The Real Mary Kelly (34 page)

74
   Many authors and Ripperologists have contended that the victims were first strangled by the Ripper before their throats were cut. Strangulation however produces very characteristic bruising which is centred on the midline over the larynx or voice box with counter-pressure marks at the back of the neck. The police surgeons would have been familiar with this and have looked for it but it was not present in any of the canonical five victims. Bruising over the carotid areas, the jaw and the upper chest was found in a number of cases and this is consistent with the use of the carotid pressure points to render the victims unconscious. See
Forensic Medicine
by Keith Simpson for a description of the bruising found in cases of manual strangulation. Unless they had studied anatomy few people would have been familiar with the carotid pressure points in 1888.

75
   Illustrated Catalogue and Price List. John Weiss and Son. 1889. Compiled by J.F. Foveaux. Printed by M.S. Rickerby, London.

76
   
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
.

77
   There is much confusion in the literature regarding witness descriptions of hats worn by various Ripper suspects. In particular the description ‘wideawake’ has often been taken by modern writers to mean a broad-brimmed hat of the type worn by Australian soldiers. In the 1880s a wideawake was any hat made from pressed felt, known by that name because it had no ‘nap’. The most popular hat for lower middle-class men was a domed hat of the sort later known as a bowler. In the 1880s it was variously known as a Coke hat, a low crowned hat (to distinguish it from a top hat) or a billycock.

78
   
Letter from Thomas Bond comparing the murder of Marie Jeanette Kelly (Mary Jane Kelly) with four of the previous murders, and an assessment of the murderer (copy of same in MEPO 3/140, ff 220-223).

CHAPTER EIGHT

79
   Many newspapers including
The Times
, Friday 31st August 1888, reported the fires at the docks. The one at the Ratcliffe dry dock broke out too late for the Friday editions of the morning papers however. It was reported in the
Morning Advertiser
, Saturday 1st September 1888.

80
   The
East London Advertiser
, Saturday 1st September 1888.

81
   
Firesetting and Mental Health:Theory, Research and Practice
. Edited by Geoffrey L. Dickens, Philip A. Sugarman and Theresa A. Gannon. RC-Psych Publications, 2012.

82
   Report of the inquest on Mary Ann Nichols,
The Daily Telegraph
, Monday 3rd September 1888.

83
   Ibid.

84
   In the 1880s and earlier, inquests were held as soon as possible after the discovery in suspicious circumstances of a body for the very good reason that, in the absence of refrigeration, storage of corpses for long periods was impracticable. This meant that opportunities for anything but, by today’s standards, rudimentary forensic examination was impossible.

85
   
East London Observer
, Saturday 8th September 1888.

86
   Casual wards were not wards in the hospital sense but places of refuge attached to workhouses where,
in extremis
, a person could receive shelter for a single night. They were so overcrowded, filthy and unpleasant that
most destitutes preferred to sleep in the street rather than have recourse to them. Only on the bitterest of nights would most unfortunates contemplate a night in a casual ward.

87
   Flower and Dean Street actually had no horticultural associations. It was named after John Flower and Gowen Dean, the two speculative jerry builders who first laid it out in 1655. Together with Dorset Street, Thrawl Street and Fashion Street, it was regarded as almost a no-go area by the local police.

CHAPTER NINE

88
   
East London Advertiser
, Saturday 15th September 1888.

89
   
Pictorial News
, 15th September 1888.

90
   
East London Advertiser
, Saturday 15th September 1888.

91
   Begg, Paul, Fido, Martin and Skinner, Keith.
The Complete Jack the Ripper A to
Z. John Blake, London, 2010.

92
   
Source
: Kate Summerscale,
The Suspicions of Mr Whicher
. Bloomsbury Publishing, London, 2008.

93
   Baxter was also coroner for the county of Sussex and he meant by this when he was hearing inquests in the county town of Lewes.

94
   Police surgeons were paid for each examination they conducted. Having carried out the initial examination at the scene, Phillips could not assume that he was automatically going to be engaged to complete the post-mortem at the mortuary; he had to wait to be instructed.

95
   
Phillips had noticed what Llewellyn had missed on the previous victim, that at least one ring had been removed from Annie’s ring finger. The murderer seems to have had an obsession with removing any rings worn by his victims. Since small quantities of money were left with the bodies, robbery can probably be discounted as a motive.

96
   This suggests that Phillips had conferred with Llewellyn and the coroner before Polly Nichols’s inquest and they had decided not to reveal the full details of her injuries in open court. If so Baxter had obviously had a change of heart. Throughout the inquests Phillips seems to have been worried that revealing too much titillating detail might encourage other copycat murders, besides having a natural reluctance to discuss injuries to the sexual organs in front of a lay audience particularly when women were present.

97
   Details of surgical mobilisation of the small intestine can be found in many surgical textbooks including
Atlas of Pelvic Surgery
, Online Edition: Small bowel resection with end-to-end anastomosis using the Gambee technique. Clifford R. Wheeless Jr. and Marcella L. Rosenberg. This also shows the traditional midline surgical incision by-passing the umbilicus to the right as used by the Ripper.

98
   This is perhaps the most telling of all Phillips’s testimony and often overlooked or discounted by historians of the Ripper murders, few of whom have actually operated on or dissected a human body. What he was saying is that he, with his considerable skill and experience, could not have opened a dead woman’s body – even in the favourable surroundings of a well-lit post-mortem room – and removed her pelvic organs in less than 15 minutes. The Ripper had considerably less time than that in the backyard of 49 Hanbury Street.

99
   Despite occasional lapses before inter-hospital rugby matches, medical students today are much more restrained than they were in the 19th
century. The
Echo
published an account on the day after the murder in Miller’s Court of what amounted to a drunken rampage by medical students during the Lord Mayor’s Show entitled ‘Medical Students at “Play”’.

CHAPTER TEN

100
The original letter, like so much else of the original archival material connected with the Ripper case, was stolen from the police files by a souvenir hunter but as it was photographed at the time it has been possible to make a facsimile of it which is today in the files of The National Archives.

101
The following report was carried by at least 18 papers across Britain, including
The Portsmouth Evening News
on Friday 1st November 1878. Whoever the original author was, he seems to have shared Francis’s facility for getting his pieces widely syndicated. It is of course perfectly possible that it was Francis who was working at the time as a reporter in Hammersmith, itself a centre of the Spring-Heel Jack sightings. If so it might explain his choice of name.

‘Spring-Heel Jack’ at Colchester.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

102
Taylor, Rosemary. ‘The City of Dreadful Delight.’ William Morris in the East End of London.
The Journal of William Morris Studies
. Winter 2009 (9–28).

103
The following year, 1889, another unfortunate, Alice McKenzie, was found murdered in Angel Alley, Whitechapel. At first she was thought to have been a Ripper victim but this was quickly discounted. She is known to have frequently used the alias Kelly, showing how widespread it was.

104
Kearley and Tonge, founded in 1878, has gone through a number of metamorphoses including the International Stores Group and is now the Somerfield chain of supermarkets.

105
A new System of Anatomy
. Sir Solly Zuckerman. Oxford University Press. London 1961. p.299.

106
Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, lived at the extreme north-east edge of the area of West Yorkshire in which his victims were killed and the first three victims were the nearest ones to his home. After that, as his confidence grew, he moved further and further from what criminologists call his anchor point, but he never – as far as is known – killed anyone to the east or north of his base.

107
Testimony of DC Halse at the inquest on Catherine Eddowes. He said: ‘There were three lines of writing in a good schoolboy’s round hand. The size of the capital letters would be about ¾in, and the other letters were
in proportion. The writing was on the black bricks, which formed a kind of dado, the bricks above being white.’
The Daily Telegraph
, 12th October 1888.

108
Sir Charles Warren. Report to the Home Secretary, 6th November 1888.

109
Judith Flanders,
The Invention of Murder
. Harper Press. London, 2011.

CHAPTER TWELVE

110
The impetus for the Vigilance Committees was the worrying reduction in sales in shops, not just in the East End but in cities across the country. Many small shops stayed open late at night to cater for people who were at work during the day, but now there was a marked reluctance for people to be abroad after dark.

111
The Daily Telegraph
, 3rd October 1888.

112
The
Morning Advertiser
, 1st October 1888, was one of many newspapers that reported Mrs Mortimer’s account. They are so nearly identical that it is likely that a single reporter interviewed her and then sold the account to a press agency or to several newspapers.

113
Judith Flanders,
The Invention of Murder
. Harper Press. London, 2011.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

114
The Daily Telegraph
, 12th October 1888.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

115
The old Truman’s Black Eagle Brewery still stands in Brick Lane but today is used as a centre for the arts, shopping, meetings and events.

116
Report on the inquest of Francis Craig, The
Fulham Chronicle
, 13th March 1903.

117
Queen Victoria in her Letters and Journals: A Selection
. Ed. Christopher Hibbert, Sutton Publishing Ltd, 2000.

118
Evans, Stewart P. and Keith Skinner.
Jack the Ripper: Letters from Hell
. Sutton Publishing, Stroud, 2001.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

119
Other people have noticed and commented on the fact that all five of the canonical murders took place within four or five days either side of three successive new moons. Most notably was the eminent (or notorious depending on your point of view) psychiatrist Dr Lyttleton Forbes Winslow, who took an intense interest in the affair at the time and is one of the many hundreds of people named as a suspect in the years since. He ascribed the timing to fits of periodic mania connected with the phases of the moon – classic lunacy in fact. The most likely explanation is that Francis did not want to venture out on nights when the moon was anywhere near full and make the risk of recognition greater.

120
Although the procession took place within the bounds of the city, the authorities insisted that extra police were drafted in from the Metropolitan area. In Sir William Logsdail’s magnificent painting showing the Lord Mayor’s coach rounding the bend in front of the Royal Exchange an hour or so before the discovery of Mary Jane’s body, the helmets of both the City Police with their distinctive crests and the Metropolitan Police with their central bosses can be made out.

121
The Star
, 10th November 1888.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

122
The British Medical Journal
, 15th June 1901, p.1, 523.

123
Since the opening of London’s first fish and chip shop in 1860, by 1888 fish and chips had become by far the most popular takeaway food in Britain.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

124
Elizabeth’s elder brother George had died in 1871 of tuberculosis but it was so prevalent in 19th-century Britain as not to be significant.

125
In this he was quite right. As has been noted before, Francis was in the habit of wearing an Inverness coat that had capacious sleeves, a cape over the shoulders and large pockets. He would have had no difficulty in concealing a knife and carrying away organs such as a heart, a kidney or a uterus.

126
Most people have taken the mutilation of her face as being indicative of the depths to which the murderer had sunk and, no doubt to an extent, they were. However, the main purpose was probably to prevent her recognition in the event that photographs or artists’ impressions were published later as had been the case with the other victims. The tentative mutilations to Catharine Eddowes’s face may have been to provide a link with this one and to prepare himself psychologically for what he knew he had to do to Elizabeth.