Jack the Ripper

Montague Druitt

2006-05-07T10:34:34+02:00

Montague John Druitt was born in 1857 in Dorset, the son of a surgeon. Druitt graduated with a degree in classics and went to teach at a boarding school in Blackheath. He was very oriented towards sports and played hockey and cricket. In his spare time he studied law and became a lawyer.

In 1885 his father died and a couple of years afterwards his mother was institutionalized for depression and paranoid delusions. His family had a very pronounced history of depression and suicide.

Despite the tragedies in his life and a genetic propensity towards depression, Druitt prospered financially and socially in the 1880s. He was very secure financially and had inherited money from both parents. He had a very good teaching position and had become very active in many sports. The social circles in which he moved were very respectable.

However, all was not as well as it seemed because his body was found floating in the Thames River at the end of December 1888, where it had been immersed for weeks. He had been dismissed from his teaching position, probably around the end of November. He left a suicide note, which was found by his brother: "Since Friday I felt I was going to be like mother, and the best thing for me was to die."

There does not seem to be any real evidence as to why Macnaghten considered him a serious suspect. The only suggestion is that cryptic message of Macnaghten's: "from private information I have little doubt but that his own family believed him to have been the murderer." Macnaghten claimed he had destroyed all of the relevant documents, so the answer may never be known. Thus far, no one has been able to come up with any credible evidence to suggest that Druitt was even a violent person or "sexually insane," as Macnaghten stated, let alone Jack the Ripper. Chief Inspector Abberline who was the most knowledgeable person in the police department about the Ripper murders did not consider Druitt a suspect.

Philip Sugden compares Druitt to the eyewitness accounts of the Ripper. While Druitt is within right age category and wore a moustache, his build is too slight to have been described by any of the eyewitnesses. The person they saw was anywhere from medium build to stout. Also, Druitt hardly looked foreign or Jewish. He did not live nor frequent the East End and there was no train service between his lodging in Blackheath and London that would allow him to commit the murders and return home. Plus in the death of Annie Chapman at 5:30 a.m., it would have been very unlikely that Druitt could have murdered her, cleaned himself up and caught a train back to Blackheath in time for a cricket game he played at 11:30 a.m.

In summary, Macnaghten was no fool and he certainly had access to all Ripper suspect records, many of which no longer exist. So, there may have been some important evidence about Druitt to support his suspicion. However, without that evidence, it is difficult to see why Druitt is a suspect. One can explain his suicide at the end of November as the tragic end of a losing fight with hereditary depression. With so many people in his family afflicted with mental illness, he may have recognized the symptoms in himself and committed suicide.

The Maybrick Diaries

2006-02-28T22:53:12+01:00

In 1992, Ripperologists were provided a rare opportunity to sharpen their teeth. Michael Barrett, a scrap metal dealer from Liverpool, came forward with a diary reputedly written by a cotton broker named James Maybrick who died in 1889. In this diary, James Maybrick confesses to being Jack the Ripper.

Barrett says that his friend Tony Devereux gave him the diary, but Devereux never explained how it had gotten into his hands. Devereux was dead and his family had no knowledge of the diary at all.

For over 100 years, scholars wondered why the Ripper murders had begun suddenly in August of 1888 with the murder of Polly Nichols and then stopped just as abruptly in November of that same year with the murder of Mary Kelly. The Maybrick diary, if it was authentic, provided the answer.

If James Maybrick were Jack the Ripper, his death in 1889 would explain why the murders ended when they did.

James Maybrick was a cotton merchant who began his business in London in the early 1870's. He traveled to the United States to open an office in Virginia and returned several years later. He had contracted malaria in the U.S. and was taking a combination of arsenic and strychnine to keep it under control. The medication was addictive and he continued to take arsenic until his death.

Maybrick brought home with him a beautiful, wealthy and socially prominent wife. 18-year-old Florence Chandler (Florie) was less than half Maybrick's age, but they fell in love immediately and married soon afterwards.

The 1880's brought bad luck to the business and marriage of the Maybricks. Poor economic conditions in the U.S. and England hurt them financially at a time when they overextended themselves. In 1888, James and Florie and their two children moved into a huge mansion outside Liverpool. James Maybrick escaped his financial worries with increasing amounts of drugs, arsenic included, plus another woman. When Florie found that despite their financial straits, that her husband was supporting a mistress and his illegitimate children, she gave up on him. She took up with a younger man.

In April of 1889, Florie bought some fly papers and soaked them to get out the arsenic to prepare a cream for her face, which had broken out just before some big social event. At the same time, James Maybrick, who was continuing to take his arsenic powders, became sick and died May 11, 1889.

Florie was charged with murdering her husband with arsenic. After a very hasty and unfair trial, she was convicted and sentenced to death by hanging. The judge had not allowed any evidence of James Maybrick's long arsenic addiction to be introduced into the trial. She spent 15 years in jail before she was finally released. The judge in her trial was the father of J.K. Stephen, the tutor of Prince Albert Victor (Eddy), and who was a Ripper suspect. The judge died a few years later in a hospital for the insane.

While Maybrick was never a suspect during his life, his alleged diary focused an enormous amount of scrutiny on him after 1992. Many experts analyzed both the diary and the life of James Maybrick. The actual volume in which the diary was written was from the Victorian times, but such volumes are available in antique shops. Quite a few pages at the beginning of the volume had been removed, suggesting that it might have been partially used for some other purpose before it became the Maybrick diary. Several experts claimed the ink was modern.

Ripper expert Martin Fido found many anachronisms in the text and Scotland Yard determined that the handwriting had been altered to add Victorian flourishes. More problematic is that there were inaccuracies in the accounts of the murders that seem to have been taken from newspaper accounts. For example, Philip Sugden says of the murder of Mary Kelly,

We are told that the various parts of her body were strewn 'all over the room,' that her severed breasts were placed on the bedside table and that the killer took the key of the room away with him. None of these statements are true.

John Douglas and Mark Olshaker reject James Maybrick as a Ripper candidate based on his personality and history:

Even more to the point, how does a fifty-year-old man with a family, children, and no sociopathy suddenly blossom into a disorganized serial killer? He can't, and doesn't. Anyone who thinks his situation through enough to decide that he wants to kill prostitutes to get back at his wife but must do so on trips to another city, where he'll hide out, stalk women of the night, rip them up, and then return to his own world and home, would not exactly be disorganized. No one plans that carefully, then goes into such a frenzy of sexual pathology.

Finally, in 1995, a number of experts who labeled the Maybrick diary a brazen hoax are backed up by Michael Barrett's confession: "I, Michael Barratt (sic) was the author of the original diary of 'Jack the Ripper' and my wife, Anne Barrett, hand wrote it from my typed notes" Even so, the Maybrick diary is still a subject of controversy, despite the evidence that it was a forgery.

From Hell: Royal Conspiracy, Concludes

2006-01-25T18:46:46+01:00

One variation of the theory has Dr. Gull, whose intellect has been impaired by a stroke, becoming a kind of Masonic ritual executioner. Not only does Gull go to great lengths to create the belief that a sex-crazed doctor has perpetrated the series of murders, he also weaves into that creation some obscure ancient Masonic lore. Gull's Masonic group, which is the virtual Who's Who of the London upper class, includes top police officials like Sir Robert Anderson who help Gull in his efforts to protect the throne.

Everybody loves a conspiracy theory and no doubt this one will endure for a long time despite the fact that there is no evidence to support it and quite a lot of reason to doubt that there is any truth to it at all.

There did exist a woman named Annie Crook who worked in a shop in Cleveland Street and she had an illegitimate daughter named Alice Margaret.

But there is nothing to connect her to a relationship with Eddy, whose sexual preferences were rumored to be men rather than women. Homosexuality was against the law in Victorian England and a man of Eddy's social standing would have to be very discreet if he were homosexually inclined.

Cleveland Street was the home of a brothel that catered to wealthy homosexuals. The brothel was raided, giving rise to strong rumors that Eddy was one of the patrons there, but there is no existing evidence of his presence there at the time of the raid.

Also, there is nothing to connect Annie Crook to Mary Kelly or to connect Mary Kelly to any of the other victims of Jack the Ripper. There is no evidence to suggest that they even knew each other at all and it is most unlikely that they were a tightly knit group of friends or it would have been discovered in the interviews that police had with the families and friends of each victim.

The victims of Jack the Ripper were murdered where they were found, not in a coach or at some other location. Also, from witnesses in the crime scene areas, it is very unlikely that more than one man carried out the crimes.

Regarding Dr. Gull's ability to be Jack the Ripper, Donald Rumbelow in The Complete Jack the Ripper points out:

"Medically the slight stroke that Gull had in 1887 was the first attack of severe paralysis. Although he recovered from it, its effects were serious enough to prohibit him from further medical practice. Taken with the fact that he was 70 years old at this time, this is surely enough to cast doubts on the story of his roaming about WhitechapelFinally, Gull did not die in a lunatic asylum. He died at home on 29 January 1890, after a third stroke which left him speechless."

Also, there is nothing to suggest that the Ripper murders had anything whatsoever to do with the Masons. Nor is it known whether Dr. Gull, Sir Robert Anderson or any of the other high level police officials involved in the Ripper murders were even members of the Freemasons.

Would the Crown have resorted to the flamboyant murder of five unfortunate women in order to protect itself? Donald Rumbelow explains the Royal Marriages Act, which was designed by George III to prevent his sons from marrying against his wishes:

"Under this Act, any such marriage as that between Eddy and Annie could have been set aside as illegal, since (1) Eddy was under 25 years old at the time of the marriage; and (2) he had married without the Queen's consent."

Finally, as John Douglas and Mark Olshaker state in The Cases That Haunt Us, the frenzied butchery of the Ripper murders is the "work of a disorganized, paranoid offender," not a person who "could continue functioning and interacting with people in a relatively normal way. Dr. Gull simply does not fit this profile.

There are a number of variants to the Royal Conspiracy Theory. One has Eddy being Jack the Ripper. Suffering from tertiary syphilis, he goes into murderous rages and haunts the streets of Whitechapel in search of victims. That is, until his keepers catch on to this and lock him up until his death from syphilis.

There is no supporting evidence for this variation either. Royal records show Eddy as a victim of the influenza epidemic of 1892. Also, several years after the Ripper murders in 1891, Eddy was named the Duke of Clarence, not a title that would have been bestowed on a person that was violently insane from tertiary syphilis. While Eddy did not possess a brilliant mind, he was always considered a nice person and was not in any way inclined to violence.

While there were rumors about Eddy's sexual proclivities during his lifetime, there was never any indication that police or anyone else at that time thought of him as a suspect in the Ripper murders. Indeed, Eddy had pretty unshakeable alibis for all of the murders, often being far from London when they occurred.

Another variant on the Royal Conspiracy Theory was that Eddy's tutor at Cambridge, James Kenneth Stephen, was Jack the Ripper: after Eddy ended a homosexual relationship with his tutor, Stephen committed the murders for revenge.

While it was true that Stephen was Eddy's tutor, there is no evidence of a homosexual relationship between them. A few years after Eddy left Cambridge, Stephen's brain was seriously damaged in an accident and he eventually died in an asylum. The emotional and mental problems that plagued Stephen after his accident gave rise to some violent phrases in his poetry, but that certainly doesn't add up to being a serial killer. Like the other variations of the Royal Conspiracy Theory, this one has no evidence to support it either.

Variants of the Royal Conspiracy will continue to prosper because they lend themselves to movies and books. They are dramatic stories that explain Jack the Ripper in motives that we can all understand unlike the frenzied evil that drives a brutal serial killer.

From Hell: Royal Conspiracy

2006-01-14T09:08:22+01:00

The theory that a royal conspiracy was behind the murders is a very popular one. Not only is it the premise of the 2001 movie From Hell with Johnny Depp and Heather Graham, it has spawned made-for-TV movies and documentaries and books.

This most appealing theory unfolds like this: Prince Albert Victor, known popularly as Eddy, was the grandson of Queen Victoria and in direct line to the throne of England. His father later became King Edward VII. Had Eddy outlived his father, he would have become King of England.

Eddy frequently went slumming in the Whitechapel area. He met and had an affair with a shop girl named Annie Crook who he kept in an apartment there. Annie became pregnant with his child and, according to one version of the story, married Eddy secretly in a Roman Catholic wedding. Other versions have the child being born out of wedlock.

Marrying or impregnating a Catholic girl of low social standing was a definite no-no for a future king and wind of this scandal got back to grandma, who insisted on a resolution to the problem. The prime minister delegated this task to Queen Victoria's physician, Sir William Gull.

Dr. Gull had Annie taken away to a hospital where he savaged her memory and intellect, leaving her institutionalized for the rest of her life. Mary Kelly was caring for Annie's royal daughter, named Alice Margaret, when Annie was kidnapped. Mary Kelly, along with her friends, Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, and Elizabeth Stride, all knew about the relationship between Annie Crook and the prince as well as their infant daughter. But they couldn't keep their mouths shut and thus became a major liability to the Crown.

Again Dr. Gull was asked for his help, this time in permanently silencing Mary Kelly and her friends. To explain the sudden demise of these troublesome whores, Dr. Gull cleverly created the persona of Jack the Ripper, a frenzied lust murderer with some degree of medical expertise.

Gull's trusty coachman locates each of the friends of Mary Kelly and persuades them individually to get into the coach. Dr. Gull then murders each woman, mutilates her in increasingly savage ways and leaves her dead on the street. Mary and her dwindling group of friends believe that a vicious gang that has threatened them in the past is responsible for the murders. Dr. Gull saves Mary for last and subjects her to ghoulish butchery.

Major Suspects, concludes

2006-01-02T10:17:27+01:00

Sir Melville Macnaghten succeeded Sir Charles Warren as the Chief Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police in June of 1889 after the Ripper murders had officially ended. However, the investigation was ongoing and Macnaghten had complete access to police files. His final report addresses his thoughts on why the murders came to an end with the monstrous destruction of Mary Kelly and the identity of the three key suspects he believed could be Jack the Ripper:

A much more rational theory is that the murderer's brain gave way altogether after his awful glut in Miller's Court, and that he immediately committed suicide, or, as a possible alternative, was found to be so hopelessly mad by his relations, that he was by them confined in some asylum.

No one ever saw the Whitechapel murderer: many homicidal maniacs were suspected, but no shadow of proof could be thrown on any one. I may mention the cases of 3 men, any one of whom would have been...(likely) to have committed this series of murders:

(1) A Mr. M. J. Druitt, said to be a doctor & of good family, who disappeared at the time of the Miller's Court murder, & whose body was found in the Thames on 31st December -- or about seven weeks after that murder. He was sexually insane and from private information I have little doubt but that his own family believed him to have been the murderer.

(2) Kosminski, a Polish Jew, & resident in Whitechapel. This man became insane owing to many years' indulgence in solitary vices. He had a great hatred of women, specially of the prostitute class, & had strong homicidal tendencies; he was removed to a lunatic asylum about March 1889. There were many circumstances connected with this man which made him a strong 'suspect.'

(3) Michael Ostrog, a Russian doctor, and a convict, who was subsequently detained in a lunatic asylum as a homicidal maniac. This man's antecedents were of the worst possible type, and his whereabouts at the time of the murders could never be ascertained.

Each one of these three major suspects that Macnaghten identified is addressed in subsequent chapters, as are several other major theories. A few of the many suspects held up by authors over the years is addressed in the chapter entitled "Other Suspects."

The most important detective in the murder series was Chief Inspector Frederick George Abberline. He did not agree with Sir Melville Macnaghten on the viability of the three suspects listed above. In 1903, he said: "You can state most emphatically that Scotland Yard is really no wiser on the subject than it was fifteen years ago."

However, Chief Inspector Abberline did eventually have a favorite suspect of his own, one George Chapman, who was hanged in 1903 for poisoning his wife.

Major Suspects

2005-12-29T09:30:00+01:00

Before looking at specific suspects, let's summarize what is known about Jack the Ripper from forensic surgeons and possible eyewitnesses.

From the testimony of the various eyewitnesses which police took most seriously, certain probabilities emerge about the killer. One must keep in mind the word probable since eyewitness accounts, particularly under conditions of dim lighting, are notoriously inaccurate in certain details even when offered by honest competent eyewitnesses.

The following is a list of probabilities about the Ripper:

A white male
Average or below average height
Between 20 and 40 years of age in 1888
Did not dress as laborer or indigent poor
Had lodgings in the East End
Did have medical expertise, despite 1-2 opinions to contrary
May have been foreigner
Right-handed
Had a regular job since the murders all occurred on weekends
Was single so that he could roam streets at all hours

Developing persuasive cases about Jack the Ripper suspects has become a profitable cottage industry for at least one hundred years. Many of these books promote one suspect or another as the "real Jack the Ripper." Usually the author conveniently compiles "evidence" that fits his pet theory and denigrates or ignores facts that don't support that theory. Given the vast number of suspects and books promoting particular suspects, a reader must be very skeptical of any new "final solutions" to the crimes.

Despite the thousands of hours of work on this case, there is not yet one suspect for which a strong unimpeachable case can be made. One remains hopeful that someday a suspect will emerge with better credentials than the ones currently promoted.

With those caveats in mind, certain suspects have garnered more interest than others and will be listed in this chapter. A few major suspects will be dealt with briefly in subsequent chapters.

Panic, concludes

2005-12-28T10:19:48+01:00

Several people had seen Mary on the night she died. Mary Ann Cox, another prostitute who lived in Miller's Court, saw Mary with a man going into Miller's Court at 11:45 p.m. Mary was very drunk and had difficulty talking. Mrs. Cox described Mary's client as "about 36 years old, about 5 ft 6 in. high, complexion fresh and I believe he had blotches on his face, small side whiskers, and a thick carrotty moustache, dressed in shabby dark clothes, dark overcoat and black felt hat.

At 8 p.m. on Wednesday, November 7, laundress Sarah Lewis was walking with a girlfriend when a man about forty years of age who was fairly short, pale-faced with a black moustache wanted either one of the two women to follow him. He wore a short black coat and carried a black bag about one foot long. They refused, but he persisted, and the women ran away. At 2:30 a.m. Friday morning, just around the time that Mary Kelly was murdered, Sarah was coming to stay with friends at 2 Miller's Court when she saw the same man, but eluded him this time. Shaken by this second sighting, she rushed to her friend's house. Just before 4 a.m. she heard a woman shriek "Murder!" Another woman also heard the scream, but shrieks like that were apparently common in bawdy Whitechapel.

Inspector Abberline clearly believed Hutchinson's detailed account, but had to wonder about Hutchinson's motivation for following Mary and her client. He said he had known her for several years and had given her money more than once. Perhaps he was fond of Mary or just worried about her with this particular client. There had to be some reason that he would take such an interest and even follow the two of them to Miller's Court. Abberline instructed a couple of policemen to walk around with Hutchinson in the hopes that they would spot Mary's client. One cannot help wondering if Hutchinson did not make up this story to throw suspicion off of himself. However, for some reason the police did not pursue him as a suspect and disseminated the description that he gave to all of the police stations.

As winter set in, the frantic police activity began to slow. All suspects had been interrogated and leads came to a dead end. It appeared that Jack the Ripper had left the scene for good. However, there were two murders that were similar in nature that should be mentioned.

The first was Alice McKenzie who was found dead in July of 1889. She too had died from the slashing of her carotid artery. If this was another victim of Jack the Ripper, the wounds to her throat and abdomen were different than the other murders. Drs. Bond and Phillips disagreed as to whether it was Jack or not.

In February of 1891, a pretty prostitute named Frances Coles was found with her throat cut. Dr. Phillips did not believe that Jack the Ripper was responsible and suspicion fell upon a man who had a quarrel with her.

At any rate, the Jack the Ripper file was closed in 1892, the same year in which Inspector Abberline retired. The Ripper murders were over, but the legend lived on.

Panic

2005-12-10T17:36:48+01:00

The murder of Mary Kelly created panic in the streets of Whitechapel, which were again abandoned at night to the police patrols. Sporadic episodes of mob violence broke out when for various reasons, an individual cast suspicion on himself by something he did or said, usually under the influence of alcohol.

Police activity was frantic. Every lead was tracked down, every suspect interrogated thoroughly. The results were disappointing and the police were heavily criticized. Queen Victoria was furious. "This new most ghastly murder," she told the Prime Minister, "shows the absolute necessity for some very decided action. All these courts must be lit, and our detectives improved. They are not what they should be."

The Times was a bit more understanding of the difficulties the police faced: "The murders, so cunningly continued, are carried out with a completeness which altogether baffles investigators. Not a trace is left of the murderer, and there is no purpose in the crime to afford the slightest clue...All that the police can hope is that some accidental circumstance will lead to a trace which may be followed to a successful conclusion."

There was disagreement on the estimated time of Mary's death. Dr. Bond believed that she had died between 1 and 2 a.m. Friday morning. Dr. Phillips thought that death occurred much later, somewhere between 5 and 6 a.m. Not having a clearer idea about time of death complicated the eyewitness testimony regarding who was with Mary or seen in Miller Court during Friday morning.

The most important eyewitness
was George Hutchinson, a laborer who knew Mary Kelly. He met her about 2 a.m. Friday morning and she asked him for some money. He told her he had nothing to spare and she walked away, but soon stopped to talk to another man. If his testimony is correct, he probably saw Jack the Ripper:

He then placed his right hand around her shoulders. He also had a kind of a small parcel in his left hand with a kind of strap round it. I stood against the lamp of the Queen's Head Public House and watched him. They both then came past me and the man hung down his head with his hat over his eyes. I stooped down and looked him in the face. He looked at me stern. They both went into Dorset Street. I followed them. They both stood at the corner of the court for about 3 minutes. He said something to her. She said alright my dear come along you will be comfortable. He then placed his arm on her shoulder and gave her a kiss. She said she had lost her handkerchief. He then pulled his handkerchief a red one out and gave it to her. They both then went up the court together. I then went to the court to see if I could see them but could not. I stood there for about three quarters of an hour to see if they came out. They did not so I went away.

Description: age about 34 or 35, height 5 ft. 6, complexion pale, dark eyes and eye lashes, slight moustache curled up each end and hair dark, very surly looking; dress, long dark coat, collar and cuffs trimmed astrakhan and a dark jacket under, light waistcoat, dark trousers, dark felt hat turned down in the middle, button boots and gaiters with white buttons, black tie with horse shoe pin, respectable appearance, walked very sharp, Jewish appearance. Can be identified.

He further elaborated on this description later:

His watch chain had a big seal, with a red stone, hanging from it...He had no side whiskers, and his chin was clean shaven...I believe that he lives in the neighborhood, and I fancied that I saw him in Petticoat Lane on Sunday morning, but I was not certain.

Mary Kelly, concludes

2005-12-02T11:01:35+01:00

John McCarthy sent his assistant Thomas Bowyer to see if he could collect any rent from Mary that Friday morning. When his knock went unanswered, he reached inside the broken window and pulled aside the curtain. He wasn't quite sure what he saw, but it caused him to run back to McCarthy. When McCarthy looked through the window, he was so horrified that he sent Bowyer for a constable.

The constable was talking with police officer Walter Dew and they went immediately to 13 Miller Court. They did not force the door, but pushed away a coat that served as a curtain over the broken window. The constable told Dew not to look inside, but he did anyway. "When my eyes had become accustomed to the dim light I saw a sight which I shall never forget to my dying day."

Soon Dr. George Bagster Phillips, the police surgeon, and Inspector Abberline were there. They opened the door to a small, cluttered room with almost no furniture. Mary's body, unbelievably mutilated, lay sprawled on the bed. The cause of death was the severance of the carotid artery in the throat. The horrendous mutilation of this last and most hideous Ripper murder was done after her death.

Dr. Thomas Bond, another veteran police surgeon, had been brought into the case specifically to determine the extent of medical knowledge the killer had. Dr. Phillips' examination report did not survive, but Dr. Bond's did:

The body was lying naked in the middle of the bed, the shoulders flat, but the axis of the body inclined to the left side of the bed...The whole of the surface of the abdomen & thighs was removed & the abdominal cavity emptied of its viscera. The breasts were cut off, the arms mutilated by several jagged wounds & the face hacked beyond recognition of the features & the tissues of the neck were severed all round down to the bone. The viscera were found in various parts: the uterus & kidney with one breast under the head, the other breast by the right foot, the liver between the feet, the intestines by the right side & the spleen by the left side. The flaps removed from the abdomen & thighs were on a table.

The ferocity of this murder astounded the veteran police surgeons. Her throat had been slashed with such force that the tissues had been cut all the way down to the spinal column. Dr. Bond went on to describe the ghastly destruction of her body:

Her face was gashed in all directions, the nose, cheeks, eyebrows & ears being partly removed. The lips were blanched & cut by several incisions running obliquely down to the chin. There were also numerous cuts extending irregularly across all of the features.

The skin & tissues of the abdomen from the costal arch to the pubes were removed in three large flaps. The right thigh was denuded in front to the bone, the flap of skin including the external organs of generation & part of the right buttock. The left thigh was stripped of skin, fascia & muscles as far as the knee.

Dr. Bond went on in his report for several paragraphs cataloging the wounds and stripping of the skin. As they tried to reconstruct her torn body, they realized that the heart had been cut out and taken away.

There seemed to be agreement that the same monster that killed the other four women murdered Mary Kelly. All of the women were murdered with "a very sharp, strong knife about an inch in width and at least six inches long."

Dr. Bond fixed the time of the murder as between one or two o'clock in the morning. However, given the length of time between her death and the time she was examined by Dr. Phillips, the time of death was approximate.

On the question that Dr. Bond was asked to address -- the medical skill of Jack the Ripper - he replied: "In each case the mutilation was inflicted by a person who had no scientific nor anatomical knowledge. In my opinion he does not even possess the technical knowledge of a butcher or horse slaughterer or any person accustomed to cut up dead animals." It is possible that Dr. Bond could not imagine that a doctor would be capable of such atrocities, because his position is very different than other physicians who examined the victims.

Mary Kelly, part2

2005-11-22T15:27:11+01:00

Things were starting to get back to normal in Whitechapel. There had been no murder for a month and the streetwalkers again began to ply their trade in force. One such woman was a good-looking young Irish girl by the name of Mary Kelly. Police officer Walter Dew knew her by sight. "She was usually in the company of two or three of her kind, fairly neatly dressed and invariably wearing a clean white apron, but no hat."

Mary had a lot on her mind at the beginning of November. She was several weeks behind in her rent and her lover, Joe Barnett, was unemployed. She rented a first floor room in Miller's Court in the back of Dorset Street.

She was born in Limerick and had lived in Wales. When she was 21 years old, she came to London and worked in a brothel. One of her clients was sufficiently taken by her to have her accompany him to France, but the relationship did not work out and she returned a couple of weeks later. Being an attractive woman, her various lovers supported her so that she did not have to live solely by prostitution.

In 1887 she met Joe Barnett, a respectable market porter, and lived with him at various locations. Every once and awhile, they would drink up the rent money and get evicted. Finally they ended up at 13 Miller's Court. Mary did not have many relationships and the one she had with Joe was a solid one. They lived together until they had an argument and he moved out. Since he did not have any work, she had been forced to return to prostitution to survive.

The cause of the argument was Mary's generosity in allowing a homeless prostitute to stay with them at Miller's Court and Mary's returning to prostitution to earn money. But this was more of a lover's spat than a break-up because they got together Thursday night, November 8, and he apologized for not having any money to give her.

People described her as "tall and pretty, and as fair as a lily, a very pleasant girl who seemed to be on good terms with everybody." One of her acquaintances said she was abusive when drunk, but "one of the most decent and nicest girls you could meet when she was sober." Another acquaintance said Mary was "5 feet 7 inches in height, and of rather stout build, with blue eyes and a very fine head of hair, which reached nearly to her waist."

Friday, November 9, 1888 was the day for the Lord Mayor's Show. This was a major festive event in the city. On that day he would be sworn into office in a style befitting a prince. Like many Londoners, Mary was planning on seeing this spectacle.