On This Day in History: August 31

Jack the Ripper commits his first murder

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There are plenty of conspiracy theories about the death of Princess Diana, which also happened on this day, but 109 years prior to that Mary Ann Nichols was definitely murdered. She was the first victim of the infamous Jack the Ripper.

--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: August 31, 1888--

Nineteenth-century England wasn’t a happy place for most women, but the story of Mary Ann Nichols is an especially sad tale. Born Mary Ann Walker in 1845 to a working-class family, she married at the age of 18 to a machinist named William Nichols. Together they had five children. They separated in early 1881, when Mary Ann was about 36. She alleged her husband had an affair with the nurse who attended the birth of their fifth child. He said she was a drunk.

Her remaining years in the east London district of Whitechapel were not happy ones. People who lived in Whitechapel were generally not well off, and Mary Ann struggled. She hired herself out as a housekeeper, lived in boarding houses and occasionally on the street, and supplemented her income via sex work just to live.

In 1888 she worked as a domestic servant for the Cowdry family, but that only lasted a couple of months because she was an alcoholic and her non-drinking employer did not approve. In the late evening of August 30, she left a pub and sought a bed in a rooming house but was turned away for lacking the fourpence for the night’s stay. Her last known words were her saying that she would go earn the money on the street. She was last seen alive in the early morning hours of August 31, 1888, standing on the corner of Osborn Street and Whitechapel Road.

Mary Ann’s body was found by meat cart driver Charles Cross at 3:40 a.m. Although “found” is suspect, because it was later alleged that he was the one who actually murdered her by cutting her throat, and was interrupted by carman Robert Paul before Cross could finish mutilating her. Cross then did the basic “She was like that when I got here. Let’s call the cops,” to Paul.

Jack the Ripper would claim at least four more victims in the next few months, all of whom worked as sex workers. Six other murders have been linked to Jack. Dozens of suspects have been proclaimed over the years, but the killer’s true identity remains uncertain.

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