Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman

attractive Mary Jane Kelly, which occurred during the early hours of Friday, 9 November 1888, was by far the most savage and brutal of the five killings that autumn. It took place, as near as can be established, at about 4 o’clock in the morning, within the confines of the small dismal room she rented at 13 Miller’s Court off Dorset Street, on the day of the Lord Mayor’s Show.
    The editorial published in The Star that same day, matched every bit in sensationalism the shock headline publicised to the crowds by the two young boys who had joined the parade with their news-boards: “Details in respect of the mutilation of the body reveal a more horrible state of things than anything which has yet been recorded in this series of crimes. The thick flesh has been literally stripped from the thighs of the victim, and placed upon a table in the room. The woman’s breasts have also been roughly sliced off. The fleshy parts of the cheeks have also been hacked away, and the corpse presents a spectacle more hideous than anything which has presented itself to even the oldest and most experienced of the police officers who are engaged in the case. Everyone’s feelings are revolted, and it is absolute truth to say that the horrors revealed by the case are simply inexpressible.”
    Mary Kelly had married at sixteen but was widowed at nineteen, when her husband was killed in a mining accident. She had one son who was now aged seven or eight. He shared his mother’s room, but was occasionally packed off to friends nearby when she wanted privacy. She needed it that night because she had to earn her rent, and earlier during the evening he had been sent out, though what the boy’s name was, who might have cared for him and where he might have slept, we were unable to discover.
    Kelly’s room was partitioned from the rest of the house so that her front door opened directly into Miller’s Court. The other tenants used the front door which led into Dorset Street, so that, while they lived in the same house, their addresses were different.
    Mrs Elizabeth Prater, a prostitute, rented a first-floor room at 26 Dorset Street, which was located immediately above Mary Kelly’s room (and destined to become the scene of another murder some ten years later). At about 1.30 a.m., Mrs Prater went to her bed, having consumed some alcohol, and fell into a deep sleep. She was awoken by her kitten, which climbed onto her bed, and almost immediately heard a cry for help. In her statement to the police, she claimed that she heard two or three cries of ‘Murder!’ in a female voice. She said that the cries seemed to emanate from somewhere close at hand, though they sounded ‘muted’. Since the lodging house light was out, she thought it was probably past four o’clock. As to why Mrs Prater did not do something: she explained that such screams were so common that she took no notice of them, and went back to sleep.
    Another witness, Mrs Sarah Lewis, a laundress, who lived with her husband at 24 Great Pearl Street in Spitalfields, arrived at Miller’s Court between 2.00 and 3.00 in the morning. She came to stay with her friends, the Keyler’s, who lived at 2 Miller’s Court, after a quarrel with her husband. Lewis was given the use of an armchair where she slept poorly until 3.30 when she awoke. She then dozed. Just moments before 4.00, she too heard a cry for help. It was just a single shriek of ‘Murder!’ Mrs Lewis told the inquest that it sounded like the scream of a woman nearby, and she thought it came from the direction of Kelly’s room, but, once again, such cries were so frequent in the neighbourhood that she did not trouble herself to investigate further.
    Sarah Lewis’s evidence accorded well with the sworn testimony of Elizabeth Prater, who, by the time of the inquest on 12 November at the Shoreditch Town Hall, decided that she had, after all, heard only one cry of ‘Murder!’
    The medical evidence of Dr Thomas Bond and Dr George Phillips was of scant help in determining the time of death, but that was understandable. They were using the traditionally established methods: the rate of the victim’s body heat loss, the time it takes for rigor mortis to set in, the drop in rectal temperature and ambient temperature, but these pointers had almost no application in the present case; the variables were just too great. Mary Jane Kelly was virtually naked; at 36.2 degrees Fahrenheit, it had been a wet and bitterly cold night, and