The Ripper's Victims in Print

by Rebecca Frost

  There is not much personal information given about the women Wescott does discuss, mostly because he marvels that “it’s as though someone were killing the same women over and over,”7 considering how similar their stories were. This is not a new observation and has been used by authors both to dismiss the individuality of the murdered women and to make a case for the Ripper’s victim type. At the same time Wescott does give the women he discuses moments of individuality, such as when he notes that Polly “did all she could in those final days to keep from having to ‘go out’ for money,”8 marking her as something other than a professional prostitute.

  With his focus on the bank holiday murder victims and on Pearly Poll, Wescott does not present readers with the normal, expected Ripper narrative. He is not explicitly searching for the Ripper’s identity—although he does suggest that further investigation into Pearly Poll might reveal him—and he does not expand his timeline to include all five canonical victims. The decision to focus on bringing Pearly Poll to the forefront limits his scope and shifts his attention from the murdered women to one who was still alive—and possibly manipulating the police to prevent the murdered women from seeing justice.

  The Ripper Murders as Ancestral Tales

  As seen above, John Morris accused Lizzie Williams of being the Ripper in his 2012 book, but seven years earlier Tony Williams and Humphrey Price wrote Uncle Jack, accusing Lizzie’s husband—and William’s great-uncle—of that same title. Williams explains that he was intrigued when he came across a letter written by his famous ancestor and looked more deeply into his papers, discovering that the collection of John Williams’ journals included one for 1888 that had a number of pages missing. It seems that Williams may have set out to disprove his suspicions that Sir John Williams, respected obstetrician and gynecologist and contributor to the National Library of Wales, was Jack the Ripper, but ends up actually finding information that supports his relative’s secret identity.

  Since his choice for Ripper suspect is not only a physician but on his own family tree, Williams emphasizes that the “[h]e killed the women quickly and cleanly”9 and “in each case death was almost instantaneous.”10 It is perhaps the only defense that can be made for the Ripper, who was after all a murderer and mutilator of women. Williams assures readers that those mutilations were only affected after the quick death—the blood in his veins might be tainted with a murderer, but not a monster.

  The murdered women themselves are likewise quickly dismissed, first in a list that contains only their names, locations and dates of death, and ages at the time of death, sandwiched by the above reassurances. He then turns to further investigating the life of his uncle, only coming back to the women ninety pages further on. They are still easily disregarded and clearly downplayed, since Williams’ focus is indeed on Sir John and he seems to have reached the conclusion that the physician was responsible for the violent acts. After all, if Sir John were innocent, then it would not matter if the dead women had been the most highly respected in the land since he had no hand in their deaths. It is only his guilt that makes the identity of the women of any importance to Williams as he tracks his ancestor’s history.

  Mary Ann Nichols is an alcoholic who lost every good thing that ever came her way to drink, including her marriage, her children, and the possibility of steady employment. Presumably drink would likely have stolen any possible good thing yet to come. Annie Chapman has “little to live for,”11 what with her husband’s death and her children dead or living abroad. She even spent time in the infirmary before her death, so Annie could not be said to even have her health. These women, like those who came after them, were prostitutes, and Williams makes the case that most, if not all of them, likely encountered his uncle through the course of his occupation before their deaths. It is a reference to Mary Ann Nichols in his uncle’s notes that started him on this quest.

  Liz Stride, like those before her, suffered from a failed marriage, a dead husband, and drink, but despite these shortcomings and her propensity to tell lies, she seems to have been well-liked. This is, of course, by the standards of the East End, which perhaps makes it easier for Williams to think of his uncle as having murdered her, since she would not have been so warmly received outside the poorest area of London. Catherine Eddowes is likely a bit dimwitted, since it took her twenty years to leave Conway despite the fact that he was beating her, and she willingly went with the Ripper into Mitre Square on the night of her death at the height of the murders. If Williams’ Uncle John were indeed the murderer, then perhaps Catherine could be forgiven for having accompanied a well-dressed man of his standing, especially if she had known him as a physician, but even then meeting Sir John in Whitechapel after midnight should have been enough to make her wonder. If Catherine were stupid enough to stay in an abusive relationship, she can’t entirely have been expected to have the wits to avoid her own murder.

  The description of Mary Kelly includes the fact that, after arriving in London, “she went off the rails, and then fetched up dead in a Whitechapel hovel”12—as though Mary herself were solely responsible for all that had happened in her own life. Williams has her end up “dead” instead of “murdered,” supposedly as a result of her own trajectory in life, and she is as disposable as the rest. Although Morris argued that Mary Kelly was key to the murders and a significant player in the life of Sir John, she is just another expendable prostitute for Williams.

  He likewise dismisses the plight of East End women in general, explaining that many of them—and likely even the Ripper’s victims—were only casual prostitutes who resorted to selling themselves when desperately in need of money. He minimizes the act of casual prostitution by saying that “in the end they all fell back on what came easiest.”13 Not only does everyone resort to it, but for a woman, the act of selling herself for sexual favors is easy. Perhaps this is only true for the class of women who have already seemed to have lost everything, so respectability has already fled, but Williams also completely dismisses the idea that accompanying strange men to secluded places in the hopes of receiving a few pennies could be difficult or dangerous. Williams is, of course, not alone in his minimization of the victims or his grouping of women together in order to dismiss them—he simply has the added pressure of discussing a man whose name falls on his own family tree, and thus has the extra incentive of downplaying the horrifying nature of these murders, especially when he cannot prove that his uncle did not commit them.

  Antonia Alexander takes up the idea of Sir John as Jack the Ripper in her 2013 book The Fifth Victim, likewise placing a famous name in her ancestry. In Alexander’s case, however, the name is that of Mary Kelly, who is her own great-great-grandmother. The confusing aspect, at least for those familiar with the Ripper narrative, is the fact that Alexander’s Mary Kelly, while targeted by the Ripper, is not in fact the victim Mary Kelly. Instead she is a woman who left her family—including her living husband and children—in order to flee to London to be with Sir John. Despite being apparently more appealing than her husband, Sir John tires of this Mary Kelly, although she lives and returns to her family. The Mary Kelly who was the final Ripper murder victim had borrowed Alexander’s great-great-grandmother’s name, since the pair had come to London at the same time.

  Despite the fact that the book’s title is The Fifth Victim, the focus of Alexander’s text is first Sir John—she extensively repeats Williams’ research—and then her own ancestor, who was not a murder victim at all. There are few notes about the other murdered women, who apparently did not know Alexander’s great-great-grandmother and thus do not impact the storyline. Mary Ann Nichols lived in workhouses and Annie had sought treatment at an infirmary after a fistfight, but otherwise no information is offered about the other women. Alexander even admits that she has no idea who the murdered Marie Kelly—who may have affected the French spelling in order to differentiate herself from her namesake—actually was. Otherwise they are simply “poor vulnerable women”14 who, unlike her own ancestor,
were not able to dodge the Ripper’s knife.

  Despite the focus of her narrative indicated by her title, Alexander spends much of the text recounting the argument for Sir John and Jack the Ripper. The focus on her own great-great-grandmother is limited to the final ten pages of the text, and even this is not entirely sympathetic. Alexander points out that “[s]ome women … were bored with a husband who was loyal and dependable and family oriented, a man who’d want nothing more than to make them happy,”15 clearly criticizing Mary Kelly for giving up such a relationship in order to pursue one with a married man in the big city. Despite her claim that she is not here to judge, Alexander makes her own feelings clear, both about her ancestor and the man she abandoned her family for.

  The intriguing aspect that Alexander does not explicitly mention is that, in forming her narrative this way, she is struggling with the same familial guilt that seems to plague Williams. While he could only find information that seemed to corroborate his ancestor’s identity as a murderer, Alexander’s narrative has Mary Kelly being the reason that Sir John began to murder in the first place. This once again situates Mary Kelly—albeit not the murder victim Mary Kelly—as the cause of the murders due to the reactions and emotions she brings out in the killer. The five women Alexander glosses over are only dead because of her great-great-grandmother, and Alexander may be attempting to avoid any sense of familial guilt when she condemns the fact that her ancestor left a presumably good marriage without explicitly placing any blame on her shoulders for the murders that followed.

  Although both Williams and Alexander are far enough removed from their ancestors so as to never have met them and thus never formed a personal attachment or impression of them, they each chose to align those ancestors with the Jack the Ripper narrative. Williams gives his great-uncle the defining role and places him at center stage as the Ripper himself, while Alexander presents readers with the addition of her great-great-grandmother as Sir John’s lover and the reason he murdered so many strangers in the first place. While engaging in a narrative that was already more than a century old, each sought to personalize it by literarily relating to a figure within the story while at the same time enacting a number of rhetorical moves in order to minimize the lives of the murdered women and the violence—and guilt—of their deaths.

  Foreigner Jack

  Although it was popular at the time to accuse Jack the Ripper of having been a foreigner, “foreigner” was most often interpreted to have meant that the Ripper was a Jew and likely fleeing pogroms in Eastern Europe. Over a century after the crimes, Stewart Evans and Paul Gainey wrote The Lodger: The Arrest & Escape of Jack the Ripper (1995)—or, as the title was printed for the later editions, Jack the Ripper: First American Serial Killer. Working off a name taken from a letter written by Inspector John Littlechild, Evans and Gainey make the case for American Francis Tumblety as having been the Ripper. Since the Littlechild letter—and thus Tumblety as a suspect—had been ignored for so long, the authors devote their text to exploring his biography and viability as a suspect.

  Evans and Gainey seem sympathetic to the idea that women in the East End would need to resort to prostitution, since “[t]he few jobs available to women … hardly provided appealing alternatives”16 considering the long hours and dismal conditions women would face in factories or as maids. Their assessment of each of the murdered women, however, veers toward the negative. When discussing Polly’s alcoholism, for example, they say she “would sell her body and soul for a drink”17—her body quite literally—and that her drinking was what kept her from succeeding in both her marriage and any attempts to reform her life. In fact they frame the dissolution of Polly’s marriage as having set her free, since she no longer held responsibilities as a wife or mother and had no one to look after except herself. Granted, her alcoholism prevented her from doing well at that, and it is likely her alcoholism that was to blame for her being on the street the night of her murder. Whatever chances Polly had in life, she could not overcome her drinking to take full advantage of them.

  Less is said about Annie, although the authors refer to her as “unfortunate”18 twice in four pages. Despite the fact that she was unattractive, Annie seemed to make her way well enough with two men in the East End. They presumably both paid for her bed and did not mind that she was working as a prostitute. Evans and Gainey name two men specifically who were known to associate with Annie, but add that she was not above sharing her bed “casually”19 with other men. Clearly selling her body was a casual act for Annie, not worth worrying over or thinking about as long as it resulted in money.

  Intriguingly Evans and Gainey find Long Liz to be the most sympathetic of the women, noting that her arrival in London came after the death of her parents and the birth of a stillborn child, both understandable reasons for a woman to want to leave her home country and that life behind. Yes, Liz is an alcoholic, but certainly not on par with Polly. Liz was also “in better health and better looking”20 than the other two women—not difficult, especially considering Annie’s health and appearance—and may not have been prone to the others’ less appealing habits. They note that Liz, unlike Polly or Annie, was not kicked out of her lodging house that night for lack of funds. If Liz did drink, she apparently was not such a slave to the bottle that she would spend her last coins on alcohol and forgo a place to sleep.

  Little is said about Kate aside from the fact that she tended to call herself Kate Kelly despite not being married into the last name. This is almost emphasized, although there is no such discussion of whether or not she had adopted the name of Conway previously. Her relationship with John Kelly is thus established as being both steady and of a long enough duration to be common-law, although Evans and Gainey do not believe Kelly when he reported ignorance of Kate’s working as a prostitute. The authors suspect that Kelly knew about, and possibly even supported, this vocation, especially when the couple found themselves low on funds. They also say that it is “interesting to note”21 the fact that, having no fixed address at a lodging house as the other women seemed to, Kate was in possession of a much lengthier list of belongings the night she died. It is perhaps less interesting than simply indicative of the fact that she was likely worse off than the other women despite the fact that she was in possession of so many items. Without a usual bed, Kate had no place to leave even the smallest belongings without them getting stolen.

  Mary Jane Kelly had a regular bed in her rented room, of course, although there seems to be doubt over whether she was even in full possession of her name. Evans and Gainey insist on calling her Mary Jane despite the fact that “her man friend”22—not her lover or her common-law husband, perhaps because they were no longer living together at the time of her death—insisted that she called herself Marie Jeanette. Because Mary Jane’s history is only passed down verbally through that same man friend and not substantiated through other reports or even other people from her past, Evans and Gainey have little to say about her outside of her youth and beauty. These, at least, were reported by others who had known her, even if she had not opened up to tell them more about her past.

  Almost two decades later Dane Ladwig also decided to put forth an American as his chosen suspect for Jack the Ripper, writing Dr. H. H. Holmes & the Whitechapel Ripper (2014). Unlike Tumblety, who was a fraudulent doctor often in trouble with the law but died of natural causes, Holmes—real name Herman Webster Mudgett—went to medical school and ended up being executed for murder. Granted, he was hanged based on a single case of murder, that of business partner Benjamin Pitezel, but it was clear that he had also murdered the Pitezel children that had supposedly been in his care. Before his execution, Holmes also confessed to have murdered multiple women in his so-called “Murder Castle” in Chicago around the time of the World’s Columbian Exposition. There is suspicion that his victim count is well into three digits, and that is before the Whitechapel women are factored in.

  Thus instead of a narrative that must encompass one murderer and five vict
ims, Ladwig is faced with an unknown number of victims—the women in Whitechapel, the women in Chicago, and various members of the Pitezel family—although at least he is focusing on a confessed murderer. Instead of making the five canonical Ripper victims the focus of the suspect’s criminal activity, they become more of a prelude to Holmes’ more spectacular murders. The Chicago murders were committed in a building he constructed specifically to aid him in that task and thus even the Murder Castle rivals the setting of Victorian England. On the other hand, the true number and identity of the women murdered in Chicago is unknown, while at least Ladwig is able to name the women of the East End.

  He begins with a dedication to the victims who, in part, “left behind unsolved and unfinished business.”23 While the unfinished business might refer to their lives, cut short by murder, anything “unsolved” would be related to the crime itself. For the Whitechapel women, the “unsolved business” would be the identity of their killer and, to an extent, their own identities. Many of the Chicago victims are unknown, since there were so few remains to be identified. Many young women used the opportunity of the World’s Fair to disappear of their own accord, and thus it is difficult to determine which may have taken off under their own free will and which may have discovered the darker secrets of Holmes’ Murder Castle. Ladwig gives his dedication to victims in general, and not specifically to those of Holmes, but once again the idea of “unsolved business” seems to relate more to the one who made them victims and not to the victims themselves.