The Legend of Jack the Ripper

Ch8: Double the drizzle!

On Sunday 30th September, the body of another prostitute, called Elizabeth Stride was discovered at about 1 am in Dutfield's Yard, inside the gateway of 40 Berner Street, Whitechapel. In this case, however, the body was not mutilated, it seemed as if the killer might have been interrupted, perhaps by Louis Diemschutz who found the body and later gave a full account of the events leading up to and in the immediate aftermath of his discovery of Elizabeth Stride's body.

A resident of 28 Berner Street. Following the murder of Elizabeth Stride, stated to the press:

Yes; I was one of those who first saw the murdered woman. It was about a quarter to one o'clock, I should think when I heard a policeman's whistleblowing and came down to see what was the matter. In the gateway, two or three people had collected, and when I got there I saw a short, dark young woman lying on the ground with a gash between four and five inches long in her throat. I should say she was from 25 to 28 years of age. Her head was towards the north wall, against which she was lying. She had a black dress on, with a bunch of flowers pinned on the breast. In her hand, there was a little piece of paper containing five or six cachuses. The body was found by a man whose name I do not know - a man who goes out with a pony and barrow, and lives up the archway, where he was going, I believe, to put up his barrow on coming home from the market. He thought it was his wife at first, but when he found her safe at home he got a candle and found this woman. He never touched it till the doctors had been sent for.

The little gate is always open, or, at all events, always unfastened. There are some stables up there - Messrs. Duncan, Woollatt, and Co.'s, I believe and there is a place to which a lot of girls take home sacks which they have been engaged in making. None of them would be there, though, after about one on Saturday afternoon. None of us recognised the woman, and I do not think she belonged to this neighbourhood. She was dressed very respectably. There seemed to be no wounds on the body.

Although initially, this letter was considered to be hoax letters the discovery of the body of Catherine Eddowes in Mitre Square with her missing ear gave another opinion to the author's promise within the letter to "clip the lady's ears off"

Not much is known about her, the police were only able to take information from testimonies of the general public who knew her and public records but none of the information was ever verified. Stride was born as Elisabeth Gustafsdotter on 27th November 1843 in Stora Tumlehed, a rural village within the parish of Torslanda, west of Gothenburg, Sweden. She was the second of four children born to Swedish farmer, Gustaf Ericsson, and his wife Beata Carlsdotter. As a child, Gustafsdotter lived on this village farm. All four children were raised in the Lutheran faith, and all were required to perform numerous chores on the farm. In February 1866, Gustafsdotter moved from Gothenburg to London. She told her friends two different reasons for this, one of them was to work as the domestic servant of "a gentleman" who lived near Hyde Park; And the other one is that she had visited relatives in London, but living in such poor condition back at home made her choose to remain in England. She likely funded the trip with the 65 krona she inherited after the death of her mother in August 1864, which she had received in late 1865. Upon her arrival in London, Gusdafsdotter learned to speak both English and Yiddish, in addition to her native Swedish. She is also known to have briefly dated a policeman in the late 1860s.

Elizabeth married John Stride on March 7, 1869, at the age of 26. They moved to East India Dock road. The two operated a coffee shop together on Poplar, moving from their first location to another one on the same street. In 1875, the business was taken over by a man named John Dale. Little is known about the Strides' marriage aside from their co-ownership of the coffee shop. Kidney said that Elizabeth claimed to have given birth to nine children in her life, but there are no surviving records of the children born from the Strides' marriage.