I also wrote to Dr. John R. Hamilton, the Medical Director at Broadmoor, asking for any information about James Kelly. In his reply, dated 6 February 1987, Dr. Hamilton said: “I regret to tell you that for reasons of medical confidentiality (which goes beyond the grave) I am not able to divulge any information…” I took the liberty of going back to Dr. Hamilton saying I did not wish to broach medical confidentiality but could he simply tell me the date James Kelly entered Broadmoor; the date he escaped; the date he returned; and the date he died. In his courteous reply Dr. Hamilton told me: “James Kelly was admitted to this hospital on 24 August 1883, escaped on 23 January 1888, returned on 12 February 1927 and died on 17 September 1929.”
John Morrison says the diary of the late Mrs. Marie Belloc-Lowndes, a high society socialite who knew several top officials in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods, is a key piece of evidence in supporting his theory. Marie Belloc-Lowndes was the author of the best-known novel based on the Ripper crimes, and John Morrison maintains that her diary shows that seven well-known people, including Winston Churchill, Oscar Wilde, and Queen Victoria, knew about the cover-up by the Government and by Scotland Yard and furthermore they knew the identity of Jack the Ripper.
New Scotland Yard denies there is any substance in these allegations that it has anything to hide in respect of James Kelly and a spokesman said, “It is nonsense to suggest there was ever a cover-up.”
John Morrison tells me he is in possession of “concrete documentary evidence” to back his claim to the full and he declares there is “not the slightest margin for error.” He says Mary Kelly was the only victim to have heard the name Jack the Ripper, since it only became public knowledge on 2 October 1888 in a letter posted from Liverpool, James Kelly’s home town. The other Ripper victims were dead by then. Mary Kelly was the only victim to know about an otherwise “quite respectable” woman named Maria Coroner being sentenced to six months’ imprisonment on 6 October 1888 for sending Jack the Ripper hoax letters to the police; she was tried at Bradford. Mary Kelly was the only victim to know that in mid-October 1888 the police were looking for a man with a “Newcastle” accent as the person responsible for sending them hoax Ripper material and Mary Kelly was the only victim to have known the true identity of Jack the Ripper. John Morrison further tells me that in fact the police traced a man they wished to interview to Newcastle but before they could apprehend him, he slipped away by sea. John Morrison says the Central Library at Newcastle have recently informed him that the man in question actually came from Hylton near Sunderland. Mary Kelly, says John Morrison, was the only one of the Ripper victims who could have identified James Kelly. When she saw him she would have known there must have been a cover-up because there was no news of his escape in the newspapers.
John Morrison hopes to publish a book on his findings one day and there is talk of a film or television series. His theories and findings are based on a number of coincidences that do seem to link James Kelly with facts known about the killer and with Mary Kelly with whom John Morrison feels an affinity. He is determined to identify her murderer.
Even a brief run-through of some of these coincidences certainly makes interesting reading as does John Morrison’s brief résumé of the Jack the Ripper crimes in 1888. He maintains that James Kelly was a married man living in Liverpool where he meets a pretty girl named Mary. She becomes pregnant and adopts his surname, thus becoming Mary Kelly. In due course she has a little girl; being a Roman Catholic she would never agree to a backstreet abortion. The child was adopted and a man named Daley wrote to John Morrison from Bristol to say that his family had always believed that their great grandmother was the illegitimate child of Mary Kelly. Mr. Daley’s grand-parents came from Ireland and all the family are Roman Catholic. He has compiled a family tree and the only unexplained member is the great grandmother.
James Kelly’s wife finds out about his affair with Mary and during the course of a quarrel, James murders his wife. He is lodged in the hospital wing of Walton Gaol for the purpose of observation and mental assessment (“this was done in a case of a capital offence whether the sanity of the suspect was in doubt or not”). Kelly, says John Morrison, avoids the gallows and is sent to Broadmoor. In January 1888 he escapes, taking with him all the staff wages. The authorities are naturally embarrassed and a “temporary” cover-up is imposed. Not until the death of Mary Kelly, coupled with the Ripper letters from Liverpool, Kelly’s home town, do those authorities see the connection; but by then it is too late to admit to the cover-up.
Sir Charles Warren wants to publicise the whole matter and alert all police forces and the public to the dangers of James Kelly remaining free but the Home Secretary, Henry Matthews, puts a stop to this. Warren is made to sign, for the first time, the Official Secrets Act, and is then dismissed under the guise of resignation.
Matthews reasons that Mary Kelly was the only intended victim so there will be no more Ripper murders and that, after all, he only killed “a load of trash”; it is better James Kelly disappears of his own accord than that the “old lady of Windsor” finds out about his incompetence in the matter, or his own head may roll.
In 1891 police in New York report a series of murders similar to those attributed to Jack the Ripper in London three years earlier and when they ask whether the same man could be responsible they are told by Scotland Yard, “Rubbish—we’ve got Jack bottled up in London and we’ll catch him if he ever kills again.” A few months later French police make similar approaches to Scotland Yard following similar murders in Paris: “Rubbish,” says Scotland Yard. “We expect to arrest him in London any time now.”
In 1927 James Kelly, sleeping rough, down and out, and without any visible means of support, surrenders himself as the escaped madman from Broadmoor. He says he has been at sea most of the time but he has had an “adventurous life” in New York and in Paris.
The government, under Stanley Baldwin, wasted no time in getting Kelly back into Broadmoor, informing the administration and staff that this man suffered with the fantasy that he was Jack the Ripper—but of course he wasn’t (John Morrison believes he can prove these conjectures as fact); and because of the nuisance and embarrassment he had caused there should be no possibility of his escaping again; he had better be placed in permanent solitary confinement until further notice or instructions from the Home Office. No such notice ever came and James Kelly died in 1929. On orders from the Home Office he was buried quietly and quickly in an unmarked grave at Crowthorne where he still lies. He was a Roman Catholic and died after receiving the Last Rites.
In 1947, John Morrison says, Mrs. Marie Belloc-Lowndes, not long before she died, asked to see the Catholic priest from Broadmoor Mental Hospital. She had revealed that she believed in communication with the dead and the reality of ghosts, although all this conflicted with her acceptance of the Roman Catholic faith. When, on her deathbed (again according to John Morrison) she was asked why she wrote The Lodger, she replied: “Because I would like to think that long after I’m dead it may help someone who is struggling to express himself with regard to the Jack the Ripper crimes.”
Mrs. Belloc-Lowndes moved in high circles in her day and John Morrison is convinced that she knew all about the cover-up concerning James Kelly’s escape from Broadmoor and that she verified what she knew with the priest who had heard James Kelly’s last confession and who received absolution for remaining silent on the subject himself. If Mrs. Belloc-Lowndes—perhaps herself receiving absolution for remaining silent—was buried in a local cemetery it could be that she lies near James Kelly since they were both Roman Catholics and Crowthorne, in common with most cemeteries, reserves part of the burial ground for Roman Catholics.
John Morrison says he can prove that Mrs. Belloc-Lowndes and Inspector Joseph Chandler, a police officer involved in the Whitechapel murders (as they were known at that time) were great friends and that he told her: “This is not for the newspapers but the man we are seeking in connection with the Whitechapel
murders once committed murder in a house in Liverpool. He was found to be insane and placed in a lunatic asylum but he escaped just prior to the commencement of these crimes. I doubt if we will ever catch him, he is such a cunning devil—but you know even if we did we could not hang him, could we?” In The Lodger Mrs. Belloc-Lowndes wrote of her “friend from the Yard, Joe Chandler,” and her diary, John Morrison says, revealed that he told her about the Liverpool murderer who was responsible for the Whitechapel murders; that the man was committed to an asylum and escaped just prior to the commencement of the London crimes, with the staff wages, and that all this was not made public to save the authorities embarrassment.
In 1927 Mrs. Belloc-Lowndes was helping in the preparation of her book, which was to become a film for the first time. The Lodger, A Story of the London Fog with Ivor Novello was the first of four films based on Mrs. Belloc-Lowndes’s book and, incidentally, the fifth film to be directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Suddenly, says John Morrison, Mrs. Belloc-Lowndes appeared on the set and insisted that part of the plot be altered. She had just heard that Kelly had surrendered to the authorities and, having achieved what she came to do, she then fled to the United States where she stayed until 1930—the year after James Kelly died. It has to be said that students of the cinema generally accept that the last part of the film differs from the book in order to protect Ivor Novello’s matinée idol image; furthermore, feeling certain that the film was made in 1926 I asked The British Film Institute whether they could confirm that this was so and they informed me (27 January 1987): “Principal photography on The Lodger began at the beginning of May and was completed by early June. The film was trade shown on 14 September 1926 and was released 14 February 1927.”
John Morrison believes that for years Mrs. Belloc-Lowndes was obtaining private and unpublished information from various ministers and senior Scotland Yard officials, even up to and including 1939. “Her husband was Obituary Editor for The Times; she was at one time a journalist and without doubt was not averse to using bribery anywhere to obtain information.” John Morrison says he has seen all this in Mrs. Belloc-Lowndes’s own hand.
He tells me that the Sun newspaper of 1891 traced Jack the Ripper to Broadmoor and was told not to print the story. He feels that Mary Kelly stands out in the Ripper story in many ways: she was the only Irish National among the Ripper’s victims; she was the only Roman Catholic; she was the youngest and the prettiest; she may have been the latest prostitute to come to the area; she was the only victim to be given a decent burial; the only victim whose death caused widespread sympathy; the only pregnant victim; the only one with the same surname as the killer; the only one whose death the killer tried to conceal; she was the only one murdered in Spitalfields and she was the last victim.
It is not altogether true that hers was the only death that caused widespread sympathy: the funeral of Catherine Eddowes (alias Kate Conway, alias Kate Kelly) was quite an affair. Several hundred people saw the coffin, bearing the inscription “Catherine Eddowes died 30 September 1888 aged 43 years,” leave the City mortuary escorted by a strong force of police; Catherine Eddowes was followed to her grave by her four sisters and by John Kelly, with whom she had been living. The Mile End Road, and elsewhere along the route, was lined five-deep with spectators. At Ilford Cemetery nearly five hundred people witnessed the actual burial and “great sympathy” was widely expressed. Elizabeth Stride, on the other hand, was certainly buried in all possible haste in a pauper’s grave.
John Morrison told me emphatically: “Everything that has ever been said and all the evidence concerning Jack the Ripper fits James Kelly in every respect. My account will eventually be accepted because it is the only account that would stand up in a British Court of Law.” This remains to be seen but it is certainly an interesting possibility.
John Morrison has also highlighted for me some strange parallels and incidents in studying James Kelly as Jack the Ripper and the Peter Sutcliffe Ripper murders. Peter Sutcliffe said he was employed at a cemetery and that there he heard a voice telling him to commit the murders; it seems that it was the cemetery that contains the grave of Maria Coroner, who wrote to the police about the Ripper murders in 1888. Bradford and Newcastle were mentioned in relation to both cases; both Sutcliffe and James the Ripper murdered only one victim in “enclosed” premises. They both murdered by night; they were both roughly the same age; they both operated in “red light” districts; they both ended up in Broadmoor; in both cases there was talk of the supernatural; both murdered one woman in Lancashire…and so on.
I am not sure how evidential all this, and the researches of John Morrison, will prove to be in seeking to unmask the identity of Jack the Ripper. What it has done for Mary Kelly is to provide her with a memorial stone on her grave in St. Patrick’s Roman Catholic Cemetery. Today a marble tombstone, engraved by a local mason, marks the last resting place of the Ripper’s last victim. Since he has become interested in Jack the Ripper, John Morrison has become more and more interested in Mary Kelly. She was known to sing to herself, she was known to have been very pretty, and she was a resident of Spitalfields, so he calls her “The Prima Donna of Spitalfields.” He has had put on the stone the name that Mary Kelly liked to be called, “Marie Jeannette Kelly” and he has added her age, the date she was murdered and the lines:
“Do not stop to stand and stare
Unless to utter fervent prayer.”
Three years ago John Morrison composed some “simple verses” consisting of six stanzas, which he dedicated to Mary Kelly prior to the erection of her gravestone on 3 December 1986; the two lines on the gravestone come from those verses. Also engraved on the gravestone are the words “Mary Magdalene Intercede,” “because Mary Magdalene is the patron saint of prostitutes and she was once herself a woman of easy virtue.” By law no grave can be disturbed for a hundred years, and as the expiry date on Mary Kelly’s grave grew near John Morrison took steps to be responsible for preserving Mary’s memory and looking after her grave—and he has reserved a burial plot for himself nearby.
There is space at the bottom of the headstone for something to be added but only when his suspect is publicly acknowledged will John Morrison arrange for the customary words to be added to Mary Kelly’s gravestone: Requiescat in Pace.
Mystery Solved!
ANONYMOUS
The Irish-born William Greer Harrison (1836–1916) was a prominent businessman in San Francisco who is best-known for being one of the founders of the Bohemian Club. He told the story about the identification of Jack the Ripper as divulged in a conversation with a Dr. Howard, one of a dozen prominent London physicians who interviewed a colleague who apparently had no idea that he had been committing the atrocities.
A preacher and spiritualist named Robert James Lees is said to have played a leading role in the physician’s arrest by using his clairvoyant powers to identify the house in London’s Mayfair where the murderer lived. The doctors and the clairvoyant persuaded police to take the physician to a private insane asylum in Islington, London, registering him as Thomas Mason. Since “Mason” was unaware of his crimes, allegedly perpetrated while the evil half of his personality was dominant, readers will be reminded of Robert Louis Stevenson’s chilling novella, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, published two years before the Ripper murders were committed.
The alleged conversation between Harrison and Howard first appeared in the Fort Wayne Weekly Sentinel (April 24, 1895) but also in several other newspaper articles across the United States, including the Fort Wayne Weekly Gazette (April 25, 1895), the Williamsport Sunday Grit (May 12, 1895), the Hayward Review in California (May 17, 1895), and The Brooklyn Daily Eagle (December 28, 1897).
MYSTERY SOLVED!
Anonymous
IDENTITY OF JACK THE RIPPER KNOWN: THE PERPETRATOR OF THE WHITECHAPEL MURDERS WAS A LONDON PHYSICIAN OF PROMINENCE.
San Francisco, April 24.
Dr. Howard, a London physician of considerable prominence, was the guest
of Wm. Greer Harrison at the Bohemian Club recently. The Englishman told a singular story to his host and vouched for its correctness in every particular. It related to the mystery of Jack the Ripper, which the physician declared was no longer a mystery among the scientific men of London, nor the detectives of Scotland Yard.
He said that the assassin was a medical man of high standing and extensive practice. He was married to a beautiful and amiable wife, and had a family. Shortly before the beginning of the Whitechapel murders, he developed a peculiar and, to his wife, inexplicable mania, an unnatural pleasure in causing pain. She grew so alarmed that she became afraid of him and locked herself and children up when she saw the mood coming on him. When he recovered from the paroxysms and she spoke to him about it, he laughed at her fears. Then the Whitechapel murders filled London with horror. The suspicions of the wife were aroused, and as one assassination succeeded another, she noted, with heartbreaking dread, that at the periods when these murders were supposed to have been committed, her husband was invariably absent from home.
At last the suspense and fear of the wretched wife became unbearable, and she went to some of her husband’s medical friends, stated the case, and asked their advice and assistance. They called the Scotland Yard force to assist them, and by adding one fact to another, a chain of evidence pointing to the doctor as the author of the murders became complete.
The Big Book of Jack the Ripper Page 20