CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
A SHINY BLACK BAG
The sun did not show itself on Saturday, September 29th, and a persistent, cold rain chilled the night as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde ended its long run at the Lyceum. The newspapers reported that the “great excesses of sunshine were at an end.”
Elizabeth Stride only recently had moved out of a lodging house on Dorset Street in Spitalfields, where she had been living with Michael Kidney, a waterside laborer who was in the Army Reserve. Long Liz, as her friends called her, had left Kidney before. She carried her few belongings with her this time, but there was no reason to assume she was gone for good. Kidney would later testify at her inquest that now and then she wanted her freedom and an opportunity to indulge her “drinking habits,” but after a spell of wandering off, she always came back.
Elizabeth’s maiden name was Gustafsdotter and she would have turned 45 on November 27th, although she had led most people to believe she was about ten years younger than she really was. Elizabeth had led a life of lies, most of them pitiful attempts to weave a brighter, more dramatic tale than the truth of her depressing, desperate life. She was born in Torslanda, near Goteborg, Sweden, the daughter of a farmer. Some said she spoke fluent English without a trace of an accent. Others claimed she did not properly form her words and sounded like a foreigner. Swedish, her native tongue, is a Germanic language closely related to Danish, which is what Sickert’s father spoke.
Elizabeth used to tell people she came to London as a young lady to “see the country,” but this was just one more fabrication. The earliest record found of her living in London was in the Swedish Church register that listed her name in 1879, with the notation that she had been given a shilling. She was five foot two or four, according to people who went to the mortuary to figure out who she was. Her complexion was “pale.” Others described it as “dark.” Her hair was “dark brown and curly,” or “black,” according to someone else. A policeman lifted one of Elizabeth’s eyelids in the poorly lit mortuary and decided that her eyes were “gray.”
In her black-and-white postmortem photograph, Elizabeth’s hair looks darker because it was wet and stringy from having been rinsed. Her face was pale because she was dead and had lost virtually all of the blood in her body. Her eyes may once have been bright blue, but not by the time the policeman lifted a lid to check. After death, the conjunctiva of the eye begins to dry and cloud. Most people who have been dead awhile appear to have gray or grayish-blue eyes unless their eyes were very dark.
After her autopsy, Elizabeth was dressed in the dark clothing she was wearing when she was murdered. She was placed in a shell that was stood up against a wall to be photographed. Barely visible in the shadow of her tucked-in chin is the cut made by her killer’s knife as it jaggedly trails off inches below the right side of her neck. Her photograph after death may have been the only one taken in her life. She appears to have been thin, with a nicely shaped face and good features, and a mouth that might have been sensuous had she not lost her upper front teeth.
Elizabeth may have been a blonde beauty in her youth. During her inquest, truths about her began to emerge. She had left Sweden to take a “situation” with a gentleman who lived near Hyde Park. It is not known how long that “situation” lasted, but at some point after it ended she lived with a policeman. In 1869, she married a carpenter named John Thomas Stride. Everyone who knew her in the local lodging houses she frequented had heard the tragic tale that her husband had drowned when the Princess Alice sank after a steam collier ran it down.
Elizabeth had different versions of this tale. Her husband and two of her nine children had drowned when the Princess Alice went down. Or her husband and all of her children drowned. Elizabeth, who would have been quite young when she began bearing children to have produced nine of them by 1878, somehow survived the shipwreck that killed 640 people. While struggling for her life, another panicking passenger kicked her in the mouth, explaining the “deformity” to it.