The Ripper's Victims in Print

by Rebecca Frost

  Catherine Eddowes

  Catherine Eddowes was the second victim of the early morning of September 30, 1888, discovered not far from Liz in Mitre Square. Like Liz, Kate had been living with a long-term companion named John Kelly who, at the inquest, referred to Kate as his wife. Kate still had family living in the area, so her biography is more complete than that of Liz.

  Similarly to Mary Ann or Annie, Kate had previously been with another man for about twenty years, long enough to have had three children with Tomas Conway. The couple did not marry. In a familiar, tale, it is reported that Conway was the one to have left Kate because of her drinking habits, although again, this was not the only version of events. Kate’s sister, Eliza Gold, testified, “I cannot tell whether they parted on good or bad terms,”6 and the couple’s daughter, Annie Philips, reported that her father had simply left without saying why, and that was the last she saw of him. Annie Philips had not been on good terms with her father, so it is possible that Kate had reason to feel the same way. Since Conway himself is not present to testify, neither member of the couple could shed light on the true circumstances of their separation.

  Despite her lack of contact with her father, Annie Philips had indeed seen her mother since her parents parted. The fact that her daughter did indeed see her mother is not necessarily a positive assessment of Kate’s character, since Annie Philips reveals that she had to hide her brothers’ addresses from Kate to prevent discussions of lending money, although it is unclear which party would be the beggar. Were Kate’s sons so ill-off that they would have asked their mother for money, or did the reports of the inquest mean to say that mother would have been the one begging, if she had known where to find them? Annie Philips certainly reports that Kate frequently asked her for money, so it makes little sense for her to imply her brothers would have been the ones asking their mother for some coins.

  As often as she may have gone to Annie Philips for spare coins, Kate was also known to have found work when she could. Her sister, her common-law husband John Kelly, and her lodging-house deputy Fredrick William Wilkinson all agreed that Kate would hawk wares on the street, while Wilkinson added that she also did some cleaning when she could. Further, Wilkinson added, “I have never heard of her being intimate with any one but Kelly,”7 a strong endorsement especially in comparison with the narratives surrounding Liz’s relationship with Michael Kidney and Annie’s with her laborer or pensioner.

  While Kate’s sister described her as being sober, Kelly himself was the one who admitted that Kate would at times get drunk. In fact, much of the possibly negative information about Kate comes from Kelly, whether he states it outright or words it in such a way as to indicate what possible truth he is arguing against. There was the positive report that, in all the time he and Kate had been together, he had been a moralizing influence on her and would not let her engage in prostitution. This indicates that she did indeed need a moralizing presence—or perhaps simply a source of income—in order to take such a high road. Kelly further argues that Kate never brought him money she had earned the previous night, although it is a statement of such exactitude that it leaves open the possibility that Kate may have indeed earned such money without giving it to him. Even with such a steady man in her life, Kate still drank and was of the class expected to have resorted to prostitution, and thus it cannot be entirely eliminated from the narrative of her past.

  One final point of interest in this initial description of Kate is the fact that her list of belongings extends over three pages. Although Mary Ann, Annie, and Liz were like Kate in that they did not have their own rooms to which to return every night, Kate carried the most numerous possessions with her, meager as they were. These included such items as a packet of tea and sugar, various colors of thread, and pawn tickets, including those for Kelly’s boots. The pair had pawned them during her last day, presumably leaving Kelly barefoot, in order to have enough money for food. She was also wearing the most layers of clothing of any of the victims, all of which paints a picture of an itinerant woman struggling to make a living in Victorian England.

  Marie Jeanette Kelly

  Marine Jeanette Kelly, referred to by this French version of Mary Jane in these earliest reports, is often considered to be the Ripper’s final victim. She is regularly set apart from the previous women, in part due to the fact that she rented a room of her own instead of staying at doss houses or workhouses, and in part because of the severity of her injuries. Marie Jeanette’s body was discovered in her rented room in Miller’s Court on the morning of November 9, 1888.

  Like Elizabeth Stride, Marie Jeanette did not have any family nearby, and thus her life is likewise narrated by the man she most recently lived with. Joseph Barnett had been staying with Marie Jeanette for a total of about eighteen months, although he had moved out of her rented room shortly before her murder. The reason for his departure changes depending upon the report. First, he is recorded to have said that it was “in consequence of not earning sufficient money to give her and her resorting to prostitution.”8 This is only the second time that the word prostitution is stated outright in connection with these women—Mary Ann’s husband refused to continue paying her an allowance when he learned she was living the life of a prostitute, but the other women stayed out late, were not particularly in how they earned a living, never brought their men money, and so on. This blunt admission after her death is supported when a friend of Marie Jeanette, who also admitted to being a prostitute, observed that Marie Jeanette herself did not lie about what she did to earn a living and thus was never heard to call herself a charwoman or other such euphemism. If she refused to adopt such terms in life, then it would seem strange to use them after her death.

  Later reports from Barnett, however, seem to attempt to restore him to the level of John Kelly: a man who supported the woman in his life and, perhaps, felt his manhood was questioned when earlier publications made much of the fact that he had lost his income. At the inquest his story has changed to the fact that he left Marie Jeanette not because he had lost his job and she had once again taken up prostitution, but because she had brought a fellow prostitute to stay with them in her tiny rented room. All the same, this correction does not necessarily place Barnett in the best of light. It is only because he left Marie Jeanette that she took to prostitution once more, and it was this return to walking the streets that placed her in harm’s way. Clearly the East End would have been alert to the dangers facing women who did not have a bed for the night, so Marie Jeanette’s invitation to her friend was one of kindness and good will.

  Although Barnett was still presumably earning money up until the point when he had left the now-overcrowded room, Marie Jeanette’s death was discovered when her landlord sent someone to seek out the back rent that she owed. While it would be unlikely that a prostitute who could not afford a bed at a doss house would have been able to help Marie Jeanette with the rent, it would seem that Barnett had not been offering assistance, either. In fact, considering the length of time it had been since the rent was paid, he may have been living off Marie Jeanette’s generosity himself. It is possible that he felt her kindness to her friend meant less for him, thinking more along the lines of money than actual physical space.

  Other than the fact that she rented a room while they frequented doss and lodging houses, Marie Jeanette is separated from the other women by dint of being the youngest victim and through the stories of her past. Those who knew her commented on her appearance as being unusually presentable as well as striking, and she was supposedly educated far beyond the other women of the East End. In general the story of Marie Jeanette is of a woman whose descent was swift and dire. Lacking friends and family who had known her longer, Barnett could only report what she had told him about her life prior to their first meeting. According to this tale, Marie had once been a prostitute in the West End and had even gone with a gentleman to France for a time. Apparently France was not to her liking, since she left both the country and her gentlema
n to return to London, although this time to the East End. Why anyone would give up the life of a kept woman in France in exchange for Whitechapel is neither questioned nor explained.

  Like the other women, Marie Jeanette was also “much given to drink, and had rapidly gone from bad to worse”9 after her return to London. Even though she was younger than the other women, likely in her twenties instead of in her forties, and in spite the fact that she was able to rent a room of her own instead of seeking out a doss house bed each night, Marie Jeanette was still poor, still a prostitute, and still a drunk. Despite her youth and rumored beauty, Marie Jeanette was still a woman of London’s East End, and she met the same fate as the other victims of the Ripper’s knife.

  A Flash in the Pan

  Despite the worldwide interest in the crimes of Jack the Ripper, and the possible further murders attributed to the killer over the next few years, the written narratives were confined to newspapers for decades. The inquest into Marie Jeanette’s murder was halted after a single day and those newspaper articles ceased almost as suddenly. While the police insisted that the Ripper was no longer a threat due to suicide, imprisonment on another charge, or because he was now in an insane asylum, editors were strongly encouraged to keep the Ripper from the headlines in order to refrain from inciting public panic. Granted, if the police had honestly identified Jack the Ripper, it is highly unlikely that they would have kept his name a secret and not allowed it to appear in print.

  Part of what had allowed the Ripper to command so much space in the newspapers was the fact that someone, or multiple someones, proceeded to write numerous letters posing at the killer. The first of these was sent to the Central News Agency instead of to the police, and was initially regarded as a joke. Once the letter writer’s predictions seemed to come true after the night of the “double event” of the murders of Elizabeth and Catherine, the letter was published—and many more were soon to follow. It was one of these letters that introduced the epithet “Jack the Ripper” and the reason why we know the killer as such today, instead of calling him “the knife” or “the Whitechapel fiend.”

  The publication of these letters continued to fuel the news stories that permeated all of London and kept the Ripper murders on the front page. Although current thought tends to dismiss most, if not all, of the letters as hoaxes, at the time some were reproduced in the hope that readers would recognize the handwriting. One letter even accompanied a piece of kidney, ostensibly part of the one that had been removed from Catherine’s body, and lamented the fact that it had to be written in red ink instead of blood. The debate over whether or not the piece was indeed a kidney, human, and had come from the Mitre Square victim allowed journalists even more fodder for their articles.

  With arguments over kidneys, letters, victims, methods, and the identity of the killer, the Ripper crimes saturated the newspapers of the day. Where murders in Whitechapel had previously been too common to create such conversation and to interest those outside of the district, much less those around the world, this series of murders was a continually updated narrative meant to interest audiences beyond those in the immediate area. The number of papers printed and distributed each day created a demand for the most current knowledge, as well as for angles and tidbits that other headlines had not already touched. The conversation was continual.

  And yet, after the protracted inquest into the murder of Marie Jeanette, silence fell. Between the sudden lack of new murders and the pressure from the police, the story dried up. The Ripper may have left the headlines but he did not leave public consciousness. Marie Belloc-Lowndess published the first fictional novel based on the Ripper in 1913, and her book, The Lodger, went on to inspire filmmakers like Alfred Hitchcock himself. Then, in 1929, forty years after the events, the first nonfiction account of the Jack the Ripper murders was published.

  • TWO •

  Fifty Years Later

  The Earliest Ripper Books

  Despite the immense amount of interest in the Ripper crimes leading up to Marie Jeanette’s death, an interest that spiked with individual brutal murderers in the following few years, little was written about them outside of the contemporary newspaper reports. There are anecdotal reports of reporters being silenced from further discussion, and published papers by those who were involved in the investigation of the crime hint strongly that the Ripper’s identity was known. Further publication, then, was stifled in order to keep the panic from rising: the Ripper was not identified in print, but neither could it be suggested that he was still a threat.

  Unlike today, book-length accounts of true crime events were not common. In fact, the first book about the Ripper crimes may be the first book-length true crime narrative to have been published. Even then it came forty years after the crimes themselves, when the killer—whoever he may have been—was likely dead or incarcerated, since no further crimes had been committed. The emotional distance from the crimes may have further been increased by the fact that the audience for this book had lived through the First World War, which was a very different attack on the Homefront. The story of a lone man with a knife—who, after all, only killed a handful of women—may have been almost a relief in the wake of a war.

  The Victims of Dr. Stanley

  The first book to be published on the subject of Jack the Ripper came forty years after the events themselves, at a time when there were still people who could remember the crimes, but also at a time removed from the specific culture that had surrounded the crimes. Blanket statements about the victims or indeed all women of the East End are common, perhaps in an attempt to properly set the scene by explaining there was nothing special about these women in particular. Leonard Matters, in his 1929 book The Mystery of Jack the Ripper, prefaces his discussion of the crimes by flatly declaring that in “each case the story of human failure and descent was the same.”1 There is little need—or perhaps little cause—to approach the women of the East End, much less the five canonical victims of Jack the Ripper, as individuals.

  Matters prefers to present his victims in a seagoing theme, as wrecks who have somehow managed to wash up or drift into the East End. They are thus perhaps like ships, borne along by the whim of the wind and tide, not in control of their movements or final resting places. To an extent this could be argued to be an apt comparison, since a Victorian woman without a husband had very few options open to her and indeed little to say about the direction of her life. It remains to be questioned whether Matters thought that the Ripper’s victims were destined distinctly for their gruesome deaths.

  When the body of Mary Ann Nicholls is discovered, Matters sets the scene by informing readers that the man who found her is familiar with the area and predicted that he was seeing one of the many prostitutes of the area, simply so drunk that she could not remove herself from the gutter. Readers are thus made aware that women of the area, if not Mary Ann herself, tended to drink themselves into stupors and then generally be ignored by men on their early walks to work. The idea of drinking to excess is thus already planted in the reader’s mind, specifically as a common reaction of women of the district.

  Mary Ann is identified as being separated from her husband and “of dissolute habits,”2 confirming excess drinking in this specific case. Later on the very same page her father is seen arguing that Mary Ann was in fact continually sober, but his voice is the sole dissension. Mary Ann’s estranged husband offers up a tale more likely to sell—and therefore more likely to be printed in—newspapers. According to William Nicholls, Mary Ann had left him years before, not simply on her own but in favor of another man. The married couple must have remained in contact in some way even after her departure, because William clarifies after her death that it had been months since he had seen her or heard anything from her. William Nicholls might not be a grieving widower, but this is not shown to be a black mark on his name. His wife left him, presumably after cuckolding him, and thus their separation is placed entirely at her feet while giving him a reason to be les
s than charitable in his descriptions of her.

  Mary Ann is also likely responsible for her own presence on the street the night of her death, since Matters tells us she was not allowed to stay in her lodging house because she did not have money for the night. Beds had to be paid for each night in advance, and credit was not accepted. Any charitable assumption of where Mary Ann’s money had gone—or question of whether she had been in possession of any in the first place—is answered when the last person to have seen Mary Ann alive reported that she had been too drunk to stand and was leaning against a wall. Mary Ann had thus either been in possession of money and spent it on drink, or found someone to buy her a drink, likely in exchange for favors.

  Matters does not say bluntly that Mary Ann was a prostitute, but he includes coroner Wynne Baxter’s comment that “[i]t was an extraordinary thing … that nobody had seen her in the company with any man”3—and besides, how else would she have been able to make money in the middle of the night? There is no outright discussion that indicates she was involved with prostitution, but no other suggestion of occupation, either, or how she was usually able to afford her bed in the lodging house. There is, in fact, very little discussion of Mary Ann herself. Readers learn that she was married, that her husband was still alive, and that the pair had been separated, but little else seems necessary prior to her movements on the final night of her life. The rest is just filler information about the woman whose name is only known because she crossed paths with Jack the Ripper.