Elizabeth Stride was the third of the ‘canonical five’ victims of Jack the Ripper. She was murdered in the early hours of 30th September 1888. Her death was the first on the night of what is known in the study of Jack the Ripper as ‘the double event’ – the only time when more than one murder ascribed to Jack the Ripper took place on a single night. The bodies of Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes were found only half a mile apart within the space of an hour.
Public interest and concern around the Whitechapel murders had been building in the month since the murder of Mary Ann Nichols on the last day of August. With the Double Event bringing the count of murders up, doubling that number in a single night, the feeling became closer to panic among many Londoners and a frenzy in the press. This was the beginning of the ‘Autumn of Terror’, when many residents of the East End of London were scared to walk the streets alone.
As well as being the first victim on the night of the Double Event, Elizabeth Stride’s case is of particular interest to historians and researchers for other reasons. Her murder was the only one where the Ripper was interrupted in his gruesome post-mortem work, leaving her body unmutilated. Police investigations at the time also collected a large body of witnesses who saw Stride on the evening of her murder, allowing us to reconstruct her last hours with some accuracy. These reports also provide multiple descriptions of men seen with Elizabeth Stride who could be Jack the Ripper.
Like all the victims of the Whitechapel Murders, there is more to the story of Elizabeth Stride than Jack the Ripper, and more to her life than the way it ended.
Elizabeth Stride was born Elisabeth Gustafsdotter in Sweden in the village of Stora Tumlehed near Gothenburg in 1843. She was one of four children, born into a farming family. In 1860, aged 16, Gustafsdotter moved to Gothenburg to look for work as a domestic servant. Records show that she moved between positions as a servant several times over the next few years and that in March 1865, she was arrested for prostitution. This suggests that she performed sex work to earn money when she was unable to find employment as a servant.
She moved to London in early 1866. Like many immigrants, Gustafsdotter settled in the East End of London. She learned to speak English and also Yiddish – a language commonly spoken in the East End – and attended the Swedish Church.
In March 1869, Elisabeth Gustafsdotter married John Stride, a ship’s carpenter, and took the name Elizabeth Stride. The couple earned a living running a coffee shop in Poplar as well as from John’s carpentry trade. Stride would later tell others that by 1874, the marriage had deteriorated due to financial hardship. Records suggest that the couple separated and reunited several times, but by the end of 1881, Stride was recorded as being admitted to the infirmary of the Whitechapel workhouse with no permanent address. She lived in several lodging houses on the infamous Flower and Dean Street in Whitechapel (a rookery held to be ‘the worst street in London’) during 1882.
John Stride died in October 1884. From after her husband’s death until her own, Stride had a tumultuous on/off relationship with a dock labourer called Michael Kidney. She spent alternate periods living in lodging houses and with Kidney. In April 1887, she filed an assault charge against Kidney, but she did not press the case in court. and the charge was dropped. Stride continued to associate with Kidney after this incident.
Throughout this period, Stride was known to be occasionally engaged in prostitution in Whitechapel, to supplement a more regular income from taking on sewing and housecleaning jobs.
She had the nickname ‘Long Liz’. At 5ft 5in, Stride was not especially tall by the standards of women in Whitechapel in the 1880s, so the nickname was either a pun on her surname or ironic. Stride appeared before the local magistrate courts eight times in these years for public intoxication and using obscene language. Those who knew her said she was generally calm and well-mannered but would drink to excess when she could afford it.
Three days before her murder, on September 26th, Elizabeth Stride had another argument with Michael Kidney and left him once again. She paid for lodgings at 32 Flower and Dean Street and earned money with cleaning duties both at her lodgings and nearby houses.
The 29th September, 1888 was a Saturday. Elizabeth Stride spent the day cleaning rooms in her lodging house. She borrowed a brush from another resident to smarten up her clothes (a black jacket and skirt and a black bonnet) before going out for the evening with the lodgings’ housekeeper to the Queen’s Head pub. They separated there.
Stride was next seen at about 11pm near Berner Street, in the company of a short man with a dark moustache, wearing a morning suit and bowler hat. Around 45 minutes later, she was seen on Berner Street itself with a ‘decently dressed’ man wearing a peaked cap, black coat and dark trousers. This witness saw Stride and the man repeatedly kissing, and heard the man say to her "You would say anything but your prayers."
At 12.35am on the morning of 30th September, police constable William Smith saw Stride on Berner Street opposite the International Working Men's Educational Club. She was talking to a man wearing a hard felt hat. A few minutes later, a dockworker passed along the street and saw a woman he felt matched Stride’s description standing with her back against a wall, speaking with a man in a long black coat. As he passed, he heard the woman say, “No. Not tonight. Some other night.”
The most important witness account took place at almost the same time. At 12.45am, Israel Schwartz walked onto Berner Street and saw a man speaking to a woman in the entrance of Dutfield’s Yard. He then saw that man throw the woman to the ground. To avoid the incident, Schwartz crossed to the other side of the road, where he saw another man standing and smoking a pipe. The attacker turned in their direction and shouted ‘Lipski!’. The pipe-smoker then began following Schwartz, prompting him to run away from the scene.
Schwartz described the man attacking the woman as around 5ft 5in tall, with a fair complexion, dark hair and a small brown moustache. He was wearing a dark jacket and trousers, and a black peaked cap. The second man was described as taller (5ft 11in), with light brown hair and a moustache, wearing a dark overcoat and a hard felt hat.
‘Lipski’ was believed by the police to have been an antisemitic slur used in Whitechapel, referencing Israel Lipski – a Jewish man convicted of a murder in a house in Batty Street the previous year. Batty Street ran parallel to Berner Street. The possible meanings of this word, and suggestions of other words that Schwartz may have misheard or misunderstood, have been much-debated ever since.
Only ten minutes or so after Stride was seen on Berner Street, Louis Diemschutz drove his horse-drawn cart into Dutfield’s Yard, which led directly off the Street alongside the International Working Men's Educational Club (Diemschutz was the steward of the establishment). The Yard was unlit and almost entirely dark, but Diemschutz’s horse shied away from a ‘bundle’ on the ground. Diemschutz had to light a match to see exactly what it was – it was Stride’s prone body.
Diemschutz’s immediately headed into the Club building to see that his wife was safe. He raised the alarm and those in the building rushed into the streets to bring help.
On closer inspection, Stride had a single knife wound on her neck, from which blood was still flowing. Her silk scarf had been pulled tight to the knot around her neck. Her hands were cold to the touch, but her body was still warm. A packet of cachous (throat lozenges) was found still clasped in her left hand, implying that she met her end swiftly and without a struggle.
How did Jack the Ripper kill Elizabeth Stride? The evidence suggests that the method of murder follows the same pattern as Annie Chapman and Catherine Eddowes – Stride had been pulled to the ground by her scarf, subdued and partially asphyxiated and then a single swift cut with a knife had been made across her neck. Elizabeth Stride’s cause of death was this wound, partially cutting her carotid artery, which would have caused swift (but not instant) unconsciousness and death.
Unlike all the other Jack the Ripper victims, the fatal wound was the only one inflicted on her. She did not suffer the post-mortem ‘ripping’ that gave the unknown murderer his name and made his crimes so horrific.
With Elizabeth Stride’s body found still warm and with blood flowing from the wound in her neck, it is most likely that the murderer was interrupted in his gruesome work by the arrival of Louis Diemschutz, forcing him to abandon the scene of his crime right after inflicting the fatal wound. Diemschutz drove into Dutfield’s Yard at 1am. Stride had been seen on Berner Street just outside the Yard ten minutes earlier, and between then and Diemschutz’s discovery, several people had entered and left the International Working Men's Educational Club without seeing anything amiss.
The murder most likely happened only minutes, or even seconds, before Diemschutz came on the scene. It is possible that the murderer was actually still in the Yard when Diemschutz stopped and discovered Stride’s body – recall that it was so dark that he had to strike a match to see what was on the ground just beneath his cart. Another person could have been hidden in the shadows on the other side of the Yard. Since Diemschutz’s first action was to head into the Club building, this would have provided the perfect time for Jack the Ripper to slip away unnoticed.
But this was only the first act of the Double Event. Even as confusion and shock were gripping Berner Street, just over half a mile away, another awful discovery was being made. Before the night was over, another victim would be found.
How old was Elizabeth Stride when she died? She was 44 years old. Her life had been almost relentlessly difficult, from a childhood of tough labour on the family farm in Sweden to a collapsed and abusive marriage in a foreign land to a breadline existence in the East End of London. Stride’s life story is much more than the brief seconds in the dark of Dutfield’s Yard that wrote her name into the history books.
It’s a powerful insight into the situation of many women in the 19th century – forced to live in rough lodging houses on dangerous streets, vulnerable to all kinds of crime and assault, even without the added risks brought by engaging in sex work to bring in some extra pennies.
With one of our daily tours, you can walk the streets of Whitechapel yourself. We can take you to the present-day location of Berner Street and Dutfield’s Yard, while our expert guides tell you the full story and answer your questions. We can even bring the past to life with our RipperVision technology. For further information or with questions about our tours, please do contact us.
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