Jack the Stripper: The Mysterious Killer Behind the Hammersmith Murders

Here’s a sanitized version of the provided transcript:

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Know that the title is not a typo. We are not talking about the infamous Ripper who preyed on the working girls of Whitechapel in Victorian London. We’ve already covered that in a previous video, so if you want to learn about him, maybe give that video a watch instead. Today, we’re discussing a lesser-known killer responsible for the so-called Hammersmith nude murders of the 1960s. Like the Ripper, he targeted prostitutes, but he had a tendency to remove their clothing during the killings. With these two details, his name became immediately obvious to every self-respecting tabloid journalist in the country. London was being terrorized by Jack the Stripper.

The story begins on the morning of June 17, 1959, on the banks of the River Thames in the Chiswick district of West London. A park by the river called Duke’s Meadows had a reputation for being a lover’s lane where young couples would retreat for some private time. It was also a popular spot for prostitution, earning the park a much more vulgar nickname. Policemen who patrolled that area were used to seeing a lot of unusual stuff, but even they were taken aback by what they discovered that morning: the body of a young woman dumped near the towpath by the river. She was left propped up against a tree with her dress torn open and strangulation marks on her throat. Her shoes and underwear were missing.

After circulating a photograph of the victim, police soon identified her as 21-year-old Elizabeth Figg. Although she had been previously arrested under the name Ann Phillips, her story was a sad but familiar one. After her mother kicked her out of the house, she started hanging out with the wrong people and soon turned to prostitution to make ends meet. Police opened an investigation but couldn’t find much to go on, as the killer left no clues behind. The landlord of a nearby pub claimed that he and his wife saw a car parked in the area, but this was not out of the ordinary for Duke’s Meadows. He also mentioned that the car turned off its headlights shortly after midnight and that he heard a woman scream but had no desire to explore any further.

Initially, authorities were hopeful that they might have an easy arrest on their hands. Figg’s boyfriend at the time was a man named Fenton Ward, who was also her pimp and had a violent streak. However, they ultimately dismissed him as a suspect. Eventually, police concluded that Elizabeth Figg was killed by one of her clients, most likely in his own car, but they never made any more progress than that, as they didn’t consider the death of a sex worker to be a priority. Because nobody yet knew this was probably the start of a serial killing spree, the murder of Elizabeth Figg soon faded from memory until the killer struck again.

Even today, the exact number of victims attributed to Jack the Stripper is in doubt, but it usually ranges between six and eight. Some consider that Elizabeth Figg may have been murdered by a different person because there was a long pause between her death and the others. Over four years passed until police had another body on their hands. It was November 8, 1963, when workers at a refuse disposal site stumbled upon the corpse of a young woman buried in a shallow grave. The dump site was located on the other side of the River Thames, about a mile away from the previous crime scene, also near the towpath. This time, the body was completely naked except for a single stocking. A post-mortem examination showed that the woman had strangulation marks and some missing teeth. However, the medical examiner could not definitively say that she had been strangled because the remains were too decomposed.

The new victim was soon identified as 22-year-old Gwyneth Reese from South Wales. Her story was very familiar to that of Elizabeth Figg. She didn’t get along with her family, so she left her small-town life behind and moved to London with naive hopes of making it big in the city. Unfortunately, she didn’t succeed and soon started working as a prostitute. Like in the case of Elizabeth Figg, police initially suspected Reese’s pimp, known to be a violent man. However, authorities could not connect him to the crime. They later considered the possibility that Reese had died during a botched abortion, as she had become pregnant that summer. Abortions were illegal at the time, so women like Gwyneth had no choice but to turn to shady amateurs for help.

If this was the real cause of death, questions remained: why strangle her and then dump her naked body in a shallow grave where she was certain to be discovered? At the time, nobody connected the deaths of the two women, and even today, some do not consider either Figg or Reese to be victims of Jack the Stripper. This is presumably because there were many more similarities between the six murders that followed, all occurring within a much shorter timeframe of almost exactly one year.

In the minds of many, the killing spree of Jack the Stripper started on February 2, 1964, with the discovery of Hannah Taylford. Her body was found by rowers on the Thames, located on the shore next to Hammersmith Bridge. The 30-year-old woman had been in the water for several days, having last been seen on January 24. Like the previous victims, Taylford was found completely naked except for some rolled-down stockings. She also had teeth missing, and her underwear had been forced down her throat. However, there was a significant difference between her and the other women. Although Taylford had strangulation marks on her neck, a post-mortem examination revealed that she died by drowning, suggesting that she may have been choked unconscious and then thrown into the river while still alive.

Predictably, her tale was just as sad and tragic as the previous victims. Born in Lancashire into a mining family, Hannah Taylford was considered a problem child who got expelled from several schools. She eventually ran away from home as a teenager and made her way to London, where she quickly amassed convictions for theft and soliciting. At one point, it was reported that she even tried selling her unborn baby through classified ads. There have been quite a few sensational stories about Hannah Taylford, and while it is hard to say which ones are true, it would certainly seem that she wasn’t your average sex worker. She told friends that on several occasions, she had been paid to attend wild parties at lavish mansions belonging to London’s upper classes.

In one notable instance, Taylford said that she was picked up by limousine and brought to a house where she had sex with a man dressed in a gorilla costume while a crowd of onlookers surrounded them and cheered. Given these stories, police investigated the possibility that Hannah Taylford was silenced because she knew too much about the powerful elite of England. It was an alluring idea, but it didn’t go anywhere, and shockingly enough, not even the press pounced on the opportunity. It seemed that more than the police, they were willing to admit that there might be a maniac preying on sex workers in Hammersmith.

The next victim was found just two months later, on April 8, again on the foreshore of the Thames, just a few hundred yards away from where Hannah Taylford was discovered. She was also naked and had ligature marks on her neck, although it appeared that the actual cause of death was drowning. She was 26 years old and was either pregnant at the time of her death or had recently visited an illicit abortionist. Her name was Irene Lockwood, and her story was unsurprisingly similar to the other women. She came to London when she was younger and resorted to prostitution as a means of making a living.

However, police heard rumors that Lockwood was often in the habit of scamming her clients, sometimes by having male friends rob them and other times by taking photographs and blackmailing them. This would have certainly increased the pool of suspects who may have wanted her dead. But something unexpected happened later that same month. On April 27, a 57-year-old man named Kenneth Archibald entered Nottingham police station and confessed to killing Irene Lockwood. Archibald worked as a caretaker at a tennis club with a shady reputation for staging after-hours parties full of booze, drugs, and sex. Prostitutes like Irene Lockwood were known to frequent such gatherings looking for clients.

At first, it seemed like they would be able to put this case to rest. Besides his confession, Archibald also knew to take investigators to the pub where Lockwood had last been seen alive and showed them the place where he strangled her, ostensibly due to a fight over money. He then stripped her naked, threw her in the river, and burnt her clothes at home. Unsurprisingly, Kenneth Archibald was arrested and put in jail awaiting trial. However, while police were building their case against him, they were unable to find any other evidence connecting him to the crime or rather crimes, as by this point, they were fairly convinced that at least two of the murders had been committed by the same person.

They couldn’t do it; all they had was Archibald’s own statement. By the time his trial came around in June, he retracted his confession, saying that he was depressed and drunk when he made it. This was just as well, as investigators were never truly convinced that the tiny elderly caretaker was the culprit, so Archibald was acquitted, and the hunt for the killer continued.

Even before Kenneth Archibald came forward, police already had another murder on their hands. Just two weeks after the death of Irene Lockwood, the body of 22-year-old Helen Bartholomew was found in an alley in Brentford. Although she had not been dumped near the Thames like the other victims, police had little doubt that she had been killed by the same person, as the circumstances were almost identical. Bartholomew was a prostitute, found naked with ligature marks on her neck, and she had missing teeth and bruises on her face, suggesting that she had been hit.

As with Irene Lockwood, there was the possibility that Bartholomew might have made some enemies, as she had previously served time for aggravated burglary after luring a client to a secluded area and having him robbed by her friends. If she continued committing such acts after moving to London, it wouldn’t have been out of the question that she upset the wrong person. However, police thought this unlikely. At this point, a clear pattern emerged, and there was little doubt in their minds that a serial killer was stalking the streets of London.

Strangely enough, the fact that Bartholomew was dumped in an alleyway ended up being the most significant part of her murder. Because her body hadn’t been found in the water, police had their first solid lead in the case: tiny specks of paint were left on her skin. A bit of research revealed that this was the kind of paint used in automatic spray painting of cars and other metalwork, which was done in special storage containers. Jack the Stripper could have been a painter or at least had access to such a storage container where he could keep bodies.

After the death of Helen Bartholomew, London police stepped up their efforts. The investigation was taken over by the commander of Scotland Yard’s Criminal Investigation Department, George Hatharill. He made an unusual move for that time and put out a public warning to the city’s prostitutes, alerting them that there was a madman among them and pleading with them to come forward with any leads under the promise of absolute secrecy. Meanwhile, patrolmen were instructed to write down the license plates of all the cars they encountered in the area after dark, while female officers went undercover as prostitutes in the hopes of running into the killer.

Consequently, dozens of women came forward with information, but this proved to be in vain as Jack the Stripper struck again in July. The victim was 30-year-old Mary Fleming from Scotland, whose naked body was found in a quiet residential area in Chiswick on the morning of July 14. This time, there were clear signs of a struggle. Mary Fleming put up a fight and had bruises on her body from being punched repeatedly. Once again, flecks of paint were found on her skin.

However, the element that attracted investigators’ attention was the place where the body was dumped. Like with Helen Bartholomew, the killer avoided his usual dumping grounds near the Thames, but there was a significant difference between the two locations. Bartholomew’s body was left in a dark, secluded alleyway, most likely to avoid the increased police scrutiny around the Thames. Mary Fleming, on the other hand, was dumped in a very busy public place with a heavy police presence, which the authorities saw as a taunt at their expense. Several neighbors heard a car reversing down the street shortly before Fleming’s body was found. Unfortunately, because it was still very early in the morning, none of them got up to look.

Once again, Jack the Stripper had eluded capture, but there was a feeling that he was getting more arrogant. It was more likely that he would make a mistake that could ultimately lead to his arrest. By this point, Jack the Stripper was a popular subject in the British media. Sex workers began taking whatever precautions they could; some carried knives with them, while others worked in pairs and made sure to look out for each other’s clients. This still proved to be useless because a few months later, the killer struck again.

On the night of October 23, 21-year-old Scottish native Francis Brown and her friend Kim Taylor went to a pub in Notting Hill to have a drink before heading out for work. Both women were prostitutes, and they even teased each other that they would become the Stripper’s next victim. For Francis Brown, who sometimes went by Margaret McGowan, this terrifying scenario became a reality. She disappeared that night and went missing for over a month before her body was found on November 25, dumped in an alley in Kensington. All the hallmarks of Jack the Stripper were present: the body was naked, the woman had been strangled, and there were paint flecks on her skin.

Again, it was tragic that another person had to die, but police were confident that the killer finally made that fatal mistake they were waiting for. He left a witness. Kim Taylor, the friend of the last victim, saw the client that Francis Brown left with on the night of her disappearance. She recognized his car as being either a Ford Zephyr or a Ford Zodiac, but more importantly, she saw his face. Taylor sat down with an identikit and produced a sketch for the police. With these two new major clues, authorities believed that identifying the killer was only a matter of time. Yet the year ended with no suspects.

1965 started with a new development, but it wasn’t the kind of development the police were hoping for. It was a new body. Jack the Stripper’s last known victim was a 28-year-old Irish immigrant named Bridget O’Hara, known as Bridgey. She went missing on January 11 and was found over a month later on February 16, dumped behind a storage shed in Acton, pretty close to where Mary Fleming had been found. Once again, the common elements were there: the body was naked, the cause of death was strangulation, the victim had some missing teeth, and there were traces of paint on the skin.

There was a promising new lead, though. After finding so many victims with those strange flecks of paint on them, police were finally able to match them to some paint on the bottom of a transformer located at the back of a building on the Heron Trading Estate. Opposite that building was a paint spray shop, which confirmed some of their earlier suspicions. This meant that the killer used that building to store some of his victims. But here’s the strange part: the reason the police found it was that Jack the Stripper left the body of O’Hara just a few dozen yards from the transformer, leading investigators straight to his hideout. Why would he do that? Did he just get lazy, or perhaps deep down did he want to get caught? Unlikely. Was he planning on moving the body later, or was this another taunt to the police, revealing the killer’s uncontrollable arrogance?

While the investigation was ongoing, police talked to the press, claiming they had a list of suspects that was getting shorter by the day. Eventually, they said they whittled it down to three possible candidates. This wasn’t true, but investigators hoped it would make the killer panic. Was this what happened with O’Hara? Was this why there were no more murders from then on? Did he simply leave everything behind and run away? Unfortunately, we can’t answer any of those questions because, as you probably already knew, Jack the Stripper was never identified. Like his Victorian namesake, he became a mysterious and elusive part of London’s criminal history.

That being said, there were a few interesting suspects worth mentioning. The head detective in charge of the case, John DeRose, maintained that he knew the identity of Jack the Stripper. He first dropped this little bombshell in an interview years after the last murder and later repeated it in his memoirs. According to him, the police were getting ready to make an arrest, so the killer committed suicide after the death of Bridget O’Hara. DeRose then refused to name the culprit for the sake of his living relatives and referred to him simply as “Big John.”

Crime author Brian McConnell dug a little deeper and presented more information about the real Jack in his book. He too only named him as “Big John,” but described him as a man in his 40s who had a rough upbringing in Scotland, full of abuse and beatings. Outwardly, he presented himself as a respectable family man with a wife and kids, but he had a habit of using prostitutes as an outlet for his violent tendencies. He tried joining the police force but was rejected, so he found work as a security guard on the Heron Trading Estate, where the last victim was discovered.

Not everyone was sold on this idea. During the 70s, an investigative reporter might have inadvertently found an alibi for Big John by showing that he was in Scotland at the time of one of the murders. Even later, author David Seabrook finally revealed Big John’s real name: Mungo Island. Although he believed that Island was innocent, the latter had indeed worked for a short period as a security guard at the estate and committed suicide in 1965. Seabrook accused DeRose of being a corrupt cop who framed a convenient dead man to close the case and end his career on a high note.

The author provided an alternative suspect, although he never named him. This suspect was also favored by another officer working the case, Detective Superintendent Bill Baldock. According to them, the killer was a former policeman with a grudge against Scotland Yard. He had been kicked off the force after being caught committing burglaries in the areas he patrolled. He then started killing women to humiliate Scotland Yard, which is why he dumped each body in a different police subdivision. It sounded plausible, but one thing they could not truly explain was why he stopped killing.

These were probably the two most reasonable theories, but