Whitechapel Murders
The case was listed as the first of eleven Whitechapel murders in Metropolitan Police files. Although elements of the press linked her death to the later murders, which were blamed on a single serial killer known as "Jack the Ripper", her murder is unlikely to be connected with the later killings. With the exception of Walter Dew, who said he thought that Smith was the first victim of the Ripper, the police suspected it was the unrelated work of a criminal gang. Smith either refused to or could not describe her attackers, possibly because she feared reprisal. Prostitutes were often managed by gangs, and Smith could have been attacked by her pimps as a punishment for disobeying them, or as part of their intimidation.
Read more about this topic: Emma Elizabeth Smith
Famous quotes containing the words whitechapel and/or murders:
“If the street life, not the Whitechapel street life, but that of the common but so-called respectable part of town is in any city more gloomy, more ugly, more grimy, more cruel than in London, I certainly don’t care to see it. Sometimes it occurs to one that possibly all the failures of this generation, the world over, have been suddenly swept into London, for the streets are a restless, breathing, malodorous pageant of the seedy of all nations.”
—Willa Cather (1876–1947)
“Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true. The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled.”
—Joan Didion (b. 1935)