Pushkin. You're alone on a city street. The darkness is total. It envelops you, pressing in. You stumble on, not knowing 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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. 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. 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 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. 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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. 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. 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 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, 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. 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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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, 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. 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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. 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 have predicted bad women. The Blackout Ripper will return shortly. 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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. 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 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, 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 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 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. 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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, 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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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.

Pushkin. You're alone on a city street. The darkness is total. It envelops you, pressing in. You stumble on, not knowing 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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. 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. 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 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. 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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. 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. 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 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, 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. 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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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, 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. 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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. 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 have predicted bad women. The Blackout Ripper will return shortly. 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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. 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 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, 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 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 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. 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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, 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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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.