Naming Jack the Ripper: The Biggest Forensic Breakthrough Since 1888 (13 page)

One letter, sent to Central News and apparently in the same hand as the ‘Dear Boss’ letter, explained a rather disturbing motive for the murders and also promised
to increase the carnage:

Even at the time, and more so over the years, the letters were assumed by the police to be hoaxes. Today most historians and researchers are agreed that the first were, in all
probability, written by an eager journalist, spicing up an already dramatic story. He may have sent everyone on a wild goose chase, but nevertheless he came up with the name, Jack the Ripper, that
has followed the case down the years.

The police investigation was intense. Eighty thousand leaflets requesting information were distributed:

Because of the suggestion that the Ripper knew the internal organs of the body well enough to carry out his ritualistic
mutilations, butchers and
slaughterers were singled out and interrogated, and so were sailors working on the Thames boats. For two or three weeks bloodhounds were deployed, until the experiment of using them was called off.
Two thousand lodgers from the local dosshouses were interviewed.

In the days immediately after the murders many of the unfortunates stayed away from the streets, and the East End was virtually deserted after dark. Shops and businesses suffered, as customers
stayed away from the area. Almost the only activity on the streets after dark was the police patrols, which were stepped up, and there were even reports of policemen dressing as prostitutes, in a
bid to lure the Ripper back to his patch, although their hobnail boots apparently gave them away.

The streets were still busy during the day, however, and when poor Catherine Eddowes’ body was taken to its final resting place, eight days after her death, it was a huge occasion.
The
Times
described ‘a multitude of persons’ assembled to see the simple cortege leave the police mortuary. Although Catherine was eventually placed in an unmarked grave at Ilford
Cemetery, her procession through the streets was as if she had been a famous dignitary, with a carriage load of press reporters following the mourners. Progress through Whitechapel was very slow,
as thousands of people were on the streets to see it, including whole families, with children being held up by their parents. Catherine’s four sisters, two nieces and John Kelly, the man she
lived with, were at the graveside. By contrast, Elizabeth Stride was given a pauper’s funeral two days earlier, with very few people there.

Frustrated by the police’s lack of success, and feeling that the murders were beginning to affect their livelihoods, groups of local businessmen got together to create ‘vigilance
committees’.
Not only did they start a campaign to get the Metropolitan police to offer rewards for the capture of the Ripper, but they also paid men, armed with
whistles and stout sticks, to be a visible presence on the streets after dark, essentially attempting to become extra eyes and ears for the beleaguered police.

The most prominent of these organizations was the Mile End Vigilance Committee, whose president was Mile End painter and decorator George Lusk. With his name appearing in the newspapers often,
Lusk became the target of some strange incidents, including the receipt of alleged letters from the murderer. The most famous of these and certainly the most notorious ever received by anybody at
the time, arrived at his home on the evening of 16 October. The letter came with a parcel containing half a human kidney.

In light of the removal of a kidney from Catherine Eddowes only two weeks previously, it made the whole package highly contentious. Apart from being definitely human, medical
experts at the time could not ascertain whether the kidney had even belonged to a woman, let alone Eddowes, and there is a possibility that it came from a dissecting-room corpse. Many rumours have
since circulated about the piece of kidney,
including the popular suggestion, put forward in memoirs, that it had traces of Bright’s disease, a condition that
afflicted alcoholics, as did the organ remaining in Catherine Eddowes’ body. Although the kidney was analysed several times, sadly the official reports or notes have long been lost. In my
opinion, this is the only one of the letters that could be genuine, especially because of the reference to the kidney, and because the writer does not use the Jack the Ripper name. But I have no
proof, and it could well be another hoax.

October was a busy month for the police, but a quiet time for the Ripper himself, with no further murders until 9 November 1888. Experts have come up with different theories for what was, for
him, a long break. It has been suggested that serial killers often take longer spells away from their ‘work’ at times.

But I believe I have now solved the mystery of the five-and-a-half-week lull in his activities. Before I explain, here are the details of his final killing, which outstrips everything that came
before in its sheer brutality. This time the Ripper returned to Spitalfields, at the heart of the East End’s most impoverished district.

CHAPTER SIX

MURDER MOST GHASTLY

The Death of Mary Jane Kelly

T
he fifth and final Ripper murder is the one I call his
Mona Lisa.
It is the one where he had the time to completely fulfil his warped,
sadistic urges, the culmination of all the fantasies he had developed in the escalating complexity of the previous mutilations. He could indulge himself, free from the risk of discovery, and he
did.

Again, thank God, the victim was dead swiftly. It is hard to imagine the terror she must have felt when she realized the man she had taken back to her room was not there for straightforward
sexual gratification, but at least he murdered her before he began to dismember and mutilate her.

Mary Jane Kelly’s body was found in her lodgings at 13 Miller’s Court, Dorset Street, on the morning of Friday, 9 November 1888. It was a morning of great police activity in London
as it was the day of the Lord Mayor’s Parade, when crowds would be out to cheer the new mayor and then 2,000 poor people would be given a free ‘substantial meat tea’, followed by
entertainment. Many of the unfortunates of the area were looking forward to earning money from the men enjoying
the holiday mood. But the festivities were eclipsed as the
news of another murder spread through the East End.

Mary was a twenty-five-year-old prostitute described as 5 foot 7 inches tall, with a fair complexion, a rather stout build, blue eyes and a very fine head of hair. From descriptions given of her
she was good-looking: ‘attractive’ is the word most used, and a ‘pretty, buxom girl’ is another description of her.

What we know about Mary’s background is contentious as it originates from Mary herself, and is what she told to friends and acquaintances. Even today, with so much access to genealogical
databases, confirmation of the facts proves elusive. She had a very common name, and it may not have been the name she was born with: many of the unfortunates were fleeing from their past when they
gravitated to the streets of the East End. What follows is her own story of her life, none of which has ever been proven to be true or false.

She was born in Limerick, Ireland, and moved with her family to Carmarthenshire in Wales when she was very young. At the age of sixteen she married a collier by the name of Davies, but,
tragically, her husband died in a mining accident within two years of their marriage. Mary apparently moved to Cardiff where, under the influence of a cousin, she became involved in prostitution.
From there onwards her life took an unusual turn. Moving to London by 1884, she worked at an exclusive West End brothel which, given her looks, could certainly have been true.

She told friends that she travelled to France with a ‘gentleman’. Deciding that this was not the life for her, she returned to England after two or three weeks. The trip to France
may have inspired Mary to occasionally call herself ‘Marie Jeannette’. Around 1884, Mary settled in the East End,
near the London docks, lodging with a Mrs Buki
until her growing fondness for alcohol meant that she had to leave. She then stayed at the home of a Mrs Carthy until 1886 when Mary left to live with at least two different men in Stepney for
short times, before ending up in the dosshouses of Spitalfields, where she stayed at Cooney’s lodging house in Thrawl Street. Her descent, as with so many of the unfortunates, seems to have
been rooted in alcohol. She was according to those who knew her a quiet, pleasant girl when sober, but noisy and bawdy when drunk.

On Good Friday 1887, she met Joseph Barnett, a twenty-nine-year-old Billingsgate fish porter, and after only one day they made the decision to live together, which they subsequently did in rooms
in various houses in George Street, Brick Lane and Little Paternoster Row before finding a room in Dorset Street, Spitalfields. Dorset Street had a notorious reputation for crime and vice; the
philanthropist and social reformer Charles Booth, who campaigned for more government help for the poor, described it in his 1888 survey notebooks as ‘the worst street I have seen so far
– thieves, prostitutes, bullies, all common lodging houses.’ Room 13, Miller’s Court, was at the end of a small passageway between 26 and 27 Dorset Street. It was actually the
back room of No. 26 which had been separated from the rest of the property with a false partition by the landlord, John McCarthy, who ran a chandlers shop from No. 27. Miller’s Court was
known as ‘McCarthy’s Rooms’ because he was the landlord for so much of the court. Mary and Joe moved there in early 1888, paying four shillings and six pence a week for the partly
furnished, squalid little room.

Joe Barnett supported the couple financially but lost his
job as a fish porter in early August, and gradually the couple fell behind with the rent. What Joe made selling
oranges did not provide enough for them, so Mary felt she had no option but to go back to prostitution. This, along with her habit of allowing other prostitutes to sleep in the room on cold nights,
caused Joe to walk out on 30 October and move into a lodging house in New Street, Bishopsgate.

Mary was apparently fascinated by the Ripper murders, as were so many of the working women of the East End. She used to ask Joe Barnett to read all the newspaper stories to her, and her fears
may account for her inviting other girls to share her room, both for her protection and theirs.

Despite the separation, Mary and Joe were obviously still on good terms and Barnett would regularly stop by to give her some money if he had managed to earn any from casual work. He last visited
Mary between 7 and 8 p.m. on the evening of 8 November, this time to apologize for not having any money to give her. That was the last time he saw her alive.

After her death, neighbours in Miller’s Court gave evidence about what they had seen and heard on the last night of Mary’s life. Mrs Mary Ann Cox, a widow who also earned her
subsistence from prostitution, lived at Room 5, Miller’s Court and had known Mary Kelly for about eight months. She followed Mary, who was with a man, into Miller’s Court at about 11.45
p.m. on that Thursday night. The couple entered Room 13 and as Mary was walking through her door, Mrs Cox said goodnight to her; Mary was very drunk and could scarcely answer, but managed to utter
a slurred ‘Goodnight’. The man who accompanied her was carrying a quart pail of beer and was described as about thirty-six years old, about 5 foot 5 inches tall, with blotches on his
face, small side whiskers
and a thick carroty moustache, dressed in shabby dark clothes, a dark overcoat and a dark felt hat. She went on to say that she soon heard Mary
singing, ‘Only a violet I plucked from my mother’s grave’. Mrs Cox was in and out of her room several times that evening and, when she finally returned at 3 a.m., all was dark in
Room 13 and she didn’t hear any noise for the rest of the night.