The Real Mary Kelly (24 page)

This is regarded as perhaps the first true attempt at criminal profiling in history and in some areas, as it will be seen, Bond could hardly have been closer to the truth in his description. His speculation that the murderer may have been suffering from a ‘revengeful or brooding condition of the mind’ was also, as it turned out, right on target and pathognomonic of a person with STPD, but he opted instead for the alternative explanation of satyriasis, the male equivalent of nymphomania. In this he completely ignored the fact that in none of the five cases was any evidence of sexual connection or masturbatory activity found even though the police surgeons were highly attuned to looking for them.

He made another observation that might be highly significant. He commented that the corner of the sheet to the right of Mary Jane’s head was
‘much cut and saturated with blood’ which to him suggested that it may have been placed over her face whilst the facial mutilation was in progress. Was Francis so overcome by the face of the woman he had once loved that he could not bear to look at it as he cut it to ribbons? Was that why he spared her deep blue eyes
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?

Bond himself was a curious character. The son of a wealthy Somerset farmer, he qualified in medicine at King’s College Hospital, London, and then signed on as a medical officer in the Prussian Army during the brief Austro-Prussian War of 1866. After gaining his FRCS he was appointed Assistant Surgeon at the Westminster Hospital in 1873, but in effect he saw only Out Patients for the next 20 years and had no practical operating experience during this time. He became a police surgeon to A Division and built up a large medico-legal practice, giving evidence in many celebrated murder trials. However, as his obituary in
The British Medical Journal
made clear: ‘It might be said that he was too dogmatic, but it was part of his nature to see one side of the case, and having expressed an opinion he was not to be shaken.’ In 1901 he suffered a painful stricture of the urethra and after some weeks of suffering he committed suicide by throwing himself out of his bedroom window. It is possible that Bond, who expressed very forthright views on the evils of venereal diseases, might in fact have been suffering from a gonorrhoeal stricture and this may have contributed to his state of mind at the time.

The inquest on the body from Miller’s Court was held by Dr. Roderick Macdonald, coroner for North-East Middlesex at Shoreditch town hall on Monday 12th November, four days after its discovery. Macdonald was the son of a crofter from the Isle of Skye and by dint of intelligence and sheer hard work had qualified in medicine and become Member of Parliament for Ross and Cromarty, representing the Crofters’ Party. He was a doughty Highlander who did not defer to anyone. In 1886 he had competed with Wynne Baxter for the post of coroner for East Middlesex. It was, apparently, an acrimonious contest which Baxter won. A year later, however, it was decided to divide East Middle-sex into North and South coronial divisions and Macdonald – who had only narrowly been beaten by his rival – was allocated the Northern one, something that could not have endeared him to Baxter.

It seems likely that there was interference at a high level in Mary Jane’s inquest. Her body had been taken to the Shoreditch mortuary which placed her remains under the jurisdiction of Macdonald. It should, by rights, have stayed within Baxter’s territory but it seems that the powers that be had become frustrated by his management of the inquests, his implied criticism of the police and his intimidation of witnesses. Almost certainly someone at a high level, probably the Home Secretary himself, had issued orders that the body be taken out of Baxter’s jurisdiction even before it was removed from Miller’s Court.

Macdonald seems to have been only too well aware of the role he was being asked to play and was probably party to the manipulation. When the inquest opened after the jury had been sworn in, one of the jurors addressed the coroner: ‘I do not see why we should have the inquest thrown upon our shoulders, when the murder did not happen in our district, but in Whitechapel
¹²⁷
.’

Macdonald was obviously prepared for this challenge and his reply was swift and severe. ‘Do you think that we do not know what we are doing here, and that we do not know our own district? The jury are summoned in the ordinary way, and they have no business to object. If they persist in their objection I shall know how to deal with them. Does any juror persist in objecting?’

They did. The juryman stubbornly continued, ‘We are summoned for the Shoreditch district. This affair happened in Spitalfields.’

‘It happened within my district,’ snapped Macdonald.

This was not true and everyone present in the court knew it. Another juryman then laid down a challenge: ‘This is not my district. I come from Whitechapel, and Mr. Baxter is my coroner.’

It is clear that the old enmity between the two coroners was at least partly behind this extraordinary mutiny and Macdonald moved swiftly to quash it once and for all. ‘I am not going to discuss the subject with jurymen at all. If any juryman says he distinctly objects, let him say so.’ He allowed a suitable pause for further challengers to his authority to make themselves known but when none did he continued, ‘I may tell the jurymen that jurisdiction lies where the body lies, not where it was found, if there was doubt as to the district where the body was found.’ There was of course no doubt whatever as to where the body had been found. Miller’s Court and Dorset Street lay very definitely within
Whitechapel and the coronial jurisdiction of Wynne Baxter, who may well have been behind the jurors’ revolt. In the course of a long and busy professional life in which he held innumerable public offices and made many contributions to the fields of science, horticulture and literature, he never once received any national honour or recognition, and this episode may have been one of the reasons why that was so.

Before the courtroom proceedings commenced, the jurymen were taken by Inspector Abberline to see the body in the Shoreditch mortuary and the room in Miller’s Court where it had been found. During their absence Dr. Macdonald took the opportunity to address the reporters assembled at the press bench on the subject of jurisdiction, taking great care to say that he had not received any communication on the subject from his counterpart in Whitechapel. The
Telegraph
the next day reported him as saying that,‘The body was in his jurisdiction; it had been taken to his mortuary; and there was an end of it. There was no foundation for the reports that had appeared. In a previous case of murder which occurred in his district the body was carried to the nearest mortuary, which was in another district. The inquest was held by Mr. Baxter, and he made no objection. The jurisdiction was where the body lay.’ It is clear that there was considerable public unease over what was seen as political interference in the judicial process and Macdonald was taking every opportunity to quell it but with little success.

When the court reconvened, the first person to testify was Joe Barnett. It can have been anything but easy for him; he seems to have been genuinely fond of Marie Jeanette as he knew her, and to have had to look at her hideously mutilated face for purposes of identification must have been a terrible experience. ‘I have seen the body,’ he said, ‘and I identify it by the ear and eyes, which are all that I can recognise; but I am positive it is the same woman I knew. I lived with her in number 13 room, at Miller’s-court for eight months. I separated from her on October 30th.’ The coroner asked him why he had done so and he replied, ‘Because she had a woman of bad character there, whom she took in out of compassion, and I objected to it. That was the only reason.’ It was one of several references to Mary Jane’s generous nature by those who knew her and which may ultimately have led to her downfall.

Joe then continued to give evidence that contained almost all the known details about Mary Jane’s background and existence until the time they had first met on Good Friday 1887. It was during this that details of her having worked from a high-class brothel in the West End emerged, as well as her trip to France with someone she apparently did not get on with and about her liaisons with the mysterious Morganstone and Joseph Flemming after her arrival in the East End.

Finally the coroner asked him if Mary Jane had seemed fearful of anybody during her last weeks. ‘Yes,’ Joe replied, ‘Several times. I bought newspapers, and I read to her everything about the murders, which she asked me about.’ The coroner then asked whether she had expressed fear of any particular individual. Joe does not appear to have fully understood the question and took it to mean was Mary Jane afraid of him. He replied, ‘No, Sir. Our own quarrels were very soon over.’

At the end of his evidence the coroner thanked him and congratulated him on having given his evidence very well indeed, which was probably recognition of the fact that Joe – who had a speech impediment – must have found the whole experience a considerable ordeal.

At that point Macdonald told the jury that he proposed that Dr. Phillips should come to court briefly that afternoon to state ‘roughly what the cause of death was’ in order that the body could be buried. He added that it would not be necessary for all the medical details to be given in court. It was clearly going to be a very different sort of inquest to the previous ones.

After that, John McCarthy, Thomas Bowyer, Mary Ann Cox, Elizabeth Prater and Sarah Lewis gave their evidence about the movements of Mary Jane on the evening before her death and the discovery of the body. A discordant note was struck when Caroline Maxwell, wife of another of the Dorset Street lodging house deputies, gave her evidence. She was cautioned by the coroner before doing so since, as he presumably already knew, her account of the last hours of Mary Jane differed markedly from all the others. She swore that she had seen and spoken to Mary Jane in the street outside Miller’s Court between 8am and 8.30am in the morning, three hours before Bowyer had peered through the broken window and seen the body on the bed. She gave a vivid account of a
severely hungover Mary Jane telling her that she had been to the Britannia on the corner of Dorset Street and Commercial Street for a glass of beer, before having brought it up again – Maxwell even adding that she had seen the vomit in the gutter. She hurried off to Bishopsgate to purchase her husband’s breakfast and when she returned about half an hour later Mary Jane was talking to a man outside the Britannia.

Although several later commentators have attempted to reconcile this sighting with the facts, even going as far as to suggest that the body on the bed was not that of Mary Jane but a substitute lured there as part of some undefined conspiracy, it seems that Caroline Maxwell must have been mistaken as to the identity of the woman she had seen. Both Dr. Bond and Dr. Phillips stated in their reports that Mary Jane’s stomach contained the partly digested remains of a meal of fish and potatoes and if she had consumed a glass of beer and then vomited, then that would have been brought up at the same time.

Dr. George Bagster Phillips was then called and gave the most perfunctory medical evidence of any of the five Ripper murders, no doubt relieved that he would not again have to go through the ordeal he had endured at the hands of Baxter at the inquest on Annie Chapman. Death, he said emphatically, was caused by severance of the right carotid artery whilst the deceased was lying towards the right side of the bed with her head in the top right-hand corner, after which she was moved towards the left side of the bed. No other injuries or mutilations were mentioned and the coroner allowed him leave. It is curious that Phillips was called at all since it was not him but Thomas Bond who had carried out both the
in situ
and mortuary post-mortem examinations. It was another small example of interference by the legislature in the affairs of the judiciary.

There was then a short adjournment and when the jury returned Macdonald addressed them again: ‘It has come to my ears that somebody has been making a statement to some of the jury as to their right and duty of being here. Has anyone during the interval spoken to the jury, saying that they should not be here to-day?’ On receiving a negative response he gave one last admonition: ‘Then I must have been misinformed. I should have taken good care that he would have had a quiet life for the rest of the week if anybody had interfered with my jury.’

The final witnesses included Julia Venturney, Mary Jane’s friend from across the passageway, who confirmed that she had last seen her alive at 10pm the previous evening and that she had not heard anything during the course of the night
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. She was followed by Mrs. Harvey who verified that she had been with Mary Jane when Joe Barnett had called at a 7.45pm. Then Inspector Beck and Inspector Abberline described the actions they had taken after arriving at Miller’s Court. Abberline gave an account of the fire set in the grate that had been fierce enough to melt the spout off the kettle and that it appeared to consist mainly of a large quantity of women’s clothing. When asked by the coroner why he thought it had been done, he replied that he presumed that it was to give more light for the murderer to work to.

Finally the coroner addressed the jury as to whether they felt that they had heard enough on which to base a verdict. He said that he personally did not think that anything more would be gained by hearing more medical evidence. Dr. Phillips had already given the cause of death as having been severance of the right carotid artery and in his view that was enough. Anything more should be placed in the hands of the police and, hopefully, left to another court to hear.

The jury did not demur and within a few minutes brought in a verdict of Murder by Person or Persons Unknown. Macdonald gave permission for the body to be released for burial and that was it; the shortest inquest of any of the Ripper victims was over in a matter of a few hours. Many people at the time and since have found it strange that the most complex, the most dramatic of all the crimes, the one that appeared to stand out from all the others, should have been treated in so cursory a way. The suspicion that Dr. Roderick Macdonald MP had colluded with the authorities has not diminished with the passage of time.