Jack the Ripper Part 5: Mary Kelly

             From August until the end of September, Whitechapel, London was lost in a nightmare. The murders and mutilations of four prostitutes had splashed the front page of every newspaper, reminding everyone that the phantom killer, Jack the Ripper was lurking in the shadows, ready to strike. People waited in anticipation throughout the entire month of October for another body to be found. It was quite on the East side of London, just long enough for everyone to let their guard down.

                       

Mary Janet Kelly

            There is very little history on the last victim of Jack the Ripper. Several people knew the twenty three year old girl, but few if any knew the truth about her past. Some of her friends believed that she had been born in Limerick, Ireland and married a coal miner when she was sixteen. She had told some friends that her husband had died in a mining accident so she had moved to London, England to work in a brothel on the West End. She told other friends that she had moved to France for a while to live with another man, but didn’t like it in France so she chose to live in London instead. None of the stories she told friends could be verified. Her past is a mystery.

            In early 1888 she did meet and move in with a man by the name of Joseph Barnett. They lived in a one room apartment on the back of 26 Dorset, Spitalfields.  Joseph worked as a fish porter; however he found it difficult to find steady work. Mary eventually took to prostitution to help pay the rent.

            Mary was well liked by many people in the area. She was described by many as a sweet and beautiful girl who liked to sing Irish songs and enjoyed playing games and visiting with everyone. She was known to have a dark side as well. Mary, like all of the other victims, had a drinking problem. People liked to refer her as Dark Mary when she had been drinking because she could be known to be abusive and violent.

            In October of 1888, Mary moved her friend, a fellow prostitute by the name of Julia into the already cramped apartment. Joseph and Julia did not get along causing Mary and Joseph to fight. Finally, Joseph felt he had enough and moved out. Julia moved out shortly after, leaving Mary to live in the apartment alone.

            Although Mary and Joseph were no longer living together, they remained friends and Joseph visited Mary often. On November 8^th, 1888 he went to Mary’s apartment to visit with her around 8pm. She was home with another friend Maria Harvey. They spent roughly an hour with Mary before both left. Joseph went back to the lodging house where he was staying. It would be the last time that he would see Mary alive.

            One of Mary’s neighbors stated that she could hear Mary singing later that evening. The neighbor left around 11 pm and when she returned at 1 am Mary was no longer singing.

            At roughly 2 am a friend of Mary’s, George Hutchinson was hanging out in the alley behind her apartment. Mary stepped out of her apartment and they began talking. He stated that she had asked to borrow about six pence which he didn’t have. Disappointed that Hutchinson didn’t have the money, Mary turned to another man, someone that Hutchinson did not know but described as being of Jewish descent. She began flirting with the stranger and the two of them headed for her apartment. Hutchinson stated to police later that he did not like the looks of the man who went with Mary to her apartment later that night and waited for a while to see if they would leave the apartment, but he never saw either one of them come back out. After a while he left.

            Two neighbors reported waking up around 4 am to the faint cries of murder. Even though there had been several gruesome murders in the area recently, the neighborhood was fairly used to fighting and crimes, so the cry of murder was not uncommon; neither neighbor went to investigate the cries.

            The next morning the landlord sent his assistant to knock on Mary’s door and collect her rent. She was six weeks behind in rent and the assistant was to evict her if she did not pay. The assistant went to her door and knocked on it but there was no answer. He assumed that she was at home and was refusing to answer the door, so he decided to go to the window and look in. The window had been previously broken by Mary several nights before and was covered by an old coat. The assistant reached inside and moved the coat so he could see in. What he saw made him sick with disbelief and horror.

            The assistant ran back to the landlord and cried that there was blood everywhere. Both the assistant and the landlord rushed back to the apartment so the landlord could look inside. Mary was lying in the bed, completely mutilated. There were chunks of flesh on the nightstand by her bed and blood everywhere. They both ran to the local police station for help.

 

            Dr Thomas Bond and Dr George Bagster Phillips examined the body. Phillips  and Bond timed her death to about 12 hours before the examination. Phillips suggested that the extensive mutilations would have taken two hours to perform,  and Bond noted that rigor mortis set in as they were examining the body, indicating that death occurred between 2 and 8:00 a.m.  Bond's notes read:

The body was lying naked in the middle of the bed, the shoulders flat but the axis of the body inclined to the left side of the bed. The head was turned on the left cheek. The left arm was close to the body with the forearm flexed at a right angle and lying across the abdomen. The right arm was slightly abducted from the body and rested on the mattress. The elbow was bent, the forearm supine with the fingers clenched. The legs were wide apart, the left thigh at right angles to the trunk and the right forming an obtuse angle with the pubis.
The whole of the surface of the abdomen and thighs was removed and the abdominal cavity emptied of its viscera. The breasts were cut off, the arms mutilated by several jagged wounds and the face hacked beyond recognition of the features. The tissues of the neck were severed all round down to the bone.
The viscera were found in various parts viz: the uterus and kidneys with one breast under the head, the other breast by the right foot, the liver between the feet, the intestines by the right side and the spleen by the left side of the body. The flaps removed from the abdomen and thighs were on a table.
The bed clothing at the right corner was saturated with blood, and on the floor beneath was a pool of blood covering about two feet square. The wall by the right side of the bed and in a line with the neck was marked by blood which had struck it in several places.
The face was gashed in all directions, the nose, cheeks, eyebrows, and ears being partly removed. The lips were blanched and cut by several incisions running obliquely down to the chin. There were also numerous cuts extending irregularly across all the features.
The neck was cut through the skin and other tissues right down to the vertebrae, the fifth and sixth being deeply notched. The skin cuts in the front of the neck showed distinct ecchymosis. The air passage was cut at the lower part of the larynx through the cricoid cartilage.
Both breasts were more or less removed by circular incisions, the muscle down to the ribs being attached to the breasts. The intercostals between the fourth, fifth, and sixth ribs were cut through and the contents of the thorax visible through the openings.
The skin and tissues of the abdomen from the costal arch to the pubes were removed in three large flaps. The right thigh was denuded in front to the bone, the flap of skin, including the external organs of generation, and part of the right buttock. The left thigh was stripped of skin fascia, and muscles as far as the knee.
The left calf showed a long gash through skin and tissues to the deep muscles and reaching from the knee to five inches above the ankle. Both arms and forearms had extensive jagged wounds.
The right thumb showed a small superficial incision about one inch long, with extravasation of blood in the skin, and there were several abrasions on the back of the hand moreover showing the same condition.
On opening the thorax it was found that the right lung was minimally adherent by old firm adhesions. The lower part of the lung was broken and torn away. The left lung was intact. It was adherent at the apex and there were a few adhesions over the side. In the substances of the lung there were several nodules of consolidation.
The pericardium was open below and the heart absent. In the abdominal cavity there was some partly digested food of fish and potatoes, and similar food was found in the remains of the stomach attached to the intestines.  

Phillips believed that Kelly was killed by a slash to the throat and the mutilations performed afterwards.  Bond stated in a report that the knife used was about 1 in (25 mm) wide and at least 6 in (150 mm) long, but did not believe that the murderer had any medical training or knowledge. He wrote:

In each case the mutilation was inflicted by a person who had no scientific nor anatomical knowledge. In my opinion he does not even possess the technical knowledge of a butcher or horse slaughterer or a person accustomed to cut up dead animals.

             Kelly was buried in a public grave at St Patrick's Roman Catholic Cemetery on 19 November 1888. Her obituary is as follows:

The funeral of the murdered woman Kelly has once more been postponed. Deceased was a Catholic, and the man Barnett, with whom she lived, and her landlord, Mr. M. Carthy, desired to see her remains interred with the ritual of her Church. The funeral will, therefore, take place tomorrow [19 Nov] in the Roman Catholic Cemetery at Leytonstone. The hearse will leave the Shoreditch mortuary at half-past twelve.
The remains of Mary Janet Kelly, who was murdered on Nov. 9 in Miller's-court, Dorset-street, Spitalfields, were brought yesterday morning from Shoreditch mortuary to the cemetery at Leytonstone, where they were interred.
No family member could be found to attend the funeral.

            This murder was the most brutal in the entire investigation. Investigators and historians alike believe that because this was done in the privacy of Mary’s apartment instead of in the street, Jack the Ripper took his time to do everything he wanted to do to the body. It was also The Ripper’s Swan song. This would be the last murder considered to be officially Jack the Ripper’s.