"Jill the Ripper" - a Victorian Clothes Stealing Broad?

[esercito sconfitto]

excerpt from " Whitechapel Jack- the 1888 Autumn of Terror"


Detective Abberline was one of the first to put forward the idea that the Whitechapel Murderer might be a woman after the murder of Mary Jane Kelly. One of the witnesses interviewed following Kelly’s murder was adamant that she had seen the murder victim alive and seriously hung over hours before her body was discovered. Mrs. Caroline Maxwell insisted that she had seen her outside the Britannia public house wearing “a dark shirt, velvet bodice, and maroon-coloured shawl”, the last of which she’d seen Kelly wearing many times.

Jill . . . the Ripper?
This led Abberline to ponder aloud, “Do you think that it could be a case not of Jack the Ripper but Jill the Ripper?” The idea was that a midwife would be the only type of woman capable of killing in such a gory way. Rumors that Mary Kelly was pregnant at the time of her death fed into the theory, due to a midwife’s easy access to other women’s homes. No one would look twice at a midwife with blood on her clothing, and moreover she could slip away from her crime scenes unnoticed the way the Ripper was notorious for doing.


Plus, the theory gelled with Maxwell’s puzzling story about having seen Kelly after she was supposed to have been killed already. A midwife could simply have donned her victim’s clothes and strolled out of Miller’s Court to face down the day.



https://whitechapeljack.com/jill-the-ri ... d-midwife/