The Real Mary Kelly (15 page)

It was written in red crayon and smeared with what was intended to look like blood but was actually red ink. It included a couple of almost perfect thumb prints, unfortunately a few years too early to have been of use, for the Metropolitan Police did not adopt fingerprinting as a forensic tool until 1901 even though it had been in widespread use as a method of identifying individuals in British India and other parts of the world for nearly half a century before that. Had anyone thought to take thumb prints from the journalists at Central News it might at least have been a useful way of eliminating them as the author of the card.

With its clear reference to the ‘double event’ that took place a day earlier, the writer was clearly seeking to establish that he was the author of both missives as well as the murderer of all four women. There was a feature about the first ‘Dear Boss’ letter, the postcard and possibly two communications that followed it, one
on 5th October and one eight years later, which may have been written by the same person, which was quickly noticed and commented upon. They contained words and expressions that originated in America and were not in common usage in Britain at the time. These included the words ‘boss’, ‘quit’ and ‘fix me’, expressions that are much more familiar to today’s audience, used to films and television from across the Atlantic, than they were at the time. Many people, including the police, concluded that the writer was either American or had spent enough time there to absorb the local journalese.

There is in fact a distinctly journalistic flavour to both messages. The absence of sentence structure and apostrophes is typical of reporters at the time who tended to use this style when taking down speech verbatim in the interests of speed but would have restored the syntax when transcribing it later before submitting their copy to an editor. Unlike most of the letters that followed, there are no spelling mistakes in them, suggesting that the writer was a reasonably educated man.

At the time that the first ‘Dear Boss’ letter and the following postcard were received the police authorities were convinced that they had been written by the murderer even though they later changed their mind. The fact that it was considered worthwhile to disseminate it so widely shows how seriously the police took the communications at the time. It seems extraordinary therefore that no attempt was apparently made to trace journalists or reporters in the area who were either American or who had visited the country. It was presumably no secret to Francis’s fellow hacks that he had spent time there some 20 years before.

It is of course entirely possible, indeed likely, that at some time Francis was interviewed by the police. By late October there was a concerted effort to trace and interview all single men living alone in the area, although it may not have extended quite as far as his lodgings in the Mile End Road which were about a mile from the epicentre of the murders. Unfortunately the records of exactly who was interviewed were not kept.

It has been suggested that the postcard was the work of a copycat seeking to cash in on the notoriety of the letter published in
The Daily News
, but it is difficult to see how that could have been the case. Although the text of the letter had been published, the facsimiles of both were not published until 4th October, so
the author of the postcard, unless he had been particularly close to either the police or Central News, could not have been able to reproduce the handwriting so accurately without actually being the same person.

There was also the issue of whether the author of the postcard which introduced the words ‘double event’ into the folklore of the Ripper murders could have known about the crimes at the time that it was written unless he was also responsible for them. It was received at Central News on the morning of 1st October and was postmarked the same day although it could have been posted late the previous day, after the last collection, and lain in the box overnight. The bodies of the two women were discovered in the early hours of the previous day, 30th September, and the rumour mill had ensured that the news was widespread in the East End by the afternoon of that day, so it would have been perfectly possible for someone bent on mischief to have written and posted it by the following morning. What is much less likely is that an imposter would have known that Liz Stride ‘squealed a bit’ and her killer was unable to conduct his customary mutilations since those details did not become public until her inquest. There is also the fact that the writer said that his recipient would find out about the double murder ‘tomorrow’, suggesting that the postcard was written, even if not posted, on the 30th – the actual day of the murder – when even fewer of the residents of East London were in possession of the facts.

Publication of the letter and the postcard did, though, have one unfortunate effect. It unleashed a flood of other letters that continued for years afterwards. They were the first of hundreds of letters, postcards and telegrams sent to the police, to various newspapers, private individuals and to no-one in particular. Some reports say that there were more than a thousand but the total retained by the Metropolitan and city police and now in the National and the London Metropolitan Archives is 210. At first they were taken seriously by the police and the first letter and postcard sent to Central News are still considered to be amongst the most likely to have been written by the actual killer. As time went on and letters were received from all over the country and from other countries including the United States, France and Portugal, it became obvious that the vast majority of them were hoaxes or written by people with serious psychological issues. Only two writers were identified and prosecuted for wasting police time, both women.

The most immediate effect that the letter had was to put the name Jack the Ripper firmly into the language. It was a brilliant choice, whether invented by the actual killer or a hoaxer. It is instantly memorable and it quickly passed into general usage. It has the look and feel of something invented by a journalist or an advertising copywriter and it immediately linked the earlier killings with the ones that were to follow in the minds of the police and the general public. There have been many other serial killings before and since of much greater magnitude and – in some cases – of equal ferocity, but none have dwelled in the popular imagination as firmly as the Ripper murders.

Its origin is not hard to perceive; through much of the 19th century there had been numerous sightings of a mysterious character known as ‘Spring Heeled Jack’, a devil-like creature in human form clad in a long black cloak and spewing forth blue and white flames from his nose and mouth. He supposedly terrorised people, particularly adolescent girls, by jumping out at them in the darkness, scratching their flesh with steel talons and, for some reason, slapping their faces, before escaping in gigantic 10ft bounds.

The sightings took place mostly in London – although a few were reported from other places including Aldershot and Colchester – since jittery army sentries seemed to have a special propensity for spotting him, perhaps with a little assistance from their off-duty comrades
¹⁰¹
. They had commenced in Hammersmith and that borough remained a particular focus of reports for many years. Putting Jack together with the concept of ripping, no doubt taken from the ‘High Rip’ gangs that had terrorised prostitutes in the East End for some years and who were thought to be responsible for Emma Smith’s terrible injuries, produced the perfect epithet. Whether it was the creation of the actual murderer or that of a journalist (or both), it was destined to become one of the best-known expressions in the English language.

There has been an enormous amount of debate as to whether this letter and the subsequent letter and postcard sent to Central News were genuinely written by the Ripper or were creations of one or more of Central News’s own journalists to further its own business. This was the explanation eventually favoured by the police but there are a couple of facts against it. If Central News was seeking publicity why did it withhold the letter for two days when a greater impact
might have been obtained by releasing it immediately? Secondly, since it was an agency rather than a newspaper, it is hard to see what advantage it would gain from such an exercise. It had no direct circulation to boost and passing the letter to the police rather than to its clients, the newspapers, would not seem to be potentially as commercially advantageous.

There is a small piece of verisimilitude in the letter that few people seem to have commented on. Probably not one person in a thousand, then or now, has ever tried to write with blood. Most people are unaware of the nature of blood that has been stored without an anticoagulant for a period of hours or days in a bottle, whether ginger beer or otherwise. What happens is that an initial, jellylike clot forms and as this further solidifies, the serum separates from it. Serum is exactly like glue. It is rich in fibrin which gives it the same sticky consistency. It is probably not a detail that a person would invent unless he had actually tried writing with old blood. Many of the other hoaxers that came later wrote in red ink claiming that it was the blood of one of the victims when, patently, it was not. A journalist at Central News would surely have done the same and not inserted the detail about the ginger beer bottle.

George Robert Sims, the popular journalist and playwright whose name has been firmly associated with the Ripper saga for more than 120 years, made a very astute point in part of an article he wrote under the pen name ‘Dagonet’ in
The Referee
on 7th October 1888:

There is an uncomfortable awkwardness about the abrupt ending which makes one wonder if Sims knew, or suspected, more than he was prepared to let on. He was not the only one who realised that the author of the letter and the postcard that followed it four days later was almost certainly a working journalist or reporter. Very few of the general public even knew of the existence of press agencies at that time and a hoaxer who was not a professional pressman would almost certainly have chosen to send a letter to one of the national newspapers or to the police. It is astonishing that, having correctly deduced that the writer is professionally connected with the press, Sims immediately dismisses the possibility that he could also be the murderer.

There are other features of the letters that are worth noticing and which might tend to connect them to a particular type of man. There is a quirky, almost eccentric, humour to them, black though it is. The writer uses the expression ‘ha ha’ repeatedly to indicate that he has made a joke, even underlining it for further emphasis. It is typical of a person with a particular sort of personality disorder who finds it difficult to pick up visual cues and to read other people’s reactions in face-to-face conversation.

If Francis did write them, the question is why? Most probably he wanted to clearly establish a link between the murders that would distract attention from his real objective, the killing of a particular victim. They enabled him to put forward an alternative motive, his dislike of prostitutes. Finally, they also provided him with an opportunity to trumpet his own prowess. For a man whose life
might until then have been dogged by failure, they were a means of demonstrating to the world that he could single-handedly outwit the Metropolitan police and the powers that be.

The police did not have long to wait before the prophecies contained in the first letter came true. On 30th September, the day after Central News handed the letter over to Scotland Yard, the horror was elevated to a new level.

The murder of Elizabeth Stride in an entranceway off Berner Street was the only one of the five Ripper murders that was botched. On the face of it, it was not a good choice of site for such an enterprise, although Francis probably had a personal reason for choosing it. Berner Street was a short road that ran down from the bustling Commercial Road to Ellen Street. It was generally quite busy, with a number of small shops which stayed open until after midnight on most evenings. About halfway down on the right-hand side was a three-storey building that housed the International Working Men’s Educational Club. To its left was the entrance to Dutfield’s Yard, where a number of commercial enterprises had their premises. On the first floor of the building housing the club was a lecture hall with windows looking on to the yard and in which, on the night of 30th September, a political discussion for a large audience of mostly Polish and Russian Jews was taking place. When the serious part of the evening wound up at about midnight, a number of participants stayed behind to sing Russian songs.

Perhaps it was the sound of music, singing and laughter emanating from this building that made Francis decide that the narrow entrance to the yard, shielded from the street lights – which were in any case very sparse – was a good site for
his next adventure. There was another possible reason: he was already familiar with the club. As well as Jewish anarchists, it was also frequently used for lectures by socialists. Only two days before Stride’s murder William Morris had lectured there, as he had on many previous occasions and Francis – as both a family friend and a local reporter – was almost certainly present
¹⁰²
. He may have made a note of the darkened alleyway and the yard beyond and realised that it would make a good venue for his purposes.