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The victim was Elizabeth Stride, a forty-five-year-old occasional prostitute from Gothenburg, Sweden. Elizabeth Stride had been in an on/off relationship with a waterside labourer, Michael Kidney, who lived on Devonshire Street, Mile End. Their final separation was only five days before Stride’s murder. When Stride was not staying with Kidney, she frequently slept at 32 Flower and Dean Street - a doss house run by a woman named Elizabeth Tanner. According to Tanner, Stride was a charwoman by profession, and in the months prior to her murder, she had been "at work among the Jews" cleaning houses. Tanner claimed that Stride was a sober and quiet woman, but in reality she was an alcoholic who had been fined a number of times for drunk and disorderly behaviour at Thames Magistrate Court. Like many downtrodden women living in the East End, Stride resorted to prostitution when she couldn’t find work.
== Lipski ==
The broad-shouldered man shouting “Lipski!” at Israel Schwartz was a point of interest to the police. The use of the term “Lipski” was believed to be a reference to a widely publicised murder that had occurred a year previously in Batty Street, which was close to Berner Street. Israel Lipski was a Jewish immigrant umbrella salesman who had been convicted and hanged in 1887 for murdering a young pregnant woman named Miriam Angel by forcing her to consume nitric acid. As Detective Frederick Abberline pointed out, after the murder trial, "Lipski" was used as a sort of derogatory slang term in the East End in reference to Jews.
== Early Life ==
Elizabeth Stride was originally from Gothenburg in Sweden.