The Real Mary Kelly (26 page)

It was a measure of the growing desperation of the police that on the day of the inquest Scotland Yard issued a statement that read:

This almost unprecedented action resulted from a Cabinet meeting that had taken place in the Foreign Office on Saturday 10th November, one of the very few times that the Cabinet has ever met at a weekend when the country was not at war. It bore the signature of Charles Warren who, by 10th November, had in fact resigned from the post of Commissioner. As a new one had not been appointed by the 12th, it was clearly felt best if it went out under Warren’s signature.

In due course the police in Limerick, Dublin and Cardiff reported that no trace of any of Mary Jane Kelly’s family or relations could be found in any of those cities nor was there anyone serving in the 2nd Battalion of the Scots Guards who admitted to being the brother of the murdered girl. It was becoming more and more clear that Mary Jane was not who she had said she was. In fact the official certificate of death issued by Coroner Macdonald gave her name as ‘Marie Jeanette Kelly otherwise Davies
¹³²
’. On 17th November, when it was signed, there was sufficient doubt about her true identity to issue an ambiguous certificate but one that probably came closer than anyone knew to the truth.

As the police hunt for the murderer continued the interest of the international press reached a climax and then, as no further killings ensued, began to diminish. There were many false alarms and arrests. Large numbers of these were precipitated by the foolish behaviour of the men concerned, either inadvertent or, in many cases, intentional. Many people sought to profit out of their experiences. An anonymous would-be reporter contrived to get himself arrested twice on 23rd and 24th November at Leman Street police station and then published an account in a penny pamphlet entitled ‘
The Whitechapel Atrocities. Arrest of a Newspaper Reporter
’ that he hawked around the city
¹³³
. He described having spent four nights in Spitalfields and Whitechapel ‘in order to obtain, for journalistic purposes, information not so much in regard to the murders as to the life, habits and customs of the denizens of these dark and dismal localities’. He apparently spent some time in a public house ‘hard by Spitalfields Church’ where he encountered ‘a black-visaged, thick set, desperate fellow, with a savage look in his dark eyes’. Whether or not such a person was a regular customer of the Ten Bells – and almost certainly he was not – it fitted most people’s perception of the Ripper perfectly.

The unknown reporter himself was questioned closely as to his whereabouts on the night of 8th and 9th November. Only when things began to look serious did he finally tell the police that he had been at home with his parents on the night in question. When asked what he was doing at home he chose to reply, ‘I was doing indoors what the police of Spitalfields seemed to be doing on their beats – sleeping.’ It was not perhaps the most judicious of answers and he could count himself lucky that he was released with only a caution at 4am on Sunday 25th November.

Gradually, with no further killings over the next six months, public anxiety lessened. The police kept up their investigations and every lead was assiduously followed up, but as the days passed the leads became fewer. There were other killings in the Whitechapel area; the body of an unknown woman was found under a railway arch in Pinchin Street on 10th September 1889 and that of Alice McKenzie in Castle Alley in July of that year, both with their throats cut, but it was obvious to Dr. Phillips and the police that they did not carry the full signature of the Ripper. A boy of 8 had his throat cut and was eviscerated in
Bradford in December 1888 and Phillips was dispatched north to examine the body. In his opinion it was a copycat killing but not by the Ripper. A man was arrested for it and later acquitted.

Perhaps because the killer who called himself by the almost pantomime name of Jack the Ripper whilst carrying out such savage killings and mutilations was never caught, public interest has remained high and, if anything, even increased with the passage of time. On average, two new books about the events of three months in 1888 appear every year. Inevitably there have been conspiracy theories, most of them preposterous and based on absolutely no evidence. Prince Albert Victor, Eddie to his family, may have been a louche, promiscuous man like his father but he was not Jack the Ripper. Nor were Sir William Withey Gull, Queen Victoria’s elderly physician, or Walter Sickert, the first of the English Impressionist artists. It was not a depressed and probably paedophile barrister called Montague John Druitt whose corpse was fished out of the Thames a month after the last killing, nor was it a mad American doctor called Tumblety. Neither the Masons nor the Fenians were involved in a conspiracy to kill East End prostitutes. If the latter had been, it would not have been in their nature to keep quiet about it.

That is not to say that there was not a conspiracy. There was, but it was a conspiracy of silence by a few people – including Elizabeth’s brother John – who felt themselves in some way responsible for what had happened and guilty that they had not intervened sooner.

In some ways John might be considered to be the sixth victim of Jack the Ripper. He was close to his elder sister and initially kept in touch with her when she disappeared from Argyle Square, which was close to his own lodgings with the family of a Welsh dairyman in Leigh Street. He was a talented young man – apprenticed as a cabinet maker to Maples, he gained his Master’s qualification at the remarkably young age of 24. His skill at producing the marquetry and decorative cabinet work that made Maples famous throughout the world ensured that his name is recorded to this day by the Victoria and Albert Museum. When he became engaged to the daughter of a prosperous Caernarvonshire owner of a chain of chemists shops his future must have seemed assured.

Although he visited Elizabeth whilst she was in Breezer’s Hill, she may have considered it too risky to remain in touch with her brother once she decamped for Spitalfields. Joe Barnett was not aware of him having been in evidence during this period although he knew that Johnto had visited her at Breezer’s Hill. When the massacred remains were found in Miller’s Court, John had no immediate reason to connect the blue-eyed girl who called herself Marie Jeanette Kelly with his sister but gradually – as the months passed, and Elizabeth failed to make any contact with the family she had once been so close to – the nagging possibility took root and grew until it became a certainty. By that time he was married with a young family of his own. His wife and her family were strict North Welsh Calvinistic Methodists and it is doubtful if he ever told them about Elizabeth. Instead, as the guilt for not having done more to protect his vulnerable sister grew to become an intolerable burden, he took solace in the bottle and suddenly, around 1892, he gave notice to Maples. The V&A record him as having ‘left of his own accord’ and to this day there is still mystification about why one of the leading craftsmen of the late Victorian era should suddenly have vanished into oblivion.

After that for Johnto and his young family it was downhill all the way. In a restless urge to distance himself from London he took a succession of ever more menial jobs all over Britain, in Canterbury, Portsea, Gloucester, Margate, Chester and Wigan, before finally taking his wife and his younger children on an assisted passage to Australia in 1913. By that time, his hands shaking and skills ruined by drink, he could only describe himself as a carpenter. He was no more successful there and eventually he deserted his family and returned to England where on New Year’s Day 1932 he left the workhouse which had been his home for many months and walked out into the grey waters of Christchurch harbour. His jacket containing a suicide note was found neatly folded in a shelter on the quayside but his body washed in and out with the tide for three weeks before being spotted by a fisherman.

Johnto had been a hard-working, ambitious and talented young man. Like his sister he was warm-hearted and popular with his family and friends but something happened around 1890 to change him into a depressed, alcoholic wreck. Almost certainly it was the growing suspicion of who the woman in
Room 13 really was. He seems to have told no-one else until shortly before his own death, when he blurted out in an emotional outburst to his own youngest son John that his sister, John’s aunt, had been an upmarket London prostitute and that she had come to a bad end. No more than that and it was a secret that his son in turn did not pass on until shortly before his own death in 1996. The legacy of Miller’s Court had lived on for nearly 50 years before it claimed the last victim of Jack the Ripper.

Some time after the murder in Miller’s Court, Francis left his lodgings in the East End and returned to live, yet again, with his elderly parents in Hammersmith. Exactly how soon after is not known but to have left abruptly and too soon afterwards would have risked drawing attention to himself. If he had been writing for the
East London Advertiser
during the period of the murders he may have considerably advanced his journalistic career, for the accounts that paper carried are full and vivid and were syndicated to other newspapers. With his inside knowledge, a cynic might say, it would not have been difficult to write pieces of such conviction and immediacy. Whichever paper he was contributing to, it seems to have done him some good for early the following year he was appointed editor of the
Indicator and West London News
, a prestigious local newspaper serving Paddington, Kilburn, Marylebone, Shepherds Bush and a large segment of West London.

Although he probably started the job in about April of 1889, the first recognisable piece carrying his initials F.C. at its foot was an article in the edition of Tuesday 18th June 1889 entitled ‘Sketches in Pen and Pencil’. It was an account of a journey by canal from Paddington to Perivale and included an
accomplished sketch of the lepers’ window in the local church by a Mr. W.G. Kemp. This suggests that not only was Francis on the editorial staff of the
Indicator
by this date – just seven months after the final Ripper murder – but that he was probably well established, since he would hardly have been entrusted with the writing of such an important piece with an expensive illustration if he was not already well thought of.

He probably moved in person from the East End in April or May of 1889, since the Mile End Road address was still on the divorce petition when he appointed Thomas Webster of 3 Howard Street, Strand, as his solicitor on 29th March
¹³⁴
. His motive for appointing a new solicitor to continue a divorce action against a woman he already knew to be dead, for the very good reason that he himself had killed her, might at first sight seem odd. In fact it was probably a clever move. It would have cost nothing to simply appoint Webster and in doing so it would keep the divorce action alive and indicate to anyone sniffing around that Francis believed his wife to be still living. The fact that there are no further entries of any sort in the notes indicate that neither he nor his new lawyer did anything actively to try to trace Elizabeth. By the time of the census of 1891 Francis was definitely living once more with his elderly parents at 10 Andover Road, Hammersmith, which his father had somewhat pretentiously re-named ‘Ralahine Cottage’. In that census he described himself as married although, ten years later in 1901, he had reverted to the status of single
¹³⁵
.

For almost the whole of his life until he started to write editorial material for the
Indicator
, Francis had been mute to history with few exceptions such as the piece he had contributed on the subject of a local centenarian to
The Times
under his own name in 1875. He certainly wrote many thousands of words of copy for other newspapers during his lifetime but, as a penny-a-liner they did not carry his signature and so it is impossible to identify them as his work so many years later. It is not even certain which newspapers he worked for during this period. Now, having achieved the position of editor, suddenly Francis has a voice which is still audible today.

The paper was published twice a week, on Tuesdays and Fridays. On page 2, below the banner, there was always a weighty leading article on a subject of national or local importance. Following that was a column entitled ‘Notes
and Comments’ signed by ‘Citizen’ who is certainly – at least in part – Francis, although others on the staff of the paper may also have contributed occasional material. There are contextual and stylistic features that link the copy with many other articles and poems that he contributed over the initials F.C.. He was almost certainly contracted to write the leader and Notes and Comments, and paid an additional fee for anything he wrote over and above that, possibly to fill space when news and advertisements were not sufficient to occupy all the available space.

He was an excellent editor. The quality of material, both editorial and news copy, in the
Indicator
during his tenure stands out as far superior to that of the majority of local newspapers at the time. He introduced many innovative features such as a children’s section and a women’s correspondent writing not about the usual domestic matters but about controversial issues to do with women’s rights. He attracted more advertising since the paper had to add extra pages to accommodate it and this must have meant that he had increased its circulation. His meticulous, obsessional attention to detail fitted him ideally for an editorial role and it is no wonder that the proprietor regretted losing him when he resigned in 1896.