Jack the Stripper was the nickname given to an unknown serial killer responsible for what came to be known as the London "nude murders" between 1964 and 1965 (also known as the "Hammersmith murders" or "Hammersmith nudes" case).
His victimology and nickname is similar to Jack the Ripper's. He murdered six — possibly eight — prostitutes, whose nude bodies were discovered around London or dumped in the River Thames. The victim count is ambiguous because two of the murders attributed to him did not fit his modus operandi.
Contents |
Hannah Tailford: 30. Originally from a northwest mining family, Hannah Tailford was found dead on 2 February 1964 near the Hammersmith Bridge. She had been strangled and several of her teeth were missing; her underwear had also been forced down her throat.
Irene Lockwood: 26. Irene Lockwood was found dead on 8 April 1964 on the shore of the Thames, not far from where Hannah Tailford had been discovered; their two deaths, along with that of Elizabeth Figg, were linked and police realized that a killer was on the loose. 57-year-old caretaker Kenneth Archibald confessed to this murder almost three weeks later; this confession was dismissed due to inconsistencies in his version of events, and with the discovery of a third victim
Helen Barthelemy: 22. Helen Barthelemy, originally from Blackpool, was found dead on 24 April 1964 in an alleyway in Brentford. Barthelemy’s death gave investigators their first solid piece of evidence in the case: flecks of paint used in motorcar manufactories. Police felt that the paint had probably come from the killer’s workplace; they therefore focused on tracing it to a business nearby.
Mary Flemming: 30. Originally from Scotland, Flemming’s body was found on 14 July 1964 in an open street in the district of Chiswick, where police presence was heaviest. Once again, paint spots were found on the body; many neighbours had also heard a car reversing down the street just before the body was discovered.
Frances Brown: 21. Edinburgh-native Frances Brown was last seen alive on 23 October 1964 by her friend, fellow prostitute Kim Taylor, before her body was found in an alleyway in Kensington a month later on 25 November. Taylor, who had been with Brown when she was picked up by the man believed to be her killer, was able to provide police with an identikit picture and a description of the man’s car, thought either to be a Ford Zephyr or a Zodiac.
Bridget O'Hara: 28. Irish-born Bridget O’Hara, also known as “Bridie”, was found dead behind the Heron Trading Estate in a storage shed. Once again, O’Hara’s body turned up flecks of industrial paint which, incredibly, were traced to a covered transformer just yards from where she’d been discovered. She also showed signs of having been stored in a warm environment; the transformer was a good fit for both the paint and the heating.
Elizabeth Figg: 21. Elizabeth Figg was found dead on 17 June 1959, a full five years before the Jack the Stripper murders started, near the River Thames in Chiswick. Her death was considered by some to bear many similarities to other victims, such as the location of the body (near the Thames and in Chiswick, where Mary Flemming's body would be found in 1964), and death by strangulation.
Gwynneth Rees: 22. Welsh-born Gwynneth Rees was found dead in a rubbish tip on 8 November 1963. Once again, investigators felt Rees may have been a Stripper victim due to her being found near the River Thames, and because she had been strangled with ligature; several of her teeth were also missing.
Chief Superintendent John Du Rose of Scotland Yard, the detective put in charge of the case, interviewed almost 7,000 suspects. He then held a news conference, falsely announcing that the police had narrowed the suspect pool down to 20 men. After a short time, he announced that the suspect pool contained only 10 members, and then three. The Stripper did not kill any more after the initial news conference.
According to the writer Anthony Summers, two of his victims — Hannah Tailford and Frances Brown, the Stripper's third and seventh victims — were peripherally connected to the 1963 Profumo Affair. Also, some victims were known to engage in an underground party and pornographic movie scene; several writers have postulated that the victims might have known each other, and that the killer may be connected to this scene as well.
Like the Jack the Ripper killings, the Stripper's reign of terror seemed to cease on its own, and there were few solid clues for police to investigate. Du Rose's favourite suspect was a Scottish security guard called Mungo Ireland, whom Du Rose first identified in a BBC television interview in 1970 as a respectable married man in his forties whom he codenamed Big John. Ireland had apparently been identified as a suspect shortly after Bridget O’Hara’s murder, when flecks of industrial paint were traced to the company where he worked as a security guard, Heron Trading Estate. Shortly after the trace was made, Ireland committed suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning, leaving a note for his wife that read: “I can’t stick it any longer”, and finished, “To save you and the police looking for me I’ll be in the garage”. Whilst seen by many as a strong suspect in the killings, recent research suggests that Ireland was in Scotland when O’Hara was murdered, and therefore could not have been the Stripper.[1] A recent book also named British light heavyweight boxing champion Freddie Mills as the killer, although this has not been substantiated.[2] The Crime and Investigation channel's 'Fred Dinage Murder Casebook', put forward the case that the killer could have been Harold Jones, a convicted murderer from Wales. Harold Jones was convicted of the murders of two girls in 1921 in the town of Abertillery. Because he was 15 at the time, he would not face the death penalty, instead receiving a life sentence. He was released 20 years later for exemplary behaviour. In 1941, at the age of 35, released from prison, he is believed to have visited his home town, Abertillery and visited the graves of his early victims. In 1947, he surfaced in London. Moving to Fulham, he got married and had a daughter. All the murders had similar traits to his early murders. No sexual assault, but horrendous violence was subjected to the victims. Due to poor records, he was never looked at by police.
The 1969 crime novel Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square, written by Arthur LeBern, is loosely based on the case; the protagonist strangles women with his necktie. The book was turned into the Alfred Hitchcock movie Frenzy in 1972.[3] Black Sabbath included a song called "Fairies Wear Boots" on their 1970 album Paranoid which was titled "Jack the Stripper/Fairies Wear Boots" in its American release. The 2009 crime novel "Bad Penny Blues" by Cathi Unsworth is closely based on the case.