September 30 | Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes

November 27, 1843 - September 30, 1888: Age 44
? - September 30, 1888: Age unknown

Elizabeth Stride was born in Sweden, and worked there as a domestic servant and a prostitute before coming to London in the late 1860s. There she met and married carpenter John Thomas Stride. The marriage seems to have lasted 10 or 15 years, but the couple were definitely separated when Stride died in 1884. During the 1880s she took in sewing and did domestic work, with some prostitution on the side to supplement what must have been a tiny income. She had been arrested a couple of times for drunk and disorderly behaviour, but overall was described as having a calm temperament and was liked by her friends.

Catherine Eddowes (right) had a more difficult life. She had had a couple of children by a common-law husband, but had left the family due to severe drinking problems. She had a boyfriend, with whom she went out into the country to do harvest work; they had just returned to London and were broke. At 8:30 on the evening of her death she was arrested by police for public drunkenness; once the pubs had closed they released her, thinking she would go home.

Around 1:00 in the morning on Sunday September 30, a steward of a club in Whitechapel (a district of London) drove his cart into a square and discovered a woman's body. It appeared that she had just been murdered, as blood was still gushing from her slashed throat. This was Elizabeth Stride.

Meanwhile, about a 20 minute walk away, police were releasing Catherine Eddowes from custody. She walked to the poorly lit Mitre Square, about a ten-minute walk from the Bishopsgate Police Station. At 1:44 a police constable discovered her second body lying in Mitre Square. This time, the murder had not been interrupted. Although, like Stride, she had been killed quickly with a slashed throat, her body had been horribly disfigured and mutilated after death. It was determined she had died about 15 minutes before her body was found; thus about 30 minutes after Elizabeth Stride. They were the 3rd and 4th victims of Jack the Ripper, the only two to be killed on the same day. It is thought that because the murder of Elizabeth Stride had been interrupted, the killer had sought a second victim to meet his needs.

People who feel compelled to kill multiple victims, secretly, in a cruel manner seem to have always been part of humankind, but industrialized society, with the technology to communicate forensic information and public alarm, has given the phenomenon a public face. Jack the Ripper was not the first serial killer by any means, but he was the first one whose name became known worldwide. He was never caught.

Sources: Find-a-Grave (1) and (2), Wikipedia. I am not providing the links to the Wikipedia article as they show autopsy photographs, which you may not like to see.

September 29 | Carson McCullers

February 19, 1917 - September 29, 1967: Age 50

"The mind is like a richly woven tapestry in which the colors are distilled from the experiences of the senses, and the design drawn from the convolutions of the intellect."
— Carson McCullers

Born Lula Carson Smith, the girl who would become Carson McCullers dreamed of becoming a concert pianist. An early childhood bout of rheumatic fever deprived her of the stamina needed for practising, but she nonetheless went to New York as a teenager, ostensibly to study at the Julliard School. By then, however, her real ambition was to write, and she never attended any classes.

The early illness was the first of many health problems that always prevented McCullers from anything like a carefree existence. She appeared, and was, fragile and frail physically, but had a tough spirit that carried her through 50 years of strokes, paralysis, pneumonia, alcoholism, and depression. She never closed her heart to life: she wrote about the inner lives of social misfits and outcasts with passionate honesty.

At the age of 20 she married the writer James Reeves McCullers. The marriage ended quickly; both parties were bisexual and pursued extramarital relationships and in 1940 there was a triangle in which she and Reeves fell in love with the same man. Perhaps the greatest stress on the marriage was the fact that Reeves never achieved any recognition as a writer. They remained emotionally attached, remarrying in 1945. In the early 1950s, living in Paris, Reeves tried to convince her to commit suicide with him. She declined, and he ended his life in November 1953.

A series of strokes left McCullers paralyzed on the left side by the age of 31. She continued to write and enjoy critical success, although her popularity even among intellectuals was never unmixed: her subjects, the misfits and outcasts, always made people feel uncomfortable. In 1967, bedridden for years, she suffered a final stroke and brain hemmhorrage, which left her comatose for more than six weeks. She finally died on September 29.

"The theme is the theme of humiliation, which is the square root of sin, as opposed to the freedom from humiliation, and love, which is the square root of wonderful."
— Carson McCullers, describing her 1957 play

Sources: Wikipedia, The Carson McCullers Project

September 28 | Pompey the Great

September 29, 106 BCE - September 28, 48 BCE: Age 57

Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus earned his "the Great" in many, many respects. He was a great general, an outstanding administrator, a compassionate man, a loving husband and father, and a loyal friend. However he happened to be a contemporary of somebody who was smarter, less scrupulous, and very ambitious: Caesar. They were for many years close friends; Pompey was even married to Caesar's daughter Julia. But the death of Julia took the last restraint off, and Caesar's ambition to rule Rome dragged the relationship into deadly enmity.

There were many traditional safeguards in Republican Rome against the rise of a tyrant; one of them was effectively smashed when Caesar illegally entered Rome with his own battle-hardened army. It was a clear declaration of Caesar's intention to hold absolute power. Pompey, who championed the Republican cause, fled to the East, intending to raise an army and retake the city. He never came close; in fact the rest of his life was spent between humiliating defeats and running away. It was an unequal contest, although it didn't seem so at a time. Pompey was an able general who lived his life based on traditional values; Caesar was a military genius with an eye to the future and an instinctive grasp of the social changes that were rocking Rome. After a final defeat at the Battle of Pharacelsus, Pompey fled with his family to Egypt, where his friendship with the previous Pharoah would, he felt confident, ensure him the protection of the young Ptolemy XIII.

Ptolemy was only 13 at the time. His counsellors advised him that the friendship of the powerful Caesar was more important than old ties to a vanquished man who had lost his army. Pompey was waiting in a ship offshore for Ptolemy's answer. It came in the form of two old comrades, Romans who had fought beside him in the old days, now serving the Egyptian government. They invited him ashore to meet with the Pharoah, but once in the small boat and away from Pompey's ship they stabbed him in the back. They then cut off his head, stripped his body, and took these things to the Pharoah, insultingly leaving the body naked and unattended on shore. (One of his servants managed to gather some timber and cremate him there.)

When presented with the head of his old friend and enemy, Caesar "turned away from him with loathing, as from an assassin; and when he received Pompey's signet ring on which was engraved a lion holding a sword in his paws, he burst into tears" (Plutarch, Life of Pompey 80). Ptolemy's advisers had misjudged the Roman sense of honour completely. Caesar demanded the assassins be executed, and had Pompey's head cremated with honour. Ptolemy was later deposed in favour of his sister, Cleopatra.

Sources: Wikipedia, The Life of Pompey