Jack the Stripper: The Forensic Case That Changed British Criminal History

On the western shores of the Thames, between 1959 and 1965, eight women were stripped naked and left where the city disposed of its unwanted things: on the tidal foreshore, in industrial yards, on the pavements of residential streets in the darkness before dawn. The press called the killer Jack the Stripper. Scotland Yard mounted one of the largest manhunts in British history. The murders have never been officially solved.

Jack The Stripper reconstructs the Hammersmith Nude Murders in full - the eight women at the centre of the case, who they were, where they came from, what the city had done to them before the killer found them - and the investigation that came so close and failed so completely. Drawing on the original forensic record, the landmark 2019 cold-case investigation led by Professor David Wilson, and decades of archival research, Carlos Rossa O'Neill traces paint micro-flecks on three women's skin to a warm electrical substation on an Acton trading estate, maps the behavioral signature of two primary suspects across forty years of violence, and confronts the social conditions - criminalized poverty, institutional indifference, industrial darkness - that made these women killable.

A gripping forensic history and an unflinching moral reckoning, The Stripper insists that the eight women at its centre deserve more than a cold case. They deserve the full accounting the city still owes them.

Carlos Rossa O'Neill was raised in County Mayo on the west coast of Ireland, where an early fascination with the stories that official records leave unfinished became a lifelong preoccupation. He studied history and criminal justice at University College Dublin before settling in London, where he has spent two decades researching the city's darker chapters: the institutional failures, the marginal lives, and the cases that fell through the gaps between justice and indifference. His writing is driven by the conviction that the people most often forgotten in crime history deserve the same careful attention given to perpetrators and detectives. He lives in south London and is currently at work on a second investigation into mid-twentieth-century British justice.