Jill the Ripper

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It was a brutal place to live in the best of times and these weren't the best of times. It was a place where two out of every ten children died before their fifth birthday. Work was hard to come by, clean lodgings and fresh food were daydreams. The narrow winding streets were lined with gutters overflowing with human sewage and cattle and sheep jostled with people for a footing in the mud and excrement.

A miasma of soot and filth clung to every surface. The very air itself was rank and slimy, a near constant dank fog barely penetrated by the flickering light of gas lanterns. When the first body was found, it was a scandal but not a surprise. The Whitechapel area of East London was rife with crime. Prostitutes shared the foul streets with brawlers and drunks, with thieves and killers.

It was a place where human life was cheap, which made it an almost perfect hunting ground. Beginning in August 1888, the hunted were women. Women who were savagely murdered, their bodies defiled and discarded. First one, then the next, and the next, 11 horrific deaths. And at least five were believed to be the work of one serial killer who was never captured, who has never been identified even to this day.

A killer we call Jack the Ripper. But have we gotten it wrong for 137 years now? Right down to the notorious name, all those years spent searching for a man we call Jack. Maybe, just maybe, we should have been looking for a woman instead. Could the knife-wielding madman of Whitechapel actually have been a woman? Jill the Ripper?

No. Really? Right. I know. No, no, no, no. No, no, no, no. No, no, no, no. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Truth. Weird. Stuff. More than 100 possible suspects were considered in the notorious Whitechapel murders. Some were highly accomplished, well-known individuals, like Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Prince Albert Victor, and even the wig maker to Queen Victoria herself, William Barry Clarkson.

Then there was a whole rogues gallery of other suspects. A man named Aaron Kosminski, who'd spent time in an insane asylum, suffering from auditory hallucinations, a refusal to bathe, a paranoid fear of being fed by others, and that crime utterly reviled by the Victorians, the sin of self-abuse. Another psychiatric patient made the list, and this one had a history of violent attacks on women in Whitechapel, Jacob Eisenschmidt.

Then there was Soren Klosowski, aka the Burrow Poisoner, who was hanged in 1903 for the murder of three wives. Montague John Druitt, a lawyer and assistant schoolmaster, made the suspect list. Druitt was described as being sexually insane, and his own family even pointed the finger at him for the Ripper killings. The locals were deeply suspicious of a Polish bootmaker by the name of John Pizer.

He had a prior conviction for stabbing. At least one police official believed that Pizer was the culprit in a whole string of minor assaults on sex workers. A number of prostitutes in Whitechapel told police that they were afraid of a man they called Leather Apron, and John Pizer was frequently seen wearing just that, a leather apron, to protect his clothing from the stains and oils used in his work as a bootmaker.

The notorious Francis Tumblety was considered a strong possibility. He made bank in the U.S. and Canada by posing as a traveling Indian herb doctor. Tumblety earned his notoriety in a few ways. For starters, he barely escaped prosecution in the death of one of his patients. He was suspected of being complicit in the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, but was released after his arrest without being charged.

Most weirdly, Tumblety enjoyed showing off his special collection. The wombs of women of every class, as he put it. And dozens more. Almost all of them men. Almost. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of beloved literary detective Sherlock Holmes, floated the theory that the Ripper may have disguised himself as a midwife, knowing that a woman of that profession, rushing through the streets in blood-stained clothing, wouldn't raise even a single eyebrow.

Such was the primitive nature of women's health care in the Victorian age. And now, a dramatic pause, as we consider how everything old might soon be new again. I am innocent of this crime. And back to Victorian Whitechapel we go. The chief inspector of the London Metropolitan Police, a man named Frederick Abberline, thought it was entirely possible that the fiendish killer was a woman.

This was a pretty radical theory for the day. Many dismissed it on the grounds that the Ripper clearly possessed both surgical skill and anatomical knowledge, and had the brute strength of a man. Yes, yes, agreed Abberline, yes, of course. But would a midwife not also have some anatomical knowledge? Some passing familiarity with a surgeon's blade?

The residents of Whitechapel, long stalked by poverty, disease, and ruin, now had something new and terrible to fear. They called the killer the Whitechapel Murderer, the Red Fiend, and of course, Leather Apron. The first body was found on August 7th, 1888. Her name was Martha Tabram. Like many poor women of her time, Martha had turned to prostitution to support herself.

Her body was found on the landing of the George's Yard building, stabbed to death. Just over three weeks later, on August 31st, 1888, the body of Mary Ann Nichols, who was found on Buck's Row in Whitechapel, throat slashed, carotid artery severed. The body of Annie Chapman was found on September 8th, 1888, in the backyard of a home at 29 Hanbury Street in Whitechapel, throat slashed, carotid artery severed.

September 30th, 1888, brought the discovery of a body on Berner Street. That victim was named Elizabeth Stride, throat slashed, carotid artery severed. That very same day, another body was found on the southwest corner of Mitre Square in Whitechapel. This victim was named Catherine Eddowes, throat slashed, carotid artery severed.

The killer appeared to go dormant until November 5th, 1888, when the body of Mary Jane Kelly was found at 13 Millers Court. Like the other victims, she was poor, worked as a prostitute, and hemorrhaged to death after her throat was slashed, her carotid artery severed. Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, Mary Jane Kelly.

These women are now known as the Canonical Five. Others, like Martha Taborum, were thought to be the unfortunate victims of an opportunistic crime, dead, tragically, but not at the bloodied hands of the Whitechapel murderer. In all, 11 people were brutally slain in those filthy streets, whether by one perpetrator or not.

Like any serial killer worthy of the title, the Ripper wasn't just out for blood. The Ripper wanted attention, wanted credit for the crimes. On September 27th, 1888, the Central News Agency received an odd letter at their offices in the city of London. Dated two days earlier, September 25th, at first it seemed like the work of a random crackpot.

The letter sat for two days, when the decision was finally made to pass it on to the Metropolitan Police. I keep on hearing the police have caught me, but they won't fix me just yet. I have laughed when they look so clever and talk about being on the right track. That joke about the leather apron gave me real fits. I am down on whores and I shan't quit ripping them, till I do get buckled.

Grand work, the last job was. I gave the lady no time to squeal. How can they catch me now? I love my work and want to start again. You will soon hear of me with my funny little games. I saved some of the proper red stuff in a ginger beer bottle over the last job to write with, but it went thick like glue and I can't use it.

Red ink is fit enough I hope, ha ha. The next job I do I shall clip the lady's ears off and send to the police officers just for jolly. Wouldn't you? Keep this letter back till I do a bit more work, then give it out straight. My knife's so nice and sharp, I want to get to work right away if I get a chance. Good luck, yours truly, Jack the Ripper.

Don't mind me giving the trade name. Wasn't good enough to post this before I got all the red ink off my hands, curse it. No luck yet. They say I'm a doctor now, ha ha. Confession time. We didn't tell you everything we should have about the Ripper's victims. Mostly because it's horrific and it's hard to hear. It's a litany of gore and even the words themselves feel like more desecration of the souls that once inhabited those bodies.

But in this case, the method and the madness are one and the same. Knowing what the Ripper did makes it clear why the authorities were convinced that the killer had medical knowledge and training, a doctor or a midwife. Mary Ann Nichols had also been stabbed twice in the vagina. Her lower abdomen was torn open in a jagged slash, intestines spilling out.

Annie Chapman's abdomen was flayed open, the small intestines removed and draped over her right shoulder. Sections of her vagina and bladder were gone. Her uterus was removed entirely. Elizabeth Stride was the lone victim in the canonical five, whose body and reproductive organs were left unmutilated. But the slash on her throat that killed her was as neat and precise as any incision performed in a hospital operating room.

Police speculated that Stride's killer had been interrupted in the middle of the crime and fled, leaving her body intact. Catherine Eddowes was another story. Her throat had been slashed from ear to ear. Her abdomen was ripped open, intestines draped over her right shoulder, with one section completely severed and tucked between her left arm and her body.

Mary Jane Kelly suffered unspeakably. Her throat severed to the spinal cord. Her abdomen hollowed out of all organs. Her face an unrecognizable, hacked mess. Both her ears and her nose had been sliced off. Her kidneys, uterus, and one breast were found shoved beneath her head. Her intestines were laid at her feet. Chunks of abdomen and thighs were arranged on a table beside the bed.

Her heart was missing. The coroner who headed up the inquest for the deaths of Mary Ann Nichols and Annie Chapman was a man named Winn Baxter. His assessment was that the mutilation of both women's bodies suggested a perpetrator with anatomical knowledge. He disagreed with the findings of the physician, Dr. Llewellyn, who had been summoned to the scene of Mary Ann Nichols' murder.

It was Llewellyn's professional opinion that the killer had, quote, rough anatomical knowledge. Dr. Llewellyn based his conclusion on the fact that the killer had attacked all of the vital organs. And as for the body of Annie Chapman, it had been examined by police surgeon, Dr. George Baxter Phillips. Annie's body was sprawled on the damp, cold ground in the backyard at 29 Hanbury Street.

Her eyes clouded and unseen. Dr. Phillips crouched beside her and declared that this monstrous mutilation struck him as something that could have been done with, quote, such an instrument as a medical man used for post-mortem purposes. At the same time, though, he also conceded that the kind of knives used by butchers and Still, when summoned again by Coroner Baxter to provide more testimony, Dr. Phillips doubled down on his belief that the perpetrator possessed some real skill.

He said, quote, Doctors, surgeons, butchers, slaughterhouse workers, they were all under suspicion. Police swept through the crowded streets of Whitechapel, interviewing those butchers and slaughterers, checking and confirming alibis. All 76 of those suspects were eliminated. All of England was caught up in the frenzy to find and apprehend the Whitechapel killer.

Even Queen Victoria herself weighed in, offering the theory that the murderer might be a butcher, working aboard one of the many cattle boats that flowed between London and the rest of Europe. Her Majesty pointed out that the pattern of the murders appeared to coincide with the schedule the cattle boats maintained. Police dutifully followed up on the Queen's suggestions, but the movements of the boats didn't align with the dates of the murders.

And there was nothing to suggest that any crew member was involved in any way. The people of Whitechapel were living in a state of sustained terror, made worse when police told the Central News Agency to publish the latest missive from the killer, calling himself or herself Jack the Ripper. This time, the Ripper sent a postcard.

Number one squealed a bit, couldn't finish straight off, had no time to get ears off for police. Thanks for keeping the last letter back till I got to work again. Signed, Jack the Ripper. The double event referred to here would be the slaying of Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes. Both women were killed in the same hour on September 30th.

The no time to get ears is a gruesome detail and maybe a clue. Catherine Eddowes right ear was slashed nearly off, but only nearly, as if the killer ran out of time to complete the terrible task. Whitechapel was a slum with thousands of people having no home but the streets. Even those who could scrape money together to rent a hovel, found themselves living three families to a single room in many cases.

And that was luxury compared to what else was available. For four pence, a person could rent a bed for a night, crammed into a room with 80 other lodgers. If all you could scrape together was two pence, then a bed was out of the question. But for that price, the weary could lean against a thick rope anchored floor to ceiling and at least be indoors for the night.

To sleep standing up was better than risking your throat in a Whitechapel alley. The sickening fear and paranoia infected all of London. And the press, don't you know, was absolutely relentless. These darksome, appalling deeds done in the center of a thickly populated metropolitan district and at a time of night when hundreds of people were still preambulating streets in the immediate vicinity of thoroughfares, in which the butchered women were found weltering in their blood, have cast a shadow of gloom and horror over this vast city.

The press was also quick to point out just how very crude and ghastly and honestly how terribly un-British the entire debacle was. It cannot be but a deep humiliation to every Londoner who has heretofore taken a just pride in the many evidences of a high civilization abounding in the English capital to recognize the terrible fact that murder after murder can be perpetrated in our midst, so to speak, undetected and unpunished.

Braving successfully all the efforts of our huge police force to bring the guilty to justice. Then came yet another letter from the Ripper. This time, the Ripper didn't bother with the Central News Agency. This letter was instead addressed to one Mr. George Lusk. Lusk headed up a group of volunteers who patrolled the streets of Whitechapel, mostly at night.

Lusk's role in this neighborhood watch group was heavily publicized and his name was featured prominently on posters that were tacked up all over Whitechapel. The letter George Lusk received was accompanied by half a human kidney. From hell, Mr. Lusk. Sir, I send you half the kidney I took from one woman. Preserved it for you. The other piece I fried and ate.

It was very nice. I may send you the bloody knife that took it out. If only you wait a while longer. Signed, Catch me when you can, Mr. Lusk. You can imagine Lusk's horror and the revulsion and the uproar that followed. The kidney was submitted by Dr. Appenshaw, the pathological curator at London Hospital. By use of the microscope, Dr. Appenshaw was able to determine that the kidney had been taken from a full-grown human being and that the portion before him was part of the left kidney.

At the inquest on the body of the woman Eddos, it was stated that the left kidney was missing. The portion of the kidney was preserved for some time in spirits of wine. The person from whom it was taken was probably alive some three weeks since, which fits with the suggestion that the organ may have been taken from the body of the deceased woman Eddos murdered in Mitre Square.

As the police hauled suspect after suspect in for questioning, life such as it was in Whitechapel went on. For the poverty-stricken inhabitants of Whitechapel, there was no taking a day or a night off, which meant the streets were as choked with prey for the Ripper as they had ever been. But there was a new chill in the air, a heavier darkness, and as always, the prickling sensation of being watched with suspicion or worse.

Mary Eleanor Wheeler Pearcey was just 22 years old when the body of the first Whitechapel victim was found. She'd been living since her teens with a carpenter named John Charles Pearcey and had taken his surname even though the couple never married. John Pearcey left the relationship in 1888, though he later testified that he did continue to see Mary on occasion.

Mary was said to suffer from bouts of melancholy, what we now call depression, was known to be a heavy drinker and was not at all keen on holding down any sort of a job. Mary was a beautiful woman with tumbling masses, russet-colored hair and blue eyes, beauty that she used to support herself, but not like so many poor women of her time as a sex worker.

Mary was very good at beguiling wealthy men. With John Pearcey in the rear view, Mary took up with a man named... Charles Creighton. He was a man of independent means, as they say, a lovely fellow, but I found that I wanted... other things. Enter Mr. Frank Samuel Hogg. Their affair was like a lifetime movie. Equal amounts of passion and deceit topped off with angry outbursts and infidelity on both sides.

Frank Hogg was two-timing Mary Pearcey with another woman named Phoebe Styles. When Styles got pregnant, Hogg married her, which didn't sit well with Mary, not at all. It was a poisonous love triangle, even though, from all accounts, poor Phoebe had no idea that her new husband already had a mistress. On a crisp autumn morning, October 24th, 1890, Mary Pearcey paid a young boy in the neighborhood to run a little errand.

He was to deliver an invitation to Mrs. Phoebe Hogg, an invitation to tea at Mary's home that very day. Dearest, come round this afternoon and bring our little darling. Do not fail. The note was left unsigned. Seems weird, doesn't it, that Mrs. Hogg would accept such an invitation from a stranger? But Mary Pearcey was no stranger to Phoebe Hogg and, in fact, had made it her business to befriend her lover's wife.

The previous winter, when Mrs. Hogg had fallen ill, it was Mary Pearcey who went to the Hogg home and nursed her rival for weeks until Phoebe Hogg's sister arrived. Multiple witnesses later told police that Phoebe had never felt even the slightest jealousy toward Mary. Instead, she was grateful for the woman's friendship, which is why an invitation to tea didn't ring a single alarm bell for Phoebe.

Why would it? At 7 p.m. that October evening, a man making his way home from work along Crossfield Road saw something odd lying bundled on the pavement. It was a body, the head wrapped in what appeared to be a sweater. When police carefully unwrapped the sweater or cardigan, they found the bloodied face of Phoebe Hogg, lifeless eyes already clouding over.

Her skull was fractured, her throat severed, the wound so violent that she was nearly decapitated. And if that wasn't tragic enough, another grim discovery was made later that same day, roughly a mile from where Phoebe's body had been found. It was an empty, abandoned baby's pram, thickly stained with blood. It took until the next morning for searchers to find the body of the infant, Phoebe Hogg's baby, dead, the coroner found by suffocation.

By now, Frank Hogg was frantic over his missing wife and child. And to make matters worse, there was a rumor that a woman's body had been found on Crossfield Road. Frank went to the police and sent his sister Clara to Mary Pearcey's lodgings to see if perhaps she'd seen Phoebe or knew of her plans. Mary Pearcey swore to Clara that she hadn't heard a word from Phoebe.

Under pressure from Clara, Mary reluctantly agreed to accompany her to the morgue to see if that body found on Crossfield Road might be Phoebe Hogg's. Mary's behavior at the morgue was peculiar. She tried forcefully to stop Clara from seeing and identifying the body of the dead woman. But Clara pushed Mary aside and named the body as that of Phoebe Hogg and the bloody pram as the same one used for the Hogg's infant.

When police informed Frank that the dead woman was his wife, Frank broke and almost immediately confessed that he had been having an affair with Mary Pearcey. Police headed to Mary's home on Priory Street. A neighbor named Mrs. Rogers told them that she had seen Mary pushing a pram on the night of October 24th. She remembered it very clearly, she said, as something about the sight struck her as strange.

There was, the neighbor said, something large in that pram that Mary was pushing. Something heavy, the neighbor said, or so it seemed, for Mary had difficulty keeping it moving. Another neighbor told police that she'd heard the sound of breaking glass and the cry of a child, a child in pain, she added, all coming from Mary's rooms late on the afternoon of October 24th.

Intriguing, for sure, but the police hardly needed those witnesses. What they found inside Mary's home was damning enough. There were signs of a struggle, furniture overturned, two broken windows in the kitchen, but most troubling of all, a blood-stained carving knife and a blood-stained fireplace poker. Where was Mary while this search of her home was being conducted?

Oh, she was right there, sitting at the piano, playing one tune after another as though oblivious to the chaos all around her. A police officer asked Mary to explain just why there was blood on the poker and the carving knife. What had she done? Without skipping a beat, Mary chanted, killing mice, killing mice, killing mice, killing mice.

Mary was arrested and charged with murdering Phoebe and her child. When police searched her, blood stains were found on her clothing, and in a macabre twist that all but sealed her fate, the wedding ring on Mary's finger turned out to belong to the murdered Phoebe Hogg. Justice moved swiftly in the 19th century. Not two weeks after her arrest, Mary Pearcey was remanded to the magistrate.

As the sun rose on the morning of November 3rd, 1890, huge crowds of the curious were already gathering at the Marlowbone Police Court. The testimony looked bad for Mary, and the evidence looked worse, right down to the sweater that had been wrapped around the battered head of victim Phoebe Hogg, a cardigan sweater that, according to his own sworn statement, had once belonged to Mary's common-law husband, John Charles Pearcey.

Mary stood trial for murder at the Central Criminal Courthouse, better known by the nickname the Old Bailey, beginning December 1st, 1890. The crowds were massive. This was expected. What wasn't expected were the number of well-known men from the City of London who asked to sit on the jury. That sure was unusual, even for a high-profile case like this one.

Mary was brought before the judge. As each indictment was read, she responded in a soft voice that never wavered. Not guilty. Not guilty. Not guilty. As she watched her lover, Frank Hogg, take the stand and testify against her, Mary remained silent and impassive. Hogg described the nature of the relationship between his late wife and her accused killer.

That was plenty weird all by itself. Like, for example, Hogg told of spending a Christmas holiday with both women, sharing a bedroom, even. Mary in one bed, Frank and Phoebe Hogg in the next. Hogg praised Mary for her kindness in tending to Phoebe Hogg while she was ill. A parade of prosecution witnesses took the stand, each testimony just a little more damning than the one before.

The evidence against Mary was all but overwhelming. And her defense? It didn't seem to be much. Not a single witness was called by Mary's attorney, Arthur Hutton. And there was no hope of a verdict of insanity, either. Mary had seen to that herself, whether she understood it or not. Mrs. Pearcey's denials of guilt dictated the lines of her defense, while her counselor disputed every fact which told against the accused the plea of insanity could not be set up at the trial without disregarding totally the plea of the prisoner that she was not guilty.

Defense attorney Hutton kept arguing that all of the evidence was actually circumstantial, even if there was just so much of it. Then Hutton threw his last Hail Mary pass, telling the court that if Mary Pearcey had murdered Phoebe Hogg and the baby, who was also named Phoebe, she would have run away. She hadn't, so... Killing mice! Killing mice! Killing mice! Killing mice!

Hutton had to hope he'd been persuasive enough. Mary Pearcey's fate was now in the jury's hands. And while they're deliberating, here's something fun. The judge in the case, along with what appeared to be the entire city of London, thought that Frank Hogg was the most vile of dirtbags. One of the mysteries of the case was that a woman should conceive ungoverned passion or lust for such a fellow as the man seems to have been.

Amen! Hogg really lived up to his name. The jury, they needed only a single hour to reach their verdict. Mary Pearcey, guilty of the crime of willful murder. The judge asked Mary if she had anything to say that might stop the court from pronouncing a sentence of death. Only that I am innocent of this charge. It was December 3rd, 1890, when Mary was led from the Old Bailey.

Her execution was scheduled for December 23rd. She had just 20 days left to live in this world. On the day before she was hanged, Mary was said to be resigned to her fate, but hopeful of a last-minute pardon. There was something else she was hoping for, too. The convict was in expectation of a visit from Frank Hogg. When the time for his visit had passed, the convict became greatly depressed.

She threw herself on her bed and sobbed violently, covering her face with her hands. Listen, this was a faithless, cheating, no-good dog of a man who looked like a bewhiskered thumb. Love really does make people crazy. December 23rd. At dawn, dim and gray, the air clammy. The gallows were inspected and found to be in working order.

Because Mary had lost weight while imprisoned, the drop or length of rope was adjusted to ensure that her neck would be broken without the risk of decapitation. With her arms and hands restrained, Mary was asked if she had anything she'd like to say, as her time had now come. My sentence was a just one, but a good deal of the evidence against me was false.

As the chaplain prayed, May God have mercy on your soul. three female prison wardens led Mary through the stone corridors. You have no need to assist me. I can walk by myself. As Mary stepped into the prison yard, a white cap was pulled firmly down over her head. The condemned woman would not see the waiting gallows. She never spoke another word.

It was said that she died instantly, though her body was left swinging at the end of that rope for an hour. The body of Mary Pearcey was buried in quicklime beneath the flagstones in one of Newgate prison's many narrow passageways. A warden scratched her initials into the stone wall, the only sign of her final resting place.

But with her death came a mystery, a puzzle that even now hasn't been solved. On the last night of her life, Mary Pearcey asked her lawyer to place a personal ad for her in a Spanish newspaper, just nine cryptic words. Mary refused to explain to the attorney just what the message meant. M-E-C-P. Last wish of M-E-W. Have not betrayed.

M-E-W. Baffling, right? Unless, as some have theorized, M-E-W represented Mary's own initials. Mary Elizabeth Wheeler. And the other part of that theory? M-E-C-P represents the first initial of the first name of four of the Ripper's victims. Mary Jane Elizabeth Catherine Polly. M-E-C-P. Interesting and, you know, mysterious, but is it really enough to make the case for Mary Pearcey as Jack?

Oops, I mean Jill the Ripper? It was William Stewart, the author of a book called Jack the Ripper, who first suggested that the killer could have been Mary Pearcey. He pointed to the similarities between Mary's victims and the Ripper's victims. The way Phoebe Hogg's throat was slashed so savagely struck him as a clue. Stewart was also convinced that the Ripper, like Mary Pearcey, killed his victims in one location and then dumped their bodies in another.

That explained for him why there had never been a single witness to the Ripper's crimes. The evidence, though, doesn't support Stewart's theory. Medical experts maintain then and now that all of the Ripper's victims died exactly where their bodies were found. But there's another intriguing little nugget that makes the idea of a female Ripper seem just, maybe, a little bit more possible.

Those letters that the killer mailed to the Central News Agency. Dear Boss, I keep on hearing the police have caught me, but they won't fix me just yet. I have laughed when they look so clever and talk about being on the right track. Those letters, they were mailed back in the day when a stamp had to be licked. In 2006, an Australian scientist named Ian Findlay was able to extract DNA from the saliva on the envelopes of those letters.

Findlay used a method called CellTrackID. It's a technology able to take genetic information from a single cell and amplify it, even if that single cell from a fingerprint or, say, human saliva, is more than 160 years old. The FBI lab at Quantico had already taken a shot at pulling DNA from the Dear Boss letter, but with no success.

The samples were just so old and had been so poorly preserved. Findlay's team had more success, but even so, they were only able to build a partial DNA profile from that Victorian-era saliva. A partial profile that strongly suggested a female. But the final result? Inconclusive. Now, jump ahead 13 years to 2019. It was time to test a stained shawl found at the scene of Catherine Eddowes' murder, which looks to be the only remaining piece of physical evidence left from the Ripper case.

Scientists in the UK gathered up genetic info from the descendants of Catherine Eddowes, from every technician known to have handled the shawl, the shawl's current owner, and the family of suspect, Aaron Kosminski. Kosminski had long been under suspicion. He was kind of the front-runner for Jack the Ripper in the eyes of London's Metropolitan Police.

Word on the street was Kosminski hated women, but he held a deeper and more explosive rage for sex workers. One of the stains on that shawl turned out to be semen, and that semen yielded a mitochondrial DNA sequence match to one of Kosminski's living relatives. That same DNA profile indicated that whoever left that semen had dark hair and dark eyes, which coincidentally lined up with the only eyewitness description of the perpetrator.

Now, mitochondrial DNA isn't the gotcha we're hoping for. It's really only valuable in terms of excluding a suspect, which means that you can't exclude Aaron Kosminski from consideration as Jack the Ripper, but you can't prove it either. It's maddening, isn't it, that the Ripper mystery continues to go unsolved? There won't ever be justice for the victims. How could there be?

The killer is dead now for almost as long as the women whose lives were so brutally taken. And Mary Pearcey? Still suspected by some as Jill the Ripper. At least she paid for her crimes, the ones we know about, and people lined up to pay to see the ghastly evidence of those crimes. Madame Tussauds Wax Museum swooped in and purchased the bloody pram used to move the body of Phoebe Hogg.

The museum also bought the entire contents of Mary's kitchen and made a wax figure of the notorious murderess herself. When that grim tableau was open for business, more than 30,000 people lined up to see it. And even now, the noose that once snapped Mary Pearcey's neck is on display at the Crime Museum at New Scotland Yard.

The demon Jack the Ripper has begun his work once more. His hate for women is bitter. He delights in human gore. In the room where she was living, her naked body was found. The Ripper no clue was giving to those who lived around. Her body was cut in pieces and portions taken away. Her flesh, tis shown, stripped from her bones.

A terrible sight, she lay. Next time on True Weird Stuff. How you feeling about your honor these days? Would you be willing to die to defend it? We challenge you to a duel. The very last duel ever to happen in America. And that's the next True Weird Stuff. Special thanks to our voice talents on this episode, making her debut on True Weird Stuff.

It is Charly King and, of course, Don Morgan. What's amazing about this is how fascinated people are with this story so many years later. When we've had lots of crimes happen, we've had lots of serial killers, all of those things. But this one always bubbles back up with somebody with a new theory or perhaps some new information that might shed some light on it.

I just I'm continually amazed by this. And I've had a fascination with it as well. I am so surprised that we still don't really know. And we don't because Minsky is a really high quality suspect. And I think Mary Pearcey, although a lot of people were rooting for her to be Jack the Ripper, I think Mary Pearcey killed her lover's wife and baby.

And that was the beginning, middle and end of that. I don't know that I really see her as the Ripper. And the reason I don't is because those were motivated murders. Yeah. These these are true serial killer. And I say they're not motivated. I mean, if somebody has a hatred of women and sex workers, obviously you can say, well, that's motivated, but it's not motivated in the same way.

So that's why I don't think because her killing. This is why I'm doing it. This is killing. I have a reason for doing it. She was just one of those beautiful, happy go lucky sociopaths who wanted what she wanted, when and how she wanted it and decided to take matters into her own hands. I don't you know, when I when we first started working on this one, I was like, I don't really know very much about this lone female suspect.

And I kind of expect it when it was all said and done to feel very strongly that maybe she was the Ripper. But the opposite happened for me. I she's definitely a murderer. I mean, let's be so real. Right. She's guilty as can be of murder. But but Jack, the Ripper. I don't know. So the thing about these crimes, there was no traditional sexual assault in these crimes.

You know, the way you would think about it, that we know that we know about, not that there has to be in order to be a serial killer. So you could I'll ride with the thing that it could be a woman, although female serial killers are really a rarity. I think the only one that comes to mind is Aileen Warnos, who worked as a prostitute and then murdered men.

There are. So we've had a couple of serial female serial killers that we've profiled on this show. There was Nanny Doss. Oh, yeah. And Grandma, one of my I always hate to say one of my favorite serial killers. But there's a there's a story that we haven't told yet. And we will. Her name is Belle Guinness. And she is. Oh, my God.

What a piece of work Miss Belle Guinness was. And it's very much it's it's right at the same time that the bloody benders, which we did do an episode on that whole like post Civil War manifest destiny just brought out the worst in a lot of folks. And this woman was truly, truly evil. But Mary Pearcey just struck me as a garden variety, selfish sociopath.

Yeah. And not as the ripper. I will say this, like, you know, we've we were born into a Jack the Ripper world, Max, where it's been part of popular entertainment and true crime for as long as we've been alive. I don't remember the first time I heard the words Jack the Ripper because they've been floating around my whole life.

It wasn't until we started working on Mary Pearcey's story that I really had like a different mental picture and sort of a different understanding of how terrible life in Whitechapel was. Yeah. Before you got your throat slashed, maybe you were grateful to have it slashed and be put out of your misery. I did, you know, the Lewis Carroll, if we talk about him for a minute, it was thought that Lewis Carroll was it was interesting.

He's the one who wrote Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. And there's been information that's come out about him that he had some sort of an alcohol slash substance abuse problem. So he was writing Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, not just as a work of fiction, but perhaps from personal experience. So it might not be surprising that if he's under the influence and doing horrific things, that he might have a reason to write this story from a place of experience.

So I'm going to I'm going to come for Lewis Carroll's throat here. But it was Robert Lewis Stevenson who wrote Jekyll and Hyde. Oh, I'm sorry. I mean, it's the same it's the same era. Right. Robert Lewis Stevenson wrote Jekyll and Hyde. And there and there have been people that are like, well, maybe that's a little more autobiographical than than fiction.

Lewis Carroll gets on the hot seat. So Lewis Carroll wrote Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. And he's on the hot seat for the Ripper Killers for a couple of reasons. One, he proximity. He was there in London at the time. And two, he kind of had a thing for little girls. And he had sort of some real weird sexual stuff going on, like in his regular life.

And kind of a fixation on an unhealthy fixation on young females and just some real, real unsavory stuff. And for the longest time, like probably a solid decade, he was everyone's favorite surprise suspect pick for Jack the Ripper. But in recent years, they've kind of let that go. And they're really looking more. The most recent thinking on the Jack the Ripper case is Kosminski because of that mitochondrial DNA profile.

Now, if you are a product of the American school system and you are over the age of 30. When I say mitochondria, you say powerhouse of the cell because you've seen the film strip a million times. Right. So here's a fun thing. Fun fact about mitochondrial DNA. Everybody gather around, gather around. Mitochondrial DNA is passed from mother to daughter in a completely unbroken chain going all the way back to the beginning.

But mitochondrial DNA is not useful for identifying a criminal suspect, as we talked about in this episode. It's pretty incredible stuff. But you can't you can't say, well, we had a mitochondrial DNA match. So Kosminski is the Ripper, even though I think a lot of people who follow this very closely now think that Aaron Kosminski was Jack the Ripper.

What did you make of that? And also, also, there's something else going on here, as we know from modern serial killers and modern forensic criminology. Of course, there was semen on that shawl because don't you know, the killer was as aroused as could be by the act of killing. Well, and that's where they're saying that, you know, that there may have been something else that he was doing in each of those situations that we're not aware of.

That was where the sexual gratification came from that the actual from the actual killing itself. That guy, Francis Tumblebee, Tumblebee. Oh, my God. So he so he traveled. So he was in England and then he also traveled to the U.S. and Canada. And there is some there are some people who say that he committed murders in this country and Canada as well that have been unsolved during that period of time when he would have been traveling around there as the the Indian herb doctor.

I wonder he's one of those curious oddball figures that that kind of comes in and out of and crisscrosses other big stories. Maybe we should maybe we should do maybe we should tell his story in one of these true words coming up. So he was he knew what's his head. I was about to say Aaron Burr, not Aaron Burr, the books, John Wilkes Booth.

He knew Lincoln's assassin and there was he was arrested and questioned as part of the conspiracy to assassinate President Abraham Lincoln. So he's a traveling when they say Indian herb doctor. He posed as an indigenous person. He posed as a native person and he just was like putting weeds and shit into an envelope and selling it as magical powders.

And, you know, a traveling medicine man is a door, you know, that kind of thing. But he did have a collection of uteruses, which I know you're going, well, then he must have been killing people. I have to remember the times that people weren't the way we are now. You know, you could get a uterus, probably get you one at the at the morgue.

You slip somebody a few bucks, get a uterus. I was wondering, do you have any fresh uterus here? Because I'm quite honestly, I I collect. I know it's a little weird, but I collect. And if you could just. Yeah, I got to say, I got to say I'm disappointed in current the current state of humanity on so many levels. And one of them is, folks, crack a book.

You think you have it so bad right now? You don't even know you were born and have lived your entire life in unprecedented peace and prosperity, which does seem to be going down the drain right now. But you at least had that. We're talking about a time when you could. First of all, when people were robbing graves on the regular.

Oh, yeah. Keep in mind that Jack the Ripper and grave robbing in London. Those are concurrent things. You could walk into a morgue, slip somebody a few bucks and walk out with a uterus or a kidney or whatever the hell you. You do not have nearly as much to complain about. Modern person. You think so. Mary Pearcey was hanged.

And you you said that they had to do this in a way. And so I know a little bit about this from history. Hanging people was never as simple as, well, they're on the rope and that's it. And their neck is broken. They instantly die. The people all the time were decapitated. So these people would gather all around and they would they would, you know, they would drop out the bottom of the floor and their head would come off, which I'm sure must have been a horrific scene.

Oh, my God. And the two of us over here chuckling it up like the freaks we are. But, you know, you laugh because otherwise you'll cry like it's insane. It's because it's so. So Mary's execution. And again, are you not always just dazzled by the swift sort of justice back in the day? Well, because we're used to appeals and all this other stuff that go on for 20 years.

Oh, my gosh. You get arrested. You get questions. You get tried. You get executed. I mean, you barely have a chance to think about it. And I don't know. Maybe that's better. You can't dwell on it. But so the gallows at Newgate Prison where she was executed, they weren't really they weren't really built and scaled for a small woman.

And of course, she lost a significant amount of weight. So that's why they had to make all these adjustments in the length of the rope and all these calculations, because they didn't want her to be decapitated. I knew that Mary Pearcey wasn't going to get some kind of a fancy funeral. I knew that just from, you know, past experience in this corner of the timeline.

But I didn't realize that after they took the bodies of executed criminals down, they just buried them in the hallway at the prison. Did you know that? That I didn't know. No. I didn't know that either. I mean, around here, you know, like my next dog, I'm going to nickname an unmarked grave because we spend a lot of time with unmarked graves around here.

But this wasn't even like a weird cemetery back behind the prison. It's in the hallway. So, Sherry, you've had some some some characters in some of these episodes that you kind of feel sorry for. I do the same thing. Only I did it with Mary Pearcey in this one. When this guy, Frank Hogg, this guy, Frank Hogg, she she she was so passionately in love with him.

Right. She was so passionate with him and he was awful. And then he was a terrible man. She did all this. And then he just like he drops her. And I'm like, yeah, my heart goes out to her. I'm sorry. Maybe that says there's some flaw in me, but I felt sorry for, you know. Well, the two of us, you know, we we're we like a fixer upper.

All right. A murdering woman that's in the prison. Yeah, she's a fixer upper. But who's perfect? You know, who comes without baggage? What a dreadful, deplorable person Frank Hogg is, though. Oh, oh. So I'm glad you I'm glad you agree, because like it's like, oh, my God, Frank Hogg, you bastard. So this was I mean, this this murder trial was you couldn't get out from under it.

This was Casey Anthony, Lacey Peterson, Charles Manson, all rolled into one for the time because it was very it's not that it was unusual to have a woman commit violent murder. That that wasn't what was unusual. It was the baby and the blood stained baby stroller and the weird, strange love triangle that only the wife was unaware of.

There were some there were so many dramatic details in this that it just caught fire. And so they didn't have photographs back then, but they did print in the London newspapers an image of Frank Hogg and engraving like an artist's rendering. I got to tell you, looks are not everything. I don't mean to be shallow. What did you call him?

I called him a bewhiskered phone because that's what he looked like. I wouldn't cross the street to spit in his face, like much less, you know, commit murder twice for the guy. Look, I just don't understand what this guy had. And she was Mary Pearcey. Hello. Breathtaking. Now, you're probably thinking, well, was she interested in Frank Hogg for the money?

Frank Hogg was really successful. He was a house mover, like, but not in the way that we think of. If I said like, oh, you know, he had a moving company. You're picturing boxes in a truck, right? I want you to imagine what it's like when you are an aristocrat or a noble, you're a duke or an earl or a count or whatever.

And you're moving from your house in London to your country home. You're taking all your rugs and china and crystal and paintings and all of that with you. That's the kind of mover Frank Hogg was. I see. Very highbrow. He made a ton of money. That was interesting all by itself, kind of learning about that. Like, oh, yeah, yeah, I guess that would be a pretty sweet gig.

And the average person didn't have much in the way of possessions. Did you catch that one of the places you could sleep in Whitechapel for two pence? You could lean against a length of rope that was attached floor to ceiling. Yeah. And you would sleep standing up. It's, you know, that sounds like people, somebody going, oh, yeah.

Let me tell you where I slept. Oh, yeah. Let me tell you where I slept on a piece of rope that was on. This was the only thing my grandmother couldn't throw at me. Oh, all right. Does it hurt? Try having a baby. Oh, are you tired? I used to sleep standing up against a piece of rope. Yeah. Life was so, so, so hard. You are the.

Listen to me. Listen to me. You two weirdos. You are the product of countless generations of suffering people who lived short, hard lives and died too young. They went through hell to get you here so that you could yell at some poor teenager who got your drink wrong at the restaurant. Like, you know, they didn't get your coffee exactly right or whatever.

Like, we need to get a grip and be a little more appreciative of what came before and how much worse it all was. That's the thing about nostalgia for me. It's like, oh, are you nostalgic? Do you miss the days of picking bugs off your kid's head? Like, what are you talking about, people? So, it was a terrible life. And Mary Pearcey, beautiful.

I mean, like, knockout beautiful. She's 22 years old. She's already in a common law marriage with Charles Pearcey. So, you know, there was no such thing as a teenager back then. You barely had a childhood. You know, it just was a different world. And then she meets Frank Hogg and he's got money. He's got a big job and he's making bank.

And maybe she loved him. Apparently, she just pined over him, was convinced that he would come see her the night before she was executed. So, she definitely had feelings for him. But you can't discount the lure of that extreme improvement in her life circumstances had she been Mrs. Frank Hogg instead of the mistress. Well, you can see how somebody is desperate enough.

Throw in, you know, being blind with love and perhaps a bit of craziness and you can see how something like this might happen. Could you even believe, like, when the police showed up at her little rented accommodations? There's like broken furniture and a bloody carving knife and she's just sitting at the piano. I want you to imagine that scene.

Like, close your eyes and imagine that scene. Here come the London Metropolitan Police. This is clearly a crime scene. The neighbors have already, like, told the most damning things and you've got blood on your clothes and you're just playing the piano and talking about killing mice. Did that not send a shiver down your spine?

She was just in shock, Sherry. I mean, you know, she felt she had to do what she had to do and she was just in shock. Have you no pity for Mary Pearcey? Well, here's what I know. She wasn't crazy. He made her crazy. Which, I don't know, maybe somebody in this conversation has had said to them before. So, I guess where it comes down when we started, when we first talked about telling Mary Pearcey's story, I didn't have an opinion.

I was interested to see if maybe it was possible that she was Jack the Ripper, but now I'm on the other side of that and I think that the more likely suspect is Kosminski and I'm wondering where you are. Well, you know, the thing is that most of the times that people are killing, when women are killing, they do it a lot with poison.

In fact, I listened to the Smithsonian Side Door podcast and they do a whole episode about women killing with poison. I don't think most women, unmotivated, would be serial killers that would kill in this way. And I'm also not convinced that some people say that it's a surgeon. I would think a butcher might have as much knowledge about how some of this stuff works with bodies and whatnot as well.

That's a great point. That was the other thing. Your whole life you heard, well, Jack the Ripper clearly had medical knowledge. But then when you really dive into the description of what was done to these victims, you're like, I don't know that you need to have a whole lot of medical knowledge to do that. He said it was a member of the royal family too and I'm not buying that.

That was another one that's been floated a lot. Yeah, Prince Albert Victor. Yeah, I'm not buying that either. But the butcher part, yeah, that's a real possibility. I'm with you. After hearing it my whole life, I don't really align with that medical expert thing. I don't really think midwife either. I think that a lot of the descriptions, and I went looking for the London coroner's report.

So how did they describe this victim back in 1890? Do you know what I mean? Or 1888? How did they describe that victim then versus, because we've grown up with medical knowledge and surgical cutting and all of that. But you go back and you look at the police and coroner reports and it's pretty savage, pretty sloppy, real hacky.

So yeah, telling Mary Pearcey's story was super interesting just for how it changed what I think about all of the pop culture noise surrounding Jack the Ripper. And I don't think we're ever going to. I think Aaron Kosminski and that mitochondrial DNA is as close as we're probably ever going to get. I want to say that there was something I saw on Netflix about this just recently.

So I think there is one that's a fairly new one that's floating around about this. If you have further interest in this particular series of crimes. I think because it's so frustrating and mysterious, I think we will probably never really put it to bed. I think there will be a new Jack the Ripper book or documentary or theory for every new generation can look forward to that.

But when you think about like that shawl is the last surviving piece of physical evidence. And when they tested that, they tried to, they were exhaustive. If you had a ghost of a chance of having touched that object, they tried to get your DNA to compare it against. They were so hopeful that this is how they would solve the Jack the Ripper.

And you know if they'd have found, if the DNA findings had been a little different and more conclusive, then we would be having a whole different conversation. I think Mary Pearcey was kind of terrible. But only kind of terrible. The reason I say kind of terrible is because I don't know how people that were born into that life in that world.

I don't know how you weren't terrible. I just, there was no work Max. There was no freaking work. People were starving and trying just to survive. And the only way, I mean it was not, it's a man's world. And back then the only way a woman could put food on her table was by working as a sex worker. Like it was just terrible.

Can I just say that it's very British that in the midst of all this horror, there's the idea of, well, how does this look? Oh, this is very un-British, yes. This is very much not us. Very savage. It's a squalor. Yeah, that's all right. But this, no. What's kind of neat is that, you know, Whitechapel still exists. Of course, like everything else in the whole wide world, it's gentrified.

But yeah, you can still, there are Jack the Ripper ghost tours and walks and stuff. It's, I don't know, unsettling the way that we turn murder into recreation. It is. It's everywhere. It's not just Jack the Ripper. But if it's 150 years ago or something, it bothers us. We feel like it's, yeah. It bothers us less. We feel like it's okay.

So, there you go. And we want to once again thank Charly King for playing Mary Pearcey, Jill the Ripper, for us. And Charlie has her own podcast. It's terrific. It's called The Horoscope Vault. Charlie's an astrologer, among many other things. And it's a terrific podcast if you lean that way, if you want to check that out.

I think that would be kind of awesome. And, yeah. I said to Sherry, hey, she's got a British accent. Can we work her into something? And Sherry said, I have just the thing. It's, you know, sometimes, like, there are certain stories we love to tell, but we're like, oh, do you know anybody from Scotland that would voice this part?

So, and we said to Charlie, Charlie was like, oh, I'd love to be on True Word Stuff. I said, how do you feel about playing, like, a notorious murderer or something terrible? And she's like, oh, definitely. We don't get very many people who want to do the show that don't want to be bloodthirsty killers, do we? No. Everybody wants to be the bad guy.

Next week's episode, very fun story. Like, when I say to people, what's the most famous duel in America, you always say? Aaron Burr. Alexander Hamilton. Certainly one of the most tragic. All duels are tragic and stupid. Oh, my God, the stupidity of it all. So, they didn't outlaw dueling after Aaron Burr killed Alexander Hamilton.

They actually didn't outlaw dueling. The last legal, quote, unquote, legal duel happened in California. And Congress passed, like, a law and said, no more, we're done with this. Please, no more dueling. But there was one state that didn't pay any mind to that. A state where a man's word was his bond, where the code of honor was so strictly enforced that people talked openly about the code of honor.

And the very real last duel fought in America was fought on a sweltering day in July. Two older gentlemen who should have been sitting on rocking chairs facing each other with pistols because one of them felt that his honor had been so grievously insulted. And what happened as a result of that duel, there ended up being a law in the books that in this particular state, you couldn't hold public office.

If you had ever participated in any kind of a duel, it was such a black eye for the state of South Carolina. And that is next week's True Weird Stuff, the last duel. And one of our protagonists, as God is my witness, was named Colonel Ellerby Boggins Cash. Of course. Because, of course, he was. I cannot wait to tell you that story on the next True Weird Stuff.

Thank you so much for listening. And if you listen to us on Apple Podcasts, hit the plus button in the top right corner. And now it helps an independent podcast like ours to get discovered. And we really appreciate it if you subscribe, rate and review True Weird Stuff. Hit our website TrueWeirdStuff.com for show notes and photos and videos when we have it and bonus content.

Everything True Weird is waiting for you at TrueWeirdStuff.com. And follow True Weird Stuff on Instagram. True Weird Stuff is a Now! Media production. Our executive producer is Anthony Garcia. The show is written and hosted by me, Sheri Lynch, along with my deep and weird director, Max Sweeten. Our equally odd producer is Kary Bowser.

Additional production by the mysterious Stephen Call. Our digital witch and social media cult leader is Heather Furr. Original graphics by Kevin Nash. Original artworks by Olivia Axlen. True Weird original music composed and performed by Jack Griffin and Zane Nash. Copyright 2025 Now! Media. All rights reserved. All wrongs remembered.