The Blackout Ripper - 202 - Murder Maps

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[00:00:15]For many centuries, London was a dangerous place.

[00:00:24]It was a magnet for the very worst kind of people. Jack the Ripper dominated the headlines. But he wasn't the only killer around.

[00:00:34]Murder was a foot.

[00:00:37]The fear of death was everywhere.

[00:00:41]But police had their work cut out to track the culprits down.

[00:00:47]In this series, we'll be investigating some of the city's most notorious and intriguing crimes.

[00:00:56]the female defendant.

[00:01:00]Sexual intrigue, vicious murder, as well as the latest technology fed the nation's insatiable desire for gruesome stories of London's dark side.

[00:02:00]the grim and dark days of of the Blitz when the nation stood together against the evils of Nazi Germany have always been a strong influence over Britain's image of its own character.

[00:02:14]London had to withstand 57 consecutive days of aerial bombardment.

[00:02:21]The city's inhabitants had to observe the strict regulations of the blackout, which made life so much harder for the German bombers, but also for the Londoners themselves.

[00:02:37]It's difficult to imagine now what life was like in London in 1940, not knowing whether you were going to be alive the next day, the next week, which must have been very difficult for people to cope with. By 1941, the city had a tremendous number of bomb sites and derelic sites.

[00:02:53]It had taken a real beating.

[00:02:55]>> It wasn't so much the deaths that were the problem. It was the amount of homelessness, the number of people that were bombed out of their houses and ended up with nowhere to live, nowhere to go. They didn't know where to turn.

[00:03:07]They didn't know what to do about money.

[00:03:08]They didn't know what to do about their possessions. And so there was a lot of chaos.

[00:03:16]There were supply shortages to exploit, empty and bomb damaged homes to loot, and huge numbers of young men to entice with drink and prostitution.

[00:03:29]From 1939 to 1945, crime rose by over 50%.

[00:03:35]An undemanded police force struggled to cope. It was, in the words of one gangster, a criminal's paradise.

[00:03:45]There was this great darkness at night which gave opportunities if you like for for people to commit crime.

[00:03:54]>> People didn't know whether they were going to live, whether they were going to die. They didn't know how to behave.

[00:04:00]They started doing things that they'd never done before. So behavior became unusual. Behavior became extreme.

[00:04:09]The blackout was tremendously exploited by criminals because with the sound of falling buildings, breaking glass, criminals were out at the beginning of a raid. They were going to risk the bombing because they could now start blowing saves, blowing indoors, uh, smashing windows.

[00:04:25]>> The blackout concealed darker crimes, too. In 1942, Harry Doppin, a fire watcher from South London, was convicted for the murder of his estranged wife, Rachel. Having vanished the previous year, her body was discovered months later among the ruins of a bombed out chapel. At first, she was thought just another victim of the Blitz. The police soon revealed his deception, however, and Doppkin was hanged for his crime in January 1943, but his was not the only act of murder disguised by the blackout.

[00:04:58]For crime was able to thrive in this blackedout world. And there are no crimes more notorious than those of the Blackout Ripper.

[00:05:48]On the morning of Monday the 9th of February 1942, Detective Chief Superintendent Frederick Cheryl, otherwise known as the fingerprint man was called to an air raid shelter where the body of a young woman had been found.

[00:06:03]Frederick Cheryl had been head of the fingerprints department since 1938. But despite his seniority, he still insisted on visiting crime scenes himself, always armed with his trusty magnifying glass.

[00:06:19]On her neck were the telltale marks of strangulation. To Superintendent Cher's experienced eyes, the pattern of bruises could mean only one thing. Whoever did this was left-handed.

[00:06:31]>> Fred Cheryl was one of the pioneer fingerprint men. It was a very new science for the police and Cheryl played an important part in the development of of the fingerprint department. It's something that we take for granted today, but it was under, you know, Fred Cheryl particularly where fingerprints and palm prints really became a recognized expertise and he's one of the people who have really contributed very largely to Scotland Yard's reputation.

[00:07:04]>> Fingerprint technology had come a long way since its first usage in the late 19th century. By 1942, the Met's Fingerprint Bureau had thousands of records on file. But records aren't much use without something to compare them to.

[00:07:25]All police had were the body and the woman's belongings strewn across the cold floor of the bomb shelter. These were sent to Cheryl's fingerprint department at Scotland Yard for further analysis.

[00:07:50]The fingerprints had really started to be introduced into police work because sometimes criminals would come to court and it wouldn't be clear whether or not they had a previous conviction in another court under a different name.

[00:08:06]What Frederick Cherald did was to establish a means of identifying single fingerprints found at crimes.

[00:08:29]Cheryl and Detective Inspector Sydney Burch had little to go on. The woman's handbag had been recovered, but it contained no clue as to her identity.

[00:08:40]They began door-to-door inquiries armed with a photograph of the dead woman.

[00:08:45]Nobody recognized her.

[00:08:57]It was found on Windham Street just around the corner from the shelters.

[00:09:01]All the prints are the victims.

[00:09:04]>> The attacker wore gloves. Then >> was a cult knight.

[00:09:09]>> No identity card.

[00:09:11]>> DDI Clare has men going door to door.

[00:09:15]Someone will recognize her.

[00:09:18]Past your line into the water enough times.

[00:09:20]>> And you catch something in the end.

[00:09:26]Though tragic, the murder of the woman in the bomb shelter seemed another unremarkable case. Gerald could have no idea, however, what was coming.

[00:09:36]Prostitution has been called the world's oldest profession. Well, it was certainly a profession that boomed in the war period. The fragility of life under constant aerial bombardment led to a fraying of normal social constrictions and the influx of Commonwealth and especially American troops meant there was no shortage of potential customers.

[00:10:02]As today it was a very dangerous occupation.

[00:10:09]I think it's fair to say that prostitution has always been with us.

[00:10:13]hasn't been unusual throughout history and it wasn't unusual at this point either.

[00:10:18]>> People were going to have a good time because who knows then tomorrow they they might be dead. There was that kind of attitude uh perhaps which affected how people behaved. Street prostitution didn't become illegal until 1959. So prostitutes of course uh were out on the street and what they would do during the blackout to attract customers. They would use torches flash that they were sort of available. They would use whistles and of course the bomb shelters and the underground shelters and dark doorways. These were places where they can actually service their customers.

[00:10:54]Fingerprint analysis of items found at the crime scene had revealed nothing.

[00:10:58]The killer had probably worn gloves.

[00:11:00]They had little else to go on. But although they had made no progress in identifying the killer, one other mystery was soon solved.

[00:11:10]The police's door-to-door inquiries in the Maraban area eventually identified the dead woman found in the air raid shelter as Eivelyn Hamilton. She was a 40-year-old qualified pharmacist originally from Newcastle. The postmortem confirmed that she had been strangled to death.

[00:11:30]There were no defensive wounds on the body, only scratches on her shoes gave any hint of a struggle. Whatever happened to Elyn Hamilton, it had been fast and unexpected.

[00:11:41]But what the police didn't know is that this would be the beginning of a deadly spree in blacked out London.

[00:11:48]The days that followed would test Superintendent Cheryl and the Metropolitan Police to the limit. They would soon be faced with ever more terrifying murder scenes and a frustrating lack of evidence to go on.

[00:12:00]But their persistence meant that any mistake the killer made would be quickly seized upon. When the press became aware of the string of murders, it would spark a frenzy across the capital as another ripper had arrived in London. There was no time to lose.

[00:12:20]On the morning of the 9th of February 1942, the body of Elyn Hamilton was assessed by Superintendent Frederick Cheryl of Scotland Yard, a man respected worldwide for his expertise in fingerprint analysis. But he had no prints to work on at this crime scene.

[00:12:37]Only the contents of Eivelyn's bag found next to a strangled corpse. But just as he began to work on this case, more news would arrive.

[00:12:49]Fingerprint office.

[00:12:51]It is.

[00:12:55]I see.

[00:13:03]Thank you, Inspector.

[00:13:05]I'll be there shortly.

[00:13:07]>> Across town, a terrible new crime had been uncovered. This crime, by coincidence, also involved a woman named Eivelyn.

[00:13:18]On Tuesday the 10th, Cheryl hurried across town to the bedset of Eivelyn Oatley. What was to be found there would shock even a man as experienced as the superintendent.

[00:13:46]What's What is that between her legs?

[00:13:56]It appears to be a torch, sir.

[00:14:20]Eivelyn Otley had suffered a brutal assault. Her killer had attempted to strangle her before cutting her throat with a razor. As she died, he abused her body with curling tongs and then ferociously mutilated her with a can opener. Once he'd finished, he left his cruy improvised weapons on the bed.

[00:14:49]Because there were more prostitutes, there were more clients, there was also more danger. This was not a an industry that was policed in any way. It was absolutely spontaneous. It was absolutely responding to to opportunity and to circumstance. And so there were a lot of dark incidents involving servicemen, involving prostitutes, involving women.

[00:15:15]Opportunity and circumstance also fueled one of the Blackout's other social problems, that of looting.

[00:15:23]Looting was actually a capital offense and it was seriously suggested that looters should be shot if caught. This may be a partial explanation why the war reserve constables were given rifles uh not so much to shoot at the enemy but to shoot at losers.

[00:15:43]The war reserve was set up in 1939 and these were volunteers who would supplement the police on on the streets.

[00:15:51]We think today of gun crime as being a great problem in America and the problem is always said to be, you know, because there's so many guns around, people use them. Well, this happened at this period as well. Young servicemen carried their guns even when they were on leave and they used them. They used them in all sorts of different circumstances. So for example, a young man came home on leave, saw his girlfriend in a shelter lying on a mattress with another man. His instinct was to become furious and to open fire.

[00:16:26]There was another case where a young man at Oxford University had access to a gun from the shooting club who went mad and started shooting people in the quad.

[00:16:35]Shot one person dead, hit another. He was found guilty but insane, sent to Broadmore. The fact is that there was a surprising amount of gun crime happening and it was happening because there were a lot of guns around.

[00:16:52]>> The large number of guns may have been unusual for the British population, but it would have seemed second nature to the influx of American soldiers who'd arrived in the country to fight in World War II. There'd be quite a cultural clash between the two peoples.

[00:17:10]I think there were a lot of social changes taking place and and and one was the Americanization of British culture, American movies, American music. A lot of people really didn't like it at all.

[00:17:23]They felt it was very cheap. They felt that it was it was very superficial and and and it had no place in the much richer British culture. But one unusual manifestation of this was what became known as a cleft chin murder.

[00:17:40]>> One of the American GIs who found himself stationed in London was a man named KL Halton. He met an English girl, a strip tease artist called Elizabeth Jones. There was an instant magnetism, but this attraction, however, would prove ultimately fatal.

[00:17:59]I think she was probably impressed by this great American army truck that Holton drove which was actually stolen.

[00:18:09]Um, and she had this fantasy that she wanted excitement and a life of crime.

[00:18:18]She thought, well, perhaps they could be a bit like Bonnie and Clyde, I suppose.

[00:18:25]Instead of tackling banks, the first target was a girl riding a bicycle who Carl pushed off the bicycle and took her purse. The second was a hitchhiker.

[00:18:35]Colton hit her over the head with a an iron bar and left her by the ditch of a canal.

[00:18:44]Um they took her money and again went back in the truck to Hammersmith.

[00:18:48]Fortunately, the young woman survived.

[00:18:52]>> After this series of petty crimes, Halton and Jones decided they would profit more from the robbery of a London black taxi driver. The unlucky victim was a man named George Edward Heath, whose defining feature was his cleft chin.

[00:19:08]>> They asked him for a ride to Chisik, for which he charged them 10 shillings, which was a lot of money in those days for a taxi ride. Eventually they asked to be put off and Hulton had a a loaded gun and shot him.

[00:19:29]The two of them robbed him. They took his purse into his money coins, identification papers, petrol coupons.

[00:19:36]These were all thrown out of the car and they drove back to London.

[00:19:40]The body was found sometime later.

[00:19:43]George Heath was identified. his car was missing, but they knew that it was RD5353 and and that was circulated to the the police who were on the lookout for it.

[00:19:58]They were easily arrested. They were brought to trial. They they ran a cutthroat defense. They both blamed the other one for what went on. Halton was found guilty and executed. Jones was found guilty and sentenced to death, but she actually wasn't executed. her death sentence was commuted and actually she only died in the 1980s. But the public feeling of revulsion of anger at these events was so great that graffiti started appearing saying that she should be executed. You know, hang her started appearing on on on walls. And this was a very very odd little case of these two people who had, you know, considered themselves gangsters. They wanted to live the American gangster lifestyle.

[00:20:42]George Orwell even wrote about them in his essay, The Decline of the English Murder, and wrote, "There is no depth of feeling in it. The background was not domesticity, but the life of the dance hall and the false values of the American film." He goes on, "Jones declared that she wanted to do something dangerous, like being a gun mole."

[00:21:03]Halton described himself as a big-time Chicago gangster. He concludes by saying, "Perhaps it's significant that the most talked of English murder in recent years should have been committed by an American and an English girl who'd become partly Americanized.

[00:21:23]The KF Chin murder appalled a nation that expected its citizens to band together in a time of war. But the Blackout Ripper case was a different beast entirely. Two bodies had been found, and if the police couldn't catch the killer quickly, terror could return to the London streets, which hadn't been seen since the days of Jack the Ripper.

[00:21:51]February 1942, in the blackout of wartime London, the Metropolitan Police were investigating two murders committed over successive nights. The victims were Eivelyn Hamilton and Eivelyn Oley. Having inspected both crime scenes, Frederick Cheryl was now analyzing the instruments found at Water Street that were used to mutilate Elyn Oley's body. As of yet, there was no reason to think that the two murders were linked. But this was all about to change. The killer had left a clue. Cheryl discovered a greasy fingerprint on one of the objects taken from the murder scene. As he lifted the print, he noticed something.

[00:22:31]>> Ah, inspector. Sorry to bother you so late.

[00:22:36]No, no, I'm afraid no much is yet, but there was something.

[00:22:43]You heard about that business on Ward Street?

[00:22:48]Yes, that's right.

[00:22:52]It's nothing perhaps, but it seems that was a left-handed job as well.

[00:23:00]Inspector Cherald finally had a bit of evidence to work with, a fingerprint of the killer. But now began the laborious task of going through all the records in Scotland Yard in the hope of finding a match. The police believed that if they could find a match, then they would be solving two murders at the same time.

[00:23:20]The police were convinced very very quickly because of the the way the bodies were mutilated, the weapons that were used that they were linked. The murderer had had caused sort of particular injuries to the victims. So it was clear that there were significant things that they had in common with each other. So it was very clear that they were looking for one person who was extremely dangerous, was attacking women frequently.

[00:23:59]Whoever the killer was, Cheryl could not find a match. For the next two days, no more bodies were found. But Cheryl knew a killer of such sadism would not stop of his own free will. Either the killer had died, moved on, or he had killed again. And the body lay alone undiscovered.

[00:24:22]Life continued in the capital as it always does. And on that Thursday night, three particular women prepared to leave their homes.

[00:24:31]One of them would not return.

[00:24:49]Is someone there?

[00:25:03]Mary was saved by chance. An 18-year-old night porter was passing by a doorway in St. Orbin Street when he spotted the flash of an electric torch. When the young porter called out, the blackout ripper sprinted down the street, disappearing into the night. Mary was left barely conscious, but alive.

[00:25:26]The blackout ripper had been frustrated.

[00:25:29]He hadn't satisfied the overwhelming craving he had awoken within him. It urged him on. And so fixed was his mind on this one desire. He didn't realize he'd made a crucial mistake.

[00:25:48]Mary Haywood had survived an encounter with the blackout ripper that night. The next woman that he came into contact with was a prostitute named Katherine Malke. They met in Piccadilly and traveled to her flat in Marble Arch.

[00:26:03]Once in the bedroom, he began to strangle her. She fought back and fled the apartment. Unsatisfied and driven by the desire for death, the killer returned to the streets looking for another victim. This time, he would not be denied.

[00:26:19]Margaret Low did not look anything like the image of a typical prostitute. Other women who worked the streets agreed. She dressed too conservatively and spoke with too much refinement. They nicknamed her the lady.

[00:26:39]The blackout ripper had been thwarted twice that evening, but Margaret Low would not be so lucky. Her friends and neighbors became concerned that they hadn't seen her for a while. Eventually, a call was made to Frederick Gerald. He arrived to find a scene even worse than the one at Wardor Street.

[00:27:01]The killer had completed a frenzied attack. He had cut deep into the flesh of her thigh. Her abdomen had been ripped open, exposing her intestines and internal organs. The knife and the razor he had scavenged from the kitchen were left on the body. Once again, he'd improvised weapons found at the location.

[00:27:31]>> What about the candle >> found inside the victim?

[00:27:38]>> They're right-handed, prince, >> I did notice. You sure they're your man?

[00:27:45]>> You are a right-handed man, aren't you?

[00:27:47]>> Yes.

[00:27:49]>> Let's say my fist is the candlestick and this pencil here is the candle.

[00:27:59]How would you go about removing it?

[00:28:05]Naturally enough.

[00:28:07]But imagine there were wax around the base of the candlestick holding it tight.

[00:28:23]You see, you had to use your other hand, your left hand, which is the natural thing to do for a right-handed man. But a left-hander now >> would use his right. Precisely.

[00:28:39]>> Right-handed prince, >> left-handed man.

[00:28:46]>> Burch and Cheryl now had three murders to deal with, and the drive to find a fingerprint match was even more intense.

[00:28:56]Fortunately, the fingerprint bureau at Scotland Yard had been a leading innovator in this new science. But no matter how good the system had become, there was no guarantee that the killer had a previous record on file.

[00:29:10]>> When the fingerprints were first started, they were used to actually identify criminals appearing in the court process.

[00:29:17]But some people thought it ought to be possible to take a finger mark left at the scene of the crime and then match it up. So they developed silver powder which would be brushed on a very soft brush.

[00:29:34]You would have had to use tape that would have been put on a glass slide then that would have been photographed.

[00:29:42]>> Many of the major developments in the study of fingerprints had not actually been made in Britain but in India by a man named Edward Henry who devised what became known as the Henry classification system.

[00:29:55]Edward Henry, who became commissioner at Scotland Yard, came up with the system that according to whether you had a loop or a wall pattern on your fingerprints and by looking at your thumbs and fingerprints, he actually worked out a way of classifying these fingerprints.

[00:30:15]And it ended up into a 1,024 different categories and permutations.

[00:30:21]And that formed the basis for how police could store and retrieve fingerprint patterns.

[00:30:32]At that time you have points of comparison similarity in arches, wells and loops. It was a long process. Of course within a very short time you then get fingerprints being sent by wireless and of course today much more scientific.

[00:30:48]Any luck?

[00:30:53]>> Nothing in the records.

[00:30:56]Do you mind?

[00:31:02]>> It was a long shot.

[00:31:05]>> Yes.

[00:31:09]When can I help wondering what he might be doing tonight, though?

[00:31:13]>> It's never best to think on that, Fred.

[00:31:16]We're doing all we can.

[00:31:18]>> No, no, you're right.

[00:31:24]Let's cast our lines again tomorrow.

[00:31:27]See what we can catch.

[00:31:33]Yes. Fingerprint office.

[00:31:41]Thank you.

[00:31:43]There's been another one. Burge.

[00:31:47]We're on our way.

[00:31:51]>> Cheryl Burch raced across London to a fresh murder scene. The blackout ripper was showing no sign of slowing down. How many victims would there be before he was finally caught?

[00:32:09]The blackout ripper had already killed three women. The bodies of Evelyn Hamilton and Eivelyn Oakley had shown that the police were looking for a left-handed killer, but they were no closer to identifying their suspect.

[00:32:23]In the early hours of Valentine's Day, Superintendent Cheryl raced across London to Sussex Gardens in Paddington.

[00:32:30]The blackout ripper had struck yet again. The postmortems conducted on Margaret Low and Doris June by Sernard Spilsbury produced strikingly similar results. Both women had been strangled, a silk stocking around both their necks.

[00:32:50]As they lay dying, both women had been hacked and slashed with abandon.

[00:32:57]Those investigating the crimes were worried. If the killer kept up this pace, it would create public panic and a fear that the police were unable to stop the slaughter. Despite their best efforts, they were no closer to identifying the man.

[00:33:16]On Valentine's Day, however, the press reported the gruesome twin discoveries of Margaret Low and Doris Shou's mutilated bodies. Inevitably, the killer was nicknamed the Blackout Ripper.

[00:33:30]In the early part of the Blitz, the press was very limited in what it could say about certain things. So even though this was happening in 1942 at a point when the war was starting to turn in the allies direction just for the first time, you know, there was still this this sort of thirst, this hunger for, you know, a good old-fashioned murder story.

[00:33:55]The newspapers picked up on this very rapidly and I think the phrase blackout repper came from the press and it was really being reported as something that caused great fear particularly for women who you know had to travel around in the dark. So you could imagine the extra fear of this man who was on the loose.

[00:34:21]>> Even the times was full of it. not just the more tabloid papers. So yes, the press were very happy to go to town on human interest, murder, crime stories, even though you know the war was going on around it. And you might think the war would be a much bigger story overall.

[00:34:39]>> But no sooner had the story broken than it was nearing its end.

[00:34:45]After receiving so many calls to inform him of the discovery of further bodies, Frederick Cheryl was finally about to receive some good news.

[00:34:57]>> Fingerprint office.

[00:35:00]>> What?

[00:35:03]How?

[00:35:06]The blackout ripper had made a crucial error. It hadn't been at one of the murder scenes, but when he'd been thwarted in his attack on Mary Haywood, the night porter, who turned up at just the right time to save Mary, found a serviceman's respirator had been left behind by the asalent. It had the number 525987 printed on it. The night porter delivered the respirator and the injured Mary to the police station on Savile Row. thinking at first it was just an assault they were investigating. No connection was made to the blackout ripper, but the police did contact the RAF and trace the respirator's owner.

[00:35:44]It was a young man named Gordon Frederick Cumins. He was 27 and had been in the Royal Air Force for over 6 years.

[00:35:55]Cumins was married, but he had a reputation amongst his fellows for drinking and womanizing. He was often out and fertively sneaking back in late after curfew. He was nicknamed the count or the Duke because of his impeccable manners and claims of noble descent, but was all a total sham. He was from a modest background in Yorkshire.

[00:36:22]None of his family suspected he had a darker side.

[00:36:28]After another night on the town, Cumins returned to his barracks early in the morning. The police were soon there, too. They took him to West End Central Police Station where they questioned him about the attack on Mary Haywood. Cumins was charged with assault. He was soon under suspicion of far worse.

[00:36:47]In Cumins quarters, police had found a pen personalized with the initials of Doris Joure. They also found a comb belonging to one of his victims and a cigarette case bearing the initials of another. They were certain they had their man. Of course.

[00:37:07]Thank you for informing me.

[00:37:19]On the 17th of February, the day before his 28th birthday, Cumins appeared at Bow Street Police Court to be charged with the murders. It was at this stage that Cumins was fingerprinted by Superintendent Fred Gerald. He signed his name, Gerald noted, with his left hand.

[00:37:49]Kumman's trial began on the 23rd of April, 1942.

[00:37:54]The case was interrupted when the jury was shown the wrong exhibit. The judge ruled that this compromised the jury's ability to try the case properly and he dismissed them. A new trial with a new jury started a week later.

[00:38:13]Cheryl was to be a key witness for the prosecution.

[00:38:18]The defense's only hope was to discredit his testimony and that of the other experts involved.

[00:38:28]What Frederick Cherald did was to establish a much better way of linking up a finger mark found at a crime with a suspect whose fingerprints were on record. It was a careful crime scene examination by the fingerprint expert that contributed to very large degree to that identification evidence.

[00:38:54]Cumins appeared in his defense on the second day of the trial. He insisted on his complete innocence.

[00:39:06]Cumins denied that he was the killer. He said the men he was sharing his billet with, they would often use one another's gas mask. They could all give one another alibis because they would sign into the register and then they would leave a billet down the nearby fire escape. But this alibi was quickly cracked and Cummins doesn't seem to have been particularly liked by his uh fellow students.

[00:39:29]The evidence not only had Cummins that even in Oatley's flat inside of his gas mask, there were sort of pebbles and stones and bits of ash which came from the bomb shelter where the first victim had actually been killed.

[00:39:44]>> The defense was fighting a losing battle.

[00:39:48]The judge clearly gave more credence to the prosecution case, calling the fingerprint evidence an important, if not essential link, and Cheryl, probably the greatest expert on fingerprints in the kingdom. The jury retired to consider their verdict at 4 p.m. and returned just 35 minutes later.

[00:40:12]Commons was found guilty and sentenced to death.

[00:40:17]He continued to insist on his innocence and appealed, of course, but that was rejected.

[00:40:28]London would be that little bit safer once again. The population of the capital, however, was still weary. Crime was still an issue, and although Britain, along with Allied forces, was on the attack against a retreating German army, the threat of aerial bombardment still lingered. These were turbulent times.

[00:40:50]>> The Blitz was a real time of extremes.

[00:40:53]It forced people to behave in ways that they hadn't behaved in before.

[00:40:59]People behaved very, very well. They actually, you know, found themselves with empathy for each other in a way they never had before. But they also broke rules. They broke laws. They pushed moral boundaries. So people were were pushing out in all sorts of different directions, opportunities opening up for good and for bad. This was a time when people were pulling together at the same time as they were pulling apart. And it's a time that we really should remember as one of the most interesting and integral and formative periods of modern British history.

[00:41:36]For the family of Gordon Cummings, the fact that one of their loved ones was a brutal murder was probably too much to comprehend during this already mixed up era.

[00:41:48]They started a mass campaign of letterw writing in order to earn him a reprieve from the noose. The home secretary at the time, Herbert Morrison, received dozens of letters outlining supposed holes in the case. Those letters are still on file in the National Archives.

[00:42:05]Mr. Cummings himself enlisted the help of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Prime Minister's wife. All these letters received the same response.

[00:42:16]I have considered sympathetically and carefully all the circumstances of the case. I regret I have failed to discover any grounds which justify me in advising his majesty to interfere with the due course of the law.

[00:42:41]Cummings the blackout ripper would indeed hang for his crimes. With all appeals exhausted, he was executed on the 25th of June, 1942.