Jack the Ripper: The Secret Police Files

by Marriott, Trevor

  In support of my theory it should also be noted that the bodies of Chapman and Eddowes were taken to two different mortuaries. If it is suggested that the killer removed the organs one must ask why after removing the uterus from Chapman did he want another from Eddowes. As my investigation unfolded, it will be seen from later medical evidence that both of the victim’s uteri were removed in two different ways, suggesting that two different persons removed those organs neither being responsible for the murders.

  The Mary Kelly murder is one of the more intriguing murders in this series simply because of the questions which remain unanswered to this day. Was Mary Kelly killed by the same hand as the other Whitechapel victims? There are some facts which would suggest she was:

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  She was a prostitute, as were the other victims.

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  She was murdered in Whitechapel, as were the other victims.

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  Her body was subjected to savage mutilations, as were the other victims.

  However the facts against her being killed by the same killer are:

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  She was murdered inside; all the others were murdered outside.

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  No anatomical knowledge was displayed by the killer in cutting out her organs and none removed from crime scene. (This as stated supports my theory in relation to the removal of organs from Eddowes and Chapman.)

  In fact my good friend and Ripper expert Stewart Evans reminded me that even the detectives who worked on the Kelly murder had their doubts as to whether or not she was a Ripper victim. This information originally came from Bernard Davis whose grandfather was a police officer attached to Whitechapel Division during the murders. Some of the detectives told him that they didn't think that the Kelly murder was the work of the Ripper. However, this is not recorded anywhere but is verbal information given to Bernard by his grandfather.

  So if Mary Kelly was not a victim of Jack the Ripper then who murdered her and what was the reason for making it appear she was a murdered by the Ripper? Was it a crime of passion committed by her estranged partner Joseph Barnett? However, this idea lacks a real motive. Although they had been separated for some time, Barnett was obviously still fond of her as he visited her once a week and on those occasions gave her money. There is no record of any ill feeling or bad blood between them either from what he told police or what police was able to gather from witnesses who knew them. So is there a more sinister theory surrounding her murder?

  There has always been a question mark hanging over Mary Kelly and her true identity, where she came from, and what she had been doing prior to her arriving in Whitechapel. She was also known as Marie Jeanette Kelly, and Mary Ann Kelly. It was not uncommon for prostitutes to use several different names. Catherine Eddowes used the aliases of Mary Kelly and Kate Kelly. Polly Nichols’ real name was Mary Ann Nichols. Annie Chapman used Annie Siffey or Sievey. Elizabeth Stride was also known as Long Liz, Martha Tabram used the name Emma Turner, Alice McKenzie used Emma Bryant and Frances Coles used the names of Frances Hawkins and Frances Coleman.

  All of what is documented about Kelly came from what she had told Joseph Barnett during their relationship between 1886 and 1888. She told him she was born in Limerick, Ireland. She stated that at a very young age she moved with her family to Wales.

  Her father was John Kelly who worked apparently in a steelworks in Caernarfonshire. She claimed to have 6 or 7 brothers and one sister. She says that one brother, Henry, whose nickname is Johnto was a soldier in the 2nd Battalion Scots Guards stationed in Dublin, Ireland.

  At the age of 16 she apparently married a collier named Davies. He was supposedly killed in a mining explosion several years later. Kelly moved to Cardiff and lived with a cousin and started work as a prostitute. She had stated she became very ill and spent the best part of the time in an infirmary.

  She then came to London in 1884 taking up work as a charwoman. Barnett stated that there came a point in time when she told him that she went to work in a high-class brothel in the West End. She says that during this time she frequently rode in a carriage and accompanied one gentleman to Paris, which she didn't like and she returned. On returning she turned to drink and prostitution before meeting Barnett in 1886.

  John McCarthy, landlord at Miller's Court, told police that she received a letter from her mother in Ireland and also her brother. However, there are conflicting issues with Barnett who says that she never corresponded with her family. In another report he is stated as saying she did correspond with her brother who was in the army. Despite all of this, not one family member attended her funeral or ever acknowledged her existence.

  Many of the aforementioned facts surrounding Mary Kelly and her early life are impossible to prove or disprove. However, enquiries show that there is no record of a Henry Kelly serving in the Scots Guards during the 19th century. But there was a John Kelly who could have had the nickname, "Johnto" - in that regiment during the 1880s. He is shown as joining the regiment in 1876 and records show that he was discharged in Dublin in 1883. His next of kin was his brother Richard, who was in the Dublin Metropolitan Police from 1882 until 1909.

  Mary Kelly told Barnett that the Scots Guards were serving in Ireland in 1888, but records show that both the regiment's battalions were in England during that year.

  So was there a darker and sinister side to Mary Kelly and her early life? In the light of the lack of corroboration to what is currently known questions must be asked. One question revolves around two separate newspaper articles, which stated that later the same day that the body was discovered, Miller’s Court was visited by a number of prominent people including two Royal Irish Constabulary officers. Was it just morbid curiosity by the officers or was there another reason, and if so what was that reason?

  There has always been a theory, which some researchers have advanced for many years. They suggest that Irish terrorist group the Fenians, who in addition to causing major disruptions in London by bombing buildings in 1888, were also behind some or all of the Whitechapel murders, in an attempt to force a major breakdown in the forces of law and order in London. I was later able to advance this theory following examination of another Metropolitan Police file from The National Archives. This is recorded under MEPO 18/1. The file in question is a crime record book, which contained details of internal police memos and files relating to enquiries and investigations. Some of these entries related to the Whitechapel murders although the dates of the files referred to and the entries are undated. One such entry read: “Whitechapel Murders suggested complicity of Irish Party.” This entry related to an original file numbered 93867.

  Was Kelly a specific target for this group, and if so why, did she have a much darker past? It does seem strange that officers from the Royal Irish Constabulary should have visited the murder location, and prior to this The Evening News printed an article on October 9th which read:

  “The correspondent of the Irish Times states that a number of Irish constables have been withdrawn from Dublin for special duty in connection with the Whitechapel murders.”

  However following this a report was quickly sent out by the press association which read:

  “The Press Association learns that there is no truth in the statement published to-day that Dublin detectives have gone to London to aid in discovering the Whitechapel murderer. Mr. John Mallow, the head of the Dublin detective force, is at present in London, but on business wholly disconnected with the East-end atrocities.“

  I am not the only the only person interested in the mystery surrounding Kelly’s true identity and the suggestion that she may have had a darker past. Another Ripper researcher Maggy Ann Steel has suggested to me that her real name could in fact be Alice Carroll who was a witness in the trial of the five Phoenix Park murderers in Ireland in 1883. The murders were carried out by a group calling themselves “The Invincibles” and were a splinter group of “The Fenians”. They murdered in Dublin in broad daylight Frederick Cavendish, Chief
Secretary for Ireland and his deputy Thomas Burke, the under Secretary.

  As a result of information given by informants and witnesses who were closely connected to the group, five men were subsequently convicted and hanged in 1883. These five were Joe Brady, Michael Fagan, Thomas Caffrey, Dan Curley and Tim Kelly.

  Alice Carroll’s specific evidence was against Brady and Kelly. For giving evidence the authorities gave her the sum of £500 and offered her a new identity. At the time of the trial in 1883 she was 17 years-old and therefore would have been twenty-two at the time of the Whitechapel murders. Mary Kelly was supposedly around twenty-five at the time of her murder according to Joseph Barnett.

  Carroll was described as having bright, golden-red, hair and very pretty blue eyes, as did Kelly. Alice lived with her parents, two brothers and three sisters in Lower Eccles Lane, just off Dorset Street, Dublin. She used to regularly shop for her mother in Hardwick Street where there was a grocery store owned by the McCarthy’s and another store owned by the Hutchinson’s.

  Joseph Brady one of the killers, had a girlfriend named Annie Meagher who hated and despised Carroll with a vengeance for giving evidence, which led to his execution. Following which she is quoted as saying to a witness, “The sun has gone from my sky and the heart has been torn from my body.” She was also claimed to have verbally abused Alice Carroll using words along the lines of, “I hope someday your heart is torn from you as has mine.”

  Alice Carroll had a hard time in Dublin. The murders and the subsequent executions had caused concern and she felt safer to stay at home with her mother. She was abused constantly on the streets. On one occasion there was an effigy of her burnt near her home. She remained in the family home for a few years after the trial and her last known whereabouts were that she was still in Dublin in 1887 having been arrested for being drunk.

  Could Alice Carroll have finally decided to leave Ireland and assume the new identity of Mary Kelly in Whitechapel? Was John McCarthy her landlord who ran a local shop taking in mail from Ireland for her, related to the same McCarthy who owned the shop near to where she lived in Ireland? Was the story of her early life, which she gave to Barnett, made-up?

  According to uncorroborated reports, following the execution of Brady and Kelly their bodies were the subject of dissection with all of their organs being removed for medical research, and their remains buried in unmarked graves inside Dublin Prison. This certainly gives food for thought in relation to the murder of Mary Kelly and certainly raises a motive.

  Were Alice Carroll and Mary Kelly one and the same and her true identity uncovered by the Fenians who then inflicted revenge on her by murdering and mutilating her, removing all of her organs and in particular the heart, making it look like the work of Jack the Ripper?

  If Mary Kelly and Alice Carroll were one and the same she was not the only witness in the Phoenix Park murder trial to be subsequently murdered by the Fenians. James Carey was another who turned Queen's evidence. After the trial the authorities had no use for Carey, but it was incumbent on them to make some provision for his safety by getting him out of Ireland. The problem was finding a safe haven in the English-speaking parts of the world as the USA and Canada, the Australian colonies; New Zealand and the Cape Colony had too many Fenian sympathizers for safety. So Natal was chosen, where the Irish were few.

  Carey’s wife and seven children were put into lodgings in the East End of London and Carey was kept in Kilmainham Gaol until arrangements had been completed. Then Mrs. Carey and five of the children were put aboard the Kinfauns Castle in London as steerage passengers and Carey and the two eldest children joined the ship at Dartmouth, all of them travelling as a family under the name Power, bound for Cape Town on the first stage of their journey.

  But word of their new life had been leaked to Fenian sympathizers who booked Patrick O'Donnell on the same ship, and when the ship reached its destination he killed James Carey with three shots from a revolver. O'Donnell was brought back to London and later hanged for the murder after a trial at the Old Bailey.

  I have to admit I find all of this surrounding the death of Mary Kelly an interesting theory and there are many coincidences in this theory but coincidences do not solve mysteries or murders.

  Following the Kelly murder the Police Commissioner Sir Charles Warren issued the following pardon:

  MURDER. - PARDON. - Whereas on November 8 or 9, in Miller-court, Dorset-street, Spitalfields, Mary Janet Kelly was murdered by some person or persons unknown: the Secretary of State will advise the grant of Her Majesty's gracious pardon to any accomplice, not being a person who contrived or actually committed the murder, who shall give such information and evidence as shall lead to the discovery and conviction of the person or persons who committed the murder.

  CHARLES WARREN,

  The Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis.

  Metropolitan Police office, 4, Whitehall-place, S.W., Nov. 10th 1888.

  Needless to say no one came forward with any information and soon afterwards Sir Charles Warren resigned his post to be replaced by James Monro.

  Mary Kelly is said to have been the last of the Ripper’s victims. But as earlier stated my investigation revealed two other subsequent murders of prostitutes in the Whitechapel area that are worthy of consideration in deciding whether the Ripper continued his killing spree after Kelly.

  ALICE McKENZIE

  Forty-year-old Alice McKenzie died in Castle Alley on 17th July 1889 of wounds to the left side of her neck. Her abdomen showed signs of only superficial mutilations. Her clothes were up around her chin. She was last seen alive at 11.40pm and her body was found at 12.50am in the same alley that a police officer later stated he patrolled some twenty minutes before this time and saw no one or nothing suspicious. Two doctors agreed that a “sharp-pointed knife” was used to inflict the wounds, but also that it could have been smaller than the one used in the previous killings. However, neither the doctors nor the police could agree on whether she was a Ripper victim.

  My ability to state conclusively that this murder was connected to the previous killings is not helped by the failure of the two doctors and the police all failing to agree. However, in the light of my theory as to how and when the organs were removed from the earlier victims, I believe Alice McKenzie could have been a Ripper victim.

  FRANCES COLES

  Twenty-three-year-old Frances Coles was the last possible UK Ripper victim and perhaps the prettiest of them all. She was murdered in the early hours of 13th February 1891 under a railway arch in Royal Mint Street. Her throat was slashed only moments before a policeman arrived on the scene. There were no abdominal mutilations. She had injuries to the back of her head consistent with being thrown to the pavement and her throat had been cut while she was lying on the pavement. The policeman who discovered the body heard footsteps walking away, but police rules required that he stayed with the body, as she appeared to be still alive. Had the officer followed the footsteps, he may have caught the murderer.

  Coles was last seen alive at 1.45am and found dying at 2.15am. At 1.45am she had met fellow prostitute Ellen Gallagher in Commercial Street, passing “a violent man in a cheese cutter hat”. Apparently Gallagher remembered the man as a former client who had given her a black eye and warned Coles not to entertain him, but Coles ignored her friend’s advice and solicited the man. She and the stranger headed toward the direction of the Minories. This was the last time she was seen alive. It appears that the police carried out no enquiries in an effort to identify this man.

  Was Frances Coles a Ripper victim? Her throat was cut, but unlike in the other Whitechapel murders a blunt knife was used. There seems to have been no evidence of strangulation. There was no mutilation of the abdomen and the clothes were not disarranged. The murder location, as in the case of Elizabeth Stride, was south of Whitechapel Road. Could the Ripper have ceased his onslaught for eight months and then resumed his slayings with Frances Coles? Or was she just another victim of the violent Whitecha
pel at that time? My initial impression is that her murder is perhaps not connected to any of the others, but during the latter part of my investigation I uncovered supportive evidence, which suggests she, and all the other victims I have mentioned with the exception of Liz Stride could have possibly all been victims of the same killer.

  It should be noted that a seaman James Sadler who was an acquaintance of Coles was arrested in connection with her murder. The case was investigated by Chief Inspector Donald Swanson who not only suspected Sadler of her murder but suggested that Sadler could have been Jack the Ripper. The case against Sadler was dropped when he produced a cast iron alibi for his movements at the time of her murder, and also the previous murders. At this early stage of my investigation it gave me a clear indication that the police did not have any clues as to the identity of Jack the Ripper three years after the first murder took place.

  Before considering any likely suspects I had to see if there was any direct evidence I could use after analysing the murders that would help me to identify the killer. There was none. All I had to go on were vague unreliable descriptions of men seen with some of the victims before their deaths and the MOs – the modus operandi, or method of killing used in each murder. As I looked at each suspect my aim was to see if any of them matched any of these descriptions, but, even if they did, I knew that this fact would be no more than weak circumstantial evidence. In reality these assortment of descriptions was of no help.