Complete History of Jack the Ripper

by Philip Sudgen

  Popular speculation about the killer’s identity was rife. On one point there was widespread agreement – that such a monster could not possibly be an Englishman. This notion naturally produced accusations against all manner of foreigners and soon found expression in broadsheet doggerel:

  In famous London City, in eighteen eighty-eight,

  Four beastly cruel murders have been done . . .

  began one, and continued:

  Some say it was old Nick himself,

  Or else a Russian Jew.

  Some say it was a ‘cannibal’ from the

  Isle of Kickaiboo.

  Some say it must be Bashi-Bazouks,

  Or else it’s the Chinese

  Come over to Whitechapel to commit

  Such crimes as these.

  Some theorists thought the Ripper a Jewish immigrant. One former resident of India assured The Times that the mutilations were ‘peculiarly Eastern’, typical of those practised by the criminal classes there to express hatred and contempt, and predicted that the killer would prove a Lascar primed with opium, bhang or gin. But Americans were perhaps the favourite suspects.

  Coroner Baxter’s story of the American seeking specimens of the womb had not been forgotten and during succeeding weeks circumstances conspired to strengthen rather than weaken the American connection in the public mind. First, an American newspaper, the Atlanta Constitution, suggested a link between the Whitechapel slayings and a series of brutal and unsolved murders of negro women in Texas about three years earlier. The Texas killings had abruptly ceased. So had their perpetrator taken refuge in England? This theory was wired to the Daily News by its New York correspondent and was soon all over London. Then, neither press nor public were slow to detect Americanisms in ‘Jack the Ripper’s’ notorious letter to the Central News Agency. In reproducing a facsimile of the handwriting on 4 October, the Daily Telegraph hazarded the view that the writer was ‘probably an American or an Englishman who has mixed with our cousins on the other side of the Atlantic’ because ‘Boss’, ‘Fix me’, ‘shan’t quit’ and ‘right away’ were American forms of expression. As far as many amateur sleuths were concerned Matthew Packer clinched the matter. For by 5 October he was telling anyone who would listen that he had seen a man, wearing a soft felt or American hat and speaking with a Yankee twang, buy grapes for Elizabeth Stride less than two hours before she was murdered. Inevitably suspicious Yankees began to feature in a welter of newspaper tales and East Enders started to look askance at every American they met. Even the police, who knew that the Central News letter was of doubtful authenticity and that Packer was unreliable, went so far as to question three cowboys working at the American Exhibition in London.39

  While some armchair detectives concentrated on the Ripper’s nationality others attempted to identify his occupation. The fact that four of the crimes had been committed in the early hours of a Friday, Saturday or Sunday prompted a suggestion that the murderer might be a sailor. ‘Waterside’, writing to the Telegraph on 1 October, was one of the first to advocate this theory. He pointed out that steamers plying between London and the outports or the Continent left the river every Sunday morning and returned during the week, a circumstance which could explain the timing of the murders as well as the Ripper’s mysterious disappearances. However, Doctors Llewellyn, Phillips and Brown all testified to the anatomical knowledge and/or surgical skill of the murderer so the most commonly indicted occupational groups were naturally those possessing such expertise – slaughtermen and butchers, medical students, physicians and surgeons, even midwives. Once lodged in popular consciousness, suspicion against the medical profession was hardened by other factors: perhaps by the proximity of the London Hospital in Whitechapel Road to the murder sites, certainly by the stories from the night of the double murder about a man with a black bag.

  There were two important black bag stories. One, from Mrs Mortimer, has been dealt with already. The other, from Albert Backert of 13 Newnham Street, told of a stranger who plied Backert with questions about local prostitutes at the Three Nuns, Aldgate, about an hour before Liz Stride was killed. This man, like the one Mrs Mortimer saw in Berner Street at about the time of the murder, carried a shiny black bag.40 Leon Goldstein, Mrs Mortimer’s man, proved to have been an innocent passer-by. And there is no evidence to link the man from the Three Nuns with the crimes or with Goldstein. Nevertheless, the stories received widespread publicity and, in their turn, generated more tales of suspicious characters with black bags. Soon the mere ownership of such an article was enough to excite suspicion. This is not to say that there were not some very eccentric bag owners.

  At about 3.30 on the morning of 9 October a police constable, investigating a rumour that Jack the Ripper was going about Covent Garden Market threatening people, found George Henderson, a man of ‘rather singular appearance’, wandering aimlessly to and fro, carrying a black bag and acting very oddly. The constable took him to a police station where he was searched and found to possess no less than 54 pawn tickets. Later in the day Henderson was brought before Bow Street Magistrates’ Court and charged with suspicious loitering but he was able to produce witnesses to his character and was discharged. Even more peculiar was Simeon Oliphant, the 67-year-old engineer who went into King Street Police Station on 16 October and complained of the loss of a black bag. After making a rambling statement to the desk sergeant he offered to cut off the sergeant’s head and replace it on his shoulders ‘in such a manner that he would be able to talk . . . as if it had never been removed’! When he appeared at Bow Street he claimed that he could prove by mathematical calculations that every man and woman was equal to God. Not surprisingly, Justice Vaughan made an order for his removal to the workhouse as a lunatic.41

  The problem of motive was, if anything, even more baffling than that of identity. Even Baxter’s ‘Burke and Hare’ theory, which for about a week had seemed to offer some sort of tangible clue, was reduced to an irrelevance by Brown’s testimony at the Eddowes inquest. A simple desire to procure a specimen of the uterus could not explain the wanton cuts to Kate’s head and body, and although an attempt to extract the uterus had been made it had been performed so clumsily that part of the organ had been left in the corpse. By contrast Kate’s left kidney had been carefully excised. Various alternative explanations of the crimes were aired in the press. Perhaps the most bizarre, implying that they were the work of a gang of German thieves, traced their origin to an old German superstition that potential victims of robbery could be sent into a deep slumber by subjection to the light of a candle fashioned from the uterus and other female organs!

  Increasingly there was an emerging consensus among medical men that the murderer must be insane, even if the nature of his insanity could only be guessed at. Dr L. Forbes Winslow, interviewed for the Central News on 1 October, remained steadfast to the view he had championed almost from the beginning – that the killer was a ‘homicidal monomaniac of infinite cunning.’ Other medical men were now openly falling in behind him. Sir James Risdon Bennett saw the Ripper as a homicidal maniac suffering under some erotic delusion. And Dr Edgar Sheppard, agreeing that he was probably insane, wondered whether he might also be ‘an earnest religionist with a delusion that he has a mission from above to extirpate vice by assassination.’ Doctors directly involved in the police investigation are known to have held similar views. Dr Blackwell and Dr Gordon Brown both publicly stated their belief that the murderer was a lunatic.42

  The police, for all their undoubted diligence, knew little more about the Ripper than the general public. Indeed, it is fascinating to note how they investigated the same suggestions and leads highlighted in the press – Asiatics and cowboys, sailors, slaughtermen and doctors, lunatics and opium addicts, carefully leaving no stone unturned but finding nothing to elucidate the mystery.

  Extra policing in the district was maintained. But as autumn faded into winter the rigour of nightly vigils and the improbability of effecting a capture sapped the determinatio
n of the amateur patrols and they began to disappear from the streets. On the last day of October the Mile End Vigilance Committee was obliged to make a fresh appeal for funds, owning sadly that because of ‘the outlay entailed by their work’ they felt unable to continue their efforts without further subscriptions.43

  By then complacency was even beginning to infect those at risk from the unknown killer. Walter Dew was continually amazed by the hardiness of the Whitechapel whores. If they ventured out at all immediately after a murder, he remembered, it was generally in terror-stricken groups. But as the days passed without further incident the groups dwindled to pairs and the pairs to lone streetwalkers. With the fatalism of the hopeless some even learned to joke about their plight and as Dew passed them in the street would call, ‘I’m the next for Jack!’

  One of the women Dew knew by sight was Mary Jane Kelly. ‘Often I had seen her parading along Commercial Street, between Flower and Dean Street and Aldgate, or along Whitechapel Road,’ he wrote a half-century later. ‘She was usually in the company of two or three of her kind, fairly neatly dressed and invariably wearing a clean white apron, but no hat.’44 Mary may have been apprehensive about the murders. At least, we know that she used to ask Joe Barnett, the man who lived with her at 13 Miller’s Court in Dorset Street, to read her the news about them. But whatever her fears, she was soliciting on the streets by the end of October. Her rent was several weeks in arrears, Barnett was out of work, and young and quite attractive, Mary probably found no shortage of clients. Besides, the Ripper had been inactive for more than a month.

  Events in Whitechapel were relentlessly sweeping to a bloody and grotesque climax.

  15

  ‘I want to go to the Lord Mayor’s Show’

  APART FROM THE occasional stable or chandler’s shop, Dorset Street, Spitalfields, in 1888, was almost entirely occupied by common lodging houses offering beds at fourpence and sixpence a night. Several narrow courts, largely inhabited by prostitutes, led off Dorset Street. One such, on the north side of the street, was Miller’s Court. A stone-flagged passage, three feet wide and twenty feet long, gave access to the court, a small paved yard upon which faced some half dozen mean houses.

  Mary Jane Kelly, a young Irish prostitute, rented a ground-floor room in Miller’s Court. But she did not lodge in any of the half dozen houses we have noticed. The house in which Mary lived actually fronted on Dorset Street. Indeed her room had once been the back parlour of No. 26, but the house had been let out in furnished rooms and Mary’s, partitioned off from the rest of the house, commanded a rent of 4s. 6d. a week. The only entrance to the room, designated No. 13, was in Miller’s Court, the second door on the right from Dorset Street. Its only two windows also looked out into the court. In the smallest window, that nearest the door, two panes of glass were broken.

  No. 13 was perhaps the most public habitation in Miller’s Court. At the opposite side of the court its doorway could be observed from a small window at the back of John McCarthy’s shop (27 Dorset Street) and from the windows of at least three of the succeeding tenements up the court, and at night the traffic in and out of Mary’s room was illuminated in the yellow shade of a gas lamp, located almost directly opposite her door. Yet few residents of the court seem to have known much about Mary Jane Kelly or to have been more than passing acquaintances.

  She was, they well knew, occasionally drunk. At such times she was noisy, ‘spreeish’ and given to singing Irish songs. She was probably the ‘Mary Jane Kelley’, aged twenty-two, who was fined 2s. 6d. at Thames Magistrates’ Court on 19 September 1888 for being drunk and disorderly1 and it was during a drunken quarrel with Joe Barnett, the man who lived with her, that she broke the window of her room. In general, however, Mary was a quiet woman with few serious relationships. Of Joe Barnett she was genuinely fond. Sometimes she visited another friend, a prostitute as herself, in the Elephant and Castle district. But the name of only one close female friend – that of Maria Harvey, a laundress who came to live at New Court in Dorset Street a day or two before Mary’s death – can be reliably established and at the subsequent inquest only Barnett could tell the coroner anything of Mary’s history.

  Her story, as Barnett had it from Mary herself, is simply told. She was born in Limerick (whether the county or the town is not stated) but the family moved to Wales when she was very young. Her father, John Kelly, became a foreman at an ironworks, either in Carmarthenshire or Caernarvonshire, and Mary married a collier named Davis or Davies when she was about sixteen. A mine explosion, which killed her husband two or three years later, ended that part of her life. In 1884, when Mary was about twenty-one, she came to London. She found work in a West End brothel and so engaged one of the clientele there that he asked her to accompany him to France. It was not, apparently, a happy experience and after only two weeks abroad Mary returned to London. In the East End she attracted several paramours and, when not being supported by one of them, made a living by prostitution. At one time she was living with a man named Morganstone near the Commercial Gas Works, Stepney, at another with a mason’s plasterer named Joe Flemming in Bethnal Green Road.2

  The only corroboration of any of this comes from a long news report of 12 November. By this account Mary entered the service of a French lady living in Knightsbridge when she first came to London. While with this lady she led a ‘degraded life’ but drove about in a carriage and made several trips to Paris. Later she found her way to the East End. There she stayed first with Mrs Buki in St George’s Street, Ratcliff Highway. On one occasion both women went back to the French lady’s house to demand Mary’s box containing numerous costly dresses. From 1885 to 1886 or 1887 Mary lodged at the house of Mrs Carthy at Breezer’s Hill, Pennington Street. According to Mrs Elizabeth Phoenix of 157 Bow Common Lane, Burdett Road, in Bow, Mrs Carthy’s sister, Mary was very quarrelsome and abusive when drunk but ‘one of the most decent and nicest girls you could meet’ when sober. Mrs Carthy herself said that Mary eventually left her house ‘to live with a man who was apparently in the building trade, and who she (Mrs Carthy) believed would have married her.’3

  Presumably the man in the building trade was Joe Flemming, the plasterer also mentioned by Barnett. It is obvious that an especially close relationship once existed between Mary and Flemming. Barnett tells us that Mary was very fond of him. Mrs Carthy believed that Flemming would have married Mary. And Mary told Julia Venturney, a German charwoman who lodged opposite her in Miller’s Court, that a man called Joe continued to visit her after she had taken up with Barnett. But we know next to nothing about this or any other of Mary’s early relationships. Our sources, too, leave important questions unanswered. Why did Mary leave Wales for London? What was the truth behind the stories of the West End brothel and that mysterious jaunt to France? And why was a girl of Mary’s youth and apparent good looks precipated so swiftly into the desperate squalor of the East End lodging house? Ripperologists have pondered such questions for decades. We can reap a harvest of speculation and theory from their labours. But they are no substitute for facts.

  Mary’s life acquires sharper focus after her meeting with Joe Barnett in Commercial Street in 1887. At that time she was living at Cooley’s lodging house in Thrawl Street.4 Barnett, a steady respectable Irish cockney, worked as a market porter at Billingsgate. The two struck up an immediate friendship. Over a drink they arranged to meet again the next day and on that second meeting agreed to live together. At first the couple took lodgings in George Street. From there they moved to Little Paternoster Row, Dorset Street, and from there, evicted for getting drunk and failing to pay their rent, to Brick Lane. At the beginning of 1888 they rented 13 Miller’s Court from John McCarthy, the owner of a chandler’s shop at 27 Dorset Street.

  Neither the horrendous scene-of-crime photographs taken by the police nor the fanciful sketches of the illustrated papers help us to visualize Mary’s appearance. But she was young and evidently quite attractive. Mrs Phoenix said that she was about ‘5 feet 7 inches i
n height, and of rather stout build, with blue eyes and a very fine head of hair, which reached nearly to her waist.’ Some of Mary’s neighbours in Dorset Street have also left us word portraits of her. To Elizabeth Prater, lodging in a room directly over Mary’s, she was ‘tall and pretty, and as fair as a lily’, a very pleasant girl who ‘seemed to be on good terms with everybody’. To Caroline Maxwell, living in Dorset Street across the way from Miller’s Court, ‘a pleasant little woman, rather stout, fair complexion, and rather pale . . . she spoke with a kind of impediment.’5 The only durable result of her French connection seems to have been the affectation of the name Marie Jeanette Kelly.

  Mary lived at Miller’s Court with Joe Barnett until 30 October, when Barnett walked out after a quarrel. He had been out of work for several months, the couple had fallen behind in their rent and Mary had returned to prostitution. Her trade had occasioned differences between the two. ‘I have heard him say that he did not like her going out on the streets,’ Julia Venturney, a neighbour, told the police, ‘he frequently gave her money, he was very kind to her, he said he would not live with her while she led that course of life.’6 But Mary’s compassion was the immediate cause of their separation. Always big-hearted, she invited a homeless prostitute to share their room at Miller’s Court.7 Barnett suffered the intrusion two or three nights and then remonstrated and left.

  Barnett found shelter in. a common lodging house in New Street, Bishopsgate, but he and Mary remained friends. On the evening of Thursday, 8 November, he visited her at Miller’s Court and told her that he was very sorry he had no work and could not give her any money. The terror that had gripped the East End that autumn had touched Mary as it had every other prostitute. In Dorset Street, within a few yards of the entrance to Miller’s Court, a bill proclaiming the Illustrated Police News £100 reward offer hung precariously from a wall. And several times Mary had asked Barnett to read to her from the newspapers about the murders. But when they parted that Thursday night, perhaps about eight, neither could possibly have anticipated the disaster that was about to engulf them. It was the last time Barnett saw Mary alive. And when he would look upon her, dead and mangled in Shoreditch Mortuary, he would recognize her only by her hair and eyes.8