The Real Mary Kelly (9 page)

It is probably an accurate description of the way Francis was living during the three years he spent in Whitechapel and the longing references to fame and success almost certainly reflect his state of mind for much of his life. Although he yearned for recognition he thought of himself as a failure and that was probably reinforced by his father who, as all who knew him agreed, was an arrogant and bombastic man obsessed with his own self-importance. The poem goes on to describe the editor wandering the streets for the news, ‘feeling the pavement through the holes in his shoes’. The cost of searching for Elizabeth by using private detectives, and engaging a West End solicitor to start a costly divorce action, were more than enough to reduce a penny-a-line reporter to penury and the self-pitying lines of the poem vividly portray his plight.

As he fruitlessly tramped the streets and alleys of the East End searching for Elizabeth during 1887 and on into 1888 the resentment and bitterness seem to have grown. The initial desire to have her back had long since given way to a determination to take his revenge on her and the people that he held responsible for her downfall. But once again she had given him the slip. The fact that he himself remained in the area suggests that he knew that she was still around. Whether small snippets of information were reaching him or whether her fail
ure to reappear in her old haunts in the West End reinforced his conviction is not known but he had certainly not given up as the events of 1888 would show.

Elizabeth seems to have kept in touch with at least one member of her family during this time. There is a persistent story that Mary Jane Kelly was visited in the East End by her brother Johnto
⁵⁴
. It was suggested by Joe Barnett that this was a nickname for her brother Henry, who was allegedly serving with the 2nd Battalion of the Scots Guards, although no such person has ever been identified. Elizabeth’s younger brother was known to his family as Johnto and he certainly knew that his sister was a London prostitute for he passed that information on to his own son John many years later. When John senior came to London around 1884 he boarded with a Welsh dairyman who originally hailed from a village a few miles from the Davieses in Montgomeryshire. His lodgings were in Leigh Street, St. Pancras, only a few hundred yards from Francis and Elizabeth’s rooms in Argyle Square, and it is very likely that the brother and sister were in touch at that time and may have remained so after she decamped to Whitechapel. If so it may be the explanation for the Johnto story, although Elizabeth’s brother had no known connection with the Scots Guards
⁵⁵
.

If the first two years of Francis’s residence in the East End were uneventful, things were hotting up by the start of 1888. The East End was always a crimeridden area but in the early part of the year it excelled itself in violence and cruelty directed at women. First, on Saturday 25th February, an unfortunate called Annie Millwood was attacked in the street and stabbed multiple times in her legs and lower body by an unknown assailant. She survived, as did Ada Wilson who opened the door to a stranger on 28th March and was stabbed twice in the throat when she was unable to hand over any money.

A much more serious attack took place on 3rd April, Easter Monday, when another unfortunate, Emma Smith, was set upon by a gang of youths in Brick Lane, Spitalfields. She was beaten and savagely gang-raped before having a blunt object rammed so forcibly into her vagina that it perforated into her abdominal cavity. She survived for four days before inevitably succumbing to peritonitis, a condition for which in 1888 there was no surgical remedy
⁵⁶
. The reports in the newspapers shocked not only the East Enders, who were almost inured to such things, but a wider, national audience who were just starting to
realise that all was not well in a part of the capital of which most preferred to forget the existence. The attack was attributed to a so-called ‘High Rip’ gang, groups of disaffected, unemployed youths who preyed on prostitutes, knowing that the police and the general public held them in such low regard that they were almost beyond the protection of the law.

Then, on 7th August another unfortunate was murdered on a public staircase in George Yard Buildings, Spitalfields. This latest in the series of attacks on unfortunates in the district was the first to fully capture national attention but that would not happen until after reports began to appear in the press following the inquest which opened at the Working Lads’ Institute on Thursday 9th August.

The Working Lads’ Institute, 285 Whitechapel Road, had been opened by the Prince and Princess of Wales three years before. The Alexandra Room, named after the Princess, was a large reading room with tall windows overlooking the street and, because Whitechapel had no coroner’s court of its own, it had been selected by Mr. Wynne Baxter, the coroner for the Southern division of East Middlesex, as a suitable place in which to hear inquests. Under normal circumstances the room was easily large enough to accommodate the jury and officers of the court as well as members of the public and the three or four local reporters that might normally be expected to attend an inquest. That was certainly the case on 9th August. The
East London Advertiser
commented that ‘there was scarcely any one present except the authorities and those connected with the case, the public being conspicuous by their absence’.

Baxter himself was away, taking a summer cruise through the fjords of Scandinavia, so the inquest was conducted by his deputy, Mr. George Collier
⁵⁷
. Mr. Collier was a very different character from his bluff and forthright senior colleague. During the entire proceedings he was ‘painfully quiet’ according to the
Advertiser
. Although reports of the first day of the inquest appeared in at
least 14 local and national newspapers in the days that followed it is apparent that most of them are syndicated copies of the same second-hand account. Almost all, including the nationals such as
The Times
,
The Manchester Guardian
,
The People
and
The Daily News
, reported the police surgeon’s name as ‘Keleene’ (it was actually ‘Killeen’), indicating that they used the same source for their stories. Only two local papers, the
East London Advertiser
and the
East London Observer
, contain accounts of the inquest that were obviously written by reporters who were actually present. Both of them paint vivid and colourful accounts of the scene, describing the dress and the voices of the witnesses in detail. Of the two, the report in the
Advertiser
bears most resemblance to the later journalistic style of Francis Craig. There is his typical use of quotation marks to indicate that he is making a joke as in his description of the jury as ‘20 good and true men of this county’. When giving the cause of death both the
Advertiser
and the
Observer
used the American spelling ‘hemorrhage’, and in a later account in the
Advertiser
of Polly Nichols’s funeral the reporter spells the word ‘ruse’ as ‘rouse’, which although pronounced to rhyme with ‘blues’, is an American spelling still in use today
⁵⁸
. It is slender evidence that Francis was the
Advertiser
’s correspondent but he was resident in the district served by both the
Advertiser
and the
Observer
and it is highly likely that he was writing for one or other of them. On balance the
Advertiser
seems the more likely.

On the first day of the inquest the identity of the victim had not been established although several people had come forward and given conflicting names. The first witnesses were people who lived in George Yard Buildings, on the staircase of which the body had been discovered. The building was one of a series of ‘model dwellings’, community housing put up by public and private subscription to house the working poor of London and the major cities of Britain in the 19th century. The apartments all shared semi-open communal staircases which served as convenient places for the destitute to sleep and for prostitutes to take their clients since the meagre gas lighting was extinguished at 11pm.

Monday 6th August was a bank holiday and a married couple, Mr. and Mrs. Mahoney – who had been out celebrating – had come in a little before 2am. They had not noticed anything on the stairs although, as Mrs. Mahoney pointed out, it was so dark that they might easily have missed seeing a body unless they
had tripped over it. Alfred Crow, a cab driver, was the next witness. He had noticed a body lying on the staircase when he returned home at 3.30am but took no notice as he was used to seeing vagrants sleeping there. An hour and a quarter later John Reeves, a dock labourer, descended the stairs on his way to work. By that time it was light and he saw the body of a woman, her skirts pulled up over her head, lying in a pool of blood. He did not stop to look further but hurried off to find a policeman.

Dr. Timothy Killeen, the police surgeon, arrived at the scene at 5.30am and his evidence was listened to in shocked silence by the small audience in the Alexandra Room. The woman, who Dr. Killeen estimated to be about 36 (she was actually 40)
⁵⁹
, had been slaughtered by 39 separate stab wounds to the stomach, lower abdomen and chest. Following the post-mortem examination that he conducted later the same day, he ascertained that the abdominal wounds, several of which had pierced the stomach, liver and spleen, had all been inflicted by a sharp, short-bladed knife like a penknife but a large chest wound which had penetrated the sternum and just nicked the heart could only have been done with a strong, rigid instrument such as a sword bayonet or a dagger. The cause of death, he stated, was haemorrhage from the various stab wounds.

The coroner listened gravely to Dr. Killeen’s evidence and then addressed the jury. Since there was doubt about the woman’s identity he was going to adjourn the inquest for a fortnight. He added that the man who could have inflicted 39 wounds on a poor defenceless woman must have been a perfect savage.

When Francis left the Working Lads’ Institute that day an idea seems to have taken root in his mind. Before the inquest resumed on 23rd August he had visited a solicitor – exactly who is not known since he had dismissed Arthur Ivens in May of the previous year – sworn an affidavit and on Monday 20th, presented it in person to the High Court of Justice: Probate, Divorce and Admiralty Division, in the Strand. It sought leave to strike out Paragraph 5 of his petition and to make certain other alterations. Permission was duly granted by the Registrar, Mr. D.H. Owen, and the following day Francis returned to file the amended document and the supporting affidavit
⁶⁰
.

It was an extraordinary thing to do. The petition had in effect lain dormant since being filed in March two years before, as all attempts to serve it on
Elizabeth had failed because of her disappearance. Why had Francis suddenly gone to the trouble and the significant expense of swearing an affidavit and making radical changes to a document that he had probably not given much thought to for more than two years? To have gone to that degree of inconvenience and expense at any time would have been odd but for a hard-up newspaper man to have taken several days off right in the middle of the most sensational murder investigation of the time seems almost incomprehensible.

The clue lies in Paragraph 5. It is the one in which he names Mrs. McLeod [sic] as the owner and proprietor of the various brothels in the Kings Cross and Holloway districts in which Elizabeth was alleged to have entertained her clients, including Harry MacBain [sic]. Why would Francis suddenly have decided to spare the reputation of a woman who he held responsible for Elizabeth’s behaviour and ultimate disappearance? He could not have been worried by the threat of her bringing a suit for libel since the divorce petition was protected by legal privilege and, in any case, since it had not yet been made public, she would have had no way of knowing that she had been named in it. It seems much more likely that Francis wanted something from her.

That something was the whereabouts of his wife.

The time and money that he had spent using private detectives to track down Elizabeth after she had left him in March or April 1885 had alerted him to Ellen Macleod’s activities and he may even have met her in his fruitless efforts to get Elizabeth to return to the marital home. He undoubtedly knew how and where to get in touch with her and it seems that at some time between 21stAugust and the night of the first Ripper murder ten days later he visited Ellen Macleod and made her an offer. In return for her telling him where to find Elizabeth he would strike her name and the addresses of her brothels from the divorce petition. Should he succeed in finding her and having the petition served, in due course when the case came to court Ellen Macleod would not have to suffer the indignity of having her name made public.

It probably seemed like a reasonable offer to Ellen. As far as she knew, Francis simply wanted to divorce his errant wife and he needed to know her address for that reason. Did she in fact know it? Mary Jane Kelly was known to have received letters from time to time and presumably she sent some also.
She had also visited her ex-employer in the West End in the company of ‘Mrs Buki’ to retrieve her French gowns so it seems possible, if she and Elizabeth were one and the same, that the two women had kept in contact. It may even have been the case that Elizabeth used Ellen Macleod as the conduit between herself and her own family.

Whether the changes to the petition were actually made remains in some doubt. The copy that is held by The National Archives bears a few minor initialled corrections but they look as if they were made when the document was first drawn up in March 1886
⁶¹
. In that document Paragraph 5 remains resolutely un-struck out. The affidavit, an almost identical document, has crosses besides Paragraphs 5 to 9 – those in which Ellen and her premises are named – but they too have not actually been struck out. Maybe he made the changes in his own copies and that was enough for Ellen. She was satisfied and Francis, apparently, went away with what he wanted.