It was a black hood for the Blackout Ripper on this date in 1942.

Charming Royal Air Force serviceman Gordon Frederick Cummins gave rein that February to a theretofore unarticulated inclination to femicide, attacking six women in the course of a single week, four of whom were killed by strangulation. The pattern of perverse post-mortem mutilations led one examiner to characterize the wanted man as “a savage sexual maniac”. This predator’s opportunistic use of the city’s protective cloak of air raid darkness reminds a similar spree perpetrated on the Berlin S-Bahn: truly, all men are brothers.

For a few days, this special horror gripped the wartime capital, so recently under enemy blitz. As fingerprint expert Frederick Cherrill, whose evidence would help to tie up Gordon Cummins’ noose, wrote in his now-out-of-print autobiography,

Women police in ordinary clothes strolled about the streets in the hope of being accosted by the unknown killer. So great was the terror which swept like a wave over the square mile in which these crimes had been committed that the regular street-walkers who haunted the area were too scared to venture out. [several of the victims were prostitutes -ed.] Small wonder, for nobody knew when or where the killer would strike again. That he would strike again seemed certain, for the lust of killing appeared to have siezed him in a merciless grip

Unlike his permanently elusive Whitechapel namesake, the Blackout Ripper was not long at his liberty once he loosed the beast within: crime scene forensics were still coming of age in this period, but the ample evolution of the bureaucratic state did for Cummins. On lucky Friday, February 13, Greta Hayward had fought off her attacker with the help of a passerby’s interruption. Cummins, when he fled, abandoned his RAF gas mask case … which was helpfully stamped with a serial number identifying its owner. He was arrested on February 16, just eight days after the start of his spree. (Scotland Yard, however, would later claim that his fingerprints connected him to two previous London murders, from October 1941.) It took a jury 35 minutes to convict him.

On this day..

• 1950: The Martyred, at the outset of the Korean War
• 1999: Eduardo Agbayani, omnishambles execution
• 1880: Three juvenile offenders in Canton, Ohio
• 1942: Evzen Rosicky, athlete
• 1483: Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers
• 1646: Jan Creoli, for sodomy in slavery
• 2003: He Xiuling, Ma Qingxui, Li Juhua and Dai Donggui
• 10 executions that defined the 1980s
• 1804: Georges Cadoudal, Chouan
• 1790: Thomas Bird, the first federal execution under the U.S. constitution
• 1591: Euphane MacCalzean, witch
• 1579: Hatano Hideharu, en route to the Tokugawa Shogunate
• 1959: Charles Starkweather, Nebraska spree killer