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

Polly was the first of Jack the Ripper’s five “canonical” victims. She was born to a working-class family in London, with her father Edward Walker working as a blacksmith. At the age of 18, she married William Nichols, who worked for the local printers. She and William had five children: Edward, John, Percy, Alice, and Henry. After William started having an affair with a neighbor named Rosetta Vidler, Polly left her family. Unable or unwilling to stay with her father for unclear reasons, Polly moved to Lambeth Workhouse. With the help of the workhouse, she was able to get a job as a domestic servant. However, she left her employer, possibly because of her growing alcohol dependency.

From then on, she entered a cycle of poverty and alcohol dependency, alternating between sleeping on the streets and spending the nights in a series of lodging houses in the Whitechapel area. On the night of August 30, she was last seen drunk, trying to find enough money to stay at a lodging house. Her corpse was found the following morning at 3:40 am. She was 43 years old.

Born on September 25, 1840, Annie Chapman would become Jack the Ripper’s second “canonical” victim. Her father George was a soldier. The family began as poor, but George rose through the ranks, becoming a valet to high-ranking officers in the British army. However, following the deaths of several of his children from scarlet fever, George died by suicide. With money that probably came from George’s employer, Annie’s mother Ruth purchased a house in a middle-class neighborhood, where she rented rooms and offered laundry services.

Annie married her husband John Chapman in 1869. They had three children named Emily, Annie, and John Alfred. Through John’s job as a coachman for a wealthy industrialist, Annie and her family benefited from a comfortable lower-middle-class life. However, Annie developed an alcohol dependency, despite the efforts of her teetotaler mother and sisters to have her pledge to stop drinking.

Eventually, Annie and her husband separated, and she ended up in Whitechapel. She was last seen on the night of September 8, 1888, getting kicked out of a lodging house because she could not afford to pay. Another witness saw her talking to a man who asked, “Will you?” to which she replied, “Yes.” Her body was found by a Whitechapel resident early the next morning. She was 47 years old at the time of her death.

Elisabeth Stride was born in Sweden to a family of well-off farmers in a rural district outside the city of Gothenburg on November 27, 1843. She was working as a domestic servant in Gothenburg when she was impregnated by, and caught syphilis from, one of her employers or one of their relatives. As an unwed mother, Elisabeth was considered a sex worker under Swedish law, which then forced her to resort to sex work to survive. Social reformers arranged for her to take a new position as a domestic servant. From that position, she migrated to Britain in 1866, where she worked for affluent households.

In 1869, Elisabeth married a carpenter named John Stride. They tried to run a coffeehouse business twice, but both times it failed. They never had any surviving children, likely due to infertility from Elisabeth’s syphilis. Their financial troubles and Elisabeth’s alcohol dependency strained the marriage until Elisabeth left John. She moved in with a dockworker named Michael Kidney, who abused her, and worked odd jobs, including lighting fires on the Sabbath and cleaning for the local Jewish community (from whom she learned Yiddish, if she had not learned it already in Sweden).

On the night of September 30, it is believed she was murdered by Jack the Ripper (on the same night as Catherine Eddowes). She was 44 and is believed to have been Jack the Ripper’s third victim.

Kate was the daughter of a cook named Catherine and a tinsmith, George. She had been born in Wolverhampton in the Midlands on April 14, 1842. Her family moved to London for work after her father had been jailed for his involvement in union activity. After her parents died, she was sent to live with an aunt and uncle in Wolverhampton.

After being fired from an industrial labor job for stealing, Kate fell in love with a wandering Irish peddler, Thomas Conway, and travelled and worked with him. During this time, it is believed she wrote or co-wrote a ballad for a chapbook, A Copy of Verses on the Execution of Charles Christopher Robinson for the Murder of his Sweetheart, Harriet Segar of Ablow Street, about the execution of her cousin Charles Robinson for murder.

Eventually, the pair ended up in London with their children. The family became even more impoverished, with one of their infant children dying from malnutrition. Kate and Thomas began to fight, to the point their fights became violent. Kate, who had an alcohol dependency at this point, began a cycle of leaving and returning to Tom, until finally she began alternating between living on the streets and with a man named John Kelly in Whitechapel.

After spending part of the summer picking hops, Kate and John went to seek separate lodgings on the night of September 30, 1888. Kate was arrested for drunk and disorderly conduct and released at one o’clock in the morning. She was killed by Jack the Ripper sometime shortly thereafter, on the same night as Elisabeth Stride. She was 46 years old.

While at least some key details are known about the backgrounds of the five women killed by Jack the Ripper, the background of Mary Jane Kelly is more mysterious. She told her romantic partner Joseph Barnett that she was from Ireland, moved to Wales with her father when he took a job as a factory foreman, and had been lured into sex work by a cousin. However, she also told the story other times with different key details, and no historical documentation has been found verifying her account of her early life. All that is known for certain is that she worked as a high-end sex worker in the posh neighborhoods of London’s West End. After Mary Jane nearly became the victim of sex trafficking in France, she was forced to give up life in the West End to avoid retaliation from sex traffickers.

Mary Jane continued working as a sex worker and developed an alcohol dependency. Eventually, she moved in with Joseph Barnett, who was a fish porter. After Joseph lost his job, Mary Jane returned to sex work and accepted money from her former lovers. Once the Jack the Ripper murders became notorious, she began letting unhoused women she knew stay in her single-room residence. Due to these circumstances, Joseph left Mary, although he continued to live nearby. She was last heard by a neighbor late at night, singing the popular song, “A Violet Plucked from My Mother’s Grave When a Boy.” On November 9, 1888, when Mary Jane was around the age of 25, she was murdered in her room. She was the youngest and last “canonical” victim of Jack the Ripper, and the only one who was killed in her own home.