The Lawkillers

by Alexander McGregor

  In the following days, as he awaited the noose, Bury remained the model prisoner he had been since his arrest six weeks earlier, devoting most of his time to writing forty pages of his life story and reading the Bible. Others were more active. His solicitors at once sent a petition to Lord Lothian, the Scottish Secretary, seeking a reprieve on the grounds of the medical evidence and because the jury had taken so little time to reconsider their verdict after being sent back by Lord Young following his rejection of their first decision. For good measure, they threw in the fact that Bury’s mother had suffered from insanity. None of it cut any ice in Edinburgh and the plea for clemency was swiftly turned down, a decision that was met with little surprise in Dundee. Police chiefs in the city, who had earlier written to their counterparts in Scotland Yard detailing their suspicions that the man they held in their cells might indeed be the notorious Jack the Ripper the Yard so eagerly sought, penned a second letter, no reply having been received to the first. This time they wrote of the strong feeling in the Dundee community that the Ripper was in their midst. When a response was finally sent by the Metropolitan Police, it was not what was expected in Scotland. The detectives hunting the London maniac, headed by Inspector Frederick Abberline, had enquired into the Dundee allegations but concluded that Bury was not connected to the Whitechapel killings. The curt dismissal of the theory that Jack the Ripper had at last been locked up, even if for an apparently unconnected murder, was surprisingly easily accepted in Dundee, perhaps because it was assumed that the Scotland Yard detective teams were much superior to those on the banks of the River Tay. In all probability, it may have had more to do with the fact that Abberline had a different suspect in mind and seemed blinkered at that time to the possibility that it might be someone else – particularly a person totally unknown to him and who had been arrested by a rival police force.

  In the days leading up to his execution, Bury continued to receive regular visits from the Rev. Edward John Gough of St Paul’s Episcopal Church in Dundee, whom he had called on shortly after arriving in the city – seemingly in the hope that the clergyman could find him work. He and Ellen had even attended a service in St Paul’s within days of arriving in Dundee. Bury had remained in loose contact with Gough and the minister had given evidence on the Englishman’s behalf at his trial. On 19 April, just five days before he was due to hang, Bury received another visit from Gough, but this time their conversation extended well beyond their usual religious topics. Haltingly, the man whose time was fast ebbing away told the minister he wanted to confess to the murder of Ellen and then, on the insistence of Gough, he put his account of how he had committed the murder down on paper. The confession was later posted to Scottish Secretary, Lord Lothian.

  Bury’s final day started unspectacularly. After going to bed the previous evening at ten o’clock, he slept well until being awakened at five in the morning with a cup of tea. For the next hour he sat reading his Bible, then in a calm voice he told the warder in charge, ‘This is my last morning on earth. I freely forgive all who have given false evidence against me at my trial, as I hope God will forgive me,’ adding that he was resigned to his fate. Later, after a breakfast of tea, toast and poached eggs, he smoked and told the officers who sat with him that he had been grateful for their decent treatment of him.

  The minister, Gough, arrived at 7.15 a.m. and the pair spent half an hour in quiet conversation before the execution procession of prison governor, two Dundee bailies, two other ministers and six wardens assembled at the door of the cell. Bury was anxious to go to his maker smartly dressed and had discarded his prison outfit in favour of his own dark trousers, twill shooting coat and shirt with a white linen collar and fashionable blue tie.

  The meticulously attired little man with less than an hour left to live would not have believed what was happening outside. In Bell Street and Lochee Road, beside the city-centre prison, the crowds had been assembling from daylight. As 8 a.m. approached, over 5,000 people had gathered, though there would be nothing for them to see since a rough shed had been erected round the scaffold within the prison to prevent the coming spectacle from becoming a peep-show (much to the distress of some would-be entrepreneurs who had hoped to sell vantage points in a high building in Lochee Road).

  When Bury came face to face with his executioner, James Berry, the pair shook hands and Bury was asked if he had anything that he wanted to say. He replied that he wanted to thank all the prison staff for their kindness during his incarceration, then, in something of an understatement, he remarked to Berry, ‘You have a very disagreeable task to perform.’ The hangman replied that it had to be done, but he would ensure that it would be carried out in the least painful way possible. Then he removed Bury’s best tie and slipped a white hood over his head to prevent him from getting a sight of the scaffold. During his twelve-yard walk from the condemned cell to the noose, Bury was said to have been the most calm and relaxed person present. His only outward sign that anything unusual was happening to him came when his arms were pinioned to his sides, at which he clenched both fists.

  Then, at 8 a.m. precisely, the trapdoor shot open and, with Gough’s prayers ringing in his ears, the brutal wife-killer who could seem so mild mannered plunged six feet and six inches to his death. He died instantaneously, his neck snapping and his head falling limp onto his left shoulder.

  At that exact moment the clock on the Old Steeple clock a few hundred yards away chimed the hour and the huge crowd fell silent. People only began to stir again when a black flag was run up the prison flagpole, signalling that the execution had taken place. For the following fifteen minutes the prison bell tolled. It was never to be heard in the same manner again, for William Henry Bury, who had first set foot in Dundee only three months earlier, was the last man to hang in Dundee. His remains still lie within the precincts of the new police headquarters that occupy the site, his grave marked with a small stone simply engraved ‘W. H. B.’

  Could the apparently timid little man who so calmly went to the gallows really have been the same monster who stalked the back streets of London’s East End and outwitted Scotland Yard’s finest detectives? Might the London Ripper more accurately have been known not as Jack but as Bill?

  The passage of so much time means it is unlikely that anyone will ever know for sure and there are now many more suspects than there were mutilated victims of Jack the Ripper. But William Bury comes high on the list of some Ripperologists – the amateur sleuths around the world who have written millions of words advancing their own particular theory about the maniac who terrorised a city and went on to become a legendary figure, even more fascinating now than he was more than a century ago.

  Bury may merely have been what Inspector Abbeline of Scotland Yard dismissed him as: a violent drunkard who married a poorly educated woman for her money then killed her in a rage; a one-off domestic murderer. If, indeed, he had been the same man who had such a pathological and lethal interest in prostitutes, would he not also have confessed to their murders when he knew his last day was nigh, just as he had unburdened himself about Ellen?

  Maybe. But there is no escaping that a strong circumstantial case can just as easily be made to indict him. Why, for example, did he so dramatically set sail from London with his belongings to start a new life in a city hundreds of miles away where he had never previously set foot? If there was no particular reason to take him to Dundee, a fair conclusion is that he was fleeing London and wished to put many miles between his past there and his new future. But what was he fleeing from? A string of unsolved murders?

  Bury was certainly familiar with the activities of the whores of Whitechapel, the chosen victims of the Ripper, and had even married a woman who had worked as a brothel maid. He was clearly a man of violence, who slept with a knife under his pillow and who savagely ripped his wife apart to such an extent that her bowels protruded. He had, too, trained as a horse butcher. The slight figure could also be calm and methodical, a plotter who could forge a business letter t
o help induce his wife to abandon her friends and relatives in her native city. While the attack on the unfortunate Ellen was frenzied and brutal, it might not have been as spontaneous as it appeared. Some hours earlier, in complete sobriety, did he not visit the Police Court in Dundee and intently follow proceedings, then a short time later go on to coolly purchase the cord which he used to strangle his victim? The foul deed committed, he behaved perfectly normally for almost a week, even using the impromptu coffin he had fashioned to play dominoes on. When he finally went to the police with his strange story of how his bride of less than a year had met her death, one of the first things he said was that he was afraid he might be mistaken for Jack the Ripper, just as a few hours earlier, during his visits to pub acquaintance David Walker, the Ripper had been a topic of conversation.

  Bury may have been religiously devout, attending church within days of settling in the city and spending much of his last days on earth reading the Bible. Yet he did not recoil from packing the mutilated corpse of his wife into a makeshift coffin which also contained the New Testament, and prayer and hymn books. His religious zeal might even have formed an integral part of the split personality he so frequently revealed.

  What of all the jewellery he carried in his pockets when he called at police headquarters? It was identified as having belonged to the tragic Ellen Bury, purchased even before she had first met the man who would so horribly end her life. But might some of it, such as the two rings Bury wore on the little fingers of each hand, not have once belonged to the women who had been the victims of Jack the Ripper? In the same way as some of the serial killers who have followed in the century since the London atrocities, did Bury collect his ‘trophies’ and treasure them?

  There can be no disputing the strong similarities in how Ellen and the Whitechapel victims – some, or all, of whom might have been known to her – came to end their days. Just like those who met their fate in the back alleys of the East End, Ellen was first strangled then mutilated with a knife, though the ‘surgical’ skills might have been better in London. The diminutive man, whose own life ended with a rope round his neck, may have had what he considered a compelling reason for throttling his wife. If Ellen had known or suspected that the man she so quickly became infatuated with was indeed the Ripper, and had colluded with him to flee London for a fresh start hundreds of miles away, might she not also have threatened to expose him after some argument? In that scenario, Bury’s premeditation in buying the cord he would use to dispose of her becomes quite reasonable.

  Or was there another explanation why he so callously took Ellen’s life? Did the occupant of 113 Princes Street, Dundee, suffer from an inherited madness of the kind which had brought about the incarceration of his mother in a lunatic asylum more than twenty years earlier? Or was there a disturbance of his mind induced by venereal disease contracted from a Whitechapel whore, just as many believe was the trigger for Jack the Ripper’s outrages?

  There is something else. The Ripper had just five certain victims. There were none prior to Bury’s stay in London and none after he and his unfortunate wife mysteriously set sail for a new life in Dundee.

  6

  DEATH IN THE SUBURBS

  There was no doubt she was dead. She lay in her night attire on the bedroom floor just behind the door and it was clear she’d been there for some time. Those who saw her wanted to turn away, for there was blood everywhere – in the pool that formed round her stiff body, on her face and on the bed sheets. Even the ceiling was spattered. At first it seemed simple. The elderly lady who had lived alone in the house had been attacked, bludgeoned to death in a violent assault that left her with twelve wounds to the head, two to her hands, and fractured ribs. She had been murdered. And the sixty-strong team of detectives that descended on the peaceful suburb where most of the residents were retired folk living their lives out quietly, thought so too … at first. The longer the inquiry went on, however, the more it transpired that all might not be quite as clear-cut as it had seemed.

  Mrs Eliza Connelly was aged 74 and had been married three times. After the death of her third husband she had lived by herself in the neat single-person council house at 105 Aberdour Place, a desirable and secluded area in an out-of-the-way corner of Barnhill where the folk were friendly but reserved. There was never any trouble. It was considered a good place to have been allocated a house and hers was one in a row of identical modern cottages, all with small, manageable gardens at the rear. Mrs Connelly had recently been in hospital with a chest complaint, but had recovered well. Sometimes she grew lonely, although she had three sons, a daughter and grandchildren and was regularly visited. She never stopped being house-proud and her apartments were seldom anything but immaculate.

  The last time the grey-haired widow was seen alive was at 3 p.m. on the afternoon of Sunday, 12 April 1981. Earlier that day, her eldest son Kenneth had visited. Following his departure, his mother called at the nearby home of a spinster neighbour to use her telephone. There was no reply from the friend she had wanted to speak to and the two women shared a cup of tea and a chat. Then she left. The following day her obliging neighbour knocked on Mrs Connelly’s door to inform her she had tried several times to phone the friend but had been unable to make contact. When Mrs Connelly failed to come to the door, the woman placed a note through the letter-box. She noted that the house appeared to be locked up.

  The next day, the Tuesday, at around 12.45 p.m., Mrs Connelly’s middle son, James, arrived at the house with his wife and daughter to take his mother on one of their regular drives together. This was something he usually did on a Sunday, but had been unable to manage that weekend. When he entered the house, he instinctively knew things were not as they should be. In the living-room a chair, unusually, was hard up against the kitchenette door and the bedroom door was closed, something his mother would not normally have done. He entered the bedroom with growing trepidation but was still unprepared for what he found. The first thing he saw was the blood-soaked carpet and bed-clothes, then, just behind the door, the corpse of the woman he had planned to take on a family car outing.

  Detectives were at the scene within an hour – and that was the end, for some time, of the usual uneventful existence of Aberdour Place’s silver-haired residents. In the days ahead, police sniffer-dogs scoured the area with their handlers, seeking anything that might have resembled a murder weapon. More than 1,500 people were interviewed but every line of inquiry drew a blank. A post-mortem indicated that the time of death had probably been between seven o’clock on the Sunday evening and ten the following morning. Two youths, carrying bags, had been seen on a pathway close to the home of the 74-year-old widow on the Monday morning and a major appeal was launched to trace them. When they were found they were closely questioned – and eliminated from the inquiry. Other appeals for information met with an unusually poor response, specifically from taxi drivers who had been asked to come forward with details of any fares they may have had in the area over the crucial two-day period.

  A few days after the launch of the murder hunt, Mrs Connelly’s son James told police he believed up to £100 could have been taken from two of his mother’s purses. It reinforced the view of some that the pensioner may have disturbed a sneak thief, who had reacted in panic and battered the life out of her with some kind of object. A plea for assistance was made to members of the underworld in the hope they might have been sufficiently sickened by the fate of the old woman to incriminate one of their own (as had happened following previous attacks on elderly victims). No one responded.

  Senior detectives began to feel increasingly uneasy about many aspects of the inquiry. From the start it had seemed a motiveless killing. Nothing, apart from the apparent disappearance of some money, appeared to have been taken or disturbed. There was no evidence of a struggle, no trace of a weapon. Nor had there been any indication of a forced entry or exit. Every surface in the flat was painstakingly examined by forensic teams but there wasn’t a single fingerprint which shoul
d not have been there. A purse with the dead woman’s blood on it was found in a closed bedroom drawer. There were no unexplained prints on that either. Neighbours in the quiet suburb had neither seen nor heard anything to have caused them concern and there was an untypical dearth of witnesses of any kind.

  The repeated pleas for information met with virtually no success, the poorest response many experienced murder detectives could recall. If an opportunist thief had, indeed, been responsible, why was there no evidence that drawers or cupboards had been ransacked? Why had nothing but the money been taken and why had some other money and cashable electricity stamps been left? Most crucially, would a casual thief have come armed with a weapon? If he had seized the nearest thing to hand, why was it not still in the room? Nothing that could have caused the kind of injuries inflicted on Mrs Connelly had apparently been removed from the flat. Having committed a spur-of-the-moment murder, would a sneak thief not have been in such a panic that his flight from the scene would have been witnessed, or at least some evidence of his hasty departure from the house left behind? It was also reasonable to ponder whether any house-breaker sufficiently experienced enough to leave not a single fingerprint would have bothered to enter the home of an elderly woman living alone in a council house, since the pickings were unlikely to have been particularly good. Perhaps she knew her killer, for the family thought it unlikely she would open her door to a stranger if she was dressed for bed. But if her attacker were an acquaintance, what possible motive could there have been? Too many questions remained unanswered. Too many pieces of the jigsaw did not fit. Apart from the corpse of the unfortunate Eliza Connelly, it was as though nothing had occurred to disturb the ordered, safe routine of the respectable neighbourhood. Gradually, police began to wonder whether they were investigating an unlikely, but just feasible, tragic accident instead of a murder.