A serial killer stalking the London Underground system in the second world war sounds like the plot for some fictional thriller but this is the true story of a ruthless killer who took the lives of several women in the 1940’s. Having survived the bombings in London they found a gruesome end in the shelters they had sought for safety. This reads like fiction but unfortunately it’s not.
Many people have a romantic notion of 1940s London, where everyone banded together and sang ‘Roll Out the Barrel’ in the Underground and bomb shelters, while the Luftwaffe flew overhead. The Blackout Murders portrays war-time London as the dirty and dangerous place it really was, where violent gangs stalked the darkened streets and desperate women resorted to prostitution.
On 9 February 1942, a woman was found strangled in an air raid shelter in the West End of London. Over the next week, the ‘Blackout Ripper’ murdered four women and attempted to murder two others. Strangulation was followed by increasingly brutal mutilation, and nobody knew when the killer, described by a pathologist at the time as ‘a savage sexual maniac’, would strike next.
In the utter darkness of the blackout, the killer could hide and strike at will - until a slip-up revealed his true identity.