The Ripper's Victims in Print

by Rebecca Frost

  From the very first book about Jack the Ripper, the killer has been given explanations for his actions. Leonard Matters began by arguing that the Ripper was in fact Doctor Stanley, bent on seeking revenge for the death of his son. That son had, of course, died because of a disease passed on to him by the harlot Mary Kelly. All murders preceding hers were committed in order to help the doctor cover his tracks; the severity of her mutilations are explained because her death was personal; and the theory neatly explains why the string of murders suddenly stopped. Matters introduced the idea of revenge as the Ripper’s motivation.

  This revenge is presented as a response to an act of free will. Mary Kelly is meant to have known exactly what she was doing when she seduced the younger Doctor Stanley and passed on the infection that killed him rather quickly. The younger Doctor Stanley names her on his deathbed, and his father is so consumed with grief that he will let nothing stand in his way of killing the woman who killed his son. This is the first time that Mary Kelly will be blamed for not only her own death, but for the entirety of the Ripper’s spree. It will not be the last.

  Because all of the Ripper’s victims were prostitutes, it is also possible to present the theme of revenge as against a certain class of person, and not as against specific people. Edwin T. Woodhall and William Stewart take this route, proposing two alternate scenarios: first, that a woman was seeking to avenge her sister against the class of women who turned her into a prostitute and led her to the disease that caused her death; and second, that a midwife had been imprisoned for performing abortions and wished to get back at the sort of women who had betrayed her. This idea of a killer’s anger and violence directed at a class of women or a specific occupation carries over to the male suspects, as well. Some are meant to be killing the sort of women who have infected him, while others see a beloved female family member wasting away and cannot stand the sight of other presumably healthy women degrading themselves on the street. The theme of the Ripper wanting to hurt the people who have hurt him comes in both the generic and specific varieties.

  When the focus is specific, Mary Kelly once again comes off the worst of all. She is not only the most viciously mutilated—she is the most often cited instigator of the murders. While it is common to blame each woman for her own murder, arguing that she should have saved her pennies for a bed instead of spending them on drink, Mary Kelly, it seems, must pay for all. Whether it is Stephen Knight’s conspiracy theory of 1976 or Antonia Alexander’s family history written in 2013, Mary Kelly did something to cause the Ripper to act.

  The proponents of Stephen Knight’s theory and its variations indicate the cause of the Ripper murders to be Mary Kelly’s blackmail threat against the crown. When she finds herself in possession of royal secrets, Mary cannot help but tell three of her friends. This is her first false step. Those friends are the ones who convince her to seek blackmail. In most cases Mary Kelly would not have thought of blackmail on her own, so the greedy trio of Polly, Annie, and Liz might still take some of the blame, but Kate is often cited as a mistake based on the fact that she gave her name as Mary Ann Kelly. Even if Mary Kelly might be absolved of the guilt of the deaths of her friends—who would never have suggested such a thing had she not spoken up in the first place—she is still responsible for the death of an innocent.

  Her role is taken to the extreme by John Wilding in 1993. Perhaps the simple blackmail of Knight’s theory could be construed as a bout of peer pressure that got out of control before Mary Kelly had any idea what was going on, but Wilding’s Kelly is as shrewd and calculating as the Mary Kelly who seduced the likes of the young Doctor Stanley. She still seeks to blackmail the royal family, yes, but this time because she is pregnant with the crown prince’s child. This Mary accidentally causes the murder of her friend Polly, perhaps only hoping to throw the strangers off her trail when she gave Polly her bonnet. She slips up when she tells the killers that she has given proof of her tale to her friend Annie—again, possibly a mistake made by a woman who found herself in over her head. She may have only been thinking of a way to save herself.

  But then things change. Wilding gives Mary Kelly the role of personally selecting Catherine Eddowes and priming her with alcohol so that the killers might have their next victim. The alcohol itself is shown to be a measure of guilt, since Mary Kelly did not want her friend to be fully aware of what was happening to her. The plan went awry, but Mary Kelly was there to meet Catherine when she was released from her cell and led her, no longer drunk, to meet the killers. Finally, Mary Kelly is shown to handpick one of her friends to stay the night at her small room in Miller’s Court and be discovered dead and horribly mutilated on the morning of November 9. Wilding does allow her an attack of conscience and lets her flee to a pub to attempt to drink it away, but this is still a Mary Kelly who has a clear hand in the murders. She may not have held the knife and she may not have purposefully caused the deaths of Polly and Annie, but she was clearly involved in the deaths of Kate and the mystery woman buried under the name of Marie Jeanette. No longer simply a young and beautiful prostitute intent on using men for she could get, this Mary Kelly sells out her own friends in hopes of a better future for herself.

  Wilding’s Mary Kelly and the Mary Kelly of the various royal conspiracy theories had some sort of active role in causing the series of Ripper murders. Even if all Mary Kelly was meant to have done was demand blackmail, this was still an act of her own instigation. She may not have been intelligent enough to realize that there would be consequences and that the royal family would not simply comply, but it was still one specific act that cause the death of five women. Authors have blamed Mary Kelly for less than that.

  For Paul Harrison, Bob Hinton, and Antonia Alexander, the Ripper was a man intent on driving Mary Kelly off the street—and, in the case of Alexander’s tale, out of London entirely. Harrison proposes that Mary Kelly’s boyfriend, Joe Barnett, instigated the murders in order to keep his girlfriend from continuing her life as a prostitute. Mary Kelly, however, is not above manipulating multiple men at once in order to get what she wants. Poor Barnett, who had struggled mightily against the sort of life in which he had grown up, finally realizes that this woman has no interest in respectability. Had Mary Kelly not played Barnett and strung him along, Barnett would not have read of the murder of Martha Tabram and decided on his specific plan of action. This was a man who was only trying to make a better life for himself and the woman he loved, but the woman he loved was far from true to him.

  Hinton’s choice of George Hutchinson meant that Mary Kelly was never in an established relationship with the killer, although she does not escape culpability. Much like Harrison’s Mary Kelly, this woman is a user, willing to string along any number of men in order to get what she wants. One of those men is Hutchinson—a poor choice, Hinton notes, because Hutchinson fixates on her. He murders the other women out of frustration with being continually snubbed by Mary Kelly, and finally murders her when he is confronted with the fact that she is not actually an angel in rags, but a common, filthy whore. At least Hinton’s version does not turn his killer into an altruistic dreamer, but again, if Mary Kelly had not used Hutchinson in the first place, he would not have fixated on her.

  Antonia Alexander, although writing about a different Mary Kelly, blames her great-great-grandmother for the murders. This Mary Kelly abandoned her husband and children in order to move to London to be with Dr. Williams, who was also married. This Mary Kelly, like the others, proved difficult to get rid of, although she did eventually return to her family while another Mary Kelly was murdered and made the headlines. Once again a woman did not comply with the expectations of her lover, and so he was driven to murder in order to right the situation.

  A woman does not have to be a Mary Kelly stringing along multiple lovers in order to be blamed for her death. In 2006 Paul Roland observed the expectation that women are meant to avoid crossing paths with killers, and in 2015 Bruce Robinson mocked the common depictions of victims b
eing on the prowl for their killer, flaunting such things as ears and uteruses, since those seem to have had a special appeal for the Ripper. Being so careless with money as to be forced onto the street at night means that the women quite literally placed themselves in his way, and the fact that many, if not all, were reported to have been drinking means that their senses were dulled and they were in no condition to fight for their lives. It would seem that every East End prostitute needed to at all times be on full alert, in complete control of her senses and every situation, so that she might avoid being murdered.

  Life After Death?

  The big question this book set out to answer was one of change: how have the representations of the canonical five Jack the Ripper victims changed? It was my hope to track these changes and show an improvement in narrative descriptions of victims across decades, dozens of books, and millions of words. From previous research I already knew that many true crime texts present murder victims as objects and sources of evidence that can be used to point to the killer, but given the vast array of writings about Jack the Ripper and so many different voices and areas of focus, I had hoped to see a constant, steady movement toward the humanization of the murdered women.

  This was not what I found.

  In 1939 William Stewart described Mary Jane Kelly as being an “accessory to her own death”14 due to the fact that she was drunk and a prostitute who walked the streets, presumably flaunting her wares, and took strange men back to her small room. In 2015 Bruce Robinson mocked the very idea of victim guilt, but not because he had recently read Stewart. Robinson was responding to so many authors across so many years. The Ripper’s victims are still whores, likely better off dead, and their lives are of no use to anyone since their biographies can tell us nothing about their killer.

  Yes, there have been standouts and moments when it seemed change was likely. The 1990s brought multiple books in which the authors strove to give the women as much attention as their murderer, but it also brought Bob Hinton asking what use their biographies were, after all. In 2007 Neal Stubbings Sheldon published a short book focusing on the murdered women, sticking with the facts he could verify through documentation and adding in photographs of their descendants to make up almost half the book. Arguments that these women live on and have become immortal are also used to dismiss them so that authors can pursue other avenues of investigation. The apparent focus on five otherwise unremarkable women has raised responses of envy and the thought that, really, they should be happy that their names are still spoken, considering how many of their contemporaries have been forgotten.

  It is true that humanizing murder victims would force other changes to the traditional murder narrative structure. Especially when a serial killer is concerned, bringing his victims in to share the spotlight would quickly crowd him out, and Jack the Ripper is practically unproductive by today’s standards. The balance of five—or more—against one has continually been shifted in favor of the Ripper and fascination with this mysterious figure, but in order to feel that fascination and not repulsion, his victims must be pushed aside. They can be nobodies, or they can be blamed for their own deaths, but they must always be clues: objects, and not people.

  What does it matter if women who were killed more than a century ago are continually denied humanity, empathy, and attention? What does it mean when attempts to change this representation are continually the exception instead of the rule? Does it minimize or even normalize instances of violence in a world where news reports are continually full of new accounts? If representation matters—and it does—then victim representation matters, too.

  The depictions of Jack the Ripper’s victims across the decades says far less about them than it does about the culture which chooses to describe them. Although the amount of information available about them likely reached a plateau long ago, the approach to telling their story—or to not telling it—is the choice of the author situated in a distinct time and place. The lack of changes in these stories has far less to do with the number of facts available about the women in question, but how the author’s culture reacts and responds to the idea of victimhood. The frequency at which Polly, Annie, Liz, Kate, and Mary Jane appear in writing does not mean that those appearances are satisfactory. They are so often simply a name, a location, or an ordinal number with a coroner’s report attached. For so long Jack the Ripper has inspired “interest and curiosity”15 among researchers who seek to discover the person behind the monster and the myth. Researchers are more than willing to play connect the dots with confirmable information about their chosen suspect, crafting varying degrees of three dimensional humans who are neither saints nor the devil incarnate. After nearly ninety years of books, it might be too late to argue for that same consideration to be given to the victims, since the narrative structure is already long established, but the first step is certainly to recognize it—in the case of Polly, Annie, Liz, Kate, Mary Jane, and so many others.

  Chapter Notes

  Introduction

  1. casebook.org.

  Chapter One

  1. Stuart P. Evans and Keith Skinner, The Ultimate Jack the Ripper Companion: An Illustrated Encyclopedia (New York: Skyhorse, 2009), 26.

  2. Ibid., 50.

  3. Ibid., 71.

  4. Ibid., 82.

  5. Ibid., 172.

  6. Ibid., 22.

  7. Ibid., 224.

  8. Ibid., 404.

  9. Ibid., 381.

  Chapter Two

  1. Leonard Matters, The Mystery of Jack the Ripper (London: W. H. Allen, 1929, reprinted 1948), 16.

  2. Ibid., 26.

  3. Ibid., 27.

  4. Ibid., 30.

  5. Ibid., 46.

  6. Ibid., 50.

  7. Ibid., 67.

  8. Ibid., 70.

  9. Ibid., 113.

  10. Edwin T. Woodhall, Jack the Ripper or When London Walked in Terror (Runcorn, Cheshire: P & D Riley, 1997 facsimile edition, first published by Mellifont Press, 1937), 7.

  11. Ibid., 11.

  12. Ibid., 9.

  13. Ibid., 11.

  14. Ibid., 15.

  15. Ibid.

  16. Ibid., 30.

  17. Ibid., 37.

  18. Ibid., 89.

  19. Ibid., 93.

  20. Ibid., 96.

  21. William Stewart, Jack the Ripper: A New Theory (London: Quality Press, 1939), 27.

  22. Ibid., 19.

  23. Ibid., 37.

  24. Ibid., 58.

  25. Ibid., 63.

  26. Ibid., 69.

  27. Ibid., 76.

  28. Ibid., 83.

  29. Ibid., 172.

  30. Ibid., 199.

  Chapter Three

  1. Donald McCormick, The Identity of Jack the Ripper (London: Jerrold’s, 1959), 23.

  2. Ibid., 38.

  3. Ibid., 71.

  4. Ibid., 106.

  5. Ibid., 109.

  6. Ibid., 120.

  7. Ibid., 109–110.

  8. Ibid., 111.

  9. Ibid., 149.

  10. Tom Cullen. Autumn of Terror (London: The Bodley Head, 1965), 14.

  11. Ibid., 30.

  12. Ibid., 49.

  13. Ibid., 50.

  14. Ibid., 116.

  15. Ibid., 131.

  16. Ibid., 132.

  17. Ibid., 164.

  18. Ibid., 166.

  19. Ibid., 179.

  20. Ibid., 211.

  21. Robin Odell, Jack the Ripper in Fact and Fiction (London: George G. Harp, 1965), 24.

  22. Ibid., 57.

  23. Ibid., 109.

  24. Ibid., 178.

  25. Ibid., 31.

  26. Ibid., 37.

  27. Ibid., 66.

  28. Ibid., 70.

  29. Ibid., 109.

  30. Ibid., 113.

  31. Ibid., 226.

  32. Ibid., 258.

  Chapter Four

  1. Michael Harrison, A Biography of the Duke of Clarence: Was He Jack the Ripper? (New York: Drake, 1972), 139.

  2. Step
hen Knight, Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution (London: Book Club Associates, 1976), 14.

  3. Ibid., 25.

  4. Ibid., 236.

  5. Ibid., 56.

  6. Ibid.

  7. Ibid.

  8. Ibid., 235.

  9. Jack Spiering, Prince Jack: The True Story of Jack the Ripper (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 978), 15.

  10. Ibid., 30.

  11. Ibid., 66.

  12. Ibid., 72.

  13. Ibid., 129.

  14. Daniel Farson, Jack the Ripper (London: Michael Joseph, 1972), 21.

  15. Ibid., 23.

  16. Ibid., 26.

  17. Ibid., 36.

  18. Ibid., 37.

  19. Ibid., 46.

  20. Ibid., 98.

  21. Richard Whittington-Eagan, A Casebook on Jack the Ripper (London: Widly & Sons, 1975), xiv.

  22. Ibid., 155.

  23. Donald Rumbelow, The Complete Jack the Ripper (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1975), 113.

  24. Arthur Douglas, Will the Real Jack the Ripper (Brinscall, Chorley, Lancashire: Countryside, 1979), 6.

  Chapter Five

  1. John Douglas, “Subject: Jack the Ripper,” 1.

  2. John Douglas and Mark Olshaker, Journey Into Darkness (New York: Scribner, 1997), 54.

  3. Douglas, “Subject: Jack the Ripper,” 2.

  4. Martin Fido, The Crimes, Death, and Detection of Jack the Ripper (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987), 18.

  5. Ibid., 20.

  6. Ibid., 57.