Perhaps some of us will be killed next! If anybody had helped the likes of us years ago we would have never come to this!”20 With hindsight, Barnardo claimed that he believed the woman who spoke those words might very well have been Elisabeth Stride. In truth, they all might have been Elisabeth Stride, and certainly Elisabeth strove to be all of those women—everyone and no one. She was anonymous: a woman with a mutable story, a changeable history, someone who had recognized that the world didn’t care about her, and chose to use that as a weapon in order to survive.
