Jack the Ripper: The Secret Police Files (11 page)

As a result of information given by informants and witnesses who were closely connected to the group, five men were subsequently convicted and hanged in 1883. These five were Joe Brady, Michael Fagan, Thomas Caffrey, Dan Curley and Tim Kelly.

Alice Carroll’s specific evidence was against Brady and Kelly. For giving evidence the authorities gave her the sum of £500 and offered her a new identity. At the time of the trial in 1883 she was 17 years-old and therefore would have been twenty-two at the time of the Whitechapel murders. Mary Kelly was supposedly around twenty-five at the time of her murder according to Joseph Barnett.

Carroll was described as having bright, golden-red, hair and very pretty blue eyes, as did Kelly. Alice lived with her parents, two brothers and three sisters in Lower Eccles Lane, just off Dorset Street, Dublin. She used to regularly shop for her mother in Hardwick Street where there was a grocery store owned by the McCarthy’s and another store owned by the Hutchinson’s.

Joseph Brady one of the killers, had a girlfriend named Annie Meagher who hated and despised Carroll with a vengeance for giving evidence, which led to his execution. Following which she is quoted as saying to a witness,
“The sun has gone from my sky and the heart has been torn from my body.”
She was also claimed to have verbally abused Alice Carroll using words along the lines of,
“I hope someday your heart is torn from you as has mine.”

Alice Carroll had a hard time in Dublin. The murders and the subsequent executions had caused concern and she felt safer to stay at home with her mother. She was abused constantly on the streets. On one occasion there was an effigy of her burnt near her home. She remained in the family home for a few years after the trial and her last known whereabouts were that she was still in Dublin in 1887 having been arrested for being drunk.

Could Alice Carroll have finally decided to leave Ireland and assume the new identity of Mary Kelly in Whitechapel? Was John McCarthy her landlord who ran a local shop taking in mail from Ireland for her, related to the same McCarthy who owned the shop near to where she lived in Ireland? Was the story of her early life, which she gave to Barnett, made-up?

According to uncorroborated reports, following the execution of Brady and Kelly their bodies were the subject of dissection with all of their organs being removed for medical research, and their remains buried in unmarked graves inside Dublin Prison. This certainly gives food for thought in relation to the murder of Mary Kelly and certainly raises a motive.

Were Alice Carroll and Mary Kelly one and the same and her true identity uncovered by the Fenians who then inflicted revenge on her by murdering and mutilating her, removing all of her organs and in particular the heart, making it look like the work of Jack the Ripper?

If Mary Kelly and Alice Carroll were one and the same she was not the only witness in the Phoenix Park murder trial to be subsequently murdered by the Fenians. James Carey was another who turned Queen's evidence. After the trial the authorities had no use for Carey, but it was incumbent on them to make some provision for his safety by getting him out of Ireland. The problem was finding a safe haven in the English-speaking parts of the world as the USA and Canada, the Australian colonies; New Zealand and the Cape Colony had too many Fenian sympathizers for safety. So Natal was chosen, where the Irish were few.

Carey’s wife and seven children were put into lodgings in the East End of London and Carey was kept in Kilmainham Gaol until arrangements had been completed. Then Mrs. Carey and five of the children were put aboard the
Kinfauns Castle
in London as steerage passengers and Carey and the two eldest children joined the ship at Dartmouth, all of them travelling as a family under the name Power, bound for Cape Town on the first stage of their journey.

But word of their new life had been leaked to Fenian sympathizers who booked Patrick O'Donnell on the same ship, and when the ship reached its destination he killed James Carey with three shots from a revolver. O'Donnell was brought back to London and later hanged for the murder after a trial at the Old Bailey.

I have to admit I find all of this surrounding the death of Mary Kelly an interesting theory and there are many coincidences in this theory but coincidences do not solve mysteries or murders.

Following the Kelly murder the Police Commissioner Sir Charles Warren issued the following pardon:

MURDER. - PARDON. - Whereas on November 8 or 9, in Miller-court, Dorset-street, Spitalfields, Mary Janet Kelly was murdered by some person or persons unknown: the Secretary of State will advise the grant of Her Majesty's gracious pardon to any accomplice, not being a person who contrived or actually committed the murder, who shall give such information and evidence as shall lead to the discovery and conviction of the person or persons who committed the murder
.

CHARLES WARREN,

The Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis.

Metropolitan Police office, 4, Whitehall-place, S.W., Nov. 10
^th
1888.

Needless to say no one came forward with any information and soon afterwards Sir Charles Warren resigned his post to be replaced by James Monro.

Mary Kelly is said to have been the last of the Ripper’s victims. But as earlier stated my investigation revealed two other subsequent murders of prostitutes in the Whitechapel area that are worthy of consideration in deciding whether the Ripper continued his killing spree after Kelly.

ALICE McKENZIE

Forty-year-old Alice McKenzie died in Castle Alley on 17th July 1889 of wounds to the left side of her neck. Her abdomen showed signs of only superficial mutilations. Her clothes were up around her chin. She was last seen alive at 11.40pm and her body was found at 12.50am in the same alley that a police officer later stated he patrolled some twenty minutes before this time and saw no one or nothing suspicious. Two doctors agreed that a “sharp-pointed knife” was used to inflict the wounds, but also that it could have been smaller than the one used in the previous killings. However, neither the doctors nor the police could agree on whether she was a Ripper victim.

My ability to state conclusively that this murder was connected to the previous killings is not helped by the failure of the two doctors and the police all failing to agree. However, in the light of my theory as to how and when the organs were removed from the earlier victims, I believe Alice McKenzie could have been a Ripper victim.

FRANCES COLES

Twenty-three-year-old Frances Coles was the last possible UK Ripper victim and perhaps the prettiest of them all. She was murdered in the early hours of 13th February 1891 under a railway arch in Royal Mint Street. Her throat was slashed only moments before a policeman arrived on the scene. There were no abdominal mutilations. She had injuries to the back of her head consistent with being thrown to the pavement and her throat had been cut while she was lying on the pavement. The policeman who discovered the body heard footsteps walking away, but police rules required that he stayed with the body, as she appeared to be still alive. Had the officer followed the footsteps, he may have caught the murderer.

Coles was last seen alive at 1.45am and found dying at 2.15am. At 1.45am she had met fellow prostitute Ellen Gallagher in Commercial Street, passing “a violent man in a cheese cutter hat”. Apparently Gallagher remembered the man as a former client who had given her a black eye and warned Coles not to entertain him, but Coles ignored her friend’s advice and solicited the man. She and the stranger headed toward the direction of the Minories. This was the last time she was seen alive. It appears that the police carried out no enquiries in an effort to identify this man.

Was Frances Coles a Ripper victim? Her throat was cut, but unlike in the other Whitechapel murders a blunt knife was used. There seems to have been no evidence of strangulation. There was no mutilation of the abdomen and the clothes were not disarranged. The murder location, as in the case of Elizabeth Stride, was south of Whitechapel Road. Could the Ripper have ceased his onslaught for eight months and then resumed his slayings with Frances Coles? Or was she just another victim of the violent Whitechapel at that time? My initial impression is that her murder is perhaps not connected to any of the others, but during the latter part of my investigation I uncovered supportive evidence, which suggests she, and all the other victims I have mentioned with the exception of Liz Stride could have possibly all been victims of the same killer.

It should be noted that a seaman James Sadler who was an acquaintance of Coles was arrested in connection with her murder. The case was investigated by Chief Inspector Donald Swanson who not only suspected Sadler of her murder but suggested that Sadler could have been Jack the Ripper. The case against Sadler was dropped when he produced a cast iron alibi for his movements at the time of her murder, and also the previous murders. At this early stage of my investigation it gave me a clear indication that the police did not have any clues as to the identity of Jack the Ripper three years after the first murder took place.

Before considering any likely suspects I had to see if there was any direct evidence I could use after analysing the murders that would help me to identify the killer. There was none. All I had to go on were vague unreliable descriptions of men seen with some of the victims before their deaths and the MOs – the
modus operandi
, or method of killing used in each murder. As I looked at each suspect my aim was to see if any of them matched any of these descriptions, but, even if they did, I knew that this fact would be no more than weak circumstantial evidence. In reality these assortment of descriptions was of no help.

CHAPTER FOUR

THE SUSPECTS

The list of Ripper “suspects” now stands at over 200. Among such illustrious names put forward through the years are Lewis Carroll the famous children’s writer, and Dr. Barnardo, who did so much good work for orphaned children and in more recent times it has been suggested the killer may have been a woman and therefore aptly named “Jill the Ripper”.

So why is there such a long list? Well in addition to unsubstantiated theories in later years regarding likely suspects, it seems that at the time anyone who had a conviction for a stabbing offence or offering violence towards a female became a suspect, as did anyone confessing to being Jack the Ripper after a night of heavy drinking or anyone coming into police custody for any similar type of murder. So the list grew and grew. For several years after the murders ceased police still continued to interview anyone arrested for any offence involving the use of a sharp knife being used against a female in the hope of finding Jack the Ripper.

One has to bear in mind that in 1888 the police did not have the benefit of modern-day forensics and scientific methods, which are afforded to our officers today. The only way the police could secure a conviction was:

“Any confession made to police should be at once reduced to writing, signed, if possible, by the person making it, and witnessed by an officer
.

“A person should, therefore, never be charged with an offence on his own confession before inquiry has been made as to its reliability.”

In many criminal cases circumstantial evidence played a great part in prosecutions, this is defined as:

To give an example as to the use of circumstantial evidence – The body of a woman is discovered, she has been stabbed repeatedly; there is no sign of the offender or the weapon used. Some 20 minutes later and half a mile away a man is stopped in the street he has blood on his hands and when searched he is found to be in possession of a long-bladed knife, which has traces of blood on the blade. If he gives no explanation or not even a plausible explanation for the blood on himself and the knife and as likely as not would be charged solely on that evidence the court would be able to use that evidence and draw an inference as to his guilt.

Before discussing specific “suspects” I will take time to expand and define the term “suspect” thereby giving readers and researchers alike the ability to assess and evaluate the viability of their favoured “suspect” because the vast majority of the suspects on the list do not fit into any of the categories shown below.

I would define “Suspect” as “
A person who by their own actions or by their spoken or written words or conduct, arouses suspicion by others having regard to their likely involvement in the commission of an offence.”

That now leaves three specific subcategories within the suspect category:

“
A person who is of interest”

“A likely suspect”

“A prime suspect”

A person of interest is self-explanatory and could be explained in many different ways. Firstly by a member of the public or the relative of a person giving the name of that person to the police by reason of unfounded personal suspicions they had against that person. Another example could be by the police themselves coming up with a name via their investigation, perhaps someone who was known to carry a knife or had been convicted of a knife offence, or someone who had assaulted a prostitute.