The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper

by Hallie Rubenhold

John needed a new pair of boots, along with a jacket, which he purchased from a pawnshop.

By that afternoon, he had earned sixpence, which would cover the expense of a night’s lodgings for one of them, but not both.

The coroner produced a pawn ticket for a pair of boots that John said he had put in hock, dated Friday the twenty-eighth. John was taken aback by this; originally he had claimed that he pawned the boots the next day, on Saturday morning, and bought food and drink with the two shillings and six pence it provided.

John apparently had been loath to mention that Kate almost certainly slept rough that night, perhaps even in the shed off Dorset Street.* However, in light of the recent murders in Whitechapel, he knew that an admission of this would not have reflected well on him.

The testimony of those who knew Kate well did not, however, support the notion that she was in the sex trade.

Unfortunately, while defending Kate’s honor, John used a turn of phrase with a double meaning. When he stated his concern over their lack of doss money, he claimed that he didn’t want to “have to see her walk about the streets at night.”

When not lying “on the kerbstone, in the gutters, on heaps of rubbish, anywhere,” they could be seen walking “up and down with their hands in their pockets, and their dull sleepy eyes almost closed.”

Regrettably, at the inquest, John’s answer to the coroner’s question about “walking the streets” did little to dissuade many journalists from persistently identifying Kate as a prostitute.

When John and Kate parted, she assured him she would return by four o’clock. According to John, they hadn’t a penny between them as he watched her bob down Houndsditch toward Aldgate.

At 8:30 that night, a woman sat in a heap against a wall at 29 Aldgate High Street, paralytic from drink. She babbled and sang and cursed, drawing the inevitable gawkers, some staring with amusement, others with genuine concern. This was hardly an unusual sight in Whitechapel. A passing police constable, Louis Frederick Robinson, seeing the crowd, decided to investigate. He found, at the center of it, a pitiful figure, with a bonnet of black velvet and straw tied to her drooping head. She reeked of alcohol.

No one answered, although some present knew precisely who she was and even ran off to tell John Kelly that his “wife” had been collared for drunkenness.

Robinson tried to lift Kate off the street, but her feet, laced up in men’s boots, were as shambling as those of a marionette, and she ...

“I shall get a damned fine hiding when I get home,” she muttered, knowing this was all for show.11 When she lived with Thomas Conway, that would have been the truth.

The police officers then handed her back the contents of her pockets, an assortment of necessities that Kate would have always kept on her person: six pieces of soap and a swatch of flannel, a small comb, a table knife with a white handle, and a metal teaspoon, her tin boxes of tea and sugar, an empty tin matchbox, a piece of red flannel that she used for keeping her pins and needles, a thimble, and a collection of menstrual rags. She refilled her skirts with her other possessions suitable for hawking: an empty red-leather cigarette case, two short black clay pipes, and a ball of hemp.

In spite of their financial circumstances, the Eddowes family did not allow Kate to be dropped into a pauper’s grave; neither would the residents of Whitechapel permit her to be laid to rest without a resounding sendoff. Hundreds filled the streets for the funeral procession on September 8.

At Ilford Cemetery, where Kate was interred, nearly five hundred people gathered to pay their respects. Among them were members of the Eddowes clan who had not seen one another in years.

It ascribes guilt by association: because a woman was poor and an alcoholic, because she left her children, because she had committed adultery, because she had children out of wedlock, because she lived in a lodging house, because she was out late at night, because she was no longer attractive, because she didn’t have a settled home, because she begged, because she slept rough, because she broke all the rules of what it meant to be feminine.

This line of reasoning also explains why Polly, Annie, and Kate’s homelessness was entirely overlooked as a factor in their murders; a “houseless creature” and a “prostitute” by their moral failings were one and the same.

Only Mary Jane Kelly, who admitted openly to working in the sex trade, was described as a “Prostitute.”

We have grown so comfortable with the notion of “Jack the Ripper,” the unfathomable, invincible male killer, that we have failed to recognize that he continues to walk among us. In his top hat and cape, wielding his blood-drenched knife, he can be spotted regularly in London on posters, in ads, on the sides of buses. Bartenders have named drinks after him, shops use his moniker on their signs, tourists from around the world make pilgrimages to Whitechapel to walk in his footsteps and visit a museum dedicated to his violence.

By embracing him, we embrace the set of values that surrounded him in 1888, which teaches women that they are of a lesser value and can expect to be dishonored and abused. We enforce the notion that “bad women” deserve punishment and that “prostitutes” are a subspecies of female.

It is only by bringing these women back to life that we can silence the Ripper and what he represents. By permitting them to speak, by attempting to understand their experiences and see their humanity, we can restore to them the respect and compassion to which they are entitled. The victims of Jack the Ripper were never “just prostitutes”; they were daughters, wives, mothers, sisters, and lovers. They were women. They were human beings, and surely that in itself is enough.