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

As my book choice in the category of Biography for the 2021 NONFICTION READER CHALLENGE, I chose this book by Hallie Rubenhold. It won the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction 2019. Rubenhold is “a social historian whose expertise lies in revealing stories of previously unknown women and episodes in history” according to the book’s jacket.

What first attracted me to this book is that I have read a lot about Jack the Ripper and his crimes (being interested in true crime), but realized that I didn’t know much about his victims, other than their names. As Rubenhold points out, one of the few things everyone thinks they know about the victims is that they were prostitutes. However, Rubenhold’s research reveals that only one of the five worked as a prostitute; there is no evidence that the others were. They were all poor and often lived on the street, and were also women at a time when it was nearly impossible for a woman to survive alone.

There is nothing in the book about the crimes themselves or any speculation about the murderer – the focus is on these women and their stories. And in telling their stories, Rubenhold creates a vivid description of life in London at the end of the 19^th century, especially for those at the bottom of the social ladder. Her research is extensive and detailed.

 It was particularly interesting to learn about the extent of homelessness at that time and how many people slept on the streets – including hundreds in Trafalgar Square. In 1887, the efforts of police to clear that area in November resulted in a clash between over 40,000 protestors and 2,000 police that ended with more than 200 injured, two dead and 40 arrested. This event received more coverage in the newspapers at the time than had Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee earlier that summer. The Ripper victims were also known to sleep on the streets at times, which Rubenhold finds relevant to the murders. In the introduction she writes:

“Jack the Ripper killed prostitutes, or so it has always been believed, but there is no hard evidence to suggest that three of his five victims were prostitutes at all. As soon as the bodies were discovered in dark yards or streets, the police assumed that they were prostitutes and that they had been killed by a maniac who had lured them to these places for sex. There is and never was any proof of this either. On the contrary, it was ascertained in the course of the coroners’ inquests that Jack the Ripper never had sex with his victims. Additionally, in the case of each murder there were no signs of struggle and the killings appear to have taken place in complete silence. No one in the vicinity heard any screams. The autopsies concluded that all of the women were killed while in reclining positions. In at least three of the cases, the victims were known to sleep on the street and on the nights they were killed did not have money for a lodging house. In the final case, the victim was murdered while in her bed. However, the police were so committed to their theories about the killer’s choice of victims that they failed to conclude the obvious: that the Ripper targeted women while they slept.”

There is extensive background information about the period of time and the area of London in which the murders took place and the alternatives (or lack of them) for the lower classes and for women who had no home and no man to “protect” them. So the specific biography of each of the women is clearly placed in context.

In sum, I found this book to be both extremely interesting and well written. More than 130 years after Jack the Ripper’s first known murder, there is finally information about his victims themselves.

As a related item: About 2 weeks after reading this book, I watched the documentary The Ripper on Netflix about the serial killer known in the press as The Yorkshire Ripper. He was convicted of killing 13 women, and attempting to murder 7 others, over the period from 1975 to 1980 in Yorkshire, England.

In episode 3 (of 4 episodes), the journalist Joan Smith spoke about the incongruity of a case in which women are being killed by a man, all the people investigating it are men, and all the journalists writing about it are men. Therefore, the lives and situations of these women were not considered from their point of view. Smith got case files from the FBI and read the investigation reports about all the victims there were at the time (including survivors). She said the descriptions of the victims were misogynist – describing them as “good-time girls”, having “low morals,” and being “prostitutes.” However, there was no evidence or support that any of the women were prostitutes. They were low-income, often divorced or single mothers, living in a poor part of town. Since they went to pubs and drank beer – often in the company of men – they were labelled “prostitutes” by the investigating officers. And this put a focus on the case that skewed the investigation.

It also caused investigators to ignore input from three women who had been attacked by ‘The Ripper’ before his first murder. They were from better neighborhoods and clearly not prostitutes, so they did not fit the theory that the police had already developed – that the murderer’s motive was that he “hated prostitutes” – thereby giving women in the area the false impression that only prostitutes were in danger. I thought – good God! The police are reacting to women’s murders the same way in the late 1970s as they had in 1888!