At 10:45 on the morning of November 9, 1888, Thomas Bowyer knocked on the door of a small room in Miller’s Court, a cramped lodging in London’s East End. He had been sent by his employer, landlord John McCarthy, to collect rent from the tenant, Mary Jane Kelly, who was six weeks behind on her payments. When no one answered, Bowyer moved aside a makeshift curtain and peered through the window. On the bed inside lay the mutilated body of a woman.
Mary Jane Kelly had been born around 1863 in County Limerick, Ireland, into a poor family. Her father worked as an ironsmith, her mother kept house for their eight children, and Mary Jane spent her childhood helping at home rather than attending school. At sixteen she was still unable to read or write, and with no education and no skills, her only path to a better life seemed to be marriage. In 1879 she married a hard-working coal miner named Davies, and the young couple settled into a modest domestic life.
But three years later, a fatal explosion in the mine killed her husband. Still young, now widowed and alone, Mary Jane moved to Cardiff in search of work. Illiterate and inexperienced, she found no opportunities, and by 1884 she was poor and homeless. She decided to try London.
Unable to find steady employment in the capital, she became a prostitute, working in a West End brothel patronized by wealthy men. One of her regular clients took a liking to her and invited her to accompany him to France. Excited by the prospect, she changed her name to the more French-sounding Marie Jeanette and traveled with him as a couple. The trip did not go as she had hoped.
In France she was sold into prostitution and became a victim of human trafficking. She managed to escape and return to London, but fearing she might be found, she moved to the East End, settling in the Stepney area, where she lived first with a man named Morgan Stone and then with another man, Joe Fleming. Mary Jane was an attractive woman with dark hair and green eyes, and she attracted attention from men. She was usually quiet, but when she drank she changed, becoming argumentative and singing Irish songs so loudly that locals knew her as Dark Mary.
In April 1887, on a night out, she met Joseph Barnett, and the two decided to live together. Their home was a single tiny square room in Spitalfields containing a bed, three chairs, and a table. The area was notorious for poverty, crime, and filth, part of a district known as the wicked quarter mile, a street lined with lodging houses and pubs. At first Mary Jane did not work, and Barnett supported them both through his job as a fish porter at Billingsgate market.
He was a difficult man, however, and regularly clashed with his employer until he was dismissed. He found new work as a meat market porter, but it paid less, and he could no longer support both of them. Facing financial hardship, Mary Jane reluctantly returned to prostitution. While working she met a young woman named Julia who had nowhere to stay.
Knowing how hard life was for girls on the streets, Mary Jane invited her to share her tiny lodgings. The room was so cramped that Joseph Barnett decided he could no longer live there. After an argument, he left on October 30, though the couple agreed to keep seeing each other. Around eight o’clock in the evening of November 8, Joseph Barnett visited Mary Jane, accompanied by a friend named Maria Harvey.
The three spent time together before Barnett and Maria left. Barnett returned to his own lodgings, stayed up late playing cards with other residents, and fell asleep around half past midnight. That night, a neighbour, Mary Ann Cox, later told police she had seen Mary Jane return home around 11:45, apparently drunk, in the company of a stout, overweight man with ginger hair and a bowler hat. After wishing each other good night, Mary Jane went inside with him and began singing Irish songs.
Another resident, Elizabeth Prater, who lived above Mary Jane’s room, said the singing had stopped by 1:30 in the morning. She woke again at four o’clock when a kitten walked across her neck, and at that time she heard a faint cry of “Murder! ” A local resident named Sarah Lewis reported hearing the same thing. Neither woman investigated, because in the 1880s cries of murder in the East End were common enough that few took notice.
The police were called immediately after Bowyer made his discovery. Inspector Walter Beck was the first officer on the scene, followed by Superintendent Thomas Arnold, Inspector Edmund Reid of the Whitechapel division, and detectives Frederick Abberline and Robert Anderson from Scotland Yard. Arnold broke into the room at 1:30 in the afternoon. Inside, investigators found that the victim’s clothes appeared to have been burned, likely to provide light, since the room’s only other source of light was a dim candle.
Doctors Thomas Bond and George Bagster Phillips arrived to examine the body. They concluded that the mutilations were so extensive that they must have taken around two hours to inflict, and that death had occurred between two and eight in the morning. The cause of death was a slash to the throat. Dr.
Bond noted that the killer displayed no medical knowledge. In his opinion, the murderer had no scientific or anatomical training, and did not even possess the technical knowledge of a butcher or someone accustomed to cutting up dead animals. Because of the state of the body, identification was difficult. Joseph Barnett identified the remains as Mary Jane Kelly by her ear and eyes, and landlord John McCarthy confirmed the identification, saying he was certain it was her.
Her death was registered under the name Marie Jeanette Kelly. The police conducted house-to-house searches and extensive inquiries but found no trace of the killer. On November 10 the government issued a statement offering a pardon to any accomplice who was not the person who committed the crime if they came forward with information about the murderer or murderers. No one did.
One new witness eventually appeared: a labourer named George Hutchinson who said he knew Mary Jane. He claimed that around two in the morning he had seen her in the street, that she had asked him for a loan, and that when he said he had no money she was approached by a man, and the two went back toward her residence. Despite the darkness, Hutchinson gave police a highly detailed description of the man, whom he found suspicious because his appearance suggested he was not from the area. Police were uncertain whether Hutchinson’s account even related to the night of the murder, since he came forward some time afterward.
Mary Jane Kelly’s body was released after the examination and buried on November 19, 1888, in the Roman Catholic cemetery at Leytonstone. None of her family attended the funeral. No one was ever charged with her murder. In the years that followed, numerous theories emerged.
Authors Paul Harrison and Bruce Paley suggested that Joseph Barnett killed her in a jealous rage, and that he may have committed the other Whitechapel murders to frighten her out of prostitution. Others claimed Barnett killed only Mary Jane and mutilated the body to make police believe the killer was the notorious Jack the Ripper. But Barnett’s clothes were examined for bloodstains and he was questioned for four hours; no evidence connected him to the crime, and he was released. Some writers pointed at George Hutchinson, suggesting he was the murderer and the Ripper himself who tried to confuse police, while others dismissed him as an attention seeker hoping to sell his story to the papers.
Still another theory proposed that Mary Jane Kelly was not actually one of Jack the Ripper’s victims, arguing that the other victims were in their forties while she was only twenty-five, and that her mutilations were far more extensive than theirs. Historians have countered that her case was also unique in that she alone had been killed in private, behind closed doors. Following her death, no similar murders occurred for another six months. Most people have come to regard Mary Jane Kelly as Jack the Ripper’s final victim, and it is generally assumed the killer’s actions ceased because of death, imprisonment, or emigration.
But some continue to believe she was not a Ripper victim at all. To this day, the identity of the person who killed Mary Jane Kelly remains a mystery, just as the identity of Jack the Ripper does.