Classic Scottish Murder Stories (24 page)

It is understood that two relatives of John McInnes, a brother and a sister, agreed to have samples taken for DNA analysis and that the match with the Bible John stain was sufficiently close for an exhumation of Mclnnes' body to be sought. Again, the relatives gave permission. Great distress was undoubtedly caused. The grave was opened on February 1st 1996. Unfortunately, the coffin of the mother who had died aged 91 had first to be uplifted. DNA tests referred to Cambridge University and the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Berlin proved negative. Even if the result had been positive, the authorities may not have realised the abhorrence felt by many people of different disciplines. Going on a fishing expedition, disturbing graves, a profound taboo, especially when relatives are still living, seems to be a novel procedure, like cloning, which needs to be watched.

There is a view that it is no worse, and in the interests of science and justice, than the exhumation of a body to determine true cause of death upon suspicion, but the cases are not on equal terms. A murder victim cries out from the grave for justice. If no foul play is discovered, no harm has been done. A suspected husband, say, has been vindicated. A murderer disclosed by DNA in his own grave cannot be convicted. The relatives of his victim are partially satisfied by the revealed truth. It is a moral, not a legal justice. But if the grave of an innocent person is disturbed, there is neither legal nor moral satisfaction. Judging from the precedent of the McInnes disaster, the relatives of the person traduced could feel relief but would have preferred the uncertainty of not knowing. Elimination of multiple suspects dead from suicide or natural causes by sampling from grave to grave would clearly be indefensible.

T
he compulsion to make false confession, to enjoy a fleeting vainglory, be important, a somebody, the focus of attention, is a little more frightening when attached to a pretendant to Jack the Ripper, because a nasty murder or two will often have preceded the claim.

The most famous Ripper confessor was undoubtedly Dr Thomas Neill Cream, the Lambeth poisoner, who fed strychnine to prostitutes. The legend is that Billington the hangman heard him say, ‘I am Jack the ...' just as the bolt was drawn. An obscurer case, on the Continent, is that of a Frenchman named Oulie, who ‘called himself Jack the Ripper' and was condemned to penal servitude for life at the Aveyron Assizes in 1889. He had butchered a shrieking woman in her own room, fled, and jumped into a pond with suicidal intent. Fished out by pursuing gendarmes and put up for trial, he argued in his own defence that the dead woman had ruined him physically for life, and therefore he had a right to his revenge. Sometimes the false confessor is insane and suffers from a delusion that he has actually offended as he insists. There is also a type of severe obsessive-compulsive, who wonders, as the notion preys on him, if he
might
have done it. Or there is the unsatisfactory case of the befuddled alcoholic who wonders if
he
might have done it. (As happened to Philip Yale Drew, the actor suspected in 1929 of murdering a tobacconist in Reading.)

William Henry Bury, the Dundee Ripper, self-confessed Jack, was a known alcoholic, but (the author believes) may well have been an
insane
alcoholic. He has become of the colourful
company of Jack the Ripper suspects, and there has been many a worse candidate. The dates have to be right (as they are here): i.e. he has to be placed in the Metropolis between (arguably) August and November 1888, and decent propinquity to Whitechapel is persuasive, the more so if the suspect has a reason to be on the streets (as here). However, the method of killing and the nature of the rippings have to be an exact match (as here they are not) for the suspect to be declared of classic cut. Also, funnily enough, the mere fact that someone said he was Jack the Ripper somehow makes it the less likely that he was so.

Not a great deal of material has appeared so far about William Henry Bury, even though there is a piquancy in the concept of Jack removed to Scotland and hanged there, his identity disclaimed by the London Establishment. Euan MacPherson from Montrose announced in the
Sunday Mail
of January 10th 1988, that he believed that Bury was the Ripper, and that he had completed a book to that effect. A photograph of a young-looking Euan in his sweater, in the mode of Colin Wilson at the time of his
The Outsider,
one elbow on a fine pile of manuscript, accompanies the feature. Sadly, the book has never appeared (at this time of writing) although it would be received with great interest. A good entry on Bury was included in the
Scots Black Kalendar
and Donald M Fraser, in
Scottish Mysteries
(Mercat Press, Edinburgh, 1977) has gone to contemporary sources to produce a fresh and detailed account.

Bury was born in Wolverhampton in 1859, that landmark year of the publication of
On the Origin of Species,
but what was Darwin to him? Euan MacPherson, in a taster for his full, promised book, a feature appearing in
The Scots Magazine
(January 1988) revealed the family history which his research had produced. Bury had an elder brother and sister and, most importantly, his mother became insane when Bury was six months old. She died in Worcester County Asylum – that is ‘Powick', lately toppled to dust and covered over by estate
houses. It was one of the great county asylums, erected out of sheer philanthropism, and sheltered many poor souls, some of whom yet wander the streets as if this were the Middle Ages, and are now less well received than then. The author visited the site in the summer of 1996 and saw the last long hall turned into a shell, the hills of Malvern showing through cavernous gaps in its tenacious structure. There are no details of the mother's illness, nor of the father.

When he was 18 years old, Bury moved to London. In the year of the Ripper, 1888, aged about 29, Bury married, in April, a girl named Ellen Elliott. By then he was already an alcoholic, improvident and violent. Most people imagine Jack the Ripper as a loner, constitutionally wifeless, but the Yorkshire Ripper, Peter William Sutcliffe, is a glaring proof of the exception. Bury's habitat was Bow, a poor, crowded part of the East End, nothing to do with Bow Bells, Cheapside, and Bow Street, Strand. If not quite contiguous to Whitechapel, it lies only a mile or so, depending on your point of reference, to the broad north-east. If you lived there in 1888, both districts probably felt like much the same territory.

It is still possible to find in directories the three known streets in which Bury lived. There may have been more: he was certainly a cheat and a bilker. He lodged with an Elizabeth Haynes in Swaton Road (the first matrimonial home); at11 Blackthorn Street; and at 3 Spanby Road. All were within a quarter-mile triangle in Bow. Limehouse Cut, a terrifying canal, ran south-west to the docks. Bury was an employed man, although he was only just employable. He worked as a sand and sawdust seller for James Martin, of Bromley, who also employed Ellen Bury, his wife, as a domestic servant. This
cannot
be, as given, Bromley, Kent, a salubrious suburb some ten miles southwest of London, but rather Bromley-by-Bow, with its self-explanatory name. It was in Bow, incidentally, that an earlier bogeyman, Spring Heeled Jack, capered up to Bearbinder Cottage, Bearbinder Lane and assaulted Miss Jane Alsop.

As for Bury's trade, the delivery of sand and sawdust has possibilities. Donald Fraser comments that he would have known the byways of Whitechapel as well as anyone. Euan MacPherson proposes that he could have kept a set of clean clothing in the cart to change into if bloodstained. We may suppose that sand and sawdust were in demand for shovelling over the floors of shops, lodging-houses, public houses, and slaughterhouses – with which Jack the Ripper has often been linked. Neat as it is to imagine Bury as a frequenter of the Whitechapel abattoirs, the reality may be that his horse merely plodded around Bow and Bromley! Sand and sawdust is a heavy load, and a large, slow draught-horse would have been needed to convey it.

The marriage, a fatal choice for Ellen, was doomed from the beginning. Her charm for him was that she had an impressive inheritance of shares left to her by an aunt who had died seven years previously. It took him a couple of months to winkle out this treasure, when, in June, he prevailed upon her to cash-in her holdings to realise the sum of £200 – a large amount indeed for a working-class couple at that time. This, too, of course, was doomed. His attraction for her is unknowable: there is a physical description – a small, thin man, five foot two inches in height and weighing a little over nine stone. Cockney sparrow springs to mind, but he came from Wolverhampton!

Soon, indecently soon, on the Saturday after the wedding, Bury's violence came into the open. His landlady heard screams and found him standing over his new bride, whom he had knocked to the floor, a large knife in his hand with which he was threatening to stab her. The argument, naturally, had been about money. For the rest of their stay with her, the landlady, at Ellen's request, held the key to the Burys' door. Matters did not improve: Bury would spend all his wages on drink, and sometimes his employer's takings as well. There were regular beatings at home. In the August of 1888, they vacated their lodgings, saying that they were going to Wolverhampton. In
fact, they took rooms at 11 Blackthorn Street, Bow, until December, and that, then, would have been a very famous address as Jack the Ripper's lair, if Jack he had been.

Their next home was at 3 Spanby Street, but disaster had struck – Mr Martin of Bromley had, by now, sacked his useless driver – and within a month the broken pair visited Ellen's married sister, Margaret Corney, who begged Ellen to leave her husband, but she would not. Bury told Margaret Corney that they were going away, not to Wolverhampton, but to Dundee, where he had secured jobs for both of them with a jute firm. They had no known family or friends in Scotland, and this was a drastic uprooting, or reinvention of themselves, for a couple in such humble circumstances, rather like an emigration. The decision has been thought to be mysterious, and certainly Dundee was the chief centre of the jute trade, but Bury was to make no effort to gain employment there. If he were mad, he might have entertained some delusion about Dundee.

Somehow, there was enough money left to book their passage on the steamer
Cambria,
leaving Gravesend on January 19th, to arrive in Dundee the following evening, a Sunday. They spent that night on board and disembarked on the Monday morning, with no home and no job and very little cash. They walked the cold streets, all their worldly goods humped on Bury's thin, bowed back in a large white-wood box which he had had specially made in London. Whether or not this coffin-box shows premeditation, and was always intended for a double purpose, who can say? In this guise, they obtained lodgings, late in the afternoon, with a Mrs Jane Robertson at 43 Union Street. There they stayed for only eight days, because Bury said the rent of eight shillings a week was too dear. The landlady was not sorry to see them go; she was so afraid of Bury that she would not enter his room, and asked her daughter to deal with him when he was leaving.

Bearing their box as penitents used to bear their coffins on their backs, off they went on January 29th, the rough, rootless,
unlikeable couple, out of place in Dundee, to move into their new home, which Bury had already acquired by a gross cheat. Not too drunk, he had gone to estate agents in the Cowgate and enquired about two-roomed flats to let. They had given him the keys to view a basement flat under a shop in a tenement at 113 Princes Street, and he had held on to them. Now they moved in, quasi-squatters, with no intention of paying rent. Not too drunk, he had, meanwhile, turned to the Church in the hope of a handout, but the Reverend Edward John Gough, of St Paul's Episcopal Church, had been unmoved, even though Bury had brought along his bruised wife for extra sympathy. Mr Gough suggested that he should try the shipyards. Bury threw in a lie or two when the minister asked for a reference from London clergy: as it happened, although he and his wife had attended several churches, he had not made himself known to any clergyman.

The last free fortnight of Bury's life passed in a grey alcoholic haze, shot through with one crimson episode. Heaven knows how he found the money. Handy at 129 Princes Street was a public house run by Alexander Patterson, who proved friendly, and there the London misfit spent his days, a regular, slumped, out of commission. Another habitué was David Walker, a house painter, perhaps of a generous disposition, because he spent time with Bury. Back home in her bare, unfurnished rooms, with the long box a principal feature, her few personal possessions emptied out around her on the floor, cold, waiting passively for the next assault, Ellen eked out her last fortnight on earth. She made one friend of her own, Marjory Smith, who had the shop above: she naturally asked why the Burys found themselves in Dundee, and Ellen's explanation was that she had thought that the change might stop her husband's drinking. This seems unlikely to have been the real reason: it was William Bury who made all the life and death decisions in that household.

During this period, Bury acted strangely, in that he
ventured into the public gallery of the Sheriff Court at Dundee and watched the proceedings. He was surely there for a purpose, whether insane or practical. There is no innocent explanation of his desire to acquaint himself with the process of law in Scotland. He was no tourist, sightseer, or Dr Johnson, but a petty criminal soon to sink further into iniquity.

On Monday, February 4th, Bury went with a specific purpose to Mrs Janet Martin's provisions shop, a few doors along Princes Street, and bought a length of rope. ‘This will do nicely, thank you,' he said as he made his selection. Night came – drinking time – and both the Burys, husband and wife, left Patterson's alehouse at closing time. Bury was drunk, and she was ‘reasonably sober'.

In the early hours of the following Tuesday, the 5th, three loud screams woke up David Duncan, a 44-year-old labourer who lived at 101 Princes Street, some 20 to 30 yards away from the Burys' basement, across the communal backyard. He got up and listened for half an hour. He thought that the noises came from the Londoners' flat but he heard no more, his fire was cold and dead, and he went back to bed. From that night onwards, the blind (if there was one, or perhaps it was a part of the fittings) at the Burys' back window on to the yard stayed down.