Jack the Ripper and the Case for Scotland Yard's Prime Suspect

by Robert House

  Unfortunately, we will probably never know. The extant police files make no mention of the Batty Street inquiries at all. And even if Kozminski became a suspect as early as October 1888, he was still only one of many individuals the police were investigating at the time. As Chief Inspector Swanson stated in an October 19 report to the Home Office, “About 80 persons have been detained at the different police stations in the Metropolis & their statements taken and verified by police.”17 On October 23, Anderson confessed to the Home Office that the police were without “the slightest clue of any kind.”18 Ultimately, it seems that the inquiry into the Batty Street suspect reached a dead end.

  Meanwhile, the police were keeping busy, thanks to numerous tips from the public, and Swanson reported that the police had conducted inquiries into “sailors on board ships in [the] Docks,” Asians, butchers and slaughtermen, gypsies, and “Cowboys” belonging to Buffalo Bill’s American Expedition, which was playing at Earl’s Court in West Brompton. In all, the police acted on tips concerning some three hundred suspected individuals.19 Among several proposed detection methods, the police were also contemplating the use of bloodhounds to track the murderer in case he should strike again. While all of this was going on, there was a new, rather morbid, turn of events. On October 16, George Lusk, the chairman of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, received a small cardboard parcel containing what appeared to be half of a human kidney, along with a letter, written in red ink, with messy handwriting and several spelling errors. It read:

  From Hell

  Mr Lusk,

  Sir

  I send you half the

  Kidne I took from one women

  prasarved it for you tother piece I

  fried and ate it was very nise. I

  may send you the bloody knif that

  took it out if you only wate a whil

  longer.

  Signed Catch me when

  you can

  Mishter Lusk20

  Lusk assumed that the letter was some sort of sick joke, but members of the Vigilance Committee convinced him to submit the kidney to the pathological curator of London Hospital, Dr. Openshaw, for analysis. Openshaw examined the kidney under a microscope and determined that it was a human kidney that had been preserved in spirits of wine. He then brought the package to the police station at Leman Street, after which the kidney was passed around like a hot potato. Detective Frederick Abberline gave it to the City Police, and then Inspector James McWilliam submitted it to City Police surgeon Dr. Frederick Gordon Brown for a second analysis.

  When Dr. Brown was interviewed by the Sunday Times, he stated that the kidney was certainly from a human adult, but he could not say whether it came from Catherine Eddowes. On the one hand, Dr. Brown noted that there was “no substantial reason that this portion of kidney should not be the portion of the one taken from the murdered woman.” On the other hand, he added, “The probability is slight of its being a portion of the murdered woman in Mitre Square.” Because the kidney had no remaining piece of the renal artery attached to it, Brown said, he was unable to match it to “the portion of the body from which it was cut.”21 In short, it might have been Eddowes’s kidney, but Brown doubted it. Still, even if Brown had concluded that the kidney was from Eddowes, it is likely that he would have kept this information from the press. As Inspector McWilliam wrote in a report, “It is not desirable that publicity should be given to the doctor’s opinion, or the steps that are being taken in consequence.”22

  The “From Hell” letter is the only letter that some researchers now believe might have been by written by the actual murderer, although there is still much debate over the issue. Either way, the reference to eating half of the kidney (“tother piece I fried and ate it was very nise”) presented a gruesome new facet of the case. Such behavior would have been consistent with a “trophy taker” like Jack the Ripper. Cannibalism is an example of a paraphilia practiced by a subtype of serial killer called a “lust murderer” or a postmortem mutilator. It is theorized that some cannibalistic serial killers may feel that by consuming their victims, they are gaining power over them. The notorious Milwaukee serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, for example, claimed that he ate body parts because he believed that his victims would live again inside him. Another example was Albert Fish (aka “the Gray Man” or “the Brooklyn Vampire”), who at the age of fifty-seven was gripped by what he called a “blood thirst.” Fish confessed to killing and eating two children and later described how he killed one boy and cut the “meat” from his body to take home and cook. When asked why he did it, Fish rather blandly said, “I never could account for it.”23

  14

  Mary Kelly

  By the first week of November, there had been no murders in more than a month, and people were starting to wonder whether perhaps the killer had moved away or died. Things seemed to be returning to normal, and the residents of London turned their attention to other news. On October 31, Princess Mary Adelaide of Cambridge visited the East End, accompanied by the Queen’s oldest daughter, Princess Victoria, for the opening of the King Edward Institute and Schools on Hanbury Street, which was gaily decorated for the occasion. At the opening ceremony, Samuel Montagu declared, “Her Royal Highness had brought sunshine into Whitechapel at the period of its greatest gloom and depression.”1 In other news, Dr. Debenham of the London Hospital reported that a diphtheria epidemic was under way, centered around Hackney and the surrounding districts.

  In the absence of any fresh Ripper news, the papers continued to fill their pages with lurid tales of violence. On November 3, it was reported that an underemployed tailor in Marylebone attempted to shoot his wife, firing three rounds at her while chasing her around the house. The shots missed, however, and the man committed suicide instead.2 A few days later, an actor in the stage play The Armada at the Drury Lane Theatre “accidentally discharged a carbine loaded with blank cartridge in the face of an opponent instead of firing the weapon in the air.”3 Such incidents lacked both the punch and the sales potential of the Ripper murders, but the papers tried their best.

  On November 5, Guy Fawkes Day was celebrated in various parts of London, and crowds carried stuffed effigies of recently unpopular or otherwise notorious figures, including both Jack the Ripper and Leather Apron.4 At Clerkenwell Green, it was rumored that a large crowd of unemployed men was planning to burn an effigy of Commissioner Charles Warren, and in anticipation of trouble, the police turned out in force, armed with billy clubs. An inspector informed one of the mob leaders, “I’ll allow no bonfire tonight; and, if you try it, we shall go for you.” Eventually, the “guy” appeared—not surprisingly, it was “an artistic production representing a stalwart policeman with his baton raised over the head of a workman.” Due to the large number of police in attendance, however, the crowd decided not to burn it.5 Later that night, there was some excitement when a crowd mistakenly believed that the police had arrested a Ripper suspect, but, as it turned out, the man, who was wearing blackface, was arrested merely for some “guying” activities.6

  Yet the biggest news of the week was the much-anticipated Lord Mayor’s Day parade, which was scheduled to take place on Friday, November 9. The police would be directing traffic and performing crowd control duties all along the parade route, which was to begin at Guildhall and meander for several miles through the City of London. Afterward, a “substantial meat tea” was to be given in the Tower Hamlet’s Mission Hall for up to two thousand destitute people, followed by an “amusing entertainment” for three thousand people.7

  As it turned out, though, the Lord Mayor’s Day celebrations were upstaged by a much more thrilling East End affair, for in the early morning hours of November 9, Jack the Ripper struck again in a most brutal fashion. At 10:45 a.m., just as the parade was setting off, the horribly mutilated body of a young prostitute named Mary Kelly was discovered in a small room on one of East London’s worst streets. The event was well timed. Indeed, it seemed almost as if the killer had a sense of the dr
amatic potential of the situation. This was to be the last of the murders definitely ascribed to Jack the Ripper. It would go down as one of the most heinous murders on record in the history of crime.

  Mary Kelly was said to be a vivacious young woman, “possessed of considerable personal attractions.” She was twenty-five years old and had blue eyes, a rather pale complexion, and “a very fine head of hair” that reached almost to her waist.8 According to a neighbor, Kelly was “on good terms with everybody.” A friend named Caroline Maxwell described her as a “pleasant little woman” who “spoke with a kind of impediment,” adding, “she never associated with anyone much, beyond bowing ‘Good morning.’ ” But Kelly frequently got drunk and then became “quarrelsome and abusive” and “would go about singing.”9 As Mary’s boyfriend, Joseph Barnett, put it, “When in drink she had more to say.”10

  Kelly was born in Limerick, West Ireland, sometime around 1863 or 1864, and when she was very young she moved with her family to Carmarthen, Carmarthenshire, in southern Wales, where her father, John Kelly, got a job as a foreman in an iron works.11 At the age of sixteen, Mary Kelly married a coal miner named Davies and then lived with him for a year or two until he was killed in a pit explosion. After her husband’s death, Kelly briefly lived in Swansea before migrating onward, as always in an easterly direction, toward the great capital. She eventually arrived in London around 1884 and found work as a prostitute in an upscale West End “gay house” run by a French woman. Kelly later claimed that during this time, she led the life of a lady and frequently drove around in a carriage. At some point, she went to live in France with a “gentleman” but didn’t like it there and returned to London after only a week or two.12 For the next few years, Kelly lived in the vicinity of the Ratcliffe Highway, where she probably worked on and off as a prostitute.

  By April 1887, Kelly was staying in Cooley’s Common Lodging house on Thrawl Street, Spitalfields, and living as a prostitute. On April 8 of that year, she met a man named Joseph Barnett on Commercial Street, and the two had some drinks together. Barnett was a thirty-nine-year-old London-born Irishman who worked at the Billingsgate Fish Market as a fish porter. They arranged to meet the following day and then decided to move in together. By early 1888, the two were living in a dingy room at 13 Miller’s Court, Dorset Street. Miller’s Court was a narrow and dimly lit courtyard that contained six “two-story, ‘one up, one down’ slum houses” of single-room apartments, accessible via a thin and unlit arched passage, less than a yard wide, that ran between two three-story buildings at 26 and 27 Dorset Street.13 A few yards from the archway was a partly torn down poster advertising a reward for the capture of the murderer, and just down the street was Crossingham’s Lodging House, where Annie Chapman had stayed on the night of her murder.

  On the ground floor of 27 Dorset Street was a chandler shop run by John McCarthy, and there were some rented rooms upstairs. McCarthy owned the apartments in the courtyard out back, thus Miller’s Court was also known as “McCarthy’s Rents.” Number 26 Dorset Street was another lodging house, also owned by McCarthy, with seven rented rooms on the two upper floors. The ground floor in the front of the house had been converted to a “shed” for storing costermongers’ barrows, with a gate entrance onto the street. According to a report in the Daily Telegraph, this shed had until recently been “the nightly resort of poor homeless creatures, who went there for shelter.”14 What had once been the back parlor of the house had been partitioned off—apparently, by nailing a door shut and possibly covering it with a thin layer of plaster or wallpaper—creating the small one-room apartment known as 13 Miller’s Court, where Kelly and Barnett lived.15 The room was about twelve feet square and sparsely furnished with a bed, two tables, and a cupboard. Opposite the door, which opened off the end of the arched passage, was a fireplace, over which hung a print titled The Fisherman’s Widow, which had been reproduced in the Illustrated London News some years earlier. Two windows looked out onto the courtyard in back.

  Kelly and Barnett seem to have lived together amicably, although they sometimes quarreled. On one occasion, Kelly broke one of their two windows, and the pane was never fixed. The couple relied on Barnett’s “hard earnings” to get by, and during their time together (according to Barnett), Kelly did not work the streets. But sometime around August 1888, Barnett lost his job, and Kelly returned to her former occupation as a prostitute. Barnett did not approve of this, but there was nothing he could do about it. He earned a little money by selling oranges in the Billingsgate and Spitalfields markets, but it was not enough to support the two of them, and by November, Kelly and Barnett were six weeks behind on their rent.

  Kelly was worried about the killings and always asked Barnett to read her newspaper accounts of them. “I used to bring them all home and read them,” Barnett said. “If I did not bring one she would get it herself, and ask me whether the murderer was caught. I used to tell her everything that was in the paper.”16 Possibly because of the murders, Kelly started to let other prostitutes sleep in her room. Barnett said that she allowed the prostitutes to stay with them because “she was good hearted and did not like to refuse them shelter on cold bitter nights.” Yet Barnett objected to the new arrangement, and the couple separated. On October 30, Barnett moved out and took up lodgings on New Road.

  On Thursday, November 8, Mary mentioned to her upstairs neighbor Elizabeth Prater, also a prostitute, that she was hoping for fine weather that Friday. “I want to go to the Lord Mayor’s Show,” she said. Unfortunately, the prospect for “fine weather” was bleak, because the entire week had been gloomy and dark, with winds blowing “with some considerable violence.”17 The forecast for that night called for strong winds, a rapidly dropping temperature, and cold rain. Kelly passed most of the afternoon with her friend (and fellow prostitute) Maria Harvey, a “laundress” of 3 New Court, who had spent both Monday and Tuesday sleeping in Kelly’s room.

  At 7:30 or 7:45 p.m., Joe Barnett visited Mary Kelly at Miller’s Court. When he arrived, he found Mary sitting with her friend Lizzie Albrook. Albrook got up to leave, saying, “Well, Mary Jane, I shall not see you this evening again.” Lizzie later claimed that one of the last things Kelly said to her was “Whatever you do don’t you do no wrong and turn out as I have.”18 Barnett and Kelly spoke amicably for about fifteen minutes, then Barnett left. As he was leaving, Barnett told Kelly that he had no work and was sorry he had no money to give her.

  Mary Kelly’s movements for the remainder of the night are unclear, but she apparently went out drinking again. At 11:45 p.m., Kelly’s neighbor Mary Ann Cox, another prostitute, was returning home and followed Kelly and a man as they walked up the court through the arched passage. Kelly’s companion was a man about five feet five inches tall, stout, about thirty-six years of age, and shabbily dressed in a dark overcoat and a round black billycock hat. The man was carrying a pot of ale and had “blotches” on his face and a carroty mustache, with a clean-shaven chin. As Cox passed, she said, “Goodnight, Mary.” Kelly didn’t turn around but drunkenly slurred, “Good night, I am going to have a song.” The man shut the door behind them. A few minutes later, Cox heard Kelly singing a song called “A Violet from Mother’s Grave.” When Cox went back outside around midnight, Mary was still in her room singing. There was a light on, but the blinds were drawn.19

  By 1 a.m., it was raining hard, and Cox returned to her room to warm her hands. A short time later, she went back out again and heard Kelly still singing. Also around 1 a.m., Prater returned home and stood near the entrance of Miller’s Court on Dorset Street waiting for a young man—presumably, either a boyfriend or a client. Prater waited twenty minutes, but the man never showed up, so she went into the chandler’s shop and told McCarthy, “Say to my young man that I had gone to my room.”20 She then entered a door off the arched passageway that opened onto a staircase leading to the upstairs rooms in number 26. This staircase abutted the partition on the other side of Kelly’s bedroom wall. “I should have seen a glimmer
of light in going up the stairs if there had been a light in deceased’s room,” Prater later said, “but I noticed none. The partition was so thin I could have heard Kelly walk about in the room.” Prater’s room was on the floor above Kelly’s, apparently at the front of the house, facing Dorset Street. She barricaded the door to her room with two tables, then lay down on the bed in her clothes and fell asleep. It was around 1:30 a.m., and the courtyard was quiet.21

  A man named George Hutchinson later claimed that at 2 a.m. he saw Kelly back on Commercial Street, presumably looking for more clients. Hutchinson’s statement was written down by Sergeant Edward Badham of H Division:

  About 2 am 9th I was coming by Thrawl Street, Commercial Street, and saw just before I got to Flower and Dean Street I saw the murdered woman Kelly. And she said to me Hutchinson will you lend me sixpence. I said I cant I have spent all my money going down to Romford. She said Good morning I must go and find some money. She went away toward Thrawl Street. A man coming in the opposite direction to Kelly tapped her on the shoulder and said something to her. They both burst out laughing. I heard her say alright to him. And the man said you will be alright for what I have told you. 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 hid 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 handkercheif he then pulled his handkercheif 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.