Jack the Ripper

Five women of the East End

The Whitechapel murders of 1888 are usually told through the figure of an unknown killer, but recent historians have turned attention to the five women most often counted as his victims. Mary Ann "Polly" Nichols, aged 43, was a Londoner whose marriage to William Nichols had broken down; she moved between workhouses, domestic service and the streets. Annie Chapman spent part of her youth and married life in Windsor; her husband, John, was a gentleman's coachman, and a photograph of the couple from around 1869 is the only known image of any of the five in life. Drink and estrangement from her family later left her ill and alone.

Elizabeth Stride came from Gothenburg in Sweden and had run a coffee shop in London that failed. Catherine Eddowes had some schooling and travelled England with her partner, Thomas Conway, selling chapbooks and ballads; roughly 500 people attended her funeral. Mary Jane Kelly was 25. Much of her early life is known only from what she told her partner, the fish-market porter Joseph Barnett, and has only partly been confirmed.

The autumn of 1888

Nichols was found in the early hours of 31 August in Buck's Row, Whitechapel. Chapman was killed around 8 September in a yard behind 29 Hanbury Street. In the early morning of 30 September two women died within a short time of each other: Stride in Dutfield's Yard off Berner Street, and Eddowes in Mitre Square, shortly after being released from Bishopsgate police station, where she had spent a few hours in the cells after a bout of drinking. Kelly was killed in her rented room at Miller's Court on 9 November; she was the only one of the five to die indoors.

Historian Hallie Rubenhold, author of The Five, argues that the long-repeated label of "prostitutes" does not fit the evidence for all of them. She found no proof that Nichols, Chapman or Eddowes were engaged in sex work, and suggests that what the women really shared was poverty, failed marriages, alcohol dependency and homelessness.

Two police forces

The killings straddled a jurisdictional boundary. The square mile of the City of London has its own police force, entirely separate from the Metropolitan Police, London's main force. Because Mitre Square lies inside the City, the investigation into Eddowes's death was handled by the City of London Police, led at the time by Major Henry Smith as acting commissioner while the commissioner was on leave. Aaron Kosminski, a Polish-born barber who lived close to the murder scenes, was among the earliest suspects named by London police.

Never solved

The killer was never identified, and the murders remain officially unsolved. Over the following century the case attracted a vast literature and a long list of proposed culprits, none of whom has been proven responsible. Any name attached to the crimes, including Kosminski, remains a theory rather than a finding.

The shawl and the call for an inquest

The most publicised recent claim rests on a shawl that author Russell Edwards bought in 2007 and that is alleged to have been found beside Catherine Eddowes. Since 2014 he has argued that DNA extracted from it points to Kosminski. Biochemists Jari Louhelainen and David Miller later published their analysis in the Journal of Forensic Sciences. Critics have raised serious objections: no documentation securely links the shawl to Eddowes, and the account of a police officer picking it up at the scene is questioned; the fabric has been dated to different periods; the mitochondrial DNA used can exclude a person but cannot positively identify one; and some of the data were presented only as graphs. Reports also disagree on how far the work has been independently reviewed.

In January 2025, Edwards called for a new inquest, backed by Karen Miller, a descendant of Catherine Eddowes, while a relative of Kosminski said she was open to establishing what happened. A fresh inquest of this kind needs the approval of the Attorney General, and a similar earlier request had been refused for lack of sufficient new evidence. None of the sources consulted reports that a new inquest has been ordered.

Why it still matters

The Whitechapel murders exposed the extreme poverty of London's East End and the vulnerability of homeless women within it. Today, families and historians increasingly insist that the case be remembered through the lives of Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly rather than through the legend of an anonymous man.