It's a bad habit we have. We tell the tale of the murderer and not the murdered.

The clock on White Chapel Church was striking half past two when Ellen Holland watched her friend

Polly Nichols sway off into the darkness. Polly was drunk, penniless and broken.

She was inconsequential in the minds of most people she met, but she was about to cross paths

with someone who would give her a grisly, unenviable place in history.

In the autumn of 1888, Polly and four other women were brutally killed in a slum neighborhood of London.

Their unsolved murders were so violent, so cruel that their killer earned a nickname that is still known the world over.

I'm down on halls and I shan't quit ripping them. Jack the Ripper.

But in the greatest call case in history, few of us have stopped to question the basic facts.

One fact that you know about Jack the Ripper. That you never got caught. And who did he kill?

Prostitutes.

I'm Hallie Rubenhold. As a historian interested in the stories of women, I disowned the lives of the five victims

had been thoroughly researched long ago. I was wrong. When I dug into the records, I began to reveal rich and interesting lives.

Most of the time, women leave if they're being beaten to a pulp or he put out an eye.

Lives blighted by problems and prejudices most women today would recognize.

There wasn't a great deal of sympathy for alcoholics, so one had to sign a temperance pledge saying, I will not drink. If only it were so simple.

I identified with the women, sympathized with the tough life choices they made and admired their determination.

She gets on a boat and comes to England. She's eaten wider horizons.

I came to know them and like them.

She wants more than she's been born into.

But I also discovered something else, something new, something troubling.

It was just so obvious to me the very first time I looked at this file. How could we have gotten this wrong for this many years?

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