S2 E1: Murders in a City Without Light

London's West End - once a glittering Mecca of nightlife - is pitch black. The lights are off to hide the city from waves of Nazi bombers - but in the darkness a merciless killer is hunting down the women of this district. 

Join hosts Hallie Rubenhold and Alice Fiennes as they walk those bomb-damaged streets to tell the stories of the women targeted by this "Blackout Ripper" over the course of just one week in 1942. 

You'll glimpse inside the theaters, jazz joints and dive bars of Piccadilly and Soho; witness deadly air raids; and criss cross the blacked out streets where a serial killer lurks. You'll learn too of the hardships that blighted the lives of many women in wartime, and the extent of the violence they faced at the hands of men from their own side in the conflict. 

Sources: 

Bone, James. London Echoing (London: Jonathan Cape, 1948)

Caddick-Adams, Peter. Sand and Steel: A New History of D-Day (London: Penguin Random House, 2019).

Cederwell, William. Reading London in Wartime: Blitz, the People and Propaganda in 1940s Literature (New York: Routledge, 2018). 

Farson, N. Bomber’s Moon (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1941).

 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. You're alone on a city street. The darkness is total.
It envelops you, pressing in. You stumble on, not knowing

(00:35):
where the sidewalk ends and the road begins. You brush
by a darkened building, bump into an unlit street lamp.
You're desperate to reach safety. For somewhere in this neighborhood
looks a killer who strikes in the hours of darkness.
The cruelty and viciousness of his crimes are unspeakable. This

(01:01):
does not make believe horror. This really happened, and it
happened in living memory. It's a tale you've probably never
heard before, a tale of forgotten women murdered in a
city without light. This is London for a year and

(01:34):
a half, its department stores and palaces, its churches and factories,
its schools and homes have been blasted and burnt by
waves of Nazi bombers. My friend ain't curling can night
after night and another. Darkness is the only defense against

(01:56):
the blitz and stopping my heir. To make it harder
for enemy aircraft to find the city. The lights have
been dimmed, but the dark and dislocation of war also
offers a serial killer cover to single out his victims,
his prey, or ordinary women who are just trying to

(02:16):
make the best of things in London's bomb damaged nightlife district.
Watching Let's start in Piccadilly, which locals boastfully called the
center of the world. For, as the guide book says,
anyone looking for a high life must sooner or later
find themselves in Piccadilly Circus. Welcome to the Brasserie Universal.

(02:47):
It's a favorite haunt of flyers. Men from the air
forces of France, Poland, Australia, Norway, South Africa and a
dozen other nations gather here to brag about the Germans
they've shot down, or drink to the memories of comrades lost.
Everybody either starts from here or ends up here, says

(03:07):
one young Canadian pilot in a letter home. Soon this
subterranean joint will burst at the scenes with American gis
flush with cash. They'll transform this area into what locals
will dub Little America. But today only a handful of
yankster in town. For this is February twelfth, nineteen forty two.

(03:30):
It's a Thursday night, and a young woman called Greta
Haywood has come to town. She's alone. Excuse me, are
you waiting for somebody? The voice is an educated one,
but perhaps a little affected, as if its owner is
trying to adopt the diction of a duke or earl.

(03:51):
Or maybe it's the effect of the drink. His breath
carries the sour reek of water down wartime beer. He's
a rather slight man, of around five foot eight or nine,
and he wears the blue wool uniform of a leading
aircraftman a Royal Air Force. On his cuff is a

(04:12):
single stripe, a commendation for good conduct. Gretta is waiting
for someone. She has a date, she tells the stranger,
a strange from her husband. Gretta struck up a new
relationship with a captain in the army. He'll join her
here within the hour. You are a very nice girl.

(04:34):
I've been looking at you for some time. Beneath the
sweep of dark hair, the stranger has piercing, pale blue
eyes and rather sharp features that some consider handsome. You
shouldn't come down to a place like this. It's not
very nice down here, a place like this. The Brassery

(04:55):
Universal is known by other names. Some call it the
Universal Brasserie. Others refer to it simply as the Universal brothel,
to the annoyance of the owners. Any woman coming here
alone is eyed with deep suspicion and assumed to be
either a so called good time girl or a professional prostitute.

(05:19):
Gretta has allowed the stranger to buy her a drink,
and he returns from the bar with two whiskeys. She
repeatedly declines his offers to take her to dinner, for
her date will be here by nine. We have plenty
of time. Eventually, she agrees to accompany the stranger to
another bar for one more drink. The man retrieves his

(05:44):
hat and winter coat from the cloak room. He's no
officer yet, but the white cotton flash on his cap
shows he's in training to become a pilot, one of
the most glamorous jobs in the Armed Services. They climb
the steps up out of the brasserie and into the night.
The streets here are busy, but Gretta only hears the

(06:07):
people around her, feels them bump past or glimpses the
bouncing red tips of their lighted cigarettes. For Piccadilly Circus,
once famed for its vast illuminated signs advertising Haig Whisky,
Gordon's Gin and Wrigley's Gums is completely blacked out. The

(06:28):
head lamps of taxis and double decker buses are also hooded,
so only the tiniest chinks of light are visible. Many
pedestrians have taken to carrying flashlights as these darting glow
worms pass Grata might see the flash of a polished
button on a military tunic, or perhaps the fleeting silver

(06:50):
shimmer of a fox fur coat. Such furs are deregeurs
and Piccadillys. There almost a uniform for the women who
sell sex along this bustling thoroughfare. A visiting American serviceman
remembered one particular woman in a fur coat underneath that
she didn't have any clothes. On true story, the Airmond

(07:15):
leads Gretta away from Piccadilly Circus to a cocktail bar
the salted Almond. To her relief, this is no dark
and sleazy dive. The bar is decorated in a brilliant
shade of a million, and it's spacious and well lit.
They sit at one of the round tables, far from

(07:37):
the other customers, out of earshot. The Airmond doesn't remove
his heavy outdoor coat. As they drink two more whiskies.
He seems keen to move on. Where do you live?
Gretta's home is twelve or more stops away on the subway.
That's a long way. Don't you know anywhere around here
that we can go? The airmond clearly won't be satisfied

(08:00):
with simply buying Gretta a drink and walking her back
to meet her captain. Are you a naughty girl? Inwardly,
Gretta bristles at the crude insinuation, but she answers simply, no,
I'll show you something. The man reaches deep into his
pocket and pulls out a fat bundle of bank notes.

(08:22):
There's thirty pounds there. You see, I have plenty of money.
Thirty pounds is more than eight months pay for this
leading aircraftman. Gretta repeats that she'll be late for her
date with the captain. He asks if he could meet
Gretta again to show her a good time. Perhaps Gretta

(08:43):
doesn't want to anger this man in uniform. She reluctantly
hands him a scrap of paper bearing her telephone number.
She stresses that she's not interested in having sex with him.
All right, if you don't want to, I can't make you.
Do you know? I knocked a girl out once. It's

(09:09):
cold outside, and in this quiet side street it's bible black.
Gretta realizes this isn't the quickest route back to the
Brasserie Universal and her waiting date, but perhaps to avoid
enraging a clearly violent man, Gretta follows his odd route
without objecting. She does, however, take a flashlight from her

(09:34):
purse to eliminate their path. You don't want to use
the torch. He grabs the light from her hand and
plunges them back into darkness. I want to kiss you
good night. Are there any air age shelters around here?
Gretta doesn't know, but she is certain of one thing.
She doesn't want to venture into a secluded, unlit bunger
with this man. He grabs her and steers her into

(09:58):
a doorway, pushing closely up against her and kissing her.
Come on, you've got to let me make love to you.
He raises her skirt. Gretta protests and pushes his hands way.
The airman reaches up as if to cradled her face
for another kiss, but instead his hands knit around her throat.

(10:19):
She tries to break free. You won't, You won't. Gretta
struggles to release the man's grip, but his fingers only
tighten around her neck, cutting off the flow of air
to her lungs and blood to her brain. You won't,
You won't. Gretta Heyward loses consciousness. You want at some time.

(10:51):
Gretta is not this killer's first victim, nor will she
be the last. Over the course of just a few
days in that chilly wartime February, women were attacked night
after night on the blacked out streets of London, in
deserted air raid shelters, even in their own homes. In

(11:13):
this series, you'll hear the stories of Evelyn Hamilton, Evelyn Oatley,
Margaret Lowe, Greta Hayward, Catherine Mulcahey, and Doris Jouannee from
their birth to the moment when their attacker struck. I'm
social historian Hallie Rubinholdt. In the last season of Bad Women,

(11:35):
I explored the case of Jack the Ripper by telling
the famous Victorian story of the White Chapel murders through
the lens of the victims. The Ripper retold was based
on my book the five. But this new season of
bad women springs from all new research. It's a mammoth task,
so I enlisted the help of journalist and criminologist Alice Fines.

(12:00):
I had never heard of this case before, which was
puzzling the murderer. That airman was especially brutal in his
attacks on the women, and such cruelty usually ensures that
a killer is remembered, even assigned a dark celebrity. But
over the years, this particular story has been talked about

(12:21):
very little, and the victims even less. So why to
change that and to restore those women to memory? We
set about reconstructing their lives. We've mined the national archives
and sifted through thousands of yellowing pages, police reports, witness statements, photos,

(12:41):
fingerprint records, and newspapers. We've even had an expert genealogists
traced the women's family trees for clues. Weighing up all
this material, I was struck by the fact that, on
the surface, at least, there's little to connect these victims.
They range in age from their twenties to their mid forties.
Some were married, but others were separated or resolutely single.

(13:03):
Some sold sex. One was a highly qualified graduate, and
another dreamt of a life the stage. But there are
a few points of connection, and these are illuminating. In
wartime London, these women shared common experiences. They faced the
same risk as men from the falling bombs, but the

(13:25):
hardships and upheavals of the war often affected them disproportionately.
War had turned the old social and moral order on
its head. As a result, women like the ones in
our story had new opportunities, but they were also viewed
with suspicion and disapproval for trying to work, live and

(13:45):
love as they pleased in a world in turmoil. The
other awful point of intersection for these women was that
they all found themselves isolated and alone, and that gave
the airmen with the affected aristocratic accent his opportunity to
strike new world In their moments of vulnerability. He beat

(14:08):
and throttled them with his bare hands, robbed them of
money and possessions, and then set about mutilating and defiling
their bodies with anything at hand, from razors to kitchen implements,
even their own flashlights. And surprisingly, the ferocity and sadism
of these murders prompted the papers to liken him to

(14:31):
a killer who had terrorized the city of full fifty
years earlier. You're listening to bad women, the Blackout Ripper
back in just a moment. In the decades separating the

(14:57):
White Shoppel murders of eighteen eighty eight and the blizz
the lives of London's women had altered significantly. The women
who were killed in nineteen forty two, the women you
will meet in this series witnessed huge changes in their lifetimes.
The oldest were born as the Victorian era was ebbing away,

(15:17):
and they entered adulthood as greater opportunities were becoming available
to women. Greater legal protections were also being put in place,
and while not perfect, these would have been unimaginable to
the victims of Jack the Ripper. For example, these women
could all vote. The war sped up some of the

(15:38):
more positive changes for women. They entered roles in military
and civilian workplaces that had been denied to their mothers
and grandmothers. But global conflict also brought into stark relief
many of the injustices and prejudices that continued to blight
women's daily lives. The war saw male partners shipped to

(15:59):
the other side of the world, and at the same
time a mass influx of young men from other nations.
Amid this upheaval, women were accused of being bad mothers,
unfaithful wives, sexual deviance, spreaders of venereal disease, gossips, even
spies who were passing vital secrets to the enemy. In peacetime,

(16:23):
men had often pestered, intimidated, and hurt women with impunity,
but the coming of war created new spaces, while women
were exposed to unwanted advances determine sexual harassment, violent assault,
and worse. As we unravel the lives of those killed
by the Blackoutripper and other ordinary women who met untimely, unjust,

(16:46):
and violent deaths during the war, will glimpse a world
far removed from the cozy myths of the Greatest generation,
a world where some women had as much reason to
fear the men wearing Allied uniforms as they did the enemy.

(17:07):
This story will take us to many places, but at
its center is London's West End, the districts of Piccadilly,
High Park, Mayfair and Soho, places where the rich and famous,
the great and the good mingled with the poor and desperate,
the deplorable, and the vile. These were places of excitement

(17:28):
and freedom, but also of degradation and danger. From diaries,
oral history recordings, autobiographies, and contemporary accounts, we've created a
snapshot of these neighborhoods and the people who frequented them.
To understand the women at the heart of this story,
we need to understand the problems and prevailing attitudes of
the time to immerse ourselves in their world. So let's

(17:53):
explore London's wartime West End together. It's spring nineteen forty one.
The Blackout murders are nearly a year away, and Nazi
bombs have been falling for months now. Some nights the
area is spared. It is mercilessly pummeled in daylight, bustling

(18:14):
Piccadilly Circus could be mistaken for its pre war self.
Well almost. The famous winged statue of Antios, the Greek
god of requited love, has been taken down and stored
away for safe keeping. His ornate perch a fountain, has
been buried beneath sandbags to protect it from bomb damage.

(18:37):
The plinth is covered in propaganda posters encouraging citizens to
buy government bonds to pay for ships, guns and warplanes,
or to drive less to preserve precious rubber so that
vital army trucks can have tires. Britain is almost totally
cut off from the world, and her cargo ships are
being sunk by German submarines at an appalling rate. But

(19:01):
despite rationing and shortages, Piccadilly's feigned restaurants remain open, some
offering meals every bit as luxury as during peacetime. Mark Gavny.
The hotels are bustling too, Just off Piccadilly Circus. In
a grand sweep of buildings owned by the British royal
family is Odnino's. Do you have any vacancies for the

(19:23):
next This one hundred room establishment tries to win custom
by bragging about the quality of its plumbing. We have
a lovely room on the third floor, but adverts also
make careful mention of the ample bomb shelter accommodation forty
feet below ground. Henri Jouanne works as a manager at Odnino's.

(19:44):
Approaching seventy years old, Henri should be enjoying retirement in
the country, but his annuity from his native France collapsed
when the war broke out, and so He's returned to
London and to hotel management. His wife, Doris Willouis and Fairhead,
is thirty years his junior. She's defied his wishes and

(20:06):
followed him back to the city. Doris, he has known poverty,
and she's determinedly carved out a better life for herself.
Perhaps what she craves most of all his financial security
and stability, but now it might all be slipping through
her fingers. When she met Henri, he was one of
her paying clients. He promised to provide for her and

(20:28):
take her off the streets. When I married my wife,
it was agreed between us that she would cease her
mode of life and regain her respectability. Their early married
DearS were comfortable and they enjoyed some luxuries too, But
Henri now fears that, with his diminished income, his wife
is at risk of drifting back to her old life.

(20:52):
Henri a is working punishingly long hours at Danino's, where
he also lives, and his health and their marriage are
beginning to suffer. Setting herself up in rented rooms, Doris
will indeed take her financial situation back into her own hands.
This will also fatally put her into the path of

(21:15):
the blackout Ripper. The West End boasts a concentration of
shops to rival the greatest cities on earth, from the
tiny high end tailors of Sapple Row to vast department
stores the size of an ocean liner. Despite the blitz,
they've mostly kept trading. One correspondent from a regional newspaper

(21:36):
is in Piccadilly to report conditions back to his rural readership.
It looked exactly like old times. I saw the facade
of a fine building, seemingly untouched. Then you realize that
you could see daylight through the windows from the outside,
and that the walls were all that was left. I
saw an elegant establishment carrying on with tarpaulins slung across

(21:58):
the open roof. Glass out everywhere. When storefronts and windows
are blasted away, shopkeepers are keen to make a show
of defiance. Business as usual, reads the sign on one
shuttered shop doorway in fact more open than ever. A
sign outside another bomb damage shop admits we never did

(22:18):
like window dressing anyway. Not everyone can joke about the carnage.
The writer George Orwell is crunching through west End Street,
slittered with stone fragments and glittering with broken glass. He
comes across some debris from a bombed out department store,
a pile of plaster dress models, very pink and realistic,

(22:40):
looking so like a pile of corpses that one could
have mistaken them for that at a little distance. The
scene is utterly shocking to him, But what astounds him
most of all is that passers by seem utterly unfazed
by the damage. To an astonishing extent. Things have slipped
back to normal, and everyone is quite happy in the daytime,
never seeming to think about the coming night, like animals

(23:03):
which are unable to foresee the future so long as
they have a bit of food a place in the sun.
But the sun is setting now and night approaches, while
the cover of darkness bring the bombers once again. The
entrances to the Tube London subway system begin to clog
with shoppers and workers heading home, but others are seeking

(23:26):
to reach the train platform's deep underground too, for the
tunnels have become a refuge to tens of thousands of locals.
There are still too few official air raid shelters, and
those that exist are often wretched, uncomfortable and unsanitary, and
so to the utter dismay of the authorities, Nearly two

(23:47):
hundred thousand Londoners prefer to bed down each night in
the tube, with the trains rumbling by just inches from them.
Worried Londoners, men, women and children line up for a
sleeping spot while rush hour is still on, despite official
orders that they stay away the pace. Since of these

(24:09):
waiting shelters is wearing, few police officers are here to
keep order amid a throng of anxious mothers and their
wailing offspring. Wooa, there's plenty of time. You can't go
down yet. If we didn't stop them, some of these
kids would spend half their lifetime underground. Now there are

(24:34):
other officers in this ticket hall too, but they're not
concerned with crowd control. Instead, they want to find someone
and quickly. Forty seven year old Rachel Tomkin is missing.
Her sister Polly has been looking for her, and she
fears foul play. Since Rachel's strange disappearance, Polly has visited

(24:58):
a clairvoyant, and the mystic insists at something sinister and
violent has occurred. Polly isn't just worried, she's also out raged.
She thinks the police aren't taking the case seriously, so
Polly calls in at her local station, has her lawyer
send letters of complaint, and takes out adverts in national newspapers.

(25:21):
The detectives think that Rachel's mental health history points to
her having taken her own life. She's probably drowned herself,
they think, But under constant pressure from Polly, whose mental
health they now also question, their inquiries continue. So far,
the only clue to Rachel's fate is her purse, which

(25:41):
was discovered the day after her disappearance but a post
office well outside the city. It contained her ID card,
her rent book, and the ration coupons needed to buy
essentials such as food. Also inside were two Tube tickets
bought the morning after she was last seen. The police
are asking staff at stations across London to cast their

(26:03):
minds back. Can they remember a woman of about five
foot three, her black hair graying, wearing a tweed coat
with a brown fur collar, a navy blue skirt and
a brown hat. No one can. As you'll hear later
in this series, when Rachel is finally found, the prophecy
of Polly's clairvoyant will prove more accurate than anyone could

(26:26):
have predicted bad women. The Blackout Ripper will return shortly.

(26:49):
Not everyone is heading underground to shelter from the bombs.
Some have grown tired of hiding away and are willing
to risk enjoying the West End nightlife once again. There
is no longer any excuse to be bored in London now.
In fact, if you can't enjoy yourself in London must
indeed be a poor prue. However, revel as attracted to

(27:14):
the West End aren't universally admired. Isn't it callous to
dance when this city is going up in flames? One
serviceman on leave is disgusted by the scenes of merriment
in a Piccadilly club. In his journal, he confides that
he'd happily see the establishment and its customers blown to smithereens.
The clubs and bars of London are the backdrop to

(27:36):
the story of the Blackout Ripper and his victims, which
is why I want to show you who frequents them,
how those people are viewed by the rest of society,
and exactly what happens inside The Cafe de Paris is
beginning to fill once the cabaret spot of choice for
Hollywood stars and aristocrats. The war has injected a little

(27:59):
egalitarianism into the clienteles spid. A reduction in prices has
helped people like Greta Hayward and her army and would
now feel able to cross its venerate, a threshold he had.
Three Martis are the known to stomach. The star attraction
is Ken's snake Hips. Johnson and the West Indian Orchestra

(28:21):
often build as the only all black swing band in Britain.
They're seen as the height of glamor's sophistication and received
glowing reviews wherever they play. Twenty six year old Ken
is a key part of the allure. Though his role
is ostensibly as bandleader, Ken's grasp of music is basic.

(28:42):
His real talent is dance. As his bandmaids play, Ken
will make a pretexts at conducting them with his baton,
but then launch into one of his trademarking teens. He
was so graceful in his white dinner jacket. His whole
body was so electric and fluid as he moved it
in time to the music. It was easy to see

(29:05):
why they build him as Snake Hills. The Cafe de
Paris is several floors below ground, and many have been
lulled into thinking that it is invulnerable to the bombs
of the Luftwaffer. In fact, the club is known for
its insusians when it comes to air raids. When the
sirens sound, snake Hips Johnson tells the drinkers and dancers

(29:26):
that they're free to seek shelter in the basements even
deeper below the club, but if they do, they'll miss
the time of their lives on the dance floor in
the skies. High above the club, the cruver German bomber
lets go its deadly cargo. The bombs, especially designed to
demolish buildings, hurtle earthwords, shrieking and whistling as they pick

(29:51):
up speed. Even the keenest of ears would have missed
their sound, for snake Hips and its orchestra have just
launched into another number. A one hundred and ten pound
bomb tears through the roof a cinema above the Catholic
and Marie, and it keeps slicing through floor, half the
floor until it reaches the balcony right above the heads

(30:15):
of snake Hips. Johnson and a guitarist, Joe Denise I
can't describe the sound it and everything went black. I
tried to stand up. I thought I was uninjured. The
next thing I know, I just fell down again. I
looked down and saw a nasty mess where my leg

(30:37):
had been. It was chaos, screams and shouts and dust
and dirt. Joe Denise is horrifically wounded. Snake Hips Johnson
is killed outright. The oddities of bomb blasts mean that
musicians to their left and right are entirely unscathed, while
others have been cut ribbons. Some dancers haven't so much

(31:01):
as a hair out of place, but a stone dead.
Others still have been stripped of their clothes but have survived.
Around thirty four staff and guests are dead. An off
duty nurse does her best to help the many wounded,
for aside from the bomb's own shrapnel, flying glasses and
shattered wine bottles, of inflicted terrible injuries on the revelers.

(31:25):
The woman is hailed as a hero for her efforts. However,
there is a telling PostScript. In an article printed in
many newspapers, the young nurse had little to say about
her work, but mentioned that while she was helping the injured,
someone ransacked her handbag, taking from it objects of sentimental value,
including a fountain pen. The selfless nurse has been robbed.

(31:50):
Corpses too, have been stripped of watches, wedding rings, and jewelry.
While the coming of war has encouraged some people to
act with bravery and compassion, it's also created tempting opportunities
for the more unscrupulous. In fact, the blackout is a
boom time for criminality in London. Indeed, it will be

(32:12):
an important thread running throughout this series. As the enemy
bombers turned for home and the groan of their engines
fades away, as the fires of burning furniture and burning
floorboards and rafters, it dowsed as the dust of pulverized plaster,
brick and stone settles. The task of rescuing the trap,

(32:34):
recovering the dead, and reclaiming whatever valued possessions have survived
must now begin. The bohemian and slightly seedy West End
neighborhood of Soho has been battered in this air raid.
Whole buildings have disappeared in the night, and their remnants
now block Soho's narrow streets. A rescue worker spots a

(32:57):
miraculously undamaged bottle of whiskey in the rubble and recommends
that the dazed and dusty homeowner takes a swig. She's
not impressed. Yeah, the bottler alone is for emergencies. Unlucky
residents stumble over the rubble and sift through the wreckage
for salvageable clothing, furnishings, ornaments, or other valuables. It's a

(33:22):
race against time for many dread that looters will swiftly
descend to pick clean the bomb site. Some criminal gangs
organized sophisticated looting operations. Teams of men arrive in trucks
and swarm over a bomb site, cuting away anything of value.

(33:43):
So brazen and so methodical are they that onlookers sometimes
presume they are official reclamation squads working for the property owner. However,
such events are rarer than newspaper coverage would have us believe,
and most looting is opportunistic and trivial for serious criminals.

(34:06):
The war has brought far easier and far more lucrative
ways of making money than scrabbling around in the rubble.
The conflict means that everything from luxury goods to basic
foodstuffs is in short supply. Many items are rustioned by
the government, so even citizens with money to spare can't
legally buy all the things they want, and so black

(34:30):
markets flourish, pulling people who might be scrupulously law abiding
in peacetime into the orbit of thieves and gangsters. Women
are often drawn into the trade, for it's women who
must feed and clothe their families, and if her husband
is away in the armed forces, his pitiful rate of
pay makes that task nearly impossible. If a wife tries

(34:53):
to find paying work for herself, an abysmal lack of
childcare options can mean the heartbreaking choice of leaving children
in a less than ideal setting in some cases. All
this makes the pull of the black market trade hard
to resist. In one court case, more than a dozen
lawn dresses were charged with stealing army blankets and using

(35:16):
the material to make coats. The thefts went unnoticed during
the warm weather, but when temperatures dropped, the military authorities
found they were twelve hundred blankets short. What started as
petty pilfering spread through the laundry women like a form
of cancer, said the prosecutor. Soho is no stranger to

(35:37):
the black market. With supplies of booze constricted by the war,
bootleggers filled the gap with stolen, counterfeit or simply homemade hooch.
At one illegal still discovered in the back of a cafe,
colorings and flavorings were added to pure alcohol to mimic
the look and taste of genuine spirits. Whiskey, gin and

(35:59):
rum could be made so apparently perfect that only an
expert could detect that they were synthetic. But many of
those drawn to Soho are not merely thirsty for drink.
We're in Soho's Windmill Theater. This establishment has two claims
to fame. One the show here went on even at

(36:22):
the height of the bombing, when many other theaters were dark.
And two, it's the only place in town to see
naked female flesh. It puts on a kind of glorified
burlesque called rivou deville. Time magazine's Walter Greatneth tells his
American readers for an audience composed mostly of bald headed
businessmen from the provinces, The Windmill avoids the prudish censorship

(36:47):
laws by arguing that it shows aren't pornography but art
my classical statues. The naked women on stage stand stock
still any movement will break the spell and see the
show close down for obscenity. Evannoeby lives a few streets

(37:08):
from here. For many years, her husband, Harold has believed
that she worked at the famous Windmill Theater. I think
it was in the chorus. While he lives hundreds of
miles away in the country, Evelyn spends most of her
time in Soho pursuing the more glamorous life of a
show girl a nightclub hostess. She finds farm life and

(37:28):
that chicken was dull, and Harold wants her to have
her freedom to enjoy a career that's exciting, but certainly not,
as he puts it, immoral. Evelyn's London friends claim she
has another occupation. She was earning her living by prostitution,
says Gladys Barton. She was very honest and when I

(37:51):
say that, I mean she'd never steal from her clients
in London. Away from Harold in the farm, Evelyn has
adopted an alter ego as Lita Ward. She weaves a
complex patchwork of relationships. Love, sex, money, and the struggle
for independence, all exert competing claims on Evelyn, as they

(38:13):
do on many women in this war. Her main problem
was that she was lonely. According to gladys Lita as
paying clients with whom she also happily socializes, and she
meets men in local clubs and bars or on the street,
bringing them back to her modest Soho dwelling until one
night when she brings home a man with an aristocratic accent.

(38:37):
The radio gets turned up louder and louder until the
neighbors can hear nothing but the music. She won't. So
this has been your introduction to the worlds of women
such as Brota Hayward, Dorschuanne, Rachel Dobkin, and Evelyn Oatley,

(39:02):
a world made darker and more dangerous by war. In
the coming episodes will look not just at the case
of the Blackoutripper, but also at the stories of other
women who didn't live to see the victory parades and
the peace. Women killed not by the enemy but by husbands,
by lovers, and by strangers wearing the uniform of their

(39:24):
own side. Will find out who each woman was, explore
the events that shaped her, and hear about the personal
triumphs and tragedies, her longings and disappointments. Will examine why
they came to be in such deadly peril, and how
society was often unsympathetic to their plight. In the next episode,

(39:45):
available right now, we'll meet thoughtful and reserved Evelyn Hamilton, intelligent, contained,
perhaps inscrutable. Some of the people she meets cruelly dismiss
her independent spirit as mystifying, odd and annoying. Evelyn has
spent most of her life living far away from London.

(40:08):
A new job, we'll see her stop in the West
End only briefly between trains, but that window of just
a few hours will be long enough for her killer
to strike bad women. The Blackout Ripper is hosted by

(40:37):
me Hallie rubin Hold and me Alice Fines. It was
written and produced by Alice Fines and Ryan Dilley, with
additional support from Courtney Guerino and Arthur Gomberts. Kate Heay
of Oakwood Family Trees aided us with genealogical research. Pascal
Wise Sound designed and mixed the show and composed all
the original music. The show was recorded at Wardoor Studios

(40:58):
by David Smith and Tom Berry. You also heard the
voice talents of Ben Crow, David Glover, Melanie Gutridge, Stella Haafer,
Gemma Saunders and rufus Wright to The music You Had
was performed by Edgarchan, Ross Hughes, Christian Miller and Marcus Penrose.
They were recorded by Nick Taylor at Porcupine Studios. Pushkin's

(41:19):
Ben Holiday mixed the tracks and you heard additional piano
playing by the great Berry Wise Hi Berry. The show
also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg,
Heather Fane, Carlie Migliori, Maggie Taylor, Nicole Morano, Eric Sandler,
and Daniella Lukhan. We'd also like to thank Michael Buchanan

(41:40):
Dunn of the Murder Mile podcast, Lizzie McCarroll, Katherine Walker
at the Royal Pharmaceutical Society and the Earbe Historical Society.
Bad Women is a production of Pushkin Industries. Please rate
and review the show and spread the word about what
we do, and thanks for listening.