The Real Mary Kelly (30 page)

He loses track of time as he stands there thinking of what might have been. Eventually he turns away and walks quickly back towards the cemetery gates through which her funeral procession had wheeled all those years ago. He hardly glances at the Birkbeck Tavern where all her friends had gathered after the funeral to be plied with drink by reporters keen to wring out one last story, some anecdote or other that would satisfy their readers’
schadenfreude
. He could have told them a thing or two if he’d had a mind to.

On the way back he gets off at Stepney Green and crosses the road to look at the house they had lodged in at Lemon’s Terrace. Their first home together. He had had such hopes at the beginning but it was there that it had started to go wrong. Within days she had wanted to return to her familiar haunts in the West End. He should have been stronger. He should have stood up to her threats and entreaties. But it was not a skill that his father had taught him. He had only ever been taught to yield, to comply with what others demanded of him. Possibly if he had known how to resist they would still be there, children nearly grown up, a son waiting to go to medical school perhaps, daughters as pretty as their mother.

As he makes his way back towards the station he is accosted by a man who has recognised him. ‘Craig, isn’t it? My word! I haven’t seen you in these parts for years. What have you been doing with yourself? Keeping well I hope? Well, mustn’t keep you hanging about in this rain …’ He can’t remember who it was. A court official perhaps or another reporter. It doesn’t matter now.

When he reaches Hammersmith he walks down Fulham Palace Road to the cemetery. The moisture from his coat has now penetrated through to his suit and he can feel the dampness beginning to seep through even that. He walks up the central avenue of the burial ground until he reaches the spot where his parents lie. There is nothing to mark this grave either, no headstone, just a narrow strip of grass between two other graves. He has no flowers to leave here.

It is starting to get dark by the time he reaches Carthew Road but the rain has finally tailed off as if every drop has been wrung from the grey, floor-cloth sky. Mr. Reading meets him in the hall and is surprised at how saturated he is. He gives him the Inverness and the coat of his suit and asks him if he could dry them in front of the kitchen range. He thanks his landlord kindly but, no, he is not hungry. He is going to have an early night.

Sleep doesn’t come. He lies looking up at the slight flickering of the street light reflected on the ceiling of his room. He hears the Readings come up to bed and the murmur of their voices in the room next to his. Every time he closes his eyes he sees a muddy patch of grass strewn with flowers and he smells the wet asphalt of the paths.

He thinks of the next day. He does not think he is going to see her. He does not believe in an afterlife. He will not see her again. He does not
want
to see her. That is precisely the point. Once he is gone so she too will vanish. There will be no more memories, no laughing face to visit his dreams. He doubts if there is anyone else who remembers her now and within a few days he will also be forgotten. It will finally be over.

In the early hours he gets up, takes a fresh reporter’s pad and pencil and sits at the table. The words won’t come. Now the time is approaching he doesn’t know what to say.

Sorry perhaps.

Yes, he is sorry for what the Readings will find when they enter his room. They do not deserve it; they have been good to him these last few years. He writes slowly: ‘Very sorry; you have acted very kindly to me, I consider more than kindly whilst I have been with you. I have been severely tried physically.’ It is hardly adequate, he knows that but he has no other words.

He must make some attempt at an explanation. Not an apology. There can be no apology or forgiveness for what he has done, no atonement. He takes another sheet from the pad. How can he explain it? If they had seen how he had treated those women no explanation would ever suffice. But he must try. He must explain that they were all dead before he carried out his work; that he had done no more to them than doctors and medical students did to the dead every day. But he knows it is no good – they are not doctors and they will never
understand. He starts to write: ‘It would only pain you to see the Doctor’s treatment.’ His hand is shaking and his normally clear handwriting is nearly illegible. It is no good, they won’t understand. The best he can do is to try to tell them how he had been feeling. He starts again, ‘I have suffered a deal of pain and agony, and was no doubt temporarily suffering from pressure of nerve complaints, including several …’ But now his hand is shaking so much that he is unable to continue. It will have to do. The time has come.

He wipes his razor a couple of times on the strop and gets back in to bed. He pulls the sheets up close to his neck and raises his hand towards his throat.

Unlike his victims, death came slowly to Francis. He had tipped his head right back before he drew the razor across his throat, which is a common thing for people attempting to cut their own throats to do. In doing so his anatomical knowledge had momentarily deserted him because the action causes the sheaths containing the great blood vessels of the neck to be pulled back either side of the spinal column
¹⁴¹
. Instead of severing the carotid arteries as he had intended, Francis merely succeeded in cleanly dividing his windpipe, which instantly deprived him of the power of speech.

He was taken to the West London Hospital, probably by horse-drawn ambulance although, by the early 1900s, the first motor ambulances were beginning to be seen in the streets of London. The hospital was a fine new one just east of Hammersmith Broadway. The building stands today but is now the headquarters of an international electronics company.

Word soon reached the Warrens, and Louisa and her daughter visited him the next day. It is a measure of their kindness and of their affection for Francis that they should have done so. He was not a relative, he was hardly more than a casual acquaintance and visiting anyone under those particular circumstances
cannot have been pleasant. He was fully conscious but only able to communicate in writing. This suggests that the wound in his trachea had been left open and a silver tracheostomy tube inserted for him to breathe through. His chief concern, as it had been for months past, was financial. He was convinced that somehow he had lost all his money. The Warrens’ daughter tried to reassure him that he had not lost any money but Francis seized the pad again and wrote,‘Yes, I am sure I have.’ Then, as if he didn’t have other things to worry about he asked – ‘instructed’ Edward said at the inquest – Louisa to visit a tailors on the Broad-way to pick up some clothes that he had left for alterations.

Four days passed before Francis died on Sunday 8th March 1903 at 9pm in the evening. The cause of death was septic pneumonia caused by infected debris entering the lungs through the severed trachea and, because the recurrent laryngeal nerves had also been cut through, aspiration of food and stomach contents into the lungs. In the days before antibiotics it would have been a lingering death with Francis increasingly fighting for breath and vainly trying to cough up the thick sticky secretions that were slowly filling his lungs. He would have developed a fever and probably 24 hours before he died he may have lapsed into unconsciousness. It was not the rapid death that his victims had experienced but, like them, after death his body was opened and his internal organs thoroughly examined in the hospital mortuary. Apart from the pneumonia he was found to be in perfect health.

An inquest was convened at Hammersmith coroner’s court on Wednesday 11th March. The coroner was Dr. C. Luxmore Drew, coroner for West Middlesex. Six years previously he had presided over the inquest of Augusta Dawes, an unfortunate whose throat had been cut in Holland Park on 25th November 1894. It was an incident that had awakened memories of the Ripper and indeed a letter was received a few days later by Kensington police station signed Jack the Ripper and posted in Ireland. The culprit was quickly identified as Reginald Saunderson, the 21-year-old nephew of Colonel Edward Saunderson, MP for County Cavan, who had absconded earlier that day from a mental institution in Hampton Wick. He was brought to trial and found unfit to plead by reason of insanity.

At Francis’s inquest, before the formal proceedings commenced, the coroner addressed the court to say how sorry he was to be presiding over the inquest of
Mr. Craig as he was well known to his court having been present in his professional capacity on so many occasions in the past. Evidence was taken from Edward Warren, the Readings and Arthur Lane, managing director of the
Indicator
. All agreed that Francis was an eccentric and socially awkward character but clearly likeable and well-regarded. Phoebe Reading gave evidence about having taken up their lodger’s usual glass of warm milk and, receiving no answer to her tap on the door, had left it on the table outside. On returning to the kitchen she had not noticed anything on the hall floor but a few minutes later she found a scrap of paper folded into a small pellet which, when unfolded, read,‘Dear Friend, My throat is cut. I hope you will forgive me.’

Her husband John had gone up the stairs to Francis’s room and had found him sitting up in bed with a muffler wound around his neck. His first impression was that he had a sore throat and the note was just his colourful journalist’s way of expressing it but then, as he leaned across the bed, Francis had seized him by the throat. With his other hand he gestured wildly at his own throat and Reading, clearly shaken, asked, ‘Can’t you speak Mr. Craig?’

Francis had hastily scrawled on his reporter’s pad with a pencil that Reading gave him, ‘Fetch any doctor urgently’ and then, to the other man’s astonishment, had drawn a meticulous plan of the surrounding streets marking out the places where a medical man might be found. Whatever his original intention, Francis had plainly decided that he wanted to live.

When John Reading returned with Dr. Martin and PC Beck a few minutes later, Francis was still fully conscious and sitting up in bed. Beck gave evidence about searching the room and finding two more notes and, on his bedside table, the razor he had used. One note was clearly intended for the Readings and said: ‘Very sorry; you have acted very kindly to me, I consider more than kindly whilst I have been with you. I have been severely tried physically.’

The other was an attempt at an explanation, written in a shaky hand, perhaps as Francis tried to screw up his courage for the final act. It read: ‘It would only pain you to see the Doctor’s treatment. I have suffered a great deal of pain and agony, and was no doubt temporarily suffering from pressure of nerve complaints including several …’ There the note ended, the writer obviously too overcome with emotion to continue. Since the only record of the notes is
contained in two local newspaper verbatim accounts of the inquest and the notes themselves have long been lost, it is impossible to say whether the word ‘Doctor’ was capitalised or not. The reporter from the
Fulham Chronicle
assumed that the second note was written after Francis cut his throat, but as it was apparently found in a different part of the room it seems more likely that it was written before the event and was his attempt to explain something that had happened a long time ago.

The Ripper had tried to masquerade as a doctor or a medical student. He joked about the police thinking that he was a doctor. Francis may even have been known, sarcastically, by his father as ‘the Doctor’ when he tried, unsuccessfully, to pursue life as a medical student many years before. It makes little sense otherwise – why should the Readings or anyone else have been pained to see the doctor’s treatment? – indeed there would have been no doctor’s treatment if Francis had succeeded in his attempt, only a brief confirmation of death. The note only makes sense if Francis himself is the doctor in question and it would, certainly, have pained them all very much if they had seen the treatment he had meted out to five unfortunate women in the streets of Whitechapel 15 years earlier.

Dr. W. Kenneth Breton, who had looked after Francis while he was in the West London Hospital, gave the cause of death and added that Francis had behaved ‘funnily’ whilst in hospital. It is tempting to think that an elderly man who desperately wanted to convey to others that he was Jack the Ripper, whilst confined to bed and deprived of the power of speech, might indeed have seemed to be behaving funnily, but that is mere speculation. The verdict was,‘Suicide whilst of unsound mind and when irresponsible for his actions’.

He was buried in the same grave as his parents on 14th March 1903. The ceremony both in the small chapel and at the graveside was performed by Rev. F.W. Northmore, chaplain to the cemetery. The
Indicator
, the paper of which he had been the editor, published a brief account of it on the back page of the edition of Monday 16th March. Amongst the mourners mentioned by name was Arthur Lane, the managing director of the
Indicator
, and three others from the staff of the newspaper, as well as Mrs. Phoebe Reading, Francis’s landlady. Almost certainly the Warrens were also present but probably few others.
The funeral arrangements were made by an undertaker near the
Indicator
’s office in Harrow Road, Paddington, so it seems likely that the newspaper arranged and paid for the funeral. He did not, as far as is known, leave a will as there is no record of probate. What happened to his possessions which, it is safe to assume, included a large number of books, is not known. Was there a creased photograph of Elizabeth? Was there even a gold wedding ring? We will never know. As his coffin was lowered into that unmarked grave, Francis Spurzheim Craig effectively passed from history leaving only a
nom de guerre
that has become more infamous and long-lasting than he could ever have imagined.