Catherine Eddowes (14 April 1842-30 September 1888) was a British prostitute and the fourth of the five canonical victims of Jack the Ripper.
Biography[]
Catherine Eddowes was born in Wolverhampton, Staffordshire, England in 1842, the sixth of twelve children born to a tinplate worker. She was raised in Bermondsey, London, and she lost her parents at the age of 15. She was raised in a Bermondsey workhouse before failing to find lasting work in Wolverhampton and Birmingham. She later formed a relationship with an Irish veteran in Birmingham and relocated with him to Westminster in 1868, and she developed alcoholism. By 1880, she and her husband settled in Chelsea, but she left her husband that same year due to her alcoholism. She moved in with a fruit salesman in East London in 1881, residing in Spitalfields. She worked as a domestic servant for the Jewish community of Brick Lane and also prostituted herself to pay the daily rent. On 29 September 1888, she traveled to Bermondsey to borrow money from her daughter, but she got drunk and was detained at the Bishopsgate police station before being released at 1 AM on 30 September 1888. On the way back to her lodging house, she walked through Church Passage towards Aldgate, and she was seen to be in the company of a man appearing to be a sailor. She was murdered at Mitre Square and her body discovered at 1:44 AM, her throat having been cut, her face and abdomen mutilated, her intestines drawn out over the right shoulder, and her left kidney and uterus removed. Jack the Ripper left anti-Semitic graffiti on a nearby wall, but Commissioner Charles Warren had the words erased lest they spark a pogrom.