Elizabeth used to tell people she came to London as a young lady to "see the country," but this was just one more fabrication. The earliest record found of her living in London was in the Swedish Church register that listed her name in 1879, with the notation that she had been given a shilling. She was five foot two or four, according to people who went to the mortuary to figure out who she was. Her complexion was "pale." Others described it as "dark." Her hair was "dark brown and curly," or "black," according to someone else. A policeman lifted one of Elizabeth's eyelids in the poorly lit mortuary and decided that her eyes were "gray."
In her black-and-white postmortem photograph, Elizabeth's hair looks darker because it was wet and stringy from having been rinsed. Her face was pale because she was dead and had lost virtually all of the blood in her body. Her eyes may once have been bright blue, but not by the time the policeman lifted a lid to check. After death, the conjunctiva of the eye begins to dry and cloud. Most people who have been dead awhile appear to have gray or grayish-blue eyes unless their eyes were very dark.
After her autopsy, Elizabeth was dressed in the dark clothing she was wearing when she was murdered. She was placed in a shell that was stood up against a wall to be photographed. Barely visible in the shadow of her tucked-in chin is the cut made by her killer's knife as it jaggedly trails off inches below the right side of her neck. Her photograph after death may have been the only one taken in her life. She appears to have been thin, with a nicely shaped face and good features, and a mouth that might have been sensuous had she not lost her upper front teeth.
Elizabeth may have been a blonde beauty in her youth. During her inquest, truths about her began to emerge. She had left Sweden to take a "situation" with a gentleman who lived near Hyde Park. It is not known how long that "situation" lasted, but at some point after it ended she lived with a policeman. In 1869, she married a carpenter named John Thomas Stride. Everyone who knew her in the local lodging houses she frequented had heard the tragic tale that her husband had drowned when the Princess Alice sank after a steam collier ran it down.
Elizabeth had different versions of this tale. Her husband and two of her nine children had drowned when the Princess Alice went down. Or her husband and all of her children drowned. Elizabeth, who would have been quite young when she began bearing children to have produced nine of them by 1878, somehow survived the shipwreck that killed 640 people. While struggling for her life, another panicking passenger kicked her in the mouth, explaining the "deformity" to it.
Elizabeth told everyone that the entire roof of her mouth was gone, but a postmortem examination revealed nothing wrong with her hard or soft palates. The only deformity was her missing front teeth, which must have been a source of shame to her. Records at the Poplar and Stepney Sick Asylum showed that her husband, John Stride, died there on October 24, 1884. He did not drown in a shipwreck, nor did any of their children - if they had children. Perhaps falsehoods about Elizabeth's past made her life more interesting to her, for the truth was painful and humiliating and did nothing but cause trouble.
When the clergy of the Swedish Church she attended discovered that her husband did not die in the shipwreck, they ceased any financial assistance. Perhaps she lied about the death of her husband and their alleged children because a fund had been set aside for the survivors of the Princess Alice shipwreck. When it was suspected that no one related to Elizabeth had died in that disaster, the money stopped. One way or another, Elizabeth had to be supported by a man, and when she wasn't, she made what she could from sewing, cleaning, and prostitution.
Of late, she had been spending her nights at a lodging house at 32 Flower and Dean Street, where the deputy, a widow named Elizabeth Tanner, knew her fairly well. During the inquest, Mrs. Tanner testified that she had seen Elizabeth on and off for six years and that until Thursday, September 27th, Elizabeth had been living in another lodging house with a man named Michael Kidney. She had walked out on him with nothing but a few ragged clothes and a hymn book. On that Thursday night and the following Friday night she stayed in Mrs. Tanner's lodging house. On the early evening of Saturday, September 29th, Elizabeth and Mrs. Tanner had a drink at Queen's Head public house on Commercial Street, and afterward Elizabeth earned sixpence by cleaning two of the lodging-house rooms.
Between ten and eleven, Elizabeth was in the kitchen and handed a piece of velvet to her friend Catherine Lane. "Please keep it safe for me," Elizabeth said, and she added that she was going out for a while. She was dressed for the miserable weather in two petticoats made of a cheap material resembling sacking, a white chemise, white cotton stockings, a black velveteen bodice, a black skirt, a black jacket trimmed with fur, a colorful striped silk handkerchief around her neck, and a small black crepe bonnet. In her pockets were two handkerchiefs, a skein of black worsted darning yarn, and a brass thimble. Before she left the lodging-house kitchen, she asked Charles Preston, a barber, if she could borrow his clothes brush to tidy up a bit. She did not tell anyone where she was going, but she proudly showed off her six newly earned pennies as she headed out into the dark, wet night.
Berner Street was a narrow thoroughfare of small, crowded dwellings occupied by Polish and German tailors, shoemakers, cigarette makers, and other impoverished people who worked out of their homes. On the street was the clubhouse of the International Working Men's Educational Club, which had approximately eighty-five members, most of them Eastern European Jewish Socialists. The only requirement for joining was to support socialist principles. The IWMC met every Saturday night at 8:30 to discuss various topics.
They always closed with a social time of singing and dancing, and it was not unusual for people to linger until one o'clock in the morning. On this particular Saturday night, almost a hundred people had attended a debate in German on why Jews should be socialists. The serious talk was winding down. Most people were heading home by the time Elizabeth Stride set out in that direction.
Her first client of the evening, as far as anyone seems to know, was a man she was observed talking to on Berner Street, very close to where a laborer named William Marshall lived. This was about 11:45 P.M., and Marshall later testified that he did not get a good look at the man's face, but that he was dressed in a small black coat, dark trousers, and what looked like a sailor's cap. He wore no gloves, was clean shaven, and was kissing Elizabeth. Marshall said he overheard the man tease, "You would say anything but your prayers," and Elizabeth laughed. Neither of them appeared intoxicated, Marshall recalled, and they walked off in the direction of the IWMC clubhouse.
An hour later, another local resident named James Brown saw a woman he later identified as Elizabeth Stride leaning against a wall and talking with a man at the corner of Fairclough and Berner streets. The man wore a long overcoat and was approximately five foot seven. (It seems that almost every man identified by witnesses in the Ripper cases was approximately five foot seven. In the Victorian era, five foot seven would have been considered an average height for a male. I suppose that height was as good a guess as any.)
The last time Elizabeth Stride was seen alive was by Police Constable William Smith, 452 H Division, whose beat that night included Berner Street. At 12:35 he noticed a woman he later identified as Elizabeth Stride, and it caught his eye that she was wearing a flower on her coat. The man she was with carried a newspaper-wrapped package that was eighteen inches long and six or eight inches wide. He, too, was five foot seven, Smith recalled, and was dressed in a hard felt deerstalker, a dark overcoat, and dark trousers. Smith thought the man seemed respectable enough, about twenty-eight years old and clean shaven.