Elizabeth Stride

Elizabeth Stride (born November 27, 1843 in Torslanda on the island of Hisingen , Sweden as Elisabeth Gustafsdotter , † September 30, 1888 in London , England ) was a British prostitute . She is considered the third victim of the to date unidentified serial killer " Jack the Ripper ", who killed and mutilated several prostitutes in the London borough of Whitechapel in the late summer and autumn of 1888 .

General

At the time of her death, Elizabeth Stride was 44 years old. Her nickname was Long Liz . There are several explanations for this nickname. On the one hand, this could have been due to the surname “Stride” ( step ) acquired as a result of the marriage, and on the other hand due to their face shape or size. At 1.65 meters, Elizabeth Stride was about four to five inches taller than the average Whitechapel woman at the time.

Earlier life

Stride was born on November 27, 1843 under the name Elisabeth Gustafsdotter in Torslanda on Hisingen , a district of Gothenburg in Sweden . She was the daughter of the Swedish farmer Gustaf Ericsson and his wife Beata Carlsdotter. In 1860, at the age of almost 17, she accepted a job as a domestic servant in the Gothenburg district around the Carl-Johan Church. In the following years she moved several times within Gothenburg. In contrast to the other victims of the woman murderer, who, due to their poverty, went into prostitution after a failed marriage , Stride had started earlier. As early as 1865 she was registered as a prostitute with the Gothenburg police. She was treated twice for sexually transmitted diseases. On April 21, 1865 she had a stillbirth , a girl. In the years that followed, she likely moved to London as a domestic servant with her employer.

Marriage

On March 7, 1869, she married the carpenter John Thomas Stride. The couple lived in a room in Poplar in east London for a while . In March 1877, Elizabeth Stride was registered for the first time at the workhouse in Poplar. It is believed that the couple had separated. They were apparently back together in 1881, but separated permanently at the end of the year. Her husband died on October 24, 1884.

Life in Whitechapel

After separating from her husband, Elizabeth Stride lived in a cheap hostel in Whitechapel. Once or twice she received charitable support from the Church of Sweden in London. From 1885 until her death, she lived most of the time with the dockworker Michael Kidney. She earned her income from sewing and cleaning . According to friends, Elizabeth Stride was calm. Even so, she was tried several times for drunkenness and administrative offenses . Her relationship with Michael Kidney went up and down. In April 1887, she reported him for assault, but did not complete the trial. A few days before her death, Elizabeth Stride left Michael Kidney again.

Recorded after her death

The discovery of the corpse

The body of Elizabeth Stride was found about 01:00 pm on early Sunday morning, 30 September 1888th It was lying on the floor of Dutfield's Yard on Berner Street (now Henriques Street) in Whitechapel. Her throat had been cut. However, no further mutilations were made to her.

The courtyard was so dark that the waiter from the adjacent club who found her body could barely see the body without lighting a match. He had just gone into the yard in a pony cart . Elizabeth Stride must have been killed minutes before the waiter arrived. He told the officers that he believed the killer must have been in the courtyard when he got there.

Various witnesses said they saw Elizabeth Stride on Berner Street a short time before her body was found.

Elizabeth Stride was killed on the night of the Double Event (English "double event"), in which less than an hour later Catherine Eddowes was also killed in Miter Square, about 1.12 kilometers away .

Some sources assume that Elizabeth Stride was not the victim of the same killer. In contrast to the other murders of the woman killer, she had no other mutilations, apart from the cut throat. In addition, doubts were raised about the course of events. A witness believed she saw Elizabeth Stride attacked outside Dutfield Courtyard around 12:45 a.m. and thrown on the street floor. Another man, whose connection to the attack was unclear, is said to have watched the goings-on from across the street. This attack in public did not seem to fit the typical behavior of the woman killer. The murder of Elizabeth Stride, however, has some striking similarities with the pattern of the murders of the woman murderer. These include the date, time, type of environment, characteristics of the victim, and the type of murder, among others. Sources suggesting the murder of the woman killer believe that Elizabeth Stride was not mutilated because the killer was disturbed by the arrival of the waiter in the pony cart during the crime. The murder of Catharine Eddowes less than an hour later also took place within walking distance. With the later murder, the woman murderer would have completed what he previously had to leave “unfinished” on Elizabeth Stride.

literature

• Philip Sugden: The Complete History of Jack the Ripper. Carroll & Graf Publishing, New York NY 1995, ISBN 0-7867-0276-1 , is widely regarded as one of the best books on the subject.
• Hendrik Püstow, Thomas Schachner: Jack the Ripper. Anatomy of a legend. Militzke Verlag, Leipzig 2006, ISBN 3-86189-753-9 .
• Hallie Rubenhold : The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper. Doubleday, 2019, ISBN 978-0857524485 .

Web links

Commons : Elizabeth Stride  - Collection of Images, Videos, and Audio Files

• Elizabeth Stride . In: jacktheripper.de
• Elizabeth Stride . In: casebook.org (contains numerous English-language articles on the case and reproduces many original sources)