The Real Mary Kelly (10 page)

The stage was now set for the next act.

By the time the inquest on the woman whose body had been found on the staircase of George Yard Buildings resumed on 23rd August she had been identified as Martha Tabram. Her story was typical of so many of the other East End unfortunates. From a respectable working-class background she had married Henry Tabram, a furniture warehouse foreman, at the age of 20. The couple had two sons but by the time she was 23 Martha was already drinking heavily and her husband threw her out. She drifted into Whitechapel where she scraped a living through hawking, occasionally living with an unemployed carpenter called Henry Turner and, inevitably for one in her situation, eventually resorting to street prostitution.

After evidence of identification had been given by Martha’s former husband and her sister-in-law, a witness was called who was able to throw what at first appeared to be a good deal of light on the affair
⁶²
. She was Mary Ann Connelly, another prostitute, who went by the working name of ‘Pearly Poll’. It was something of a misnomer since Mary was a big, raw-boned, masculine woman with a voice ravaged by years of alcohol and tobacco which, like many of her friends, she smoked in a cut-down clay pipe. By all accounts she also had a
truculent and unhelpful manner. She gave evidence that she and Martha, who she knew as ‘Emma’, met at about 10pm on the evening of 6th August. It was the Summer Bank Holiday and the public houses and music halls of the East End were packed with people eager to catch a last few hours of carousing before returning to work the next day. They met up with a pair of soldiers and visited several pubs, drinking a mixture of rum and beer, before splitting up to complete the transactions with their respective clients. Mary and her soldier – apparently a corporal – went in one direction down Angel Alley and Martha took her private to the staircase of George Yard Buildings, no doubt a secluded spot she had used many times in the past.

A local policeman later remembered having talked to a soldier, who he believed to have been a Grenadier Guard, near the entrance to George Yard. The soldier had told the constable that he was waiting for a friend who had ‘gone with a girl’. Since Dr. Killeen, the police surgeon who had examined the body on the staircase and later conducted the post-mortem, specifically suggested that the wound that had penetrated the breast bone and punctured the heart had been caused by a strong bladed weapon like a soldier’s bayonet, it was a promising lead
⁶³
.

Mary Ann Connelly was extensively questioned by the police and asked if she would attend an identity parade. This was carried out at the Tower of London, the nearest military barracks, where it was assumed that the soldiers had come from. She was unable to pick out anyone from the ranks of the Scots Guardsmen mustered on the parade square and then apparently remembered that the two soldiers had been wearing caps with white bands. That immediately identified them as Coldstream Guards and Mary was asked if she would attend another identity parade at their depot at Wellington Barracks near Buckingham Palace.

She agreed somewhat reluctantly and the next day she picked out two soldiers as having been the ones that she and Martha had been drinking with. As it turned out both men – one of whom had spent the night with his wife – had rock solid alibis and at that stage the police concluded that Mary was unreliable, uncooperative or both. Inspector Reid, the detective who was in charge of the investigation, confirmed to the court that Pearly Poll had been unable to help them any further but that investigations were continuing.

The inquest jury duly returned a verdict of wilful and felonious murder by person or persons unknown and the police investigations continued. A week later there had been no further progress and press interest was beginning to wane when two apparently unrelated events occurred which were to change the course of criminal history.

Francis was no doubt in court to hear the Tabram verdict. A very full account of the proceedings, quite possibly written by him, appeared in the
East London Advertiser
on 23rd August. By that time he knew where Elizabeth was living and his desire to avenge himself on her had been re-ignited. But now it was not divorce he sought.

He wanted her dead.

Three years had passed since she had walked out on him. In that time his obsession to have her back, to resume their life together and maybe to raise a family had gradually changed to a festering resentment, but the passage of time did not cause her to fade in his memory. The obsessive rumination typical of STPD meant that she had rarely been out of his mind during that time. He had wasted three years of his life, almost bankrupted himself in looking for her, forfeiting his self-respect and the goodwill of his parents. She had made him look a fool by disappearing after he had spent a great deal of money in preparing a divorce petition which could then not be served because she had done a moonlight flit. Gradually the bitterness had built up until now all he could think about was taking the ultimate revenge on her; nothing less would do.

As he sat listening to the closing witnesses and the coroner’s summing up, Francis must have been thinking about how he could achieve his objective and yet not be detected. As a court reporter he knew that invariably and with good reason the first person the police suspected in the case of a married woman’s murder was the husband. Although Elizabeth had made things easier by disguising her identity, he did not know how much she may have told her friends since she had been in the East End. Had she mentioned that she was married? Had she indeed mentioned either her maiden name, Davies, or her married name Craig to anyone? Were there letters that, if found, could lead to her true identity being discovered and, through that, the facts of their marriage? Above all, what had become of her wedding ring? Until the late 20th century men in
England rarely, if ever, wore a wedding ring but married women always did and, to symbolise the union of the couple, it was frequently engraved on the inner surface with the date of the wedding and the names or initials of both partners
⁶⁴
. If Francis had given Elizabeth such an object it was essential that it should be found and removed.

Slowly a plan crystallised in his mind. Martha Tabram was the third unfortunate to be murderously attacked in a small area of the East End in less than eight months. If the sequence continued – particularly if the next ones could all be connected by a distinctive pattern that made them appear to be the work of one man, and that man was seen as a lunatic – then Elizabeth’s death as one of the series would be less likely to be connected with an ex-husband, even if the fact that she had once been married should later come to light.

The idea that a man would kill other innocent people in order to disguise his real motive and the identity of the intended victim may at first seem extraordinary yet it is probably as old as murder itself. At the time it seems to have been too bizarre a concept for the Metropolitan Police, for they do not even seem to have considered the possibility. However, a psychopath sufficiently motivated to kill one person may have no compunction about killing others if he thinks it will assist him in carrying out his mission whilst remaining undetected. There have been examples throughout history.

In September 1949 Albert Guay, a French Canadian, planted a dynamite bomb in his wife’s suitcase before she checked in for a flight from Quebec to Baie-Co-meau. In the ensuing mid-air explosion 23 innocent people were killed along with the intended victim on whose life Guay had taken out a large life-insurance policy
⁶⁵
. Six years later Jack Graham murdered the 43 passengers and crew of United Airlines Flight 629 soon after it took off from Denver, Colorado in an identical way, hoping to profit by his mother’s will and life-insurance policy
⁶⁶
. In Texas in 1974, Ronald Clark O’Bryan, another psychopath, murdered his own 8-year-old son Timothy using candy poisoned with cyanide, apparently in order to profit from a $20,000 life-insurance policy. Hoping to disguise the object of his murderous intent he also handed out poisoned candy to four other children, including his daughter, under cover of a Halloween ‘trick or treat’ outing. Fortunately none of the other children sampled the poisoned sweets and as a consequence his plan was laid bare
⁶⁷
.

In O’Bryan’s case, unlike Francis, he had no particular animosity against any of the intended victims, he was simply killing for profit. Francis, on the other hand, was driven by a bitter hatred of his wife and a desire to exact vengeance at almost any cost, although not, apparently, that of his own neck. He also had good reason to dislike prostitutes in general, since he no doubt considered that it was prostitution that had effectively taken his wife from him. Killing both Elizabeth and at the same time taking with her a few women of a class that most people considered to be outside normal society was a price he may have considered well worth paying.

It was an outrageous plan but then, as we have seen, Francis was not a normal man. As his future employer Arthur Lane said, he was a man who took antipathies against other people easily and for no reason
⁶⁸
. As his writing was later to show, he suffered from a smouldering resentment against a world that he felt had treated him unfairly; he was crushed by a sense of failure. Add to that a corrosive malice towards a woman for whom he had once held a fatal obsession but who had, in his mind, cruelly and wantonly abandoned him, and the lives of a few other unfortunates were to him of no consequence
⁶⁹
.

The idea of embarking on a campaign of mass murder almost certainly came to him during the three weeks in which Martha Tabram’s inquest took place. He could have visited Ellen Macleod at any time during the past three years but his hurried visit to the High Court on 20th August suggests that a plan had suddenly formed in his mind and he needed to get on with it whilst Martha’s murder was uppermost in the consciousness of the Press and the general public.

Six types of serial killer are generally recognised by criminologists: Visionary, those who have schizoid or psychotic tendencies and are driven to commit their crimes by hearing voices; Missionary, those who have a mission to rid the world of a particular type of person; Lust; Thrill; Power-Seeker – which are all self-explanatory – and Gain
⁷⁰
. The last category best fits Francis, although he may also, to a certain extent, have exhibited some aspects of all the others, except perhaps Lust. Gain serial killers murder to achieve a particular end, which may be monetary or otherwise, and once their goal has been achieved, they stop. That is what distinguishes them from the others and it is what makes the Ripper stand out in the canon of murder. Of course, their underlying
personality disorder persists and, should the need arise, they remain capable of killing again many years into the future.

If this was what was passing through his mind during the Tabram inquest, he would also have realised that he would have to devise a suitable
modus operandi
to ensure that there would be no possible doubt that the sequence of killings from that moment on were the work of one man and that that man’s motive was directed against a recognisable class of victim rather than against one target in particular. He knew that there was little to connect the killings of Emma Smith and Martha Tabram other than the fact that they were both unfortunates. The next ones had to be different and the only way to ensure that was to carry them out himself.

His choice of method was dictated by his upbringing. His father’s passion for anatomy and his participation in dissections is well documented. In the 19th century you did not have to be a doctor or medical student to indulge your interest in the workings of the human body. Attendance at lectures in anatomy, observations of, or even taking part in, dissections was open to any man (women were excluded until the latter part of the century) who was willing to pay a fee at any one of the 20 or so medical schools in the country or at any of the private schools of anatomy that existed during much of the century. The last private school of anatomy in Britain was Thomas Cooke’s in Bloomsbury, and that didn’t close its doors until 1918
⁷¹
.

With his enthusiasm for education, particularly self-education, it would have been natural for E.T. Craig to have introduced his son to the dissecting room at an early age. Whether or not Francis had ever wielded the knife himself, by the time he was in his teens he was probably used to seeing his father laying open the abdomen and demonstrating the organs of the body, following the course of the great vessels as they ascended from the thoracic cage into the neck and, especially, attempting to confirm his phrenological beliefs by slicing into the yielding substance of the brain.

It may not have taken Francis long to decide that leaving the bodies of his victims bearing the unmistakeable stigmata of the dissecting room was a good way of making them appear to have been the work of a deranged anatomist. That way the attention of the police would be directed towards the thousands
of doctors and medical students that lived in the capital rather than towards an inky-fingered reporter. There was, however, no way in which they could be made to look as detailed and meticulous as actual medical dissections. Medical students then, as now, take a full year to dissect a single human cadaver, spending perhaps eight to 12 hours a week on the task and working in groups of four. Francis was going to have, at best, only a few minutes, working alone, on the ground and in semi-darkness. The most he could hope to do was to give his work a passing resemblance to a medical student’s dissection but he trusted that it would be sufficient to link the killings together as the work of one man
⁷²
. But the dissections, such as they were, would be done after they had been killed.

Since, of necessity, all but one of the actual killings would take place in the open, they had to be accomplished as quickly and cleanly as possible – leaving the victim no chance to cry out or to struggle. His knowledge of anatomy was good enough to know that a swift cut through the soft tissues of the neck dividing both carotid arteries and the windpipe in one sweep of the knife was enough to achieve this. Ideally they should be lying supine on the ground when it was done, so that there was less chance of being sprayed with blood.