apron.
Speaker 7: And they told the police about this, and they told
Speaker 7: the press about this. Well, then the press took that
Speaker 7: and kind of exaggerated a bit and created this character
Speaker 7: with these menacing eyes and these crazy whiskers and and
Speaker 7: all of this, and and and and sold a lot
Speaker 7: of copy with that character. And so the police were like, Okay, well,
Speaker 7: who is this leather Apron? We clearly need to talk
Speaker 7: to him. And uh, you know, I think a lot
Speaker 7: of leather Apron was probably more than one person was
Speaker 7: it was. None of them were the killer. But this
Speaker 7: fellow by the name of John Piser was pointed out
Speaker 7: on the street as being leather Apron, and the cops
Speaker 7: just talked to him for a minute and let him go,
Speaker 7: and no one thought anything of it until Sergeant William
Speaker 7: Thick decided, oh, yeah, yeah, I've known Pieser for eighteen
Speaker 7: years and whenever anyone speaks of leather Apron, they're talking
Speaker 7: about him. We got to hunt him down. And that
Speaker 7: became a big thing, and he was eventually arrested at
Speaker 7: his home and taken into police custody. And the police
Speaker 7: or the press, the press were always in the footsteps
Speaker 7: of the police. I mean they would literally follow the police,
Speaker 7: and if the police knocked on a door and spoke
Speaker 7: to someone as soon as the cop left, the pressman
Speaker 7: would be there knocking on the door saying, what did
Speaker 7: you just talk about? And so and it was, you know,
Speaker 7: there were a hundred times more newspapers and then like
Speaker 7: today London might have what two or three major newspapers,
Speaker 7: in eighteen eighty eight it had over one hundred and
Speaker 7: twenty and that we're talking one city. So in American
Speaker 7: newspapers had London correspondents. So anyways, Piser was arrested as
Speaker 7: leather Apron, and the press tried to find evidence that
Speaker 7: this guy leather Apron. What they found was that no
Speaker 7: one in the neighborhood, no one who knew him ever
Speaker 7: knew him by that name, and he steadfastly denied being
Speaker 7: leather Apron. But this, you know, with his reputation, he
Speaker 7: was ran through the mud in the press as being
Speaker 7: leather Apron, and Sergeant Thick was making all these statements
Speaker 7: about him being leather Apron, and what I talk about
Speaker 7: in my book, it appears in my opinion Thick lied.
Speaker 7: You know, it's pretty clear he lied. Piser was not
Speaker 7: known as leather Apron. Those two did know each other
Speaker 7: personally for eighteen years. They lived in roughly the same
Speaker 7: area and knew each other. There was an identity parade
Speaker 7: where a man stepped forward and picked Piser out of
Speaker 7: a group of men and said, yeah, I saw him
Speaker 7: attacking Annie Chapman. Well, it turned out this man was lying,
Speaker 7: and in my opinion, Thick put him up to it.
Speaker 7: He said, go pick out Piser and accuse him of
Speaker 7: basically murdering Annie Chapman, and it backfired. It didn't work,
Speaker 7: so eventually a deal was struck where Peyser would appear
Speaker 7: at the inquest into Andy Chapman's murder and be allowed
Speaker 7: to clear publicly clear him of any wrongdoing in the murder,
Speaker 7: but in return, he had to admit to being leather
Speaker 7: Apron because he was already talking about suing everybody, and
Speaker 7: they couldn't, you know, they couldn't let the police. The
Speaker 7: police couldn't let that get out. So they struck a deal.
Speaker 7: If you just say you're known as leather Apron and mean,
Speaker 7: and by doing that he lets the police off the hook,
Speaker 7: then you'll be allowed to clear your name. There'll be
Speaker 7: no more suspicion against you. Because mobs were forming outside
Speaker 7: his door trying to kill her. That's unpopular he was,
Speaker 7: so that's the story. But I thought, well, why would
Speaker 7: this sar police sergeant with otherwise pretty good reputation, why
Speaker 7: would he do this? It doesn't make any sense. And
Speaker 7: then I started researching him and I'm like, oh, well,
Speaker 7: look at that six years before there he is giving
Speaker 7: good character references for John Satchel Purley, Paul's landlord, and
Speaker 7: John McCarthy, Mary Kelly's landlord and the lord's Hospittlefields. And
Speaker 7: I did more research and he had a reputation of
Speaker 7: fitting people up, and I'm not making this stuff up.
Speaker 7: I've gotten a lot of heat from some reprologists because
Speaker 7: they all love their They just think the police can
Speaker 7: do no wrong. And then on the other hand you
Speaker 7: have people who say, oh, the police were all idiots,
Speaker 7: and I don't believe in any of those. The police
Speaker 7: overall the back then were very good. But there's going
Speaker 7: to be bad apples in every bunch, and then there's
Speaker 7: going to be cops who's usually are good, but then
Speaker 7: you know they also step out and do crazy things
Speaker 7: for extra money, and it appears that's what Sergeant WILLIAMS
Speaker 7: Thick was. So then the question is was he framing Piser?
Speaker 7: Why was he framing Pyser? Who was he trying to protect?
Speaker 7: With someone paying him to do this? What was the motivation.
Speaker 7: I do not believe that Sergeant William Thick was a
Speaker 7: murder or anything, although he does hold the dubious distinction
Speaker 7: of being the only member of the the police force
Speaker 7: at the time to be accused by a member of
Speaker 7: the public of being Jack the Ripper. A lawyer was
Speaker 7: writing letters saying, I think Serge Wally picked to Jack
Speaker 7: the Ripper, but there's nothing. I don't believe that for
Speaker 7: a second, but I did think maybe have an idea
Speaker 7: of who the ripper was and decided it was in
Speaker 7: his best interest to keep that information to himself and
Speaker 7: possibly frame an innocent person. That's possible. That's possible, but
Speaker 7: you know there's other possibilities as well.
Speaker 6: And he was known as Upright, and you explain what
Speaker 6: that meant.
Speaker 7: Johnny Upright was his name, and in the street slang.
Speaker 7: If there was an urban dictionary published in eighteen eighty eight,
Speaker 7: which in fact there was, but it was publishing the
Speaker 7: fifteen hundreds, but it talked about a man who was
Speaker 7: known as an upright. It was someone who would squeal
Speaker 7: or someone who would take money to turn a blind eye,
Speaker 7: who would use prostitutes? Who would you know? Just it's
Speaker 7: like a play on where it's upright you think it
Speaker 7: to mean an upright citizen, you know, upstanding citizen, high morals. Well,
Speaker 7: in slag, you took a word and then whatever its
Speaker 7: opposite was is what its actual meaning was. So the
Speaker 7: criminals called him Johnny Upright because he was a crooked cop.
Speaker 7: In other words. Now the flip side of that, of course,
Speaker 7: the police spent on it was, oh, he was Johnny
Speaker 7: Upright because he was such an upstanding cop. But that
Speaker 7: doesn't appear to be the case. He was given the
Speaker 7: name by a criminal who was getting convicted on his evidence.
Speaker 7: So clearly that person gave him that name because he
Speaker 7: was accusing Thick of fitting him up on fake evidence
Speaker 7: to get him convicted. If there was no truth to that,
Speaker 7: I don't think the name would have stuck. But it did,
Speaker 7: and that became his street nickname as Johnny Upright.
Speaker 6: Part of this book too is I know we're jumping
Speaker 6: around just a little bit, but you state this other
Speaker 6: against so many coincidences here that you put together for
Speaker 6: the reader to just ponder and really question yourself because
Speaker 6: you don't have all the answers, but you stir, you know,
Speaker 6: you you bring all the information to get a conclusion.
Speaker 6: Drawn tell us about the Flower and Dean address connection
Speaker 6: between Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Edos, Purley, Paul Mary Kelly. Tell
Speaker 6: us this describe this vicinity of how short a distance
Speaker 6: it is between all of these and the commonality between
Speaker 6: these addresses.
Speaker 7: Well, one thing that I talked about in the book,
Speaker 7: and is talk about another Ripper books, is the fact
Speaker 7: that all the Ripper murders occurred inside of one square mile.
Speaker 7: That's why you know there are Ripper walking tours in
Speaker 7: London where you can sign up in a tour guide.
Speaker 7: I'll take you around to not all of it, but
Speaker 7: a number of the murder sites in a relatively short
Speaker 7: period of time because they're all within walking distance of
Speaker 7: each other. And you can't really the name any other
Speaker 7: serial killers out there. You couldn't do a Ted Bundy
Speaker 7: walking tour, you know what I mean, because he's over
Speaker 7: numerous states. But you can with the Ripper, and I
Speaker 7: find that very curious in itself. Flower and Dean Street,
Speaker 7: Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddoes or two of the Ripper
Speaker 7: victims killed on the same night what's known as the
Speaker 7: Double Event September thirtieth of eighteen eighty eight. They were
Speaker 7: killed in different areas. Catherine Ettos was killed in Miterer
Speaker 7: Square area in the city of London, and Elizabeth Stride
Speaker 7: was killed on Berner Street. They were killed to ten minutes.
Speaker 7: Their murder sites were ten minutes walk apart, and they
Speaker 7: were murdered forty five minutes one from the other. What's
Speaker 7: interesting is these two women, aside from being approximately the
Speaker 7: same age, also happened to have lived on the same street,
Speaker 7: Flower and Dean Street for six or seven years. I
Speaker 7: don't know that they knew each other, that they were friends.
Speaker 7: There's no question they had to have known each other
Speaker 7: by sight at least, and were probably acquainted just by
Speaker 7: virtue of the fact. Again, if we can't judge anything
Speaker 7: by how it is today, we all think, well, gosh, Tom,
Speaker 7: I've lived in my house for five years and I
Speaker 7: couldn't tell you the names of the people two doors
Speaker 7: down from me. But I can guarantee you if you
Speaker 7: saw them at the store, you'd probably recognize them, weren't you.
Speaker 7: But this is a different time. These people didn't set
Speaker 7: in their cozy air condition homes watching TV all day.
Speaker 7: They were when they weren't sleeping or cooking, they were
Speaker 7: out in front of their lodging houses. They were in
Speaker 7: the streets. They were in the pub on that street.
Speaker 7: They were in the little corner grocery stores, eating and
Speaker 7: setting outside and talking with one another. That being the
Speaker 7: bath houses, go into the bathhouses. Catherinetto's and Elizabeth Wride
Speaker 7: had to have known each other. They probably worked again.
Speaker 7: They would make both supposedly make extra money by cleaning.
Speaker 7: I would have been cleaning in the same buildings. So
Speaker 7: it's just another interesting connection because these days one of
Speaker 7: the popular things is to go ooh, was Elizabeth Stride
Speaker 7: a ripper victim or was she not? People think their
Speaker 7: hip if they can take a ripper victim and argue
Speaker 7: that she wasn't a ripper victim, even though they have
Speaker 7: to use a lot of false information to do that,
Speaker 7: and some very reputable authors do that. Donald rumblow And
Speaker 7: in the most recent edition of his book, gets all
Speaker 7: the facts wrong in his attempt to try and argue
Speaker 7: that Elizabeth Stride was not a ripper victim, and numerous
Speaker 7: authors before him have done that. And it's again self perpetuating.
Speaker 7: One author makes a mistake and it gets repeated. You know,
Speaker 7: that's why each author has to kind of do their
Speaker 7: own research. I've made mistakes. I'm sure in my book
Speaker 7: that I'll have to correct in a future edition if
Speaker 7: someone else doesn't correct at first. But you know, you've
Speaker 7: got to at least make the effort to not make
Speaker 7: those kind of mistakes. But yes, Elizabeth Stride most probably
Speaker 7: was killed by the same person who killed Catherine Etto's
Speaker 7: and that person was probably the same person who killed
Speaker 7: Polly Nichols, Andy Chapman and Mary Kelly. But of course
Speaker 7: nobody can say that for one hundred percent certainty. But
Speaker 7: we're dealing with probabilities. And when you're looking at one
Speaker 7: hundred and twenty six year old cold case, you know
Speaker 7: that's all you have are possibilities and probabilities. You know
Speaker 7: what I'm saying.
Speaker 6: Right, Let me ask this, Let me ask this question,
Speaker 6: because this I'm a curious fellow. And after reading this book,
Speaker 6: you again, just like we had mentioned the Flower and
Speaker 6: Dean Address connection, the connection between Stride, Eedos Purley, Paul,
Speaker 6: Mary Kelly, you put another interesting thing without really spelling
Speaker 6: it out. But you say Mary Kelly was butchered in
Speaker 6: her own flat in one of the rooms, and the
Speaker 6: witness that discovered her he immediately went to the lodging
Speaker 6: or contacted the lodging house owner. Yes, so you do
Speaker 6: talk about that in terms of these other murders. That again,
Speaker 6: the protocol must have been for these people to go
Speaker 6: to the lodging house owner first. You talk about that
Speaker 6: with Emma Smith. The other thing I wanted to ask
Speaker 6: was this, with these tenuous connections between all of these victims,
Speaker 6: what do you say about the Again, the idea that
Speaker 6: he made one killer may have escalated his crimes, changed
Speaker 6: his signature. Is there any kind of good possibility that
Speaker 6: one killer, or the one killer with an accomplice did
Speaker 6: all of these murders.
Speaker 7: Yes, I would say it's a probability that the murders
Speaker 7: of Emily Horsnell, Emma Smith, Martha Taber and Polly Nichols,
Speaker 7: Annie Chapman, Elizabeth tried Cathernetto's and Mary Kelly were all
Speaker 7: the same person or persons. That that, to me, is
Speaker 7: a probability. Now, when you get to the murders that
Speaker 7: followed Mary Kelly were into more of a gray area. Uh,
Speaker 7: you know, although one of them that mayor one of
Speaker 7: Rose Milett who is It's interesting because she also lived
Speaker 7: at nineteen George Street and her boyfriend was a boxer
Speaker 7: who John Satchel trained and paid a lot of money
Speaker 7: to train. And I've often wondered, you know, and others
Speaker 7: have wondered too, if Jack Roper himself wasn't a boxer
Speaker 7: because the reason the way these women I believe were
Speaker 7: rendered unconscious because they weren't. Most of them were not
Speaker 7: strangled per se, but they were all somehow rendered unconscious
Speaker 7: in a way the doctors could not detect. And I've
Speaker 7: in my book I present the most probable to my
Speaker 7: mind way of doing this was called garretting, but not
Speaker 7: with a string or a chord, but using your own
Speaker 7: arm to suffolk to render a person unconscious, which was
Speaker 7: crucial for the ripper because he can't have this woman
Speaker 7: screaming out, you know, and running and getting help and
Speaker 7: then capturing him, right, so he had to quickly render
Speaker 7: her unconscious, which meant he had to be tall and strong.
Speaker 7: That's who we're looking for. And the people who would
Speaker 7: know these techniques would be boxers and criminals. So that's
Speaker 7: another clue that wasn't in the books before mine, but
Speaker 7: that's something to strongly consider, and it explains away the
Speaker 7: mystery of how some of these women were rendered unconscious
Speaker 7: but yet left no fingerprints on the next you know,
Speaker 7: or the telltale signs of strangulation that you usually see.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 6: Just to lay a little credibility to what you're saying,
Speaker 6: you do talk about in the book that these lodging
Speaker 6: house owners also had these amateur fight clubs as well,
Speaker 6: and so part of their income was i guess, gambling
Speaker 6: and owner owning and organizing these fights, and so maybe
Speaker 6: the protection of one of these fighters possibly could have
Speaker 6: been a motive for a couple.
Speaker 7: Absolutely, yeah, absolutely, I've wondered about that exact same thing,
Speaker 7: you know, because a boxer is an asset. A boxer
Speaker 7: is an asset, so you know, it's one of those
Speaker 7: things that you know, did a boxer loose his temper
Speaker 7: and beat up Emily Horse now and they said, well,
Speaker 7: let's just cover it up, just hey, you know, don't
Speaker 7: let it happen again. Well then it happens again, and
Speaker 7: they're like, hey, you got to stop, and then it
Speaker 7: keeps happening that at some point it's out of control.
Speaker 7: You know, they so are sure it's a possibility. It's
Speaker 7: a possible, But I have no proof or straightforward evidence
Speaker 7: to to to say that that's the case. It's just
Speaker 7: that's just another speculation, you know what I'm saying. That's
Speaker 7: that's what I was to find. I was hoping to
Speaker 7: find that enough avenue has led to a certain individual
Speaker 7: where we could point to him and go, ah, he's
Speaker 7: extremely suspicious. But that's not the case. Instead, there's a
Speaker 7: number of individuals who are suspicious, and it could be
Speaker 7: any one of them or none of them.
Speaker 6: Right now, you talked about near the beginning of the
Speaker 6: interview about since this book has come out, the acceptance,
Speaker 6: and I guess you know you had a little bit
Speaker 6: of trepidation on that as well, because it is a
Speaker 6: pretty esteemed group. Sometimes it looks at AT has tackled
Speaker 6: some of this. So tell us about the response since
Speaker 6: the book has come out, and in particular, anything that
Speaker 6: really surprised you or you know, really impressed you made
Speaker 6: you pretty satisfied with what you had done.
Speaker 7: Well, Paul bag who is you know, as far as
Speaker 7: riprothters go is is you know, he's like up at
Speaker 7: the top of the heap. Right, he's like the Beatles.
Speaker 7: I call him the Beatles of and then Stuart p.
Speaker 7: Evans is the Elvis of ripperlogy. Anyways, Paul Egg writes
Speaker 7: reviews for Ripprologist magazine, and my book came out in
Speaker 7: February of twenty fourteen, and he said, even though it's
Speaker 7: too early to say because it's the beginning of the year,
Speaker 7: he predicted my book might be the best ripper book
Speaker 7: of the year, which is really saying. So I'm considering
Speaker 7: he had his own book coming out the next month,
Speaker 7: but you know, that set everything off to a good pace.
Speaker 7: And then if anyone who wants to go to Amazon
Speaker 7: or Goodreads and read what people say, I've just been
Speaker 7: overwhelmed with the positive response. Of course, I've had a
Speaker 7: handful of critics, you know, who just immediately if it's
Speaker 7: in that book and it's under my name, it's just crap.
Speaker 7: You know, you're always going to have ripperology. Like any
Speaker 7: field where there's debate is content you know, everything is contentious.
Speaker 7: But those people, you know, I'm they keep you on
Speaker 7: your toes too. It's good to have someone with a
Speaker 7: on their shoulders picking your work. Apart and saying, Okay,
Speaker 7: here's this here. It makes you look and think about things.
Speaker 7: And it also it led to people going out. Sometimes
Speaker 7: people go out to try and prove you wrong and
Speaker 7: find new evidence. Sometimes it actually proves you right, and
Speaker 7: sometimes it does prove you wrong. The truth is what matters.
Speaker 7: Though I couldn't care less whether I'm right or wrong
Speaker 7: about anything. What I want to see happen is new
Speaker 7: stuff gets discovered and brought to light. You know what
Speaker 7: I'm saying. That has happened. That that right there, that
Speaker 7: answers your question. The best thing that's happened since this
Speaker 7: book came out, as I've seen a lot of new
Speaker 7: information come out, discussions happen, research has taken place that
Speaker 7: wouldn't have happened had I not come out with that book.
Speaker 7: And some of that's come from my biggest critics and
Speaker 7: some from my biggest fans, and then some from the
Speaker 7: people who are extremely objective and just stay right down
Speaker 7: the middle. But that's my favorite thing about it. That
Speaker 7: and I also like the money. The money's been fun.
Speaker 7: You know, I have got I haven't got rich from it,
Speaker 7: but considering I thought I was writing that I wrote
Speaker 7: this book and I thought, I hope I just kind
Speaker 7: of break even or something. But it's, like I said,
Speaker 7: it's it's done well, and people like Dance the Panski
Speaker 7: are saying, get on my show, and I'm like, well,
Speaker 7: so I didn't expect. I swear to god, I had
Speaker 7: no idea anyone would want to talk to me just
Speaker 7: because of this little book. But it has. It's won
Speaker 7: three awards, you know too. It's won some Best History
Speaker 7: Book Award, a Best Try Prime Book Award, so very please.
Speaker 6: Great, And I guess that's going to inspire you because
Speaker 6: you already have plans. I mean, this is not okay.
Speaker 6: I've done the definitive Jack the Ripper book, so I
Speaker 6: can retire now and just rest on my laurels. But
Speaker 6: I'm sure you've got so you talked about Charles L.
Speaker 6: Grand and so tell us what is in the works next.
Speaker 7: Well, right now as we speak, I'm actually writing fiction,
Speaker 7: which I publish under a different name. But so I'm
Speaker 7: taking a break from Ripper Ology. But yeah, well not
Speaker 7: an extended break or anything, I'm sure. But you know
Speaker 7: I've I've written some on my next Ripper book, which
Speaker 7: which is where I want to take the Ripper murders
Speaker 7: and what I do what I did with m Smith
Speaker 7: and Martha Table, which will start at the beginning and
Speaker 7: research them unbiased. And I want to continue on with
Speaker 7: that because I stopped. I stopped when I got to
Speaker 7: Polly Nichols because I had to write the Bank Holiday murders.
Speaker 7: So starting with Nicholson moving forward, I want to keep
Speaker 7: that going on. I've already written most of a pretty
Speaker 7: large section on Polly Nichols, which I think a lot,
Speaker 7: which again is going to cause a lot of debate
Speaker 7: and a lot of people will love it and some
Speaker 7: will hate it. It's going to have new stuff and
Speaker 7: then just keep going on. It's time consuming though, it's
Speaker 7: tough work, and so anyways, I want to do that book,
Speaker 7: and then I want to do Charles Lagrant. I want
Speaker 7: to do a book on him, which you could call
Speaker 7: it a suspect book. But again, my approach is going
Speaker 7: to be to respect the reader in this way that
Speaker 7: I want to be respected when I read a book.
Speaker 7: I don't want someone telling me what the truth is
Speaker 7: and shoving it down my throat and saying, oh, here's
Speaker 7: Jack the Ripper. I'm gonna say, here's a guy who
Speaker 7: people back then some of them thought, was Jack the Ripper.
Speaker 7: Let's take a closer look at him and and see
Speaker 7: what you know, and then you decide what you think.
Speaker 7: Because I'm not convinced he's Jack. I'm not convinced anybody's
Speaker 7: Jack Ripper. You know what I'm saying. It would take
Speaker 7: an awful lot to convince. Some people are extremely easily convinced,
Speaker 7: and then and then others, like myself, I can't. I
Speaker 7: can't imagine. I can't imagine myself being convinced beyond doubt
Speaker 7: of someone's guilt. It would take some It could happen,
Speaker 7: but it would have to be There have to be
Speaker 7: evidence that I don't currently know about come forth to convince.
Speaker 1: Me of that.
Speaker 7: And I haven't seen that yet, so I but my instinct.
Speaker 7: But Charles L. Grant is probably the single best suspect ever,
Speaker 7: and no one knows that right now because my book
Speaker 7: isn't written. When they read it, they'll go, oh, I
Speaker 7: see what he's talking about. So there you go.
Speaker 6: That's fascinating. We'll look forward to your book regarding Charles
Speaker 6: the Grant. And I want to say too, I agree
Speaker 6: with you that if you were to put all of
Speaker 6: the things that I ever read, and I'm no ripperologist
Speaker 6: expert whatsoever, but just from the more I read, it
Speaker 6: seems to be more suspects. As you say, it seems
Speaker 6: to be more complex, and that's not surprising to me
Speaker 6: for one hundred and twenty six year old cold case,
Speaker 6: let alone something that's fifteen or twenty years, never mind
Speaker 6: one hundred and twenty five years. And a lot of
Speaker 6: the records were destroyed, a lot of stuff was Pilford,
Speaker 6: like you mentioned in the book, things were stole as souvenir,
Speaker 6: so there isn't a complete story, and a lot, like
Speaker 6: you say, lives were built upon other lives or perpetrated
Speaker 6: or repeated. So you've did an incredible job digging through
Speaker 6: all of that stuff and then coming to some at
Speaker 6: least juncture where we can at least decide, Okay, this
Speaker 6: is what are you saying about this particular victim and
Speaker 6: the connection between these murders based on the flower and
Speaker 6: Dean address and some of the other things. So just
Speaker 6: a fascinating read. You bring the reader right into London
Speaker 6: in eighteen eighty eight, and I applaud you on a
Speaker 6: great book and very fascinating, very fascinating take on another
Speaker 6: aspect of the Jack the Ripper saga in this the
Speaker 6: Bank Holiday Murder. So I want to thank you very
Speaker 6: much Tom. For those that might want to contact you
Speaker 6: or learn more about this tell us how they might
Speaker 6: contact you or learn more about this book and more
Speaker 6: about what you do regarding Jack the Ripper.
Speaker 7: Tell us about that well. First of all, if anyone
Speaker 7: wants to check out The Bank Holiday Murders. The full title,
Speaker 7: by the way, is The Bank Holiday Murders, The True
Speaker 7: Story of the First Whitechapel Murders. It is available through
Speaker 7: Amazon dot com, Amazon dot co dot UK and wherever
Speaker 7: you happen to live and have an Amazon I have
Speaker 7: it available in kindle format cheap actually right now in
Speaker 7: American dollars it's four ninety nine, and you can also
Speaker 7: get the paperback through Amazon relatively inexpensively. If you want
Speaker 7: to contact me, my website is ripperbook dot com. You
Speaker 7: can go on Facebook and find me at Facebook dot
Speaker 7: comback slash Ripperbooks with an spy n and then I
Speaker 7: don't really tweet much. I don't fully understand what that is,
Speaker 7: but I have you can find me at Ripperbook and
Speaker 7: then I also moderate the busiest Jack the Ripper page
Speaker 7: on Facebook. If you just type in Jack the Ripper,
Speaker 7: you'll find the Jack the Ripper community on there with
Speaker 7: like fifteen hundred members, and just sign up and you'll
Speaker 7: catch me on there, along with a number of other
Speaker 7: names you'll recognize from the books on your shelf.
Speaker 6: Oh fantastic. I want to thank you very much Tom
Speaker 6: for this interview and you have yourself a great evening,
Speaker 6: and hope to hear from you again real soon.
Speaker 7: He appreciate it, Dan Man, I look forward to continuing
Speaker 7: to listen to your awesome show.
Speaker 6: Thank you very much, Tom, best of luck with your
Speaker 6: next project, and hope to hear from you soon.
Speaker 7: Good Night, you got Bye.