HistoryHype at Casebook.org

It’s no secret that I’m working on more articles on the Jack the Ripper crimes. I hesistate to spill the beans on the results of my latest research before the essay is finished and accepted for publication, but I am too excited not to say anything.

I just landed an exciting one-on-one interview with a first-person source for my next article. If all goes as planned, not only will the insights gained be beneficial to my article, but the interview itself will become a sidebar article which ought to be of considerable interest.

I won’t say just now who the interview is with, but I will tease this much: the focus of my next article is a comparative study between Dennis Rader of the BTK murders, and Jack the Ripper. My source will be an eye-popper, I promise.

Stay tuned!

While researching my next article, I came across this insightful quote. It comes from Wichita homicide investigator Ken Landwehr, the man who headed up the effort to capture the BTK Strangler, and who ultimately succeeded. It’s no easy task solving any murder, but serial murder is perhaps the hardest of all to solve. So when someone like that offers advice, it’s usually worth one’s time to listen to him. While he is speaking to a fellow detective on how to approach solving the BTK case, I believe his insights can be applied, usefully, to Ripperology as well.

“Here’s where detectives get themselves lost,” Landwehr told Relph the day they first talked about BTK. “They get lost on some guy’s story. A guy looks good as a suspect; if you have maybe twelve criteria for being the right guy for a crime, and this guy meets ten of the twelve, then he’s looking good. And so the detective gets enthralled, chases his story - and goes off on a tangent, a wild goose chase. Because if the guy’s DNA doesn’t match the DNA from the crime, it’s not him. And then you have to drop him like a rock.”

Relph began to apply this advice while reading about BTK and working on other cases.

“How do you not get lost in all these thousands of pages of evidence,?” Relph asked.

“Don’t try to get into all that peripheral evidence,” Landwehr said. “Just read the actual case files. Focus on the essentials.”

(Wenzel, Potter, Kelly and Laviana, “Bind, Torture, Kill: The Inside Story of the Serial Killer Next Door,” HarperCollins, p. 145, 2007.)

Although DNA is not a useful reference in the Ripper killings, the rest of Landwehr’s insights could help dispense with a lot of wasted effort in the field of Ripperology, I believe. How often to authors and researchers get so caught up in the story of a suspect, they begin to ignore the evidence in the Ripper crimes that does not support the conclusion that their pet suspect was the Ripper? More often than most of us would like to believe; it’s a common mistake of most suspect-oriented books in this field.

Also, many Ripper researchers similarly fall into the other pitfall Landwehr warns against: obsessing over the peripheral evidence. It’s often hard to know what peripheral evidence is relevant and what peripheral evidence is not, but it can serve as a great distraction. The best way to approach the Ripper case, then, is to stay focused on the essentials and the case files (such as they survive to this day.)

Good advice from a fellow who actually led a successful effort to capture a serial who nearly got away with it, like our man Jack did. Words we in the field of Ripperology might all do well to heed in our own research and writing.

Every writer and every blogger face the same exact challenge each day: the terror of the blank screen (or page). For bloggers, the satisfaction point is reached far more easily. Scan a favorite newspaper, magazine, Web site or message board and, BANG, you have something to react to.

That’s the essence of blogging. Reacting to something someone else wrote. Spouting off an opinion that may or may not be based in careful consideration of and research into the item to which one is responding. That’s where the challenge of the person who dabbles in history is a bit more daunting.

History, or even the true-crime spin-off of history I am currently dabbling in with my Jack the Ripper research, is not written via off the cuff remarks in knee-jerk fashion. It requires careful, sometimes exhausting as well as exhaustive research, and quite a bit of analysis and thought, before one can be certain enough of the prevailing facts to even begin to speak authoritatively on anything.

That’s where blogs and history crash, and probably why there’s not too many blogs dedicated to the study of history. Either the research has already been done any it is in a textbook somewhere, or the research is incomplete and it’s far too soon to speak authoritatively on the subject.

Even in Ripperology, there are plenty of good examples. As Tom Wescott pointed out on the Casebook: Jack the Ripper message board recently, few Ripper researchers discount Mary Jane Kelly as a Ripper victim and only one researcher he is aware of even attempted to do so based on the evidence: Stewart Evans, in the course of investigating Ripper suspect Dr. Francis Tumbulty. Even then, Evans did so hesitatingly and only called it a remote possibility. Wescott further pointed out that further research proved Tumbulty may have been out of custody after all at the time of the Kelly murder, and quickly added Kelly back into the canon of Ripper victims.

Such caution is worthwhile when dealing with history; conclusions, especially if they contradict previous understandings and interpretations, should not be asserted too hastily. Yet it happens daily on sites like the message board. Without a whisper of research or understanding of the prevailing facts, all too often Ripper enthusiasts will boldly proclaim they’ve discovered an incontrovertible fact that sheds new light on everything and their word is Gospel.

Of course, upon further questioning, some of these folks are merely smoke-blowers; they want to fit in with the research heavyweights, but are unwilling to do the work themselves, instead challenging others to “prove me wrong.”

Sorry, but it’s not our work to prove you haven’t done yours. Most of the minds in Ripper research are bright, well-reasoned, careful folks who, sure, want to write an essay that garners them some attention, but more importantly, want to be sure that if they do discover something new about the case, it is something that won’t be easily dismissed or disproved. Too often, these “overlooked facts” that “shed a whole new light on the case” are things most Ripper scholars have known for a long time but realized were either untrue myths that grew up around the facts of the case, or not of any real significance.

It takes time, caution and diligence to put together a solidly-researched historical essay, even of the true-crime variety. Yet some less-restrained message board boasters are more than willing to rip such work to shreds on a whim, rather than look into any of the evidence the author researched to at least see if there is another way to interpret it.

While such an atmosphere makes for a lively message board community, I fear that it can grow out of control and draw precious time away from researchers who would be better off checking for the real birth records of Mary Jane Kelly or something else far more useful than quarreling with a simple attention-grabber addicted to contradiction.

Writing and maintaining a history blog promises similar challenges and pitfalls. It will be interesting to see if I maintain the slow, careful pace of my research and still find things to blog about at a pace that makes search engines happy.

The following is the final draft of the manuscript that first appeared as the debut blog entry on HistoryHype.com. It was published recently in Ripper Notes #28. This version reflect the article as it appeared there, minus Dan Norder’s masterful final edit.

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I can think of few pursuits in historical studies more heartless than the romanticizing of Mary Jane Kelly. Kelly, allegedly 25 and a native of Whitechapel, London, England, at the time of her death on November 9, 1888, is often called the last of the so-called “canonical five” victims of the Whitechapel fiend known as Jack the Ripper.

More than any other victim of this 19th-century murderer, Kelly is the subject of the most fascination, romanticizing of whom she was and inexcusable speculation in all of Ripperology. Frequenting sites dedicated to the study of the so-called “Jack the Ripper” crimes, and specifically Mary Jane Kelly herself, one finds all sorts of ideas about who Kelly was and what became of her that cold, fateful Whitechapel night.

Several factors fuel this fascination.

First, Mary Jane Kelly was younger by far than all the other “canonical” Ripper victims. She was reportedly aged 25, whereas the rest of the canonicals were in their 40s.

Also, Mary Jane Kelly, primarily because of her youth, had not been used up by a life of poverty and prostitution quite so much as other victims, and therefore was considered attractive, at least in comparison to her older competitors for alleyway trysts. She may have even been the subject of anywhere from one to perhaps even three marriage proposals in her Whitechapel years, yet it is believed she had been married only once, to a collier named either Davis or Davies(1), who died shortly after the marriage in a mine explosion. Kelly thus seems doubly tragic, as a woman with options who never utilized them.

Finally, very little about her is known and reliably verified.

Perhaps this last point is what so captures otherwise brilliant minds to draw them off-focus. Human intellect is stimulated by mysteries, and aside from the Ripper’s actual identity, there is no mystery in the Jack the Ripper case greater than Kelly herself. It might be best to approach this point by outlining some of the things folks commonly think they know about Mary Jane Kelly, which actually are not certain at all.

The victim’s name was Mary Jane Kelly

False! Accounts of her name vary greatly. She is said to have referred to herself as Mary Jane Kelly, Mary Anne Kelly and Marie Jeanette Kelly. Other names proposed for her include “Lizzie Fisher, Mary Jane Lawrence, Fair Emma, and Ginger.(2)” Author Tom Cullen also claims she was known as Black Mary(3). Of course, Mary Kelly and variations thereof were common names in London in the 1880s. Some researchers and case enthusiasts on the Casebook: Jack the Ripper Web site have recently even put forward the theory that “Mary Jane” was 19th century slang referring to female genitalia(4), in much the same way that “John Thomas” was used as slang for male genitalia. Overall, Mary Jane Kelly could have been a chosen pseudonym, or a street name; such is not an uncommon practice in prostitution, even back in 1888.

One earlier Ripper victim, Catherine Eddowes, also used the name “Mary Ann Kelly” on the night of her murder when being released from Bishopsgate Police Station after an arrest for being drunk(5). Eddowes likely used the surname Kelly due to her association with John Kelly, himself no known relation to Mary Jane Kelly. However, this coincidence has prompted much useless and distracting speculation that Mary Jane Kelly was the killer’s target all along due to some conspiracy, usually royal in nature, against her, and that the killings stopped when the conspirators offed “the right Mary.”

Hogwash. What few folks realize is if you want coincidences in this case, there are many if you care to obsess over useless trivia spurred to life simply by the use of common names.

For example, one of Mary Jane Kelly’s aliases as cited above is “Lizzie Fisher.” Ironically enough, Catherine Eddowes had a real sister named Elizabeth Fisher, a married woman who lived at 33 Hackliffe Street, Greenwich(6). She, however, used the nickname Eliza rather than Lizzie. Not that such details would matter to one looking hard enough for coincidences that support a conspiracy theory. None of it, however, is research that will help us arrive any closer to the truth.

MJK was 25 at the time of her death.

False again. Mary Jane Kelly’s age has always been just an estimate with no real, trustworthy, official source to back it up. The estimate is believed to have come from Joseph Barnett, likely Kelly’s last regular lover – as opposed to customer – prior to her death. The estimate also may have come from the coroner. Whatever the source, it appears to be either an estimate or someone repeating what Mary Jane Kelly told them about herself while still alive. There is nothing official, like a birth certificate, to establish the veracity of her age.

So how do we deal with the veracity of the age estimate of Mary Jane Kelly?

Since Barnett has come under the radar of some Ripperologists as a Jack suspect –or at least as a potential murderer of Mary Jane Kelly – should his inquest testimony be considered reliable? If Barnett was the one who killed her – whether he was Jack or not – then all his statements about Kelly should be called into question, even on matters as trivial as age.

Let us suppose for a moment Barnett is not a reasonable suspect in Mary Jane Kelly’s death. Even if Barnett was being honest, the next question must be, was Mary? Shaving years off one’s age is not uncommon among those in the prostitution trade. Believing a prostitute is young can extend her appeal until the ravages of time on the street and in poverty catch up and rob her of her youthful charm. It is also possible that, depending on her true life circumstances, she may have grown up on the streets long enough not to know her own true age.

Although Kelly and Barnett were lovers and perhaps even common law spouses, there is no certainty she would have told him her true age. After all, they originally met in the circumstance of Barnett being a client of hers before deciding that they ought to stay together, according to Barnett’s inquest testimony. Kelly could easily have been as old as 35, or as young as 20, a fifteen-year spread. We must also question Kelly’s honesty with Barnett based on his testimony that she told him her name was Marie Jeanette Kelly with “the French spelling, as described to me.(7)” The vast majority of testimony about her suggests Kelly was Irish, not French; so it appears Kelly was attempting to make herself appear more exotic to Barnett initially, by insisting on the French spelling of her name. While “Marie Jeanette” may have been the version of her name she preferred, it does reveal a tendency by her to play around with names, calling into question whether any of them were genuine.

No birth certificate ever found verifies Kelly’s date of birth. The search is more difficult for the fact that we do not necessarily know her given name. Until a birth certificate is found that establishes her identity and date of birth beyond reasonable doubt, we shall never know whether Kelly was 20, 25, 30, 35 or somewhere in between.

Mary Jane Kelly was born in Limerick, Ireland

Kelly told Barnett this was the case but his trustworthiness, as pointed out above, is at least plausibly in question. The closest we can get to the truth here, I believe, is that Kelly’s hair was reportedly red or “ginger(8)” and considered by those who knew her to be among her best features. Accounts of her hair color vary quite a bit, just like every other account of the woman, ranging through blonde(9), ginger, light(10) and dark(11). However, ginger or red-colored hair seems to be the most commonly accepted tradition, so for our limited purposes here, I shall go with it, just as I continue to use the non-de-plume Mary Jane Kelly, even though her name is equally uncertain.

While red or ginger-colored hair is not uncommon among Irish women, obviously not all redheads come from Ireland. As we lack birth records or even a verifiable name for Kelly, we again cannot be sure of this.

Some argue that, given the tension between England and Ireland in the 1880s, there would be no advantage for Kelly to claim Irish heritage if it was untrue; not necessarily. Although by the end of her life she had stepped down into the level of an unfortunate, Kelly’s prostitution career allegedly began in a slightly more upscale bordello, which means she was likely trained in some of the basics of slightly-more-upscale prostitution.

Part of such training is to indulge the fantasies of men, rather than disabuse them. If a young woman had ginger hair and a client wanted to believe she was Irish, why correct him? If believing Kelly was Irish turned a one-nighter into a repeat customer, so much the better. Kelly could have learned to allow the clients to fill in the details of who they wanted her to be, offering only the mildest of hints to indulge whatever fantasies kept them coming back.

Given such training, everything Joe Barnett thought he knew of Mary Jane Kelly, and indeed testified to at her inquest, could easily be – even without him realizing it – more his invention of exotic fantasy than her confession of truth. A basic fact too many Ripper researchers tend to brush past is that prostitutes are not in the truth-telling business; they are often desperate women looking to make a living, even if it is just doss money to keep them indoors and warm at night, or in Kelly’s case, rent money, which she was in serious arrears over.

It is unlikely Kelly had many close friends, even among those who shared her profession, if the inquest testimony of Caroline Maxwell has any truth to it. At the inquest, Maxwell testified, “She was a young woman who never associated with any one.(12)” If that was the case, it is entirely possible no one was close enough to Kelly to ever earn the trust required for her to take them into her confidence. She might never have told anyone her real name, age, or place of birth. If we do not even know that, and it is likely we do not, how can anything else we believe we know of Mary Jane Kelly be considered reliable?

Other elements of Kelly’s mystique

Among the many elements Joe Barnett contributed to Kelly’s mystique include her being widowed at an early age. The idea of a young widow creates sympathy, and sympathy is one of the best ways to form an emotional bond that keeps a first-time customer coming back.

Barnett also introduced the “fact” that Kelly had been to France with a suitor, but that it did not agree with her and she returned. This creates a touch of the exotic to a woman otherwise completely unfortunate and on a rapid spiral downward. Even if a suitor paid her way to France, upon rejection it is unlikely he would have paid her way home, so how would she have obtained the funds to return, and why return to Whitechapel, of all places? It is an element of Kelly’s invention that stretches credulity.

This and many other elements, including having a brother in the military and a relative in the world of theater, could all be fabrications Kelly herself spread to draw clients as well as casual friends to her. Call it deception or a survival tactic, but truth is not always the friend of a person struggling to survive.

None of these fanciful flourishes to Mary Jane Kelly’s life have, as far as I am aware, been verified outside the testimony of Joe Barnett and one or two of her Whitechapel acquaintances; and they were only repeating what Mary allegedly told them about herself.

The cruelty of speculation and false compassion

Here’s the stark truth: we know less of Mary Jane Kelly than we know of Jack. The only truths we can verify beyond doubt are the tragic pair of photos of the scene of her death. They bear incontrovertible testimony of a life come to a sudden, violent end.

The deeply cruel element emerges when some researchers speculate Kelly escaped her attacker, that she was out when Jack arrived and it was some anonymous French prostitute, not Mary, butchered in her bed. This is no mere fantasy of some lone, obsessed Ripperologist no one respects, but the closing minutes of the movie, From Hell, hardly a source for well-researched, accurate portrayals of any of the victims, but especially not in the case of Kelly.

Even if it were some other women on that bed at 13, Miller’s Court, how exactly does this make the death of the woman on the bed less tragic? Could anyone be crueler than to wish Kelly’s fate on one prostitute over another? Does it ease the minds of some researchers with an almost necrophilic obsession for Kelly that they would prefer to see some other unfortunate inherit her fate? This wishful thinking is as dark, cruel, and thoughtless as any of Jack’s crimes.

It smacks of false compassion, as well. How many Ripperologists have ever sought to lend real aid to the poverty-stricken prostitutes of today’s London, or held a benefit for them? Hired them for legitimate work? Offered them a meal with no “profession courtesy” strings attached? How many have even talked to one? I suspect the answer is, “very few.”

The world is full of Mary Jane Kellys and yet the only one most Ripper researchers seem to care about is long dead. Do they care about these modern-day Mary Jane Kellys only when they become crime victims? If Mary Jane Kelly walked by most Ripperologists today, would they even give her the time of day, let alone some sign of genuine compassion? I suspect not.

The real Mary Jane Kelly is, in all honesty, as much a ghost as the woman Mrs. Maxwell claims to have seen the morning following the murder, heaving her guts out in the street to the “the horrors of drink.”(13) Mrs. Maxwell incorrectly believed that woman to be Mary Jane Kelly – or whatever this Jane Doe’s name really was. Maxwell believed her to be the same Mary Jane Kelly who had spent several months living with Joseph Barnett before tiring of him and kicking him out; but “our” Mary Jane Kelly had almost certainly been dead several hours by then, as Kelly’s completely anonymous spirit departed from this mortal coil.

Mary Jane Kelly has been accused of being the mastermind of a blackmail scheme against the royal family(14) and an alleged spy for the Fenians(15), as though simply being who she was – a down-on-her-luck-and-sinking-fast unfortunate, was not sufficient. They would rather imagine her as a woman who cheated fate by not being in the room at the time, by surviving to escape – on what resources, heaven only knows – to live a long and pleasant life raising many children, anywhere from the shores of her native Ireland, to Scotland, to France, to as far away as the imagination of morbidly-obsessed Ripperologists can dream her; far away from that awful, bloody scene in 13, Miller’s Court.

Where, in one of the only facts I believe we really can be sure of, the real Mary Jane Kelly, whatever her name, age and country of origin really were, died a most horrible death, and even to this day has never truly been allowed to rest in peace.

Endnotes

1 Paul Begg, Jack the Ripper: The Facts, Barnes and Noble Books, 2005, p. 267.
2 Dan Souden, “The Murder In Cartin’s Court,” Ripper Notes #21, January 2005, Inklings Press, p. 4.
3 Tom Cullen, When London Walked in Terror, 1965, Boston, MA, Houghton-Mifflen.
4 “Celesta,” “About the real age of Mary Jane Kelly,” Casebook: Jack the Ripper, July 14, 2007, URL: http://forum.casebook.org/archive/index.php/t-4507.html.
5 Begg, ibid, p. 169. “On being asked her name, she said, ‘Mary Ann Kelly’ and gave her address as 6 Fashion Street.”
6 Begg, ibid, p.166.
7 The Daily Telegraph, Tuesday, November 13, 1888. As found on the Casebook: Jack the Ripper Web site, URL: http://www.casebook.org/official_documents/inquests/inquest_kelly.html.
8 Manchester Guardian, Western Mail, November 10, 1888. “Barnett ‘at once identified the body as that of Kelly, of “Ginger,” as she was called, owning to the color of her hair.”
9 “Victims: Mary Jane Kelly,” Casebook: Jack the Ripper. URL: http://www.casebook.org/victims/mary_jane_kelly.html.
10 The Daily Telegraph, November 10, 1888.
11 Maurice Lewis, Illustrated Police News, November 17, 1888. “She was short, stout and dark.” Most Ripperologists believe Lewis to have been describing someone other than Mary Jane Kelly in a case of mistaken identity.
12 The Daily Telegraph, Tuesday, November 13, 1888. Ibid.
13 Kelly Inquest Records, pp. 11-12, 28-29.
14 In the works of Stephen Knight, Alan Moore and filmmakers Albert and Allen Hughes, among many others, who support and promote the Royal Conspiracy Theory.
15 “jerryd” and “Graham,” “About the real age of Mary Kelly,” Casebook: Jack the Ripper Forums, July 14, 2007. URL: http://forum.casebook.org/showthread.php?t=4507

Welcome.

This site will initially be a mirror of a blog I maintain at my own domain, HistoryHype.com. Over time, I may add some original posts as well. The main difference will be that most of what I post here, whether mirrored or original, will focus on Jack the Ripper and related topics. If you have any interest in other historical topics I may eventually write about, then my main HistoryHype.com site would be worth a visit as well!

 I’ve been a student of the Jack the Ripper case for nearly 30 years now, but only recently have I started conducting my own research into the topic and writing professionally about it. My first Jack the Ripper-related article appeared in Ripper Notes #28, and you’ll find a final draft version on this site in the next post, without the benefit of Dan Norder’s masterful final edit. As it stands, this is about 95 percent the way it appeared in Ripper Notes #28.

Currently, I am hard at work on my next article, which, unlike the one-0ff piece, “Romanticizing Mary Jane Kelly,” will focus more on my main area of research insterest, which is the comparative study of Jack to other serial killers. I’ll likely be using this blog, as well as my main HistoryHype.com blog, to test out some of my thoughts as I work toward completing my next manuscript.

I hope you enjoy the time and discussions we’ll share going forward. I know I will.