Pages 211-212: Just as the newspapers' reporting on Polly Nichols and Annie Chapman's last movements are riddled with contradictions and inconsistencies, the same is true for Elizabeth Stride. While some publications, like the Western Daily Press, affirm that she did pay Elizabeth Tanner in advance for her stay that night, others, like the Daily Telegraph, state the opposite. If Stride had paid for her bed, then her intention when she left number 32 later that evening was certainly to return.
This point is discussed in the online article "Deconstructing Hallie", by David Barrat [18 July 2020]. Almost all the London newspapers say that she had not paid for her bed. This includes the Echo, 3 October 1888 [transcript available at Casebook], which reports the question and answer explicitly. Barrat suggests that the source of the inaccurate claim in the Western Daily Press, which would not have had its own reporter at the inquest, is the accidental omission of the word "not" from a report which appeared in the Edinburgh Evening News the previous day.