The Real Mary Kelly (25 page)

There has been considerable speculation over the ensuing years as to how the murderer gained access to Room 13. The door was clearly locked at the time the body was found and most people, including the police of the day, have assumed that Mary Jane unwittingly took her killer back to her room herself as a client. If Francis was the killer and Mary Jane was his wife Elizabeth, that would have been unthinkable, assuming that she recognised him. The evidence, including that of Mary Jane singing in the early hours of the morning, suggests that her last client, possibly the man with the blotchy face and the carroty moustache
that Mary Ann Cox had reported as having accompanied her back to her room at a 11.45pm, had left a short time later and that she had then decided to call it a day. She had announced her intention of going to the Lord Mayor’s Show the next morning and possibly she thought she would have what for her was an early night.

She was dressed in a shift with her day clothes neatly folded at the foot of the bed when her mangled corpse was found, adding to the likelihood that she had retired for the night. It seems more probable that her killer had managed to waken her and then gain admission by tricking his way in. Elizabeth would certainly not have let Francis in if she had realised that that was who it was. There is only one sort of person that Mary Jane is known to have had no hesitation in letting in to her room on raw cold nights such as that November evening. Another woman, especially an unfortunate.

When the police searched the room the next day they very carefully sifted through the remains of the fire that had burned so fiercely that it had melted the spout off the kettle. They were looking for human remains, particularly the missing heart. They reported that none had been identified but that a large quantity of woman’s clothing had been burnt, including a bonnet. Abberline assumed that the purpose had been to provide more light despite the fact that there was at least half a candle remaining unused.

If Francis had put a woman’s shawl and long skirt over his own clothes and shielded his face under a bonnet before tapping on Mary Jane’s window it would have been a woman’s silhouette that she saw outlined against the dim light from the Court. Already befuddled by sleep and drink she may briefly have slipped out of bed, opened the catch on the door and let the stranger in. From the blood stains on the wall and the bed itself, Bond concluded that Mary Jane had been lying on the far side of the bed when she was killed and that her body had then been moved to the side nearest to the door to give her dissector better access. If so, had she lain on the far side of the bed to make room for someone she had taken pity on to lie down next to her? It may have been that fatal kindly gesture that cost her her life.

There was another purpose to the fire. After the butchery was over, Francis is certain to have searched the room minutely. Elizabeth had received letters
whilst she was in Miller’s Court, possibly from Johnto or other members of her family, forwarded by Ellen Macleod. Such links with her former life would have been precious to her and are likely to have been kept to be read again when homesickness overtook her. There may have been photographs and other mementos of her past, possibly even a wedding ring engraved with their joint initials, although that is more likely to have been sold or pawned long since as it bore no sentimental value to her. Anything that Francis found that could possibly connect him to the mutilated remains lying on the bed or could identify her had to be destroyed along with his blood-soaked disguise
¹²⁹
.

The funeral of Elizabeth’s
alter ego
took place on the morning of Monday 19th November. Her body had been lying in the Shoreditch mortuary attached to St. Leonard’s church since her gruesome death. As it was impossible for Joe Barnett or any of her friends to defray the costs of a proper burial, Mr. Henry Wilton – who had been sexton of St. Leonard’s for more than 50 years – bore the cost of it himself as a gesture to the poor of East London.

In the time between the murder and her funeral the police in London, Wales and Ireland had been engaged in an enormous effort to identify the dead woman whose name few now believed to be Mary Jane Kelly. The case had received massive coverage in newspapers throughout Britain and around the world. With, by her account, two living parents, seven brothers and a sister – not to mention a cousin living in Cardiff who, according to Joe, had lured her into prostitution in the first place – it was inconceivable that, had her story been genuine, one of them would not have recognised her and come forward.

The major problem was that, unlike the other victims, it was not possible to publish a post-mortem photograph of her face since it had been mutilated beyond all recognition. Various periodicals attempted to show artists’
reconstructions of her but they were so far from reality as to be absurd. The
Penny Illustrated Paper
carried a supposed drawing of her outside her room in Miller’s Court which portrayed a statuesque blonde woman in middle age wearing a stylish full-length coat of the kind that certainly had not formed part of her wardrobe for at least three years and a hat, a garment that Mary Jane is known seldom to have worn. Despite her various nicknames – which included ‘Fair Emma’ and ‘Ginger’– it is almost certain that the woman who called herself Marie Jeanette Kelly had thick dark hair and this seems to be borne out by the picture taken by the police photographer, although it may have been so saturated with blood that it was difficult to tell.

The polished oak and elm coffin was carried out of the mortuary on the shoulders of four pall-bearers at 12.30pm whilst the bells of St. Leonard’s tolled a funeral knell. The same bells would have been familiar in name to the occupant of the coffin, through the words of the old nursery rhyme, ‘When I grow rich say the bells of Shoreditch’. Elizabeth had once briefly known prosperity, if not actual wealth, when she worked at Ellen Macleod’s establishment in the West End, but she was never to be rich and her life had been cut brutally short. Despite the circumstances it appears to have been a surprisingly cheerful and compassionate one and the people of the East End responded accordingly. By the time the coffin was placed in the glass-sided, horse-drawn hearse the street outside the church was packed with hundreds of people and the police were having a hard time keeping them back from the funeral procession.

The coffin bore a brass plate inscribed ‘Marie Jeanette Kelly. Died 9th November 1888 aged 25 years.’ Two wreathes of artificial flowers and one of heartsease or wild pansy, the nearest available relative of the violet that she had sung about on the night of her death that would have been available in November, were placed on the coffin and numerous other floral tributes were heaped alongside, many bearing cards from the public houses that she had frequented in life.

Joe Barnett and some of the other mourners who had been fortifying themselves for the coming ordeal in a nearby public house emerged and took their places in the two open carriages behind the hearse. Joe, John McCarthy and, probably, his wife occupied the leading one and four of Mary Jane’s women friends who had given evidence at the inquest, the other. The police struggled
to open a passage through the crowd in order that the cortege could move off
¹³⁰
. Men removed their hats and women threw flowers and shouted ‘God forgive her’, as, under a leaden sky, the carriages started the five-mile journey to Leytonstone Catholic cemetery. Although there was not the slightest evidence that she was Catholic, the authorities seem to have presumed that a girl who used the name Kelly and claimed to have been born in Limerick was likely to be of that faith.

The route was densely lined with spectators all the way to the cemetery although many of those following on foot had dropped back after the first mile or so. Nevertheless there was sufficiently large a crowd at the cemetery that the authorities decided to close and lock the gates after the carriages had pulled up outside the Chapel of St. Patrick. The cemetery and its surroundings have hardly changed in the years since the funeral. The chapel, which is only used for funerals, is austere and devoid of ornament inside and out. As the hearse drew up, Father Columban OSF came out of the building accompanied by a cross bearer and two acolytes and escorted the coffin and the small group of mourners to the freshly dug grave.

Most people have assumed that the OSF means that Father Columban was a Roman Catholic Franciscan priest, but he was not. The Order of St. Francis is an Anglican order of Franciscans, the Catholic equivalent being the Order of Friars Minor, so, although Mary Jane was buried in a consecrated Catholic cemetery, the funeral was actually conducted by an Anglican
¹³¹
.

When it was finished the mourners made their way back to the cemetery gates. A persistent story says that as they did so a man who had been standing some distance away stepped forward and either spat or urinated into the grave. There seems to be no substance in the report as it does not seem to have been mentioned in any newspaper account at the time and it may have been invented by children keen to cash in on the generous amounts of money that were being handed out by reporters anxious for good copy. Were it to be true it would be interesting to know if he was a middle-aged man wearing an Inverness coat and a billycock hat.

Once outside, Joe and some of the women made for the Birkbeck Tavern, a pub that still stands on the corner of Langthorne Road a few hundred yards
from the cemetery gates, in order to drown their sorrows while the remainder returned in the carriages to Whitechapel.

At this stage of course no-one could know that the terror was finally over. Only 12 weeks had elapsed since Polly Nichols’s body had been discovered in Bucks Row but to many, especially perhaps the senior policemen and the unfortunates of Whitechapel, it must have seemed a lifetime. To the general public the last horrific murder in Miller’s Court seemed to herald a new and even more terrible phase in the killings, and the trickle of letters from would-be Rippers, some motivated by a perverted sense of humour, others by genuinely troubled minds, increased to a deluge. No more however were sent by the scribe who had sent the two letters and a postcard to Central News – or not, at least, for another eight years.

Over the next days, as the police continued investigations that looked increasingly desperate and equally futile, the efforts to identify Mary Jane were stepped up. To many of the senior officers working on the crimes, the Miller’s Court murder looked different. The degree of savagery alone marked it out from the others. If they could only find out the true identity of the victim it might lead them to the killer. As perhaps the most likely suspect they took Joe Barnett in for questioning, but he had been at his new lodgings – 24 and 25 New Street, Bishopsgate, another doss house – and the deputy was able to confirm that he was there at the time of the murder.

Joe was only one of many men arrested in the days following Mary Jane’s death. They included a man, apparently French, with a pointed moustache, who was found to be carrying a pocket medical case containing bottles of chloroform; a man called Compton who had already been arrested once in Shadwell for wandering around in a blood-stained coat and shirt; and a man with a blacked-up face who proclaimed himself in a loud voice to be Jack the Ripper as he walked the streets of Whitechapel. When the police discovered that he was a young doctor from St. George’s Hospital he was released with a warning. It seems that any number of young men were quite prepared to run the very real risk of being lynched for the thrill of a few minutes of notoriety.

Another suspect was introduced into the confused picture when, belatedly, on 12th November – after Mary Jane’s inquest had closed – George Hutchinson presented himself at Commercial Street police station with
another, apparent, sighting. He gave a highly detailed account of Mary Jane, who he knew, having approached him in Commercial Street in the company of another man at 2am on the morning of her murder. She wanted to borrow six pence, which he was unable to lend her. For some reason George decided to follow the couple as they turned into Dorset Street and headed for Miller’s Court. He said that the man had scowled at him and turned his head away as if not wishing to be recognised. Hutchinson decided to keep watch from across the street. He would have had a perfect view of the door to her room which opened off the right side of the short alleyway and he stayed there for at least an hour, according to his account, but the man did not emerge.

He gave a vivid description of the man, so vivid indeed that many people at the time and since believed that it owed more to George’s imagination and desire for reward than it did to reality. He described him as being about 34 or 35 years of age, dark and of ‘Jewish appearance’ with a black moustache curled at the ends and wearing a full-length dark overcoat trimmed with astrakhan fur. His shoes were partly covered by grey spats with white buttons. He wore a black Homburg type hat, white collar and black silk tie held in place with a gold horseshoe pin, and across the front of his waistcoat he wore a ‘huge’ gold watch chain from which hung a gold seal fob with a red stone. It was an amazingly detailed description of the sort of man rarely seen in Dorset Street but which closely matched the public and police image of the killer. The newspapers were full of artists’ reconstructions of the man over the next few days and a more villainous-looking character it would be hard to imagine. Just to complete a portrait that would exactly fit the public perception of the Ripper he was, according to George, carrying an elongated parcel bound up in American cloth and carried from a small strap.

It was just too perfect and most people now believe that Hutchinson was yet another publicity seeker trying to take advantage of the large sums being offered by the reporters for good, lurid copy. If not, why had he not come forward at the time of the murder rather than waiting until after the inquest was closed? Hutchinson, or a man answering his description, was spotted hanging around across the street from the entrance to Miller’s Court at about the right time but leaning against lamp posts was a favoured occupation for penniless men in the
East End and maybe it gave him time to dream up a perfect picture of the Ripper.