4.6 • 1.7K Ratings
🗓️ 11 October 2022
⏱️ 44 minutes
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London's West End - once a glittering Mecca of nightlife - is pitch black. The lights are off to hide the city from waves of Nazi bombers - but in the darkness a merciless killer is hunting down the women of this district.
Join hosts Hallie Rubenhold and Alice Fiennes as they walk those bomb-damaged streets to tell the stories of the women targeted by this "Blackout Ripper" over the course of just one week in 1942.
You'll glimpse inside the theaters, jazz joints and dive bars of Piccadilly and Soho; witness deadly air raids; and criss cross the blacked out streets where a serial killer lurks. You'll learn too of the hardships that blighted the lives of many women in wartime, and the extent of the violence they faced at the hands of men from their own side in the conflict.
Sources:
Bone, James. London Echoing (London: Jonathan Cape, 1948)
Caddick-Adams, Peter. Sand and Steel: A New History of D-Day (London: Penguin Random House, 2019).
Cederwell, William. Reading London in Wartime: Blitz, the People and Propaganda in 1940s Literature (New York: Routledge, 2018).
Farson, N. Bomber’s Moon (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1941).
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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0:00.0 | A 34-year-old man was found bleeding to death on the street. |
0:03.6 | This man was Anthony Virgilio, Tony, to his friends. |
0:07.3 | Calvin Jones would spend 30 years in prison for Tony's murder. |
0:11.0 | And for 30 years, Calvin Jones would call my house and speak to my father. |
0:15.7 | What did my dad have to say to a convicted murderer? |
0:19.2 | When my dad died, he left behind a question. |
0:22.2 | Was he responsible for killing Tony Virgilio from Sonoro and Tenorfoot TV, the estate? |
0:28.0 | Listen to the estate wherever you get your podcasts. |
0:36.8 | Pushkin. |
0:45.9 | You're alone on a city street. |
0:48.8 | The darkness is total. |
0:51.0 | It envelops you, pressing in. |
0:54.6 | You stumble on, not knowing where the sidewalk ends and the road begins. |
1:00.8 | You brush by a darkened building, bump into an unlit street lamp. |
1:06.2 | You're desperate to reach safety. |
1:08.9 | For somewhere in this neighborhood, looks a killer who strikes in the hours of darkness. |
1:16.3 | The cruelty and viciousness of his crimes are unspeakable. |
1:20.8 | This is not make-believe horror. |
1:25.2 | This really happened and it happened in living memory. |
1:34.0 | It's a tale you've probably never heard before. |
1:37.5 | A tale of forgotten women murdered in a city without light. |
1:44.4 | This is London. |
... |
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