The five women were killed in 1888.
Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly are the five women whose murders are generally grouped together in the canonical Jack the Ripper case.
KODAMA / TRUE CRIME
2026
Biography · True Crime · History · Serial Killers
The Five
Five women whose lives were overshadowed by the legend of Jack the Ripper. Hallie Rubenhold looks beyond the killer's mythology to reconstruct the lives, struggles, families and identities of the women history too often reduced to victims.
Categories
Author
Hallie Rubenhold
Publication
2019
Country
United Kingdom
Original Publisher
Doubleday
Subject
Jack the Ripper's victims
Type
True Crime / Social History
Five lives remembered beyond the legend.
Whitechapel · London · 1888
KODAMA ARCHIVE
TRUE CRIME
01
About the book
The victims had lives before the legend.
In 1888, five women were murdered in London in a series of killings that became associated with the unidentified figure known as Jack the Ripper. Their names were Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly.
For more than a century, the mystery surrounding their deaths often overshadowed the women themselves. In The Five, historian Hallie Rubenhold shifts the focus away from the mythology of the killer and toward the lives of the people who were murdered.
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History remembered the killer. The Five remembers the women.KODAMA / EDITORIAL NOTE
Archive
Four details that change the story of The Five.
Their lives came from very different places.
The women had different backgrounds and life experiences, with connections to England, Wales and Sweden. Their lives cannot be reduced to the circumstances of their deaths.
The murderer was never identified.
The identity of the person responsible for the Whitechapel murders remains unknown. The mystery helped transform Jack the Ripper into one of the most enduring figures in criminal history.
The book won the Baillie Gifford Prize.
The Five won the 2019 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, recognizing Rubenhold's historical reconstruction of the women's lives and the social world of Victorian London.
Historical context
A mystery that became a myth.
The Whitechapel murders became one of the most recognizable unsolved cases in criminal history. But The Five asks what happens when the mythology surrounding a crime becomes more famous than the people who died.
1888
Whitechapel
In Victorian London's East End, a series of murders generated intense public fear and unprecedented newspaper attention. The press helped create the enduring character of "Jack the Ripper", while the individual lives of the victims gradually disappeared behind the legend.
2019
The Five
More than a century later, Hallie Rubenhold reconstructed the women's histories and presented their lives as the central narrative, rather than treating them merely as victims in someone else's story.
Watch
Book review & analysis.
An in-depth review and narrative breakdown of Hallie Rubenhold's landmark biography, uncovering the forgotten lives of the five women.
ARCHIVE FILM
Hallie Rubenhold · The Five · Book Review
Legacy
More than a book about Jack the Ripper.
The Five matters because it questions the way true crime and history choose their protagonists. Instead of giving the greatest attention to the unidentified killer, Rubenhold reconstructs the lives of the five women whose names became attached to his legend.
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