Liz Stride - Was the Third Victim of Jack the Ripper.
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Liz Stride was the third woman believed to be a victim of Jack the Ripper.
At one o’clock on the morning of Sunday, September 30th, Louis Diemschutz turned his pony and cart into Berner Street. All the gaslights had failed, so it was pitch dark.
No problem, the little pony knew its way. It clip-clopped down the cobbled street through the wind and the rain. Then turned into an entrance which led to a little yard. The pony shied. Louis couldn’t make it go any further.
It was pitch dark, so he climbed down and, using his whip, felt his way forward. His whip touched something in the entranceway - he bent down and struck a match. Almost immediately, the wind and rain blew it out. But in the brief flare of light, he saw a woman.
He couldn’t make out any details, so he went indoors to fetch a light. He discovered the woman was dead, and her throat had been cut wide open.
Louis ran to alert the police who attended within minutes.
The victim was born on the 27th of November 1843 and christened Elisabeth Gustafsdotter. She was raised in Torslanda on the west coast of Sweden.
Like Polly and Annie, her father had skilled work. He was a farmer and ensured that his daughter went to school. Like Polly and Annie, she could read and write. And on Sundays she attended the local Lutheran church.
Like many girls with rural backgrounds, Elisabeth moved to the nearest large town as a teenager and found work as a domestic servant. In her case, the town was the port of Gothenburg.
In March 1865, the Gothenburg police became aware that Elisabeth had become guilty of ‘lecherous living’. She was six months pregnant. This meant she had to attend the police clinic, strip herself naked, and join a line of other naked women waiting to be examined.
She never revealed who the father was.
Unfortunately, this young woman wasn’t only pregnant. The regular inspections revealed that by April, she was showing all the signs of syphilis.
She was kept in Gothenburg’s venereal disease hospital, where she was treated. After 17 days of treatment, she went into premature labour, and her baby daughter was stillborn.
Quite a lot for any young person to deal with.
The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper by Halle Rubenhold
in her excellent book The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper Halle Rubenhold writes about Elizabeth with suitable sympathy.
“The trauma of Elizabeth’s experience between the end of March when her name was placed on ‘the register of shame’ and the 13th of May when she was discharged from the Kurhuset (Gothenburg’s venereal disease hospital) cannot be underestimated. To have been publicly denounced as a whore, to have suffered the indignity of police examinations, to have discovered that she carried the potentially deadly and disfiguring disease, to have been incarcerated and subjected to two excruciating medical procedures, to have suffered a miscarriage in a hostile environment and then to have been released onto the street with no relations to whom she could turn must surely have scarred her.”
Indeed, it must have scarred her. And things didn’t get better because once on the ‘register of shame’, respectable work was no longer available. Elisabeth became a prostitute in Gothenburg.
Although the legal systems across Europe lacked sympathy for women who turned to prostitution, there were in society those who believed these ‘fallen women’ should be given a second chance.
A German musician, a member of the Gothenburg Orchestra and his wife offered Elisabeth a place in their home to work as a maid.
Through this couple Elisabeth found employment with a wealthy British family who were returning to London.
Nine months after the birth and death of her daughter, 22-year-old Elisabeth Gustafsdotter left Sweden. On an icy February morning in 1866, she boarded a ship in the port of Gothenburg and sailed to the port of London.
By early 1869, Elisabeth was working as a maid in a respectable lodging-house close to Tottenham Court Road in Gower Street. It was soon after working there that she met John Stride.
John Stride was a skilled worker, a carpenter. At 47, he was nearly twice the age of the pretty Swedish maid. On March 7, 1869, the couple were married at St Giles-in-the-Fields on Denmark Street, and Elisabeth Gustafsdotter became Liz Stride.
The couple moved to Poplar in the East End. Within months the couple had set up in business. They opened a coffee shop.
The business didn’t thrive, so in 1871, they moved the business to where they hoped to find less completion. It seems it wasn’t a roaring success because John returned to work as a carpenter.
By the autumn of 1873, they had to sell the lease on their second coffee shop. The failure of these businesses drained all their savings and left them in debt. The relationship began to falter.
At the end of 1881, it was over, and like Polly Nichols and Annie Chapman, the end of the relationship was followed by a move to Whitechapel.
After a year or so, she settled on a doss house at number 32 Flower and Dean Street.
Flower and Dean Street has an attractive-sounding name derived from the two bricklayers, John Flower and Gowan Dean, who built its houses in the late 17th century.
However, Flower and Dean Street did not live up to its name. It competed with Dorset Street for the title of ‘the worst street in London’.
The last six years of her life were mostly spent living in her doss house home on ‘Flowery Dean Street’ as it was known locally.
Those six years were spent ducking and diving and just desperately trying to survive.
She had learned to speak English and spoke it so well that some who knew her in Whitechapel believed her to be English.
Her ability to learn a language extended to Yiddish. There was a Jewish population in Gothenburg, so it’s possible that she picked up a little of the language there.
It would have improved in Whitechapel, which had more than 100,000 Jews mainly centred around Brick Lane. They were recent refugees from Eastern Europe, many of whom would have little or no English.
Being able to communicate with some Yiddish would have helped Liz find work among the Jewish population.
This would have meant char work, casual employment as a domestic servant. Work that was readily available on the Jewish Sabbath from sunset on Friday to sunset on Saturday.
Beginning around 1885 Liz began living with a dock worker called Michael Kidney.
They rented rooms on Devonshire Street, which ran south of Commercial Road. Later, they moved to Fashion Street, which ran between Commercial Street and Brick Lane.
They both enjoyed drinking, and they both could become angry and violent when they’d had a drink. She reported Kidney’s brutality to the police in June 1887 but then withdrew the charge.
This was a common pattern among couples.
The People of the Abyss by Jack London
“The men are economically dependent on their masters, and the women are economically dependent on the men. The result is, the woman gets the beating that the man should give his master, and she can do nothing. There are the kiddies, and he's the breadwinner, and she dare not send him to jail and leave herself and children to starve.”
Michael Kidney said that she left him twice during the three years they were together, but she always came back to him.
The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper Halle Rubenhold
“The couples relationship was a complicated one, which was likely to have unravelled not only on account of Elisabeth’s drinking and Kidney’s violence, but also due to infidelity. By the end of their time together, Kidney was suffering from syphilis for which he received treatment at the Whitechapel Infirmary in 1889. He would not have contracted this from Elisabeth, who was no longer contagious by the time she was living with him.”
This didn’t mean that syphilis wasn’t still taking a toll on Liz.
By 1886, the disease would have moved into its third stage when it would have been attacking her brain.
Hallucinations and erratic behaviour are typical symptoms, and they would have supercharged the chaos created by the alcohol that she drank.
Between 1886 and 1888, she was arrested several times for being drunk and disorderly.
Towards the end of September, she turned up again at the doss house at 32 Flower and Dean Street. One of the regulars there who had known Liz on and off for five or six years said that Liz and Michael Kidney had had words.
On September 29th, she was paid sixpence for cleaning the doss house, and the deputy keeper said she then went to the Queens Head pub on Commercial Street.
The narrow entrance to Dutfield's Yard
After that there is no solid evidence that tells us what she did from that point until she ended up lying in the dark and narrow entrance to a small yard that led off Berner Street. Like Polly Nicholls and Annie Chapman - Liz Stride was a woman in her forties. Like them she’d been married. Like them she’d separated from her husband and ended up living precariously in Whitechapel and Spitalfields. Like them she had had her throat cut. But unlike them she had not had her stomach ripped open.
Some researchers claim this was because Liz Stride wasn’t a victim of Jack the Ripper. They believe she was killed by someone else, possibly her boyfriend, Michael Kidney.
Others say that she hadn’t had her stomach ripped open because Jack the Ripper was interrupted by the man who discovered the body.
They believe that Liz Stride was the third victim of Jack the Ripper and the first of two victims that he killed in less than an hour in what has become known as the ‘Double Event’ of September 30th, 1888.
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