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

Employers preferred female servants from rural backgrounds, because it was thought they were uncorrupted by city life. Female servants were also often romanced or sexually exploited by their male employers or men in their households. This is what happened to Elisabeth, who took a lover—whose name has been lost to history—who paid for her lodgings. Elisabeth still registered herself in the census as a domestic servant, even though she was no longer working.

Like other European governments, including Britain in the 19th century, the Swedish government had cracked down on sex work and extramarital sex to combat the spread of venereal disease. The laws shared the assumption that sex workers were the cause, so they focused their regulations and punishment on female sex workers rather than their male clients. The laws also attacked women who had sex and became pregnant outside of marriage. By March of 1865, Elisabeth, who was pregnant, was caught in the dragnet. Under the law, she had to submit to regular medical inspections by the police. In police records, she was labelled as “Allmän Kvinna’ (Public Woman) number 97” (146). In the same records, Elisabeth continued listing her profession as a servant, not a sex worker.

Rubenhold argues that, because of Elisabeth’s religious upbringing, she “would have internalized the punishment as a justifiable one” (147). Her sense of self-hatred would have gotten worse after medical examinations revealed that she had syphilis. Likely she caught it from her unnamed lover. As a result, she was taken to the Kurhuset (literally “cure house”) (148). Treatments for syphilis at the time favored either ingesting mercury or ingesting and applying to the skin metals and chemicals. Both treatments were dangerous for patients. On April 21, Elisabeth gave birth to a stillborn girl. She did not write the father’s name on the birth certificate.

Ironically, because Sweden’s legal system treated women who had extramarital relationships no differently from sex workers, many women like Elisabeth were forced to become sex workers because their police record barred them from many forms of employment. By October of 1865, Elisabeth lived on Pilgatan, a street known as Gothenburg’s red-light district. Due to laws against street sex work, Elisabeth had to solicit her clients in a brothel or in a coffeehouse.

Under medical knowledge of the time, it was not fully understood how syphilis could spread. Antibiotics were also not yet available, and Swedish society was unsympathetic. Middle-class activists tried to “rescue” (151) sex workers, but it was widely believed they became sex workers because of poor moral choices, not economic desperation and social circumstances. It was also thought sex workers could only be reformed by reintroducing them to domestic labor associated with women.

One such middle-class activist, Maria Ingrid Wiesner, the wife of a concert musician, hired Elisabeth as a maid. Weisner removed Elisabeth’s name from the police “register of shame” (152). Meanwhile, Gothenburg was a growing, prosperous port city that drew a large number of English and Scottish immigrants. Elisabeth had decided to move to London, using money from either an inheritance or a final cash gift from her lover to pay for the voyage. She also got a job as a servant for a British family, whose name has been lost to history.

Elisabeth came to London in the winter of 1866. She worked for what must have been a wealthy family in the upper-class neighborhood of Hyde Park. However, Elisabeth lost her job at some point, possibly because she had an affair with her employer’s brother. Sometime around 1869, she started working for a widow named Elizabeth Bond, who ran a “genteel lodging house” (162) on Gower Street. While working there, Elisabeth met John Stride, a carpenter who migrated to London from Sheerness, a port town in the county of Kent.

The two married on March 7, 1869. Afterward, John Stride founded a coffeehouse in the East End in a partially rural and partially urbanized area called Poplar New Town. Their first coffeehouse failed, forcing John to briefly work as a carpenter again. All of Elisabeth and John’s children were miscarried or stillborn, probably because of Elisabeth’s syphilis. For whatever reason, when John’s rich father died, John and his brothers Daniel and William James, who also moved to London, were left out of the will completely. Without an inheritance to help him, John’s second coffeehouse failed.

On September 3, 1878, a pleasure ship, the Princess Alice, collided with a coal freighter, killing over 650 people (169). Since the Princess Alice had sailed from Sheerness to London, the Stride family likely knew someone affected by the tragedy. At about the same time, Elisabeth and John’s marriage had been failing since John’s second coffeehouse went out of business. By March of 1877, Elisabeth left John and became unhoused. Elisabeth made money by claiming John and two of her children had died in the Princess Alice shipwreck, and that she had been forced to leave her seven surviving children at an orphanage run by the Swedish Church.

In April 1881, Elisabeth and John reunited, but separated again after several months. After this, she relocated to Whitechapel, where she may have lived on a small income given to her by her husband. She made a “base” at a lodging house nicknamed “Flowrydean Street” (172). Elisabeth worked as a “charwoman” (195), so named because they were hired by Jewish residents to light fires and cook meals during the Saturday Sabbath. From this experience and possibly her past time in Gothenburg as well, she was proficient in Yiddish.

A tailor named Mary Malcolm once mistook Elisabeth for her own estranged sister, Elizabeth Watts. Elisabeth exploited the confusion for money. As a result of this, when she was interviewed at the coroner’s inquest following Elisabeth’s murder, Mary described Elisabeth using details from her sister’s life, such as the nickname “Long Liz.” After John’s death in October 1884 and the loss of her income from him, Elisabeth’s circumstances became worse. One time, she was arrested for soliciting and drunk and disorderly conduct, and sentenced to seven days’ hard labor (176).

After that, she began living with a dockworker named Michael Kidney. He had an alcohol dependency and acted abusively toward Elisabeth, but like most women in abusive relationships at the time, she would drop the charges. By the year 1888, Elisabeth had been arrested multiple times for obscene language and drunk and disorderly behavior. Rubenhold theorizes that this is because Elisabeth’s syphilis had advanced to the stage of neurosyphilis, or cerebral syphilis, when it begins to affect one’s mental health.

After a fight with Michael, Elisabeth had gone to her usual lodging house in September 1888. There is a mystery over her activities the night she was killed, September 29. She may have gone out to solicit, to find a new lover, or to just “socialize or to meet someone” (182). One likely eyewitness report from a Hungarian named Israel Schwarz claims to have seen a woman and a man arguing. He was scared off by another man who lit a pipe. Elisabeth’s body was found 15 minutes later. Among Elisabeth’s possessions was a Swedish hymnbook that perhaps reminded Elisabeth of her childhood.