The Real Mary Kelly Read online

  THE REAL

  MARY KELLY

  THE REAL

  MARY KELLY

  WYNNE WESTON-DAVIES

  To

  Elizabeth Weston Davies

  my great aunt, who until recently had no known grave and whose fate was unknown to her family for 130 years.

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank the many knowledgeable and extremely helpful librarians and archivists that have assisted me in the research for this book. They are the unsung heroes of our nation’s history, preserving it and making it accessible to successive generations. In particular I wish to thank Anne Wheeldon of the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham, Malcolm Barr-Hamilton of Tower Hamlets Council, and Catherine Richards of the Powys Archives.

  The staff of the National Archives, the London Metropolitan Archives, the British Library, The National Newspaper Library formerly in Colindale but now closed whilst the collection is moved to new premises in Boston Spa, West Yorkshire, the Archives of the London Borough of Camden, the Durham County Archives, The Suffolk County Archives, the Buckinghamshire County Studies Centre, the Gloucestershire Public Libraries and the Archives Départmentales des Côtes d’Armor, France, have all been unfailingly helpful.

  I owe most of my thanks to the encouragement and tolerance of my wife, Julia, who has put up with long hours of what should by rights have been shared time, during which I was immured in my study working on the book or out doing research in the streets of London, or in one of the many archives. The intrusion into our joint leisure time over the course of five years should have been intolerable but instead she uncomplainingly supported me, sustained me with endless cups of tea and coffee, and proof read countless drafts of the manuscript as the book evolved. My children Jessica and Edward similarly had to put up with less of my company when they were at home for weekends than they deserved but nevertheless gave me unstinting support. To my cousin Jill Nicholls and her son John Tindle I owe thanks for their recollections of Jill’s father Ted and his association with Sickert. My brother-in-law Richard Malone and his wife Susan advised me about American vocabulary and usage. Others who have helped with general encouragement and constructive criticism include the late Rosemary Petty of Dallas, Texas, my brother Peter Weston-Davies who was able to confirm many details of family history, his wife Dorinda, and Frances Williams.

  To Sara George, herself a noted author of books such as the brilliant The Journal of Mrs Pepys, I owe a debt of gratitude for help and constructive criticism in crafting the early structure of the book. Kate Summerscale, the author of the best-selling The Suspicions of Mr Whicher was an inspiration and gave me her encouragement, practical support and research suggestions in numerous emails. I am extremely grateful to Keith Skinner, one of the world’s leading authorities on the Whitechapel murders and co-author of the most authoritative reference book on the subject, The Complete Jack the Ripper A to Z, for his encouragement and for introducing me to his, and now my, agent Robert Smith.

  John Julius Norwich kindly confirmed my belief that his grandfather, the eminent surgeon Sir Alfred Cooper, far from being responsible for mutilating Walter Sickert and turning him into a woman-hating monster as other authors have suggested, was ever held in high esteem by the artist for his skill and compassion.

  To Professor Harold Ellis CBE, perhaps the greatest teacher of anatomy and surgery of the 20th century and a foremost medical historian, I also owe huge thanks. Not only through his truly inspirational teaching did he launch me and countless others on their medical and surgical careers but his endorsement of my theories regarding the anatomical knowledge of the Ripper gave me the confidence to complete the book. Dr Raymond Prudo, formerly Professor of Psychiatry at McMaster University, Toronto, Canada, gave me expert advice about the possible psychopathology of Francis Craig. Robert Radley, a noted forensic handwriting expert, kindly gave me his opinion on the very small amount of Francis Craig’s handwriting known to exist. Personal communications from Professor Alun Evans of the Department of Epidemiology, Queens University, Belfast gave me further insights into the life of E T Craig. Robert David Pool kindly sent me information about his ancestor Sergeant David Pool of the Metropolitan Police who was murdered in mysterious circumstances in France in 1901. Christine Williams, a solicitor and expert in family law, advised me on aspects of divorce law relating to Francis Craig’s petition and affidavit.

  Finally I would like to thank my agent Robert Smith, himself one of the country’s leading experts on the Whitechapel murders, who proved himself to be an excellent mentor and professional colleague and my publishers at Blink, Clare Tillyer, Acquisitions and Rights Director and my editor Joel Simons who helped to make the process of publication a much easier and pleasanter experience than it might otherwise have been.

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Mystery

  CHAPTER TWO

  Mary or Marie?

  CHAPTER THREE

  Elizabeth

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Phrenologist’s Son

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Marriage

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Trail Goes Cold

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Breakthrough

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Rehearsal

  CHAPTER NINE

  Polly

  CHAPTER TEN

  Annie

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Jack Introduces Himself

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The Double Event

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  From Hell

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The Pressure Mounts

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Hue and Cry

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Oh Murder!

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The Horror in Room 13

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The Aftermath

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The Last Act

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Where’s Jack?

  CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

  Encore?

  CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

  The Last Day

  CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

  Swansong

  Epilogue

  Bibliography

  Endnotes

  Index

  The East End in 1888. Spitalfields is centred on Commercial Street with the notorious Flower and Dean and Thrawl Streets running between it and Brick Lane. Whitechapel lies in the centre and, to the south, the area around the docks is Wapping. The two H division police stations at Commercial Street and Leman Streets are within a few hundred yards of three of the murder sites. Francis’s lodgings at 306 Mile End Road were about a mile and a half from the most distant site, Mitre Square, where Catherine Eddowes met her death.

  KEY

  A 306 Mile End Road where Francis Craig lodged from 1886 until a few months after the murders.

  B Breezer’s Hill, Elizabeth’s home from late 1885 or early 1886 until the end of that year.

  C Bucks Row (Polly Nichols, d. 31st August 1888).

  D 29 Hanbury Street (Annie Chapman, d. 8th September, 1888).

  E Dutfield’s Yard, Berner Street (Elizabeth Stride, d. 30th September, 1888)

  F Mitre Square (Catherine Eddowes, d. 30th September, 1888)

  G Miller’s Court, Dorset Street (Elizabeth Weston Craig a.k.a. Mary Jane Kelly, d. 9th November, 1888)

  H Spitalfields market

  I Christ Church, Spitalfields

  The homicidal impulse may have developed from a revengeful or brooding condition of the mind … the murderer in external appearance is quite likely to be a quiet inoffensive looking man, probably middle-aged and neatly and respectably
dressed.

  Report to the Metropolitan Police by Mr. Thomas Bond FRCS,

  Surgeon and Lecturer in Forensic Medicine to the Westminster Hospital, London.

  10th November 1888

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Mystery

  At some time in either late 1885 or early 1886 a young woman arrived in the East End of London.1 She arrived suddenly and anonymously, and people wondered what such an attractive woman – who was apparently used to living comfortably and riding out in carriages – was doing in the worst stews of the London docks. When she left it again, some two and a half years later, it would be in her coffin and still no-one was any the wiser as to who she was or what had brought her there. Despite that, when her brutally murdered body was found in a squalid room in Spitalfields on the morning of 9th November 1888, she became overnight one of the best-known and most tragic characters in British criminal history. She became famous not because of who she was but because of who had killed her. His name, until now, has also remained a mystery but her murderer’s nom de guerre is as well-known as any in history. It was Jack the Ripper.

  The crowds that turned out for his victim’s funeral on 19th November brought the streets of East London to a standstill. Her coffin, carried in a glass-sided hearse behind two black-plumed horses, bore the name Marie Jeanette Kelly but few people then or now believed that that was her real name. Marie Jeanette, or Mary Jane as most people knew her, took her real identity to her grave in Leytonstone Catholic cemetery. The arc light of the world’s press, the investigative powers of the greatest police force in the world and the intense scrutiny of hundreds of writers and criminologists since have never succeeded in penetrating the false persona that a frightened young woman carefully encased herself in 127 years ago.

  Her first residence after she came to the East End was in the house of a character famous in the mythology of Jack the Ripper, who until recently has always been known as ‘Mrs. Buki’. The first written appearance of Mrs. Buki was in The Star on 12th November 1888.2 The Star, which had been founded less than a year before, had already become by far the highest circulation newspaper in Britain. After the news of Mary Jane’s murder burst upon the world on 9th November, the newspaper sent one of its reporters into the streets of Wapping in an attempt to shed some light on her shadowy background. Other newspapers and the Press Association did the same but the anonymous newshound from The Star succeeded in uncovering more detail than any of the others, possibly because his employer’s bulging purse was capable of loosening more tongues.

  He reported that the woman, who had previously been employed at an upmarket house of ill-repute near Knightsbridge, had ‘suddenly drifted into the East-end’. Although the words ‘suddenly’ and ‘drifted’ don’t belong naturally together, it was clear that most people who knew her believed that Mary Jane had left her previous haunts in something of a hurry – taking refuge in the anonymity of the poorest and most crowded part of the capital – but from who or what she was fleeing remained, like the girl herself, a mystery.

  The Star reporter went on to say that Mrs. Buki resided somewhere off St. George’s Street, the polite name for the westernmost end of the notorious thoroughfare otherwise known as the Ratcliffe Highway. The Highway, as most locals knew it, was a long road running parallel to the River Thames, skirting the complex of docks that started just downstream of the Tower of London.3 It ran to the north of the high dockyard walls, many of which are still standing although the docks they once protected have almost all passed into history. In 1886, when Mary Jane arrived on the scene, the Highway consisted largely of chandlers’ shops, public houses, opium dens and brothels, all catering to the constantly changing population of seamen whilst their ships were berthed in what was then the largest port in the world. Mrs. Buki apparently ran an enterprise of the last kind and the newcomer, who was, by all accounts, younger and prettier than most of the women who plied their trade around the streets of Wapping, soon became part of her household.

  She did not, it seems, stay long with Mrs. Buki and within a matter of weeks moved to a nearby establishment run by a Mrs. Mary McCarthy4. Her house was on the corner of Breezer’s Hill and Pennington Street, facing the 14ft wall which formed the boundary of the huge and malodorous Western Basin of the London Docks. Even by the standards of the docks it was an unattractive place but no doubt, being close to the dockyard gates, it had the advantage of being one of the first premises of its kind that sailors came across on their first run ashore after a long voyage.

  It is from the time of her arrival with Mrs. McCarthy that a clearer picture of the mysterious newcomer emerges. Many of the details are based on the investigations conducted by The Star reporter and published on 12th November. They are recollections of events that happened up to three years earlier drawn from a number of different sources and, not surprisingly, the particulars vary according to whom the reporter was talking to. The most voluble was Mrs. Elizabeth Phoenix, who claimed to be Mrs. McCarthy’s sister. She had presented herself at Leman Street police station on the evening of the previous day, two days after the hideously mutilated body of a young woman had been discovered in Miller’s Court, Spitalfields and the day before the inquest was due to open at Shoreditch town hall5. She told the police that she believed that the victim might have been the same young woman who had lodged with her sister in Pennington Street between two and three years previously. Very soon it was established that she was correct and it was probably a policeman from Leman Street who tipped off The Star’s reporter in return, no doubt, for a small consideration.

  It was by the time she had moved from Mrs. Buki’s that the mystery woman had begun using the name Mary Jane Kelly, despite the fact that she had initially told Mrs. McCarthy that she was Welsh6. There is nothing surprising in her choice of name. It has been estimated that in 1880 between 70 and 80 percent of the prostitutes in London were Irish, the result like so much other Irish emigration, of the successive famines that had swept the country since the potato blight had first appeared in 18457. Because of this the word Kelly was frequently used as a synonym for a prostitute and many ‘unfortunates’, as lower class prostitutes were known, used it whenever they needed an alias.

  The stranger soon changed her story to one that sat better with her adopted name, saying that she was in fact Irish, having been born in Limerick, and taken to Wales as a baby when her father sought employment in the iron industry8. Few people appear to have been taken in by this however. An unnamed woman who knew her later, when she was lodging at a doss house in Thrawl Street, stated categorically that she was Welsh and that she spoke the language fluently. It is yet another of the enduring riddles that surround the girl who called herself Mary Jane Kelly; if she was actually Welsh why would she have wanted to appear to be Irish? Welsh or Irish however, most people agreed that she was better educated than other girls of her sort and, according to Mrs. McCarthy, she was ‘no mean artist’.

  Mrs. McCarthy and her sister were puzzled and fascinated by the new arrival. She was a different class of girl from the raddled dockyard prostitutes they were used to. She claimed to have worked in an upmarket brothel run by a Frenchwoman in the West End before coming to Wapping and, shortly before she arrived, to have been taken to France by a gentleman who they assumed was one of her clients9. It was incomprehensible to them why a woman who boasted of having lived the life of a lady and of riding around Knightsbridge in a carriage should have exchanged that life for the noisome, dangerous streets of the East End.

  The identity of Mrs. McCarthy is well established (although, at the time and until recent research established her true name, she has usually been referred to as Mrs. Carthy or Carty), but that of Mrs. Buki remained a mystery for more than a century. Through a recent brilliant piece of Internet detective work by husband and wife team, Neal and Jenni Sheldon, it is now known that she was in fact a Dutch widow by the name of Boekü, a word for which the nearest English pronunciation is Buki or Bookie10. At the time that Mary Jane knew h
er, she lived with a man called Johannes Morganstern, a skinner in the fur trade, who occupied 79 Pennington Street, next door to Mrs. McCarthy’s.

  The cause of her leaving Mrs Boekü’s was most likely to have been arrears of rent, although drink may also have played a part for Mary Jane, who according to Mrs. Phoenix was, ‘one of the most decent and nicest girls you could meet’ when sober, became a veritable fury on the occasions when she had one too many. Moving next door did not, apparently, enable her to escape her debts and Mary Jane travelled one day to visit the French lady in the company of Mrs. Boekü, to collect a box containing expensive gowns that she had left there. The fact that her former landlady bothered to accompany her troublesome exlodger all the way across town strongly suggests that she didn’t trust her out of her sight, and since no-one in the East End ever subsequently saw Mary Jane attired in such finery, it may reasonably be assumed that no sooner had she retrieved the gowns than she was made to hand them over in lieu of the missing rent. It is this report and a similar one by a Press Association reporter quoted in the Echo on the same day that are the only independent corroborations of the story that she later told her lover Joe Barnett, of having once worked in a ‘gay house’* in the West End.

  Breezer’s Hill is little changed in appearance today from when Mary Jane knew it. It is a narrow cobbled alleyway which slopes down from the Highway to Pennington Street, overshadowed by tall, red-brick warehouses. Although today the warehouses have been gutted and converted into offices and smart loft conversions it is easy enough to imagine what it might have looked like on a winter’s night in 1886 when the few gaslights barely penetrated the swirling fog rolling in from the river. If Mary Jane really had been used to the stuccoed mansions of Knightsbridge – and her visit with Mrs. Boekü suggests that she was – then the greasy cobblestones and soot-stained brickwork of Breezer’s Hill must have made a dismal contrast.