Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper--Case Closed (49 page)

Police and physicians were of the opinion that the dismemberment was an attempt to conceal the victim’s identity. This conclusion is inconsistent with the killer severing the pelvis at the fourth lumbar and at the hip joints—or essentially removing the victim’s sexual organs and genitalia. One might wonder if there is a similarity between such a mutilation and what the Ripper did when he slashed open the abdomen of his victim and took her uterus and part of her vagina.

When the torso was found on the site of Scotland Yard’s new headquarters, it was bound in old cloth and “a lot of old string of different sorts tied all around in each direction,” said Frederick Wildore, the carpenter who noticed a mysterious shape at six o’clock in the morning on October 2nd, when he reached inside a dark recess of the foundation, looking for his basket of tools. He dragged out the bundle and cut open the string and for a moment did not know what he was looking at. “I thought it was old bacon or something like that,” he said at the inquest. The foundation was a labyrinth of recesses and trenches, and to hide the bundle there could not have been done unless the person knew his way, Wildore claimed. It was “always as dark as the darkest night in the day.”

Adhering to the remains were bits of newspapers that were fragments from an old
Daily Chronicle,
and a blood-saturated six-inch-long, four-inch-wide section of the August 24, 1888, edition of the
Echo,
a daily paper that cost a halfpenny. Sickert was a news addict. A photograph of him in later life shows a studio that is a landfill of newspapers. The
Echo
was a liberal publication that published numerous articles about Sickert throughout his life. In the August 24, 1888, edition, on page 4, is the “Notes & Queries” section with its instructions that all queries and answers must be written on postcards, and one is to refer to the query he is answering by using the number of that query as assigned by the newspaper. Advertising in disguise, the
Echo
warns, “is inadmissible.”

Of eighteen “Answers” on August 24, 1888, five of them were signed “W.S.” They are as follows:

Answer One (3580): OSTEND.—I would not advise “W. B.” to choose Ostend for a fortnight’s holiday; he will be tired of it in two days. It is a show place for dresses, &c., and very expensive. The country around is flat and uninteresting; besides, the roads are all paved with granite. To an English tourist I can recommend the “Yellow House” or “Maison Jaune,” which is kept by an Englishman, close by the railway station or steamboat pier; also the Hotel du Nord. Both are reasonable, but avoid grand hotels. The sands are lovely. No knowledge of French is required.—W.S.

(Ostend was a seaport and resort in Belgium accessible from Dover, and a place Sickert had visited.)

Answer Two (3686): POPULAR OPERAS.—The popularity of
Trovatore
is naturally due to the sweetness of the music and the taking airs. It is not generally accepted as a “high class” music—indeed, I have frequently heard “professional” musicians call it not music at all. For myself, I prefer it to any other opera, except
Don Juan
.—W.S.

Answer Three (3612): PASSPORTS.—I am afraid “An Unfortunate Pole” will have to confine his attention to those countries where no passports are required of which latter there are plenty, and are, besides more pleasant to travel in. I once met a countryman of his who traveled with a borrowed passport; he was caught at it and sent to quod [street slang for prison], where he remained some time.—W.S.

Answer Four (3623): CHANGE OF NAME.—All “Jones” has to do is to take a paint brush, obliterate “Jones” and substitute “Brown.” Of course this will not relieve him from any liabilities as “Jones.” He will simply be “Jones” trading under the name of “Brown.”—W.S.

Answer Five (3627): LETTERS OF NATURALISATION. —In order to obtain these, a foreigner must have resided either five consecutive years, or at least five within the last eight years, in the United Kingdom ; and he must also make a declaration that he intends to reside permanently therein. Strict proofs of this will be required from four British-born householders. —W.S.

To offer answers by using the original query number implies the writer was familiar with the
Echo
and was probably an avid reader of it. To send in five answers is compulsive and in keeping with Sickert’s prolific writing and the stunning number of Ripper letters received by the police and press. Newsprint is a leitmotif that shows up repeatedly in Sickert’s life and in the Ripper’s game playing. A Ripper letter to a police magistrate is written in an exquisite calligraphy on a section of the
Star
newspaper, dated December 4th. The torn-out section of paper includes the notice of an etching exhibition, and on the back of the paper is a sub-headline, “Nobody’s Child.”

Walter Sickert was never sure who he was or where he was from. He was “No Englishman,” to quote the signatory of another Ripper letter. His stage name was “Mr. Nemo” (or “Mr. Nobody”), and in a telegram the Ripper sent to the police (no date, but possibly the late fall of 1888) the Ripper crosses out “Mr. Nobody” as the sender and writes in “Jack the ripper” instead. Sickert wasn’t French but considered himself a French painter. He once wrote that he intended to become a French citizen—which he never did. In another letter he states that in his heart he will always be German.

Most Ripper letters mailed October 20, 1888, through November 10th were postmarked London, and it is a certainty that Sickert was in London prior to October 22nd to attend an early showing of the “First Pastel Exhibition” that opened at the Grosvenor Gallery. In letters that Sickert wrote to Blanche, references to the New English Art Club’s election of new members indicate that Sickert was based in London or at least was in England during the autumn, and most likely into November and possibly until the end of the year.

When Ellen returned home to 54 Broadhurst Gardens at the end of October, she came down with a terrible case of the flu that lingered and sapped her health well into November. I could find no record of her spending time with her husband or whether she knew where he was from one day to the next. I don’t know if she was frightened by the violent atrocities happening a mere six miles from her home, but it is hard to imagine she wasn’t. The metropolis was terrorized, but the worst was yet to come.

Mary Kelly was twenty-four years old and very pretty with a fresh complexion, dark hair, and youthful figure. She was better educated than the other Unfortunates who trolled the area where she lived at 26 Dorset Street. The house was rented by John McCarthy, who owned a chandler’s shop and let out all the rooms at 26 Dorset to the very poor. Mary’s ground-floor room, number 13, was twelve feet square and separated from another room by a partition that was flush against her wooden bedstead. Her door and two large windows opened onto Miller’s Court, and some time ago—she wasn’t sure when—she had lost her key.

This hadn’t caused a huge problem. Not so long ago, she had a bit too much to drink and got into a row with her man, Joseph Barnett, a coal porter. She couldn’t remember, but she must have broken a windowpane then. She and Barnett would reach through the jagged hole in the glass to release the spring lock of the door. They never bothered repairing the glass or replacing the key, and probably didn’t think either was a wise expenditure of what little money they had.

Mary Kelly and Joseph Barnett’s last big row was ten days earlier. They exchanged blows, the cause of the fight being a woman named Maria Harvey. Mary had begun sleeping with her on Monday and Tuesday nights, and Barnett wouldn’t put up with it. He moved out, leaving Mary to somehow pay off the £1 9s. owed in rent. Barnett and Mary patched up their relationship a bit, and he dropped by occasionally and gave her a little money.

Maria Harvey last saw Mary the Thursday afternoon of November 8th, when Maria visited Mary in her room. Maria was a laundress and asked if it would be all right to leave some dirty laundry: two men’s shirts, a little boy’s shirt, a black overcoat, a black crêpe bonnet with black satin strings, a pawn ticket for a gray shawl, and a little girl’s white petticoat. She promised to retrieve the garments later, and was still in the room when Barnett showed up unexpectedly for a visit.

“Well, Mary Jane,” Maria said on her way out, “I shall not see you this evening again.” She would never see Mary again.

Mary Kelly was born in Limerick, the daughter of John Kelly, an Irish iron worker. Mary had six brothers who lived at home, a brother in the Army, and a sister who worked in the markets. The family had moved to Caernarvonshire, Wales, when Mary was young, and at sixteen she married a collier named Davis. Two or three years later, he was killed in an explosion, and Mary left for Cardiff to live with a cousin. It was at this time that she began to drift into drink and prostitution, and for eight months she was in an infirmary to be treated for venereal disease.

She moved to England in 1884, and continued to have no trouble attracting business. I’ve found no photographs that show what she looked like, except after the Ripper completely destroyed her body. But contemporary sketches depict her as a very handsome woman with the hourglass figure coveted in that era. Her dress and manner were a remnant of a better world than the wretched one she tried to forget through alcohol.

Mary was a prostitute in the West End for a while, and met gentlemen who knew how to reward a pretty woman for her favors. A man took her to France, but she stayed only ten days and returned to London. Life in France, she told friends, did not suit her. She lived with a man on Ratcliff Highway, then with another man on Pennington Street, then with a plasterer in Bethnal Green. Joseph Barnett was not certain how many men she had lived with or for how long, he testified at the inquest.

One Friday night in Spitalfields, the pretty Mary Kelly caught Joseph Barnett’s eye and he treated her to a drink. Days later they decided to live together; this was eight months before he rented room 13 at 26 Dorset Street. Now and then Mary got letters from her mother in Ireland, and unlike many Unfortunates, she was literate. But when the East End murders began, she got Barnett to read accounts of them to her. Perhaps the news of the slayings was too unnerving for her to take in alone and in the quiet of her own imagination. She may not have known the victims, but there is a good chance she had seen them on the street or in a public house at some point.

Mary’s life with Joseph Barnett wasn’t a bad one, he testified at her inquest, and the only reason he left her was “because she had a person who was a prostitute whom she took in and I objected to her doing so, that was the only reason, not because I was out of work. I left her on the 30th October between 5&6 P.M.” Barnett said he and Mary remained on “friendly terms” and the last time he saw her alive was Thursday night between 7:30 and 7:45, when he dropped by and discovered Maria in the room. Maria left, and Barnett stayed with Mary briefly. He told her he was sorry but he had no money to give her, and “We did not drink together,” he testified. “She was quite sober, she was as long as she was with me of sober habits” and only got drunk now and then.

Mary Kelly was vividly aware of the monstrous murders happening within blocks of her rooming house, but she continued walking the streets at night after Barnett moved out. She had no other way to earn money. She needed her drinks, and she was about to get evicted with no prospect of another decent man to take her in. She was becoming desperate. Not so long ago she was an upscale prostitute who frequented the finer establishments of the West End. But recently, she had been sliding down deeper into the bottomless pit of poverty, alcoholism, and despair. Soon enough she would lose her looks. It probably did not occur to her that she might lose her life.

Few facts are known about Mary Kelly, but a number of rumors circulated at the time. It was said that she had a seven-year-old son and that she would rather kill herself than see him starve to death. If this son existed, there is no mention of him in police reports and inquest testimony. On the last night of her life, she supposedly ran into a friend at the corner of Dorset Street whom she told she had no money. “If she could not get any,” the friend later told police, “she would never go out any more but would do away with herself.”

Mary was quite noisy when she was drunk, and she had been in the drink Thursday night, November 8th. The weather had been wretched the entire month, with days of hard rain and fierce winds out of the southeast. Temperatures were dipping into the low forties and mist and fog enveloped the city like gauze. Mary was spotted several times that Thursday night, apparently heading off to the nearest pub not long after Joseph Barnett left her room. She was spotted on Commercial Street, quite drunk, and then at 10:00 P.M. on Dorset Street. Times cited are not to be trusted, and there is no certainty that when a person saw “Mary Kelly” it was really Mary Kelly. The streets were very dark. Many people were intoxicated, and after the Ripper’s recent murderous spree, witnesses seemed to spring up from everywhere and their stories were not always to be trusted.

One of Mary’s neighbors, a prostitute named Mary Ann Cox who lived in room 5 of Miller’s Court, testified at the inquest that she saw Mary Kelly intoxicated at midnight. She wore a dark, shabby skirt, a red jacket, and no hat, and was accompanied by a short, stout man who had a blotchy complexion and a thick carroty mustache and who was dressed in dark clothing and a hard, black billy-cock hat. He carried a pot of beer as he walked Mary Kelly toward her door. Mary Ann was walking several steps behind them and bid Mary Kelly good night. “I’m going to have a song,” Mary Kelly replied as the man shut the door to room 13.

For more than an hour, Mary was heard singing the poignant Irish song “Sweet Violets.”

“A violet I plucked from my mother’s grave when a boy,” she sang, and the light of a candle could be seen through her curtains.

Mary Ann Cox worked the streets, periodically stopping by her room to warm her hands before going out again in search of clients. At 3:00 A.M., she came in for the night and Mary Kelly’s room was dark and silent. Mary Ann went to bed with her clothes on. A hard, cold rain was slapping the courtyard and streets. She did not sleep. She heard men in and out of the building as late as a quarter of six. Another neighbor, Elizabeth Prater in room 20 directly above Mary Kelly, said at the inquest that at close to 1:30 A.M., she could see a “glimmer” of light through the “partition” that separated Mary Kelly’s room from hers.