A newspaper’s first sentence about a murdered woman is written by someone who never met her, from what a police officer, a landlord or a neighbor will say on the doorstep. The sentence travels. It gets repeated in the next paper, in the inquest report, in the book written fifty years later, and by then nobody remembers who first said it or whether it was true. Seven cases, from Whitechapel in 1888 to Barking in 2021, show how that process has worked, and what happened on the occasions when someone went back and corrected the record.
The pattern is not a simple march from callousness to decency. Some of the worst wording appears in the most recent cases. Some of the best work on the earliest ones was done in the last few years. What changes from one period to the next is chiefly who gets to speak for the dead: a coroner, a police superintendent, a tabloid editor, a surviving sister, a historian with the archive open on the desk.
For more than a century the five women killed in Whitechapel in the autumn of 1888 were described, in the police files and in almost everything written since, as prostitutes. The historian Hallie Rubenhold’s 2019 book The Five does not support that. By Rubenhold’s reckoning, only Mary Jane Kelly was earning her living that way at the time of her death, and Elizabeth Stride had done so only at times. As Smithsonian magazine summarized her findings, there is no evidence tying Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman or Catherine Eddowes to the label at all.
What the women had in common was something else. Most of them slept rough, and all five drank. All five had been pushed out of ordinary life by ordinary things: a marriage that failed, a child who died, a husband’s allowance that stopped when he did. "It is only by bringing these women back to life," Rubenhold wrote, "that we can silence the Ripper and what he represents."
The label did its work early, because the police category itself was broad. The inquiry into the "Whitechapel murders" eventually took in eleven deaths between April 1888 and February 1891. It began with Emma Smith, a woman of about forty-five who died in the London Hospital after an assault on Easter Monday night, and Martha Tabram, who died on August 7. Most researchers today do not believe either death was the work of the man who came to be called Jack the Ripper. A file that sweeps eleven deaths into one series invites the reader to see one kind of woman and one kind of fate.
The records of the individual women say more than the file does. Mary Ann Nichols, known as Polly, married and separated from her husband several times before the break became final in 1881; he said she had left him "four or five times, if not six." In 1882 he stopped her allowance, arguing that she was living with another man. She then moved between the Lambeth Workhouse, her father’s house and, for about four years, the household of a blacksmith named Thomas Dew. In May 1888 the workhouse placed her as a domestic servant with a teetotal, churchgoing couple in Wandsworth. She wrote to her father that the house was "a grand place inside, with trees and gardens back and front" and that her employers were "very nice people." Two months later she left, taking clothing worth three pounds ten shillings, and by August she was sharing a room with four other women in a lodging house.
The coroner, Wynne Baxter, opened the inquest on September 1 and let it run on and off until September 23. She was identified first by Mary Ann Monk, who had known her at the Lambeth Workhouse, and then by her husband. Her father, who had called her a drunkard, told the inquest: "I don’t think she had any enemies, she was too good for that." Her funeral took place on September 6, in a polished elm coffin, paid for by her father, her husband and her eldest son.
Annie Chapman’s file reads the same way. Her husband sent her ten shillings a week until he died of cirrhosis on Christmas Day 1886, and when she heard of his death she cried. Her friend Amelia Palmer said that even two years later Annie seemed downcast when she spoke of her children. The week before her death she told Palmer, "It’s no use my giving way. I must pull myself together and go out and get some money or I shall have no lodgings." Her relatives held the funeral early on September 14 at Manor Park, in secret, so that no crowd would gather. The plate on the coffin read "Annie Chapman, died Sept. 8, 1888, aged 48 years." Later accounts give her age as 47.
The newspapers, meanwhile, had a villain ready. Since the start of September they had been printing stories about a man called "Leather Apron," said to threaten women in the district, and the stories carried a plain anti-Jewish edge. The man they meant was John Pizer, a Jewish boot finisher. On the morning of September 10 Sergeant William Thick of H Division arrested him. The police seized five knives; the stains on them proved to be rust. Pizer had alibis for the nights in question, the police confirmed them, and he was released the next evening. At the Chapman inquest on September 12 the jury foreman said the jury considered him cleared. "I wish to vindicate my character to the whole world," Pizer said. He later accepted ten pounds in settlement from The Star, the paper that had led the Leather Apron coverage.
The Pizer episode shows both halves of the newspaper habit in a single week. The press invented a name for the suspect and attached an ethnic identity to him, and it rendered the victims as a type. Neither was tested against anything. The correction, for the man, was a settlement. For the women it took more than a century.
Béla Kiss was a tinsmith in Cinkota, a village just outside Budapest, when the First World War began. In 1914 he went into the army and did not come back. In May 1916 the bodies of seven women came to light at Cinkota in property he had left behind, and the Budapest police concluded that he had met the women through marriage advertisements and taken their savings. According to a later account in the weekly HVG, the case pushed war news off the front pages of Hungarian newspapers for a time. He was never arrested, a court offered a reward for his capture alive, and no court ever tried him. Each death is attributed to him by the police and press of the time, not proven against him.
Reading the Hungarian provincial press of that May is an education in how a story assembles its numbers and its names. The Nagyvárad paper Tiszántúl wrote on May 14, 1916 that eight to ten women had been robbed and killed over about ten years, and it put much of the blame on the lonely-hearts columns of the Budapest papers for giving him his opportunity. Foreign reports later gave totals of 9, 23 or 32, none of them supported by the 1916 record, HVG noted in 2007. The women, in the 1916 accounts, were mostly working women, cooks and maids. A 2014 study by Henrietta Trádler concluded that the victims were more varied than that, including older single women with uncertain finances. The occupational label belonged to the press.
The names, in the end, depended on relatives. Tiszántúl reported the identifications on May 12 and 13 as they were made. A woman identified the first body as her sister, Mária Tóth. A second was identified as Margit Tóth. A third was identified as Katalin Varga, a maid. A sister identified another as Katalin Kukán, who had left Budapest in 1912 and wrote once afterward to say she had a position with a family and was going to America. When the Budapest paper Hétfői Napló reviewed the police file in 1933, it listed five victims by name: Katalin Vargha, Margit Tóth, Katalin Kukán, Mária Tóth and Juliska Pesadik. The list left out a sixth woman whose identification had been reported in 1916.
That woman was Eszter Fekete, known as Eszti, from the village of Csatár in Bihar County, and her story is the fullest in the record because her sister gave a long interview to Tiszántúl. Eszti was born in 1882 to a farming family that was well off. She married a knife-grinder in Nagyvárad in 1902 and left him in 1909, saying he had mistreated her. She went to Cinkota to work as a cook and stayed until 1911. In early March of that year she came to Csatár and told her family she was engaged to a tinsmith who wanted to emigrate to America. She needed about 400 crowns and had 300, and asked her parents for 100 crowns and bedding. Her father refused. She went back to Cinkota on March 4, and the family heard no more until they read about the case in the newspaper. Her father identified her, and he recognized her handwriting among the letters police had seized. Her sister described her as an attractive, red-haired woman of medium height who wanted to marry again.
Seventeen years later, in a police-file summary printed under a lead story about an arrest in Kansas City, the paper gave five names. The woman who had been named, described and identified by her own father had dropped out of the list. No correction to that list is known. There is only the omission.
Carl Grossmann was arrested on August 21, 1921, in Berlin, near the Silesian Station, after a neighbor called the police. He was a street peddler with a long record of earlier convictions. He confessed to killing three women, Marie Nitsche, 34, among them, and once put his own total at "three, at most five." His trial for three murders opened before a Berlin jury court on July 1, 1922. On July 5, before a verdict, he died by suicide in his cell at the Moabit remand prison. No court ruled on any of the killings; he died accused, not convicted.
The historian Sace Elder studied the investigation file in the Landesarchiv Berlin for a chapter published in 2014, and her chapter is a case study in how a press can shape a victim and her class at once. One of the women whose death was later attributed to Grossmann was Frieda Schubert, 33, who came from Dresden. On October 16, 1920 the Berliner Morgenpost reported the discovery of a woman’s body; the next day it reported that she had been identified by fingerprints. The paper called her a "street girl" and wrote that she had not been well liked in her neighborhood. Her death was later attributed to him.
The numbers ran ahead of the evidence. Elder writes that an undated police report in the file speaks of six deaths, that police in 1921 hoped to attribute as many as 27 to him, and that the Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger reported on September 4, 1921 that there was firm evidence of at least 15 to 20 victims. Rumor in the city put the figure at fifty. A later Berlin tabloid piece summarized the estimates as running from 23 to 200 and noted, as the police history page also does, that only three could be attributed to him. Newspapers named missing women, among them Melanie Sommer and Emma Baumann, as possible victims, and Elder shows that the BZ am Mittag and the Morgenpost dressed up their stories with invented detail. The Berliner Volkszeitung printed an invented scene in which a woman neighbor demanded fifty marks from him under threat of turning him in. The police had already taken her into custody, had nothing to support Grossmann’s accusation that she had known of the killings and blackmailed him, and released her.
The papers also divided the women along political lines. Elder writes that the Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger portrayed Grossmann as a degenerate and dwelt on the count, while the liberal Ullstein papers, among them the Morgenpost, cast the victims as naive young women from the provinces. Neither picture, she argues, fitted the women in the file: mothers, wives, workers and women in desperate need from the surrounding streets.
Elder’s larger point concerns why the women in the file never reached the police. Several described violence at his hands. None went to report it, and the reasons were practical. A woman suspected of prostitution could be registered with the morals police and made to undergo compulsory medical examinations, and Berlin residents had to register their addresses, a step that many of the women staying with him had not taken. To these women, Elder concludes, the police were persecutors rather than protectors, and the investigators later treated their accounts as evidence of murder rather than of the violence done to the women themselves. The press labels were not decoration on the case. They were part of what had kept the case from being seen sooner.
Peter Sutcliffe killed 13 women and tried to kill at least seven others in West Yorkshire and Manchester between July 1975 and November 1980. He was a married truck driver from Bradford, and during those five years West Yorkshire Police interviewed him nine times. The inquiry was the largest the country had seen. It was also overwhelmed by its own paperwork, distracted by a hoax tape and letters sent from Sunderland, and built around a theory that the killer hated prostitutes, which led senior officers to sort his victims into those they called innocent and the rest.
The phrase that stayed was applied to Jayne MacDonald, 16. Officers described her as the first "innocent" victim. The son of Wilma McCann, the first woman killed, said in 2020 that this implied the other women had not been innocent. "My mum was completely innocent and deserved to live," he said. He was five when his mother died, and he told reporters that police had described her as a "good time girl" and a "woman of loose morals." Her family had always denied the rumors that she sold sex, the Yorkshire Post reported, but the press treated them as fact. Jayne’s own family were angered by the division of the dead into good and bad women.
The sorting also applied to survivors. Marcella Claxton survived an assault in Leeds in May 1976 and gave the police a description and a photofit that later proved accurate. By the Press Association’s account she was ruled out as a victim of the series because she was not a prostitute. She was pregnant at the time and lost the baby. The assault on her was one of the seven attempted murders to which Sutcliffe pleaded guilty. Speaking after his death in November 2020, she said she still lived with her injuries and with the loss.
While the labels were being fixed, the publicity effort was aimed elsewhere. In March 1978 the inquiry began receiving letters from a man who claimed to be the killer, and in June 1979 a cassette tape arrived addressed to Assistant Chief Constable George Oldfield. "I’m Jack," it began. Dialect experts placed the voice in the Castletown area of Sunderland. The tape was played to the media, the public could hear it by calling a "Dial-the-Ripper" telephone line, and it appeared on billboards and in newspaper advertisements in a campaign that cost about one million pounds. About 40,000 men in the North East were investigated. Voice experts and some detectives warned that the material was a hoax. The survivors who had heard the man speak said he sounded like a local man, and Sutcliffe was from Bradford. He later said of the Sunderland hunt: "While ever that was going on, I felt safe." It is a striking arrangement: the voice of a hoaxer on billboards, and, for the women, a vocabulary of innocent and not.
He was caught on January 2, 1981 by two Sheffield officers who noticed false number plates on his car. At the Old Bailey in May 1981 he said he was not guilty of murder because God had told him to kill; a jury convicted him of 13 murders, and he was sentenced on May 22, 1981. He spent most of the next 39 years at Broadmoor Hospital, was told in 2010 that he would never be released, and died of COVID-19 in November 2020.
The correction, when it came, came the day he died. On November 13, 2020 the chief constable of West Yorkshire Police apologized to the families for the language, tone and terminology used by officers in the original investigation, Police Professional and the Yorkshire Evening Post reported that day. The Yorkshire Post had run a long piece in 2019 on restoring the reputations of the victims after decades of victim-blaming, and the Yorkshire Evening Post published a list of the 13 women with a few lines on each, headed by the idea of remembering who they were. The apology followed the coverage, and the coverage followed the families.
Steve Wright was convicted in February 2008 of murdering five women in Ipswich, Suffolk: Tania Nicol, 19, Gemma Adams, 25, Anneli Alderton, 24, Annette Nicholls, 29, and Paula Clennell, 24. They went missing between the end of October and the second week of December 2006. Mr Justice Gross ordered that he never be released.
The coverage of those weeks is a good specimen of the modern, faster, kinder-sounding version of the old habit. The press built each woman a small portrait from whatever was at hand. One had worked for an insurance company, press reports said in December 2006; another had trained as a beautician; one was described as a mother of three daughters. Tania Nicol’s parents spoke publicly about the daughter they had known and the one they had not. "They can’t take away our memories," her father said. "They can’t take away our love, our fortitude, our courage." Paula Clennell’s friends described her as lively, intelligent and witty, good company who could be very caring. The tone was sympathetic. Yet in the same weeks Ipswich’s afternoon paper gave the unidentified killer a nickname, and international coverage, among it CBS in an Associated Press report of December 13, 2006, put the case beside the Whitechapel one. The five women were named, and the man was branded.
A different kind of omission came to light twenty years later. On February 2, 2026, on the day his trial was due to begin, Wright pleaded guilty to the 1999 murder and kidnap of Victoria Hall, 17, of Trimley St Mary, and to the attempted kidnap of a 22-year-old woman the day before. The Press Association headline called her "the sixth woman." He was sentenced on February 6 to life with a minimum of 40 years. The 1999 inquiry had been the largest in the history of Suffolk Constabulary, the force has said, and a man, A.B., was charged with Victoria’s murder and acquitted by a jury at Norwich Crown Court on November 20, 2001. Wright’s name appeared in the early inquiry, police have said, but only as one among many, and the force has accepted that the attempted kidnap in Felixstowe "could have been more prominent."
For twenty years the Ipswich victims and Victoria Hall had belonged to two separate stories. One set of deaths had a nickname and a place in the national memory. The other was a teenager’s murder in a Suffolk village, for which a different man had stood trial and been acquitted. When the two were joined, the press had to rewrite its own description, and it reached for the vocabulary of a series: a sixth woman. Mr Justice Bennathan, passing sentence, described Victoria as a typical, bright and lively teenager, who had been studying for her A-levels and hoped to study sociology at Roehampton.
Stephen Port killed four young men in Barking, east London, between June 2014 and September 2015: Anthony Walgate, 23, from Hull; Gabriel Kovari, 22, from Slovakia; Daniel Whitworth, 21, from Gravesend, Kent; and Jack Taylor, 25, from Dagenham. He was convicted of their murders at the Old Bailey on November 23, 2016, and given a whole life order two days later. For more than a year the Metropolitan Police treated the deaths as separate, non-suspicious drug cases.
Here the question of naming is largely a question of whether the dead were believed. Walgate’s death led to an arrest within days, and Port was jailed for eight months in March 2015 for lying to police about it, yet the deaths that followed were not linked to it. The family liaison officer assigned to Kovari’s relatives never contacted them and recorded him as Lithuanian. The closing report in the Whitworth case contained the wrong name in places and wrongly stated that no injuries had been observed. A police officer told the coroner in June 2015 that Whitworth’s family had identified his handwriting on a note; his father told the inquests in 2021, "I definitely did not say it was." The coroner, Press Association reported, recorded open conclusions in both the Kovari and Whitworth inquests and said her concern about a third party’s involvement in Whitworth’s death "cannot be allayed by the evidence."
The people who saw the pattern were not the ones with an investigation to run. PinkNews said it first heard claims linking the deaths in December 2014 and approached Scotland Yard in early 2015, and was told the deaths were being treated as separate incidents with nothing suspicious linking them. The Barking and Dagenham Post made inquiries. The human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell said he raised concerns about a possible serial killer after the first three deaths. A friend of Kovari’s went to charities, the specialist press and Tatchell because, he told the inquests, "I didn’t trust the police to link it properly." PinkNews headed its report of the 2016 verdict by pointing out that Port had killed again nine months after the police dismissed its inquiry.
At the inquests that ran through the autumn of 2021 the dead men’s relatives were asked how they had been treated. Whitworth’s partner said he and Daniel were pushed aside as an unmarried couple: "If it was a straight couple I wouldn’t have been pushed out as much as I was at the time." The inquests were told in November that "homophobia in the Met" meant evidence had been dismissed, and a Press Association report of December 2, 2021 carried the headline "Homophobia issue ruled out in Stephen Port victims' inquests." Jack Taylor’s father said of his son: "We think because the police treated Jack as a drug addict the police didn’t look any further." His sisters, Donna and Jenny Taylor, kept their own notes listing three earlier deaths nearby and an earlier arrest for perverting the course of justice, and pressed officers to do more.
On December 10, 2021 the jury ruled that all four men had been unlawfully killed and that failings by the Metropolitan Police had probably contributed to the deaths of the last three. The Metropolitan Police apologized. In January 2022 the coroner reported on the investigation’s basic failings. The Independent Office for Police Conduct, which had looked at the case in 2017 and again from 2020, announced in November 2023 that eight Met officers faced gross misconduct investigations.
In her evidence Anthony Walgate’s mother, Sarah Sak, remembered a shy and reserved boy who grew in confidence in London. "The longer Anthony was in London, I could see a cygnet becoming a swan," she told the inquests. It is a sentence that no police file would produce. It reached the public because an inquest allowed the family to speak, and because the press, this time, printed the words.
Between the spring and late summer of 1988, at least eleven women were reported missing in and around New Bedford, a fishing city on the south coast of Massachusetts. Into April 1989 the bodies of nine of them came to light in towns around the city; two have not been located. The case has been described by Boston 25 News as possibly the largest unsolved murder case in New England. Five of the nine have been named publicly: Debra Medeiros, Nancy Paiva, Debra Greenlaw DeMello, Rochelle Clifford Dopierala and Mary Rose Santos. The other four, and the two women still missing, have not been named in published reports.
The coverage of the women at the time was shaped by the coverage of the search. The reporter who first wrote that a serial killer appeared to be at work in the city, Maureen Boyle, said later that no one realized the women were missing until they started turning up dead. Boyle, who covered the case as a crime reporter and later wrote a book about it, told CBS Boston that the victims shared similar backgrounds and that addiction was the common factor. The families have spoken more about who they were outside that thread. Debra DeMello’s brother described her as a good person who had become caught up in something she could not control, and said he did not believe the case would have gone unsolved if the women had been the daughters of police officers, judges or lawyers. Nancy Paiva’s daughter was a teenager when her mother died. Thirty years later she told Boston 25 News that there was no justice and no answers, and that she could not call her mother to talk about her day. "There has to be somebody who saw something, heard something, knows something," she said.
New Bedford also records what the press does to a man who is named. In 1990 one man was indicted for one of the deaths, that of Rochelle Clifford Dopierala. He called himself the victim of a witch hunt. Before he was charged, speaking by telephone from Florida, he counted 254 news articles that had linked him to the case, and in a 1990 interview with the Associated Press he said the indictment had ruined his legal career, the ABA Journal reported. A special prosecutor cleared him in the summer of 1991 for lack of evidence and called the indictment "a fishing expedition." He remained the only person ever indicted. Other men’s names circulated for years; none of them was charged. The women’s families, in the meantime, kept asking for the name that mattered.
Set side by side, the seven cases do not tell a story of improvement. They show a repeating transaction in which an authority supplies a description, a newspaper amplifies it, and a family or a researcher, years later, goes to the paper and the file to see what was actually written. In 1888 the correction took the form of an archive. In Berlin it took a historian’s reading of a police file. In Yorkshire it took the death of a man convicted nearly forty years before, and a chief constable’s willingness to say the words. In Barking it took an inquest jury.
The language of the better-intended coverage has its own limits. A portrait of one woman as a former insurance clerk and another as a mother of three daughters is kinder than a police label, but it is still a portrait assembled by someone who did not know her. The most durable descriptions in these cases are the ones given by people who did: a father at a Whitechapel inquest saying his daughter was too good to have enemies; a sister in a Hungarian newspaper describing a red-haired woman who wanted to marry again; a mother in a London coroner’s court remembering a cygnet.
• September 10 to 12, 1888: John Pizer arrested, released and publicly cleared at the Chapman inquest; he later accepted a settlement from The Star.
• 1888 to 1891: The police file on the "Whitechapel murders" takes in eleven deaths.
• May 12 to 16, 1916: Tiszántúl reports the identification of the Cinkota victims as relatives come forward.
• October 16 and 17, 1920: The Berliner Morgenpost reports the identification of Frieda Schubert, calling her a "street girl."
• August 21, 1921: Carl Grossmann arrested in Berlin.
• September 4, 1921: The Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger reports firm evidence of 15 to 20 victims.
• July 5, 1922: Grossmann dies by suicide in his cell, during his trial.
• July 31, 1933: Hétfői Napló prints a five-name victim list from the Cinkota file.
• March 1978 and June 1979: A hoaxer’s letters, then a cassette tape, reach the Yorkshire inquiry; the voice is publicized on billboards and by telephone.
• May 22, 1981: Peter Sutcliffe convicted of 13 murders.
• 1988: At least eleven women reported missing around New Bedford.
• 1990: One man indicted for one of the New Bedford deaths; charge dropped in 1991.
• December 2006: Press reports build portraits of five women in Ipswich; CBS and AP compare the case with Whitechapel.
• February 21, 2008: Steve Wright convicted of five murders.
• June 2014 to September 2015: Four young men die in Barking.
• June 19, 2015: Open conclusions recorded in two Barking inquests.
• November 23, 2016: Stephen Port convicted of four murders.
• 2019: Hallie Rubenhold’s The Five published.
• November 13, 2020: Sutcliffe dies; the chief constable of West Yorkshire apologizes for the language used about the victims.
• December 10, 2021: Inquest jury rules that failings probably contributed to three of the Barking deaths.
• February 2 and 6, 2026: Wright pleads guilty to and is sentenced for the murder of Victoria Hall.