At the age of just 25, she was the Ripper’s youngest, and last known victim. Or was she?

It’s the morning of November 9th, 1888 in the East End of London. Think bowler hats, flamboyant moustaches and a young Michael Caine.

During these final years of the Nineteenth Century, London’s East End, but particularly the district of Whitechapel, is known for its slum dwellings where people on the edge of poverty are living cheek-by-jowl (sometimes literally). Disease is rife, life expectancy hovers around the mid forties, and somewhere, out there on the smog-choked streets, a serial killer is abroad. And his name is Jack the Ripper.

We’ve all heard the story of Jack The Ripper; the elusive killer who was never caught despite a massive manhunt by England’s finest Metropolitan Police Force. Many criminologists today believe he killed five women, others four, and there are some who think he killed a lot more than that. Today though, I want to examine the woman who most people agree was his final victim; Mary Jane Kelly. And I want to answer a very uncomfortable question; did she actually survive the attack?

But before we can delve head-first into the mystery, we have to understand what had been happening in the days leading up to that fateful night of the 9th November 1888.

Throughout that autumn, a series of brutal murders on unsuspecting women had gripped the residents of the East End. Whipped up by media speculation via the huge abundance of cheap newspapers, people had grown scared at the devilish perpetrator who seemed able to slip through the shadows, killing at whim before melting into the night. Some began reporting on their neighbours, others their own family members. By the night of Mary Kelly’s murder, there were already four victims that it’s generally agreed the Ripper had killed;

Mary Anne Nicholls

Annie Chapman

Elizabeth Stride

Catherine Eddows.

All of them were desperate women living in absolute poverty who the newspapers described as unfortunates, which was Victorian code for sex workers. In the early hours of November 9th, one such woman, Mary Kelly, was returning to her bedsit at 13 Miller’s Court in the company of a man. Less than 12 hours later, she’d be discovered murdered, her body horrendously mutilated and left lying in state on a blood-drenched bed.

As the sun rises over Whitechapel on that morning of November 9th, the Landlord of Miller’s Court, a man called John McCarthy, wakes up and goes through his rent book to find one of his tenants, Mary Kelly, is behind on her rent for room 13.

Now McCarthy owns so many of the dwellings in Miller’s Court that it’s known locally as McCarthy’s Rents. The court itself is rather small, and the rooms are as you’d expect for Whitechapel at this time. They’re small, basic, and pretty mucky.

By 10.45am on the morning of November 9th, McCarthy asks his rent collector, Thomas Bowyer, to go round and collect the overdue rent that Mary owes.

Bowyer trudges up to number 13, and we can only imagine his reluctance at having to undertake such an unwanted – but necessary – confrontation on behalf of his boss. Clenching his calloused hand into a fist, he knocks on the door once, twice, thrice. But there’s no answer.

He tries to look through the window around the corner but there’s a curtain blocking the view inside. However, one of the window panes close to the locked door has been broken for some time. So Thomas Bowyer pokes his hand through the hole in the window, carefully lifts the curtain away to peer inside, and what he sees makes his blood run cold. 

It’s the body of Mary Kelly lying on the room’s only bed, torn to bits. There’s blood daubed up the walls, soaked through the mattress, clotted on the floor. Internal organs have been removed and are seemingly lying on every surface the rent collector sets his terrified eyes on. Mary’s face has been disfigured so much, she’s unrecognisable. Her lips have been cut off, her nose and ears hacked off, even her cheeks have been sliced away. 

A horrified Bowyer dashes back to McCarthy and tells him what he’s found. McCarthy goes to take a look himself, and he describes the scene as “beyond all comprehension, beyond words.” The two men raise the alarm, and the police soon arrive. But they don’t make any immediate attempt to go inside the room of 13 Miller’s Court. In fact, several hours go by with the officers waiting outside maintaining a cordon. What are they hesitating for? What possible reason can they have for dragging their feet? Is it fear?

Partly – but not fear of what they might find inside. What’s preying on their minds is a fear for their jobs. Because these officers are waiting for bloodhounds.

At his wits end and getting increasingly desperate, the Police Commissioner had previously made a strict order that no suspected Ripper crime scene was to be touched until bloodhounds had first arrived. The idea being that this would give the dogs a chance of picking up any scent trail the killer might have left behind.

So we now have this farcical situation where the body inside the room is cooling down, allowing rigor mortis to set-in, making it that much harder for any estimate of the time of death to be made. Yet outside is a group of police officers doing little more than crowd management against a mass of curious onlookers whose numbers have only been growing out in the courtyard since rumours of the dead body began flying around.

Eventually, Superintendent Thomas Arnold arrives, tells the men the bloodhounds aren’t coming, and orders the officers to gain entry to room 13. 

That leads us to another problem. The door to Mary Kelly’s room is locked, and seemingly no-one has the key. Allegedly it’s gone missing, presumed either stolen or simply dropped on the filth-strewn cobbles. A lot has been made about this missing key over the years by many amateur sleuths. How can a door be locked without a key? Did the killer take it with them after committing the murder? Did he have possession of it before the murder?

Like many real-world mysteries, the truth is rather mundane; it turns out the lock was a latch type, and would always engage whenever the door was fully closed. It didn’t need a key to lock, but did need one to unlock. Apparently, Mary Kelly had gotten used to unlocking the door by threading a slender arm through the hole in the window from where she could reach the latch on the inside.

But right now on that cold November day, this doesn’t help the police. Faced with the locked door, a pick axe is found and it’s used to break in. I’ve read two separate sources over who exactly gained entry with the axe. One states that Inspector Abberline had been the person who broke the door down, while a newspaper clipping unequivocally named the landlord, McCarthy. Whoever did break down the door, it doesn’t change the facts around the murder as we know it. So let’s move on.

With the door broken open, the police finally gain entry, and they take in the absolute massacre that’s occurred. Mary Kelly’s clothes have been neatly piled on the seat of a chair, and she’s left wearing the remains of a chemise, which is essentially a modest undergarment worn by most women of the time.

A police surgeon called Thomas Bond is next to arrive, and he performs a medical assessment. He’s accompanied by another police surgeon called George Bagster Phillips. Because of the state of the body, the two men can’t accurately work out the time of death, but come to the conlcusion it had to be around 4.00am. Remember that time because I’ll be coming back to it later. Rigor mortis had already set in by the time the official autopsy was conducted at 2pm that afternoon, and Thomas Bond stated it got more pronounced throughout the examination.

George Bagster Phillips is recorded as stating he believed that, despite the mutilations, Mary Kelly was killed much like the other Ripper victims; by laceration of the throat, in this case down to the vertebrae.

So far it’s uncontroversial. That’s until the police start taking witness statements, and more questions than answers pile up over the whereabouts of Mary Kelly – both before – and after the time she is supposed to have been killed.

Firstly, who was Mary Kelly? The short answer is; we don’t know. There are no official records that survive with her name on them, not even a birth certificate. All we have are testimonies from those who knew her. One friend of hers thought she might have been Irish, another believed she was from Wales. We’re not even sure her name is accurate. There’s a high probability it’s an alias. 

At the time of her death, she was believed to be twenty five, making her the youngest of the ripper victims by a large margin. The room in which she was found was sparsely decorated. It had a bed in the corner, it had a single chair, and a fireplace where police found remains of burnt clothing. Who exactly they belonged to and why they were burned, is still a mystery. What’s not a mystery is the man she had until about a week prior, been cohabitating with. That man was Joseph Barnett.

At the time of Kelly’s murder, Barnett was down on his luck. He was out of work, and he’d walked out on Kelly a week previous because, according to him, he was unhappy with the other women she associated with, and often had round in the room. But that disagreement didn’t stop him from visiting most nights for an hour or so, and on the night she was killed, he followed the same routine.

From eyewitness reports and Barnett’s own testimony, he had visited her at Miller’s Court at around 7pm, and had left by 8pm. 

After that, there are no confirmed sightings of Kelly until 11 o’clock that night where she’s seen drinking in a local pub with a well-dressed man who appears respectable (or at least respectable for the East End).

By 11.45, a woman by the name of Mary Anne Cox, who lives at 5 Miller’s Court, is returning home to get warm by her fireplace since it’s begun to rain. Cox is a widow who’s also turned to sex work in order to make ends meet. She states very clearly that she recognises Kelly walking ahead of her on the arm of a stout man who’s well dressed in shabby clothes. She thought him to be in his mid-thirties and about 5ft 5 inches tall.

Cox follows the couple into Miller’s Court and finds them standing outside room 13. As she passes them, she wishes Kelly goodnight, and from the response she gets, she believes the younger woman to be heavily intoxicated. A few minutes later, Cox can hear Kelly singing a song from inside her room. By the time Cox leaves her own room to go back outside, Kelly is still singing in her room.

At around 12.30am, a flower seller called Catherine Pickett is disturbed from sleep by the singing. Living in one of the rooms above Kelly’s, she makes to go downstairs to complain about the noise when her husband stops her and sleepily calls her back to bed. 

1am rolls along as the temperature continues to drop. Mary Anne Cox is returning home through the rain once again to warm herself by her fire, and she hears Kelly still singing, or at least singing again, and she sees a light coming from inside.

Then by 2am, things really start to get interesting. A man called George Hutchinson stated to police that he meets Kelly at this time out on the street some distance from Miller’s Court. According to him, she asks for money but he doesn’t have any to give. Perhaps annoyed at being brushed off so easily, she leaves and walks off down the street telling him she needs to make some money.

Not far on what becomes a very short journey, she meets a man whom Hutchinson is able to describe down to the buttons on his jacket. Standing in the shadows, he watches as this stranger places an arm around Kelly’s shoulders, and he decides to tail them when they walk off in the direction of Miller’s Court, laughing and joking on the way. From a distance, Hutchinson continues to watch as the couple linger at the entrance of Millers Court for about 3 minutes. At this point, he hears Kelly agree to a request from the stranger, and she leads him inside her room.

The level of detail that Hutchinson is able to give when describing the stranger to the police later on is suspicious by itself. Now, I’ve been questioned by police as a witness, and I’ve been asked to give a description of someone. If you’re an innocent bystander (which I was – honest), often the police have to drag the information out of you. This is especially true where visibility is a factor (such as at night time). Much like Hutchinson, I saw a man at night, illuminated by a single light source from a distance, and I can tell you it’s almost impossible in those conditions to give information as accurately as Hutchinson could. 

In fact, he is able to give everything down to the trim of the man’s coat. And remember – this is with 19th century outdoor lighting in the rain. He can even describe a horseshoe pin on the stranger’s necktie. Couple it with his description of the man carrying a wrapped parcel under his arm, and it’s almost too perfect a fit for how we would expect the Ripper to look. As far as I’m aware, we only know the existence of this man who Mary Kelly took inside her room from Hutchinson himself. And he lingers at the entrance to Miller’s Court without an alibi until he hears the local clock bells strike for 3 in the morning. By his own testimony, he could have been out there in the rain for forty minutes, perhaps more.

So it’s now 3:00 AM: Mary Anne Cox returns home yet again. It’s begun raining hard. There is no sound or light coming from Kelly’s room. Cox doesn’t go back out but neither does she go to sleep. Throughout the early hours she occasionally hears men going in and out of Miller’s Court in order to start work at the local market. She later told the inquest;

“I heard someone go out at a quarter to six. I do not know what house he went out of (as) I heard no door shut.”

She added that a quarter to six is too late for any of the men working at the market to be leaving home. The coroner asked her whether it could have been a policeman, although this is purely speculation.

But back to the night of the murder, and it’s 4:00 AM: Elizabeth Prater, a woman living in the room directly above Kelly, is awakened by a faint cry of “Murder!” but since the cry of murder is common in the district, she pays no attention to it. Another woman who happens to be staying with friends in Miller’s Court also hears the cry, but she too goes back to sleep.

These two accounts match with the time of death that Phillips estimated, and police are confident they’ve got their timeline nice and accurate. But then along comes Caroline Maxwell to ruin it completely.

Caroline Maxwell is a really interesting witness. At the time, she was living in a lodging house at 14 Dorset Street, and at 8.30 in the morning, she’s on her way to visit a neighbour when she comes across Mary Kelly standing at the entrance to Miller’s Court looking decidedly ill. She was able to describe Kelly in depth, and actually called out to her by name. According to her, Kelly replied that she was feeling sick and pointed to a pool of vomit she’d made on the ground. Caroline Maxwell continues on and never sees Mary Kelly again.

10:00 AM then rolls around: Maurice Lewis, a tailor also living in Dorset Street, told newspapers he had seen Kelly outside her room at this time, some six hours after her official time of death. Because of this discrepancy, he was never called to the inquest and was virtually ignored by police.

Yet Lewis claimed to have known Mary Kelly for five years, and shortly after 10.00am, he and a few friends went to the local pub. While they were in there, he saw her drinking with some other women, but wasn’t sure if any man was with them. This is less than 45 minutes until her body is supposedly discovered by the rent collector, Thomas Bowyer, and more than six hours after her official time of death.

How can we explain this discrepancy?

Firstly, let’s look at the cry of murder the neighbours heard at 4am. In 1888, Cries like that were common at nighttime in Whitechapel. Shouts of murder would go out in an attempt to alert as many people as possible during an assault or a robbery. And even around the time of one of the other Ripper murders, similar cries were heard by others woken out of bed. Contempory sources state that shouts of murder could be heard ringing out like church bells, three, four, even five times a night in some areas.

At the time of the coroner’s inquiry, Caroline Maxwell, the woman who claimed to have seen Mary Kelly outside at 8.30, was warned about her testimony because it didn’t match the timeline the police had built. A simple explanation is she got the date wrong or mistook Mary Kelly for someone else.

Yet under questioning, she was adamant that she called Mary by name, and had a full conversation with her. And she was certain of the time and date. Would anyone forget the date that someone they knew was found viciously killed and mutilated mere yards from their front door? It’s unlikely. And other witnesses had seen Maxwell out on the street at around 8.30am on the day in question, so there seems to be at least a plausable truth to what she’s saying.

When you consider that police didn’t gain access to the room because of the several hours wait for bloodhounds that never arrived, it’s easy to see how the task of coming up with a time of death would have been made all the harder by that delay. And this was the nineteenth century, when determining time of death was more an artform than an exact science.

Then there’s Maurice Lewis seeing Kelly at the pub after 10 o’clock – police questioned him, then disregarded his witness testimony. Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt since they were there and we were not. Let’s say it was a case of mistaken identity, despite Lewis claiming he’d known Mary Kelly for five years. That still leaves Caroline Maxwell standing outside her home at 8.30 chatting with a sick-looking Kelly in broad daylight.

Could Kelly have been sick not because of a hangover, but because she had wandered upon the gruesome murder scene of some other poor woman at 13 Miller’s Court? Afterall, the broken window allowed anyone access inside if they knew the trick of slipping their hand through a hole in the window. Could the killer have seen how Kelly had unlocked the door on a previous visit? Could he have returned with another woman, another victim, knowing how easy it was to gain access and get off the street?

It’s no big leap to assume Mary Kelly would have been frightened out of her wits at the narrow escape when she returned to that room and looked upon the carnage left behind. She might have been too frightened to tell Caroline Maxwell about the horror she’d seen and gone instead to the pub where she was noticed by Maurice Lewis and his friends. People can react in seemingly strange ways to an outsider when they’re gripped in shock. It’s why some people laugh at funerals.

Perhaps the whole ordeal scared her enough to leave Whitechapel behind? Perhaps she left the whole city in her wake and led a quiet life of peace out in the country? Perhaps.

Or perhaps not. 

There is another outcome between the two extremes of Mary Kelly being murdered by her mystery client at 4am, and Mary Kelly not being murdered at all.

George Hutchinson, the man who claimed he’d tailed Kelly with her mystery gentleman at 3am in the morning. The man who had given such a detailed description down to a necktie pin. The man who had waited outside for half an hour, perhaps more. What if he had spent that time inside, carving up Kelly’s body? If we disregard Caroline Maxwell’s testimony, it’s a possibility that he could have been the killer.

Afterall, what could his motivations have been when giving his evidence to the police?

• He could have been telling the truth about what he saw, and implausible as it may seem, gave us the best eyewitness description we have of Jack the Ripper.
• He could have exaggerated parts of his statement to please the press and police.
• He lied and was in fact himself Jack the Ripper.
• Hutchinson, realising the strange man looked wealthy, hung around waiting for him to reappear on his own, with the intention of mugging him.
• Perhaps the reason he hung around so long was that it was Mary Kelly he was keeping an eye on. Perhaps he was besotted with her, possibly even stalking her. She had said on a previous occasion that she was frightened of someone other than the Ripper, though did not dare say who.
• Possibly the reason he hung around for so long was because he had no money for a bed and was just passing time. He did say to Kelly that he had spent all his money and had none to give her.

Hutchinson said he hung around for so long because he was suspicious of a man so well dressed wandering the streets of Whitechapel, especially while there was a serial killer abroad. So why did he leave at 3am without so much as sneaking a peek through the window to check on Mary?

To this day, we don’t know how old Hutchinson was. We don’t know anything about him because after the inquest into Kelly’s murder, he simply disappeared. There is no date of birth, there is no date of death. It’s like he vanished into thin air.

And what about Joseph Barnett, the man who’d lived with Kelly? Did he hold onto his key and use it to gain entrance later that morning? He would have heard all the stories about the Ripper’s Modus Operandi. Fuelled with anger at his ex-partner, could he have murdered her in cold blood and copied the real Ripper’s methods to hide his tracks? Afterall, Mary Kelly was the only victim to have been murdered inside – all the other victims met their end under the stars. By inserting himself so early into the timeline that night, he would also have given police no cause to suspect him when weighed against Mary’s time of death.

There are so many possibilities, it’s almost a fool’s errand to try and fix these contradictions. The Ripper case is nothing if not stuffed full of contradictions, and a brief glance at Mary Kelly’s case brings up a slew of them. It’s a fascinating and slightly romantic suggestion to consider she survived whatever horrors occurred in Room 13 of Miller’s Court. Yet while we have witness testimony of her standing larger than life long after her supposed death – whether out on the streets or safe inside a pub – the tantalising hope that she lived out her life far from the slums of London will endure.

There is one depressing thing we can be sure of, though. Someone was brutally killed at 13 Miller’s Court, and the culprit vanished without a trace, never to be brought to justice, and never to be unmasked.