This walking tour promises chills and frights as we visit the locations of the Whitechapel Murders, discover more about the victims and the gruesome details of their murders and explore the conspiracy theories surrounding the identity of the killer. Learn about the world’s most chilling, unsolved murder mystery!
I must apologise for the quality of my photos, my camera struggled in the dark and it was wet and cold. If my phone hadnt been in for repair Im sure it would have coped better!
We arrived early and walk off trying to find somewhere to get something to eat, Lucy's phone GPS was a joke it was all over the place.
After we eventually found a place to eat, we made our way back to Tower Hill Station where the tour starts at 8pm.
So we set off, but it took ages for my GPS Etrex 10 to get a signal in the built up area. We were lead around the Station and through the Roman Wall.
The London Wall was the defensive wall first built by the Romans around Londinium, their strategically important port town on the River Thames in what is now London, England, and subsequently maintained until the 18th century.
It is now the name of a road in the City of London running along part of the course of the old wall between Wormwood Street and the Rotunda junction where St. Martin's Le Grand meets Aldersgate Street. Until the later Middle Ages, the wall defined the boundaries of the City of London.
After a introduction from the Tour guide Jamie, and were told of the dosshouses where people paid 8 pennies for a room with a dirty straw mattress alive with bugs and vermin,there was a 4 pennies option with even less luxury and for 2 pennies they slept on a rope tied over two points, they were usually drunk so they just slumped over these.
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| The 2d rope option. |
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| Dosshouse Womens Quarters |
We set off along and up the Minories.
Mary Ann was born to locksmith Edward Walker and his wife Caroline on 26 August 1845, in Dean Street, Soho, in London. On 16 January 1864 she married William Nichols, a printer's machinist, and between 1866 and 1879, the couple had five children: Edward John, Percy George, Alice Esther, Eliza Sarah, and Henry Alfred. Their marriage broke up in 1880 or 1881 because of disputed causes. Her father accused William of leaving her after he had an affair with the nurse who had attended the birth of their final child, though Nichols claimed to have proof that their marriage had continued for at least three years after the date alleged for the affair. He maintained that his wife had deserted him and was practising prostitution. Police reports say they separated because of her drunken habits.
Legally required to support his estranged wife, William Nichols paid her an allowance of five shillings a week until 1882, when he heard that she was working as a prostitute; he was not required to support her if she was earning money through illicit means. Nichols spent most of her remaining years in workhouses and boarding houses, living off charitable handouts and her meagre earnings as a prostitute. She lived with her father for a year or more but left after a quarrel; her father stated he had heard she had subsequently lived with a blacksmith named Drew in Walworth. In early 1888, the year of her death, she was placed in the Lambeth workhouse after being discovered sleeping rough in Trafalgar Square, and in May left the workhouse to take a job as a domestic servant in Wandsworth. Unhappy in that position—she was an alcoholic and her employer, Mr Cowdry, and his wife, were teetotallers—she left two months later, stealing clothing worth three pounds ten shillings. At the time of her death, Nichols was living in a Whitechapel common lodging house in Spitalfields, where she shared a room with a woman named Emily "Nelly" Holland.
At about 23:00 on 30 August, Nichols was seen walking the Whitechapel Road; at 00:30 on 31 August she was seen to leave a pub in Brick Lane, Spitalfields. An hour later, she was turned out of 18 Thrawl Street as she was lacking the fourpence required for a bed, implying by her last recorded words that she would soon earn the money on the street with the help of a new bonnet she had acquired. She was last seen alive standing at the corner of Osborn Street and Whitechapel Road at approximately 02:30 (one hour before her death) by her roommate, Emily Holland. To Holland, Nichols claimed she had earned enough money to pay for her bed three times that evening, but had repeatedly spent the money on alcohol.
A carman named Charles Allen Cross (birth name Lechmere) found Nichols' body lying on the ground in front of a gated stable entrance in Buck's Row (since renamed Durward Street), Whitechapel at 3:40 AM, about 150 yards from the London Hospital and 100 yards from Blackwall Buildings. Her skirt was raised. Another passing cart driver on his way to work, Robert Paul, approached and saw Cross standing in the road. Cross called him over, and both men walked across to the body, where they examined it together. Cross expressed his opinion that she was dead, but Paul was uncertain and thought she might simply be unconscious. They pulled her skirt down to cover her lower body, and went in search of a policeman. Upon encountering PC Jonas Mizen, Cross informed the constable: "She looks to me to be either dead or drunk, but for my part, I believe she's dead." The two men then continued on their way to work, leaving Mizen to inspect Nichols' body.
As Mizen approached the body, PC John Neale came from the opposite direction on his beat and by flashing his lantern, called a third policeman, PC John Thain, to the scene. As news of the murder spread, three horse slaughterers from a neighbouring knacker's yard in Winthrop Street, who had been working overnight, came to look at the body. None of the slaughterers, the police officers patrolling nearby streets, or the residents of houses alongside Buck's Row reported hearing or seeing anything suspicious before the discovery of the body.
PC Thain fetched surgeon Dr Henry Llewellyn, who arrived at 04:00 and decided she had been dead for about 30 minutes. Her throat had been slit twice from left to right and her abdomen mutilated with one deep jagged wound, several incisions across the abdomen, and three or four similar cuts on the right side caused by the same knife, estimated to be at least 6–8 inches (15–20 cm) long, used violently and downwards. Llewellyn expressed surprise at the small amount of blood at the crime scene, "about enough to fill two large wine glasses, or half a pint at the most". His comment led to the supposition that Nichols was not killed where her body was found, but the blood from her wounds had soaked into her clothes and hair, and there was little doubt that she had been killed at the crime scene by a swift slash to the throat. Death would have been instantaneous, and the abdominal injuries, which would have taken less than five minutes to perform, were made by the murderer after she was dead. When a person is killed, further wounds to their body do not always result in a large amount of blood loss. When the body was lifted a "mass of congealed blood", in PC Thain's words, lay beneath the body.
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| Mary Ann Nichols |
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| Bucks Row,(Now Duward Street) where Nichols was murdered. |
Annie Chapman was born Eliza Ann Smith. She was the daughter of George Smith of the 2nd Regiment Life Guards and Ruth Chapman. Her parents married after her birth, on 22 February 1842, in Paddington. Smith was a soldier at the time of his marriage, later becoming a domestic servant.
Annie Chapman eventually moved to Whitechapel, where in 1886 she was living with a man who made wire sieves; because of this she was often known as Annie "Sievey" or "Siffey". After she and her husband separated, she had received an allowance of 10 shillings a week from him, but at the end of 1886 the payments stopped abruptly. On inquiring why they had stopped, she found her husband had died of alcohol-related causes. The sieve-maker left her soon after, possibly due to the cessation of her income. One of her friends later testified that Chapman became very depressed after this and seemed to give up on life. Her friends called her "Dark Annie", for her dark brown hair.
By 1888 Chapman was living in common lodging houses in Whitechapel, occasionally in the company of Edward "the Pensioner" Stanley, a bricklayer's labourer. She earned some income from crochet work, making antimacassars and selling flowers, supplemented by casual prostitution. An acquaintance described her as "very civil and industrious when sober", but noted "I have often seen her the worse for drink."
In the week before her death she was feeling ill after being bruised in a fight with Eliza Cooper, a fellow resident in Crossingham's lodging house at 35 Dorset Street, Spitalfields. The two were reportedly rivals for the affections of a local hawker called Harry, but Eliza claimed the fight was over a borrowed bar of soap that Annie had not returned.
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| Annie Chapman |
According to the lodging house deputy Tim Donovan and the watchman John Evans, at about 1:45 a.m. on the morning of her death, Chapman found herself without money for her lodging and went out to earn some on the street. At the inquest one of the witnesses, Mrs. Elizabeth Long testified that she had seen Chapman talking to a man at about 5:30 a.m. just beyond the back yard of 29 Hanbury Street, Spitalfields. Mrs. Long described him as over forty, and a little taller than Chapman, with dark hair, and of foreign, "shabby-genteel" appearance. He was wearing a deer-stalker hat and dark overcoat. If correct in her identification of Chapman, it is likely that Long was the last person to see Chapman alive besides her murderer. Chapman's body was discovered at just before 6:00 a.m. on the morning of 8 September 1888 by a resident of number 29, market porter John Davis. She was lying on the ground near a doorway in the back yard. John Richardson, the son of a resident of the house, had been in the back yard shortly before 5 a.m. to trim a loose piece of leather from his boot, and carpenter Albert Cadosch had entered the neighbouring yard at 27 Hanbury Street at about 5:30 a.m., and heard voices in the yard followed by the sound of something falling against the fence.
Two pills, which she had for a lung condition, part of a torn envelope, a piece of muslin, and a comb were recovered from the yard. Brass rings that Chapman had been wearing earlier were not recovered, either because she had pawned them or because they had been stolen. All the pawnbrokers in the area were searched for the rings without success. The envelope bore the crest of the Sussex regiment, and was briefly thought to be related to Stanley who pretended to be an army pensioner, but the clue was eliminated from the inquiry after it was later traced to Crossingham's lodging house, where Chapman had taken up the envelope for re-use as a container for her pills. The press claimed that two farthings were found in the yard, but they are not mentioned in the surviving police records. The local inspector of the Metropolitan Police Service, Edmund Reid of H Division Whitechapel, was reported as mentioning them at an inquest in 1889, and the acting Commissioner of the City Police, Major Henry Smith, mentioned them in his memoirs. Smith's memoirs, however, are unreliable and embellished for dramatic effect, and were written more than twenty years after the event. He claimed that medical students polished farthings so they could be passed off as sovereigns to unsuspecting prostitutes, and so the presence of the farthings suggested the culprit was a medical student, but the price of a prostitute in the East End was likely to be much less than a sovereign.
The first officer on the scene was inspector Joseph Luniss Chandler of H Division, but Chief Inspector Donald Swanson of Scotland Yard was placed in overall command on 15 September. The murder was quickly linked to similar murders in the district, particularly to that of Mary Ann Nichols a week previously. Nichols had also suffered a slash to the throat and abdominal wounds, and a blade of similar size and design had been used. Swanson reported that an "immediate and searching enquiry was made at all common lodging houses to ascertain if anyone had entered that morning with blood on his hands or clothes, or under any suspicious circumstances". The body was conveyed later that day to Whitechapel mortuary in the same police ambulance, which was a handcart just large enough for one coffin, used for Nichols by Sergeant Edward Badham. Badham was the first to testify at the subsequent inquest.
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| Backyard of Hanbury Street |
As you can see this tour doesn't actually visit the sites of the first two murders as they are some distance from the walk itself.
We are now lead round to St Botolph without Gate Church in Aldgate also known as the Prostitutes Church.
St Botolph's Aldgate is a Church of England parish church in the City of London and also, as it lies outside the line of the city's former eastern walls, a part of the East End of London.
The full name of the church is St Botolph without Aldgate and Holy Trinity Minories and it is sometimes known simply as Aldgate Church. The ecclesiastical parish was united with that of the Church of Holy Trinity, Minories, in 1899.
The current 18th-century church building is made of brick with stone quoins and window casings. The tower is square with an obelisk spire.
We are told that the Prostitutes of the time would circle the church plying for trade, but when the police were seen they would all go into the church and wave at the police from the windows taunting them as they cant be arrested on Holy Grounds.
The Rippers Third Victim Elizabeth Stride;
Stride was born Elisabeth Gustafsdotter in the parish of Torslanda, west of Gothenburg, Sweden, on 27 November 1843. She was the daughter of a Swedish farmer, Gustaf Ericsson, and his wife Beata Carlsdotter. In 1860, she took work as a domestic in the Gothenburg parish of Carl Johan, moving again in the next few years to other Gothenburg districts. Unlike most other victims of the Whitechapel murders, who fell into prostitution due to poverty after a failed marriage, Stride took it up earlier. By March 1865 she was registered by the Gothenburg police as a prostitute, was treated twice for a sexually transmitted disease, and gave birth to a stillborn girl on 21 April 1865.
The following year she moved to London, possibly in domestic service with a family in Hyde Park. On 7 March 1869 she married John Thomas Stride, a ship's carpenter from Sheerness who was 13 years her senior, and the couple for a time kept a coffee room in Poplar, east London. In March 1877, Liz Stride was admitted to the Poplar Workhouse, suggesting that the couple had separated. They had apparently reunited by 1881, but separated permanently by the end of that year.
She told acquaintances that her husband and two of her nine children had drowned in the sinking of the Princess Alice in the River Thames in 1878. In the accident, according to her story, she had supposedly been kicked in the mouth by another of the victims as they both swam to safety, which had caused her to stutter ever since. In fact, John Stride died of tuberculosis in Poplar and Stepney Sick Asylum on 24 October 1884, more than five years after the Princess Alice disaster, and they had no children.
After separating from her husband, Stride lived in a common lodging-house in Whitechapel, with charitable assistance once or twice from the Church of Sweden in London, and from 1885 until her death lived much of the time with a local dock labourer, Michael Kidney, in Devonshire Street. She earned some income from sewing and housecleaning work. An acquaintance described her as having a calm temperament, though she appeared at Thames Magistrates Court numerous times for being drunk and disorderly, giving her name as Anne Fitzgerald. She learned to speak Yiddish in addition to English and Swedish. Her relationship with Kidney continued in an on-and-off fashion. In April 1887, she laid an assault charge against him but failed to pursue it in court. She left Kidney again a few days before her death. Dr Thomas Barnardo, a leading social reformer, claimed to have met Stride at the lodging house at 32 Flower and Dean Street on Wednesday 26 September.
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| Elizabeth Stride |
On the night before her murder, 29 September, Stride was wearing a black jacket and skirt, with a posy of a red rose in a spray of maidenhair fern or asparagus leaves. Her outfit was complemented by a black crêpe bonnet. She may have been seen with a client, a short man with a dark moustache wearing a morning suit and bowler hat, at around 11:00 p.m. near Berner Street, and again at about 11:45 p.m. with a man wearing a peaked cap. At 12:35 a.m., PC William Smith saw her with a man wearing a hard felt hat opposite the International Working Men's Educational Club, a socialist and predominantly Jewish social club, at 40 Berner Street (since renamed Henriques Street) in Whitechapel. The man was carrying a package about 18 inches (45 cm) in length.
Stride's body was discovered close to 1 a.m. on Sunday 30 September 1888 by Louis Diemschutz, the steward of the Workers' Club, in the adjacent Dutfield's Yard. Diemshutz drove into the yard with a pony and two-wheeled cart, when his horse shied. The yard was so dark that he was unable to see her body without lighting a match. With blood still flowing from a wound in her neck, it appeared that she was killed just moments before he arrived. Between 12:30 and 12:50 a.m., departing club members, who had attended a debate on "The Necessity of Socialism amongst Jews" followed by community singing, had seen nothing amiss in the yard. Mrs. Mortimer, who lived two doors away from the club, had stood in Berner Street to listen to the singing at about the same time, and had not seen anyone enter the yard. Mortimer did report seeing a man with a shiny black bag race past, which was reported widely in the press, but one of the club's members, Leon Goldstein, identified himself as the man Mortimer had seen and he was eliminated from the inquiry.
The police searched the remaining members of the club, and the adjacent properties, and interviewed the residents of the area. A witness named Israel Schwartz reported seeing Stride being attacked and thrown to the ground outside Dutfield's Yard at around 12:45 a.m. Her attacker may have called out "Lipski" to a second man standing nearby, which was thought to be an anti-semitic taunt derived from the name of a notorious poisoner, Israel Lipski. Schwartz did not testify at the inquest on Stride, possibly because he was Hungarian and spoke very little if any English. Ripper investigator Stephen Knight found Schwartz's statement in case files in the 1970s. At about the same time, Stride, or someone matching her description, was seen by James Brown rejecting the advances of a stoutish man slightly taller than her in the adjacent street to Berner Street (Fairclough Street). A note in the margin of the Home Office files on the case points out that there was time for Stride to meet another man between her death and the latest sightings of her. The steward Diemshutz later said that he believed that the killer was still in the yard when he drove into it.
No money was found on Stride's body, so it is possible that her night's takings were stolen from her, either in the attack seen by Schwartz, or by her murderer. Either way she seems to have gone into the yard with her murderer alive, presumably on the basis that he was a client.
Stride's murder occurred in the midst of the Jack the Ripper scare, when a single attacker, known as Jack the Ripper, was blamed for a series of brutal attacks against sex workers. However, unlike at least six other victims, who had abdominal injuries in addition to a slash across the neck, she had no mutilations beyond her slit throat. The murder of Stride shares similarities to the pattern of Ripper killings, such as day of the week, time, type of site, characteristics of the victim and the method of murder. It is possible that the killer was interrupted before he had the opportunity to mutilate the body. Catherine Eddowes was murdered within walking distance less than an hour later, and both Stride and Eddowes lived in Flower and Dean Street. The deaths of Eddowes and Stride sent London into a panic, as it was the first time that two murders ascribed to the Ripper had occurred in one night.
On 1 October, a postcard, dubbed the "Saucy Jacky" postcard and also signed "Jack the Ripper", was received by the Central News Agency. It claimed responsibility for Stride's and Eddowes's murders, and described the killing of the two women as the "double event", a designation which has endured. It has been argued that the postcard was mailed before the murders were publicised, making it unlikely that a crank would have such knowledge of the crime, but it was postmarked more than 24 hours after the killings took place, long after details were known by journalists and residents of the area. Police officials later claimed to have identified a journalist as the author of the postcard, and dismissed it as a hoax, an assessment shared by most Ripper historians.
The text of the postcard reads:
I was not codding dear old Boss when I gave you the tip, you'll hear about Saucy Jacky's work tomorrow double event this time number one squealed a bit couldn't finish straight off. Had not time to get ears off for police thanks for keeping last letter back till I got to work again.
Jack the Ripper
The tour guide tells us a journalist was found to have mailed this to generate interest and was later sacked. This was the first time the name Jack The Ripper was used and it stuck,
We were then walked round to Mitre Square the site of The Rippers Fourth Victim.
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The square occupies the site of the cloister of Holy Trinity Priory, Aldgate, which was demolished under Henry VIII at the time of the dissolution of the monasteries. The square became infamous as the site of the murder of Catherine Eddowes by Jack the Ripper in September 1888. |
Rippers Fourth Victim Catherine Eddowes;
Eddowes, also known as "Kate Conway" and "Kate Kelly" after her two successive common-law husbands, was born in Graisley Green, Wolverhampton on 14 April 1842. Her parents, tinplate worker George Eddowes and his wife Catherine (née Evans), had 11 other children. The family moved to London a year after her birth, but she later returned to Wolverhampton to work as a tinplate stamper.
On losing this job, she took up with ex-soldier Thomas Conway in Birmingham; she moved back to London with him and they had a daughter and two sons. She took to drinking and left her family in 1880; the following year she was living with new partner John Kelly at Cooney's common lodging-house at 55 Flower and Dean Street, Spitalfields, at the centre of London's most notorious criminal rookery. Here she took to casual sex work to pay the rent. To avoid contact with his former partner, Conway drew his army pension under the assumed name of Quinn, and kept their sons' addresses secret from her.
At the time of her death she was described as being five feet tall, with dark auburn hair, hazel eyes, and a tattoo that read "TC", for Tom Conway, in blue ink on her left forearm. Friends of Eddowes described her as "intelligent and scholarly, but possessed of a fierce temper"and "a very jolly woman, always singing."
In the summer of 1888, Eddowes, Kelly, and their friend Emily Birrell took casual work hop-picking in Kent. At harvest's end they returned to London and quickly spent their pay. Eddowes and Kelly split their last sixpence between them; he took fourpence to pay for a bed in the common lodging-house, and she took twopence, just enough for her to stay a night at Mile End Casual Ward in the neighbouring parish.
They met up the following morning, 29 September, and in the early afternoon Eddowes told Kelly she would go to Bermondsey to try to get some money from her daughter, Annie Phillips, who was married to a gun-maker in Southwark. With money from pawning his boots, a bare-footed Kelly took a bed at the lodging-house just after 8:00 p.m., and according to the deputy keeper remained there all night.
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| Eddowes Mortuary Picture after stitching |
At 8:30 p.m. on Saturday, 29 September, Eddowes was found lying drunk in the road on Aldgate High Street by PC Louis Robinson. She was taken into custody and then to Bishopsgate police station, where she was detained, giving the name "Nothing", until she was sober enough to leave at 1 a.m. on the morning of 30 September. On her release, she gave her name and address as "Mary Ann Kelly of 6 Fashion Street".
When leaving the station, instead of turning right to take the shortest route to her home in Flower and Dean Street, she turned left towards Aldgate. She was last seen alive at 1:35 a.m. by three witnesses, Joseph Lawende, Joseph Hyam Levy and Harry Harris, who had just left a club on Duke Street. She was standing talking with a man at the entrance to Church Passage, which led south-west from Duke Street to Mitre Square along the south wall of the Great Synagogue of London. Only Lawende could furnish a description of the man, whom he described as a fair-moustached man wearing a navy jacket, peaked cloth cap, and red scarf. Chief Inspector Donald Swanson intimated in his report that Lawende's identification of the woman as Eddowes was doubtful. He wrote that Lawende had said that some clothing of the deceased's that he was shown resembled that of the woman he saw—"which was black ... that was the extent of his identity. A patrolling policeman, PC James Harvey, walked down Church Passage from Duke Street very shortly afterwards but his beat took him back down Church Passage to Duke Street, without entering the square.
Eddowes was killed and mutilated in the square between 1:35 and 1:45 a.m.
At 1:45 a.m., Eddowes' mutilated body was found in the south-west corner of Mitre Square by the square's beat policeman PC Edward Watkins. Watkins said that he entered the square at 1:44 a.m, having previously been there at 1:30 a.m. He called for assistance at a tea warehouse in the square, where night watchman George James Morris, who was an ex-policeman, had noticed nothing unusual. Neither had another watchman (George Clapp) at 5 Mitre Square or an off-duty policeman (Richard Pearse) at 3 Mitre Square.
Police surgeon Dr. Frederick Gordon Brown, who arrived after 2:00 a.m., said of the scene:
The body was on its back, the head turned to left shoulder. The arms by the side of the body as if they had fallen there. Both palms upwards, the fingers slightly bent. A thimble was lying off the finger on the right side. The clothes drawn up above the abdomen. The thighs were naked. Left leg extended in a line with the body. The abdomen was exposed. Right leg bent at the thigh and knee.
The bonnet was at the back of the head—great disfigurement of the face. The throat cut. Across below the throat was a neckerchief. ... The intestines were drawn out to a large extent and placed over the right shoulder—they were smeared over with some feculent matter. A piece of about two feet was quite detached from the body and placed between the body and the left arm, apparently by design. The lobe and auricle of the right ear were cut obliquely through. There was a quantity of clotted blood on the pavement on the left side of the neck round the shoulder and upper part of the arm, and fluid blood-coloured serum which had flowed under the neck to the right shoulder, the pavement sloping in that direction.
Body was quite warm. No death stiffening had taken place. She must have been dead most likely within the half hour. We looked for superficial bruises and saw none. No blood on the skin of the abdomen or secretion of any kind on the thighs. No spurting of blood on the bricks or pavement around. No marks of blood below the middle of the body. Several buttons were found in the clotted blood after the body was removed. There was no blood on the front of the clothes. There were no traces of recent connection.
Brown conducted a post-mortem that afternoon, noting:
After washing the left hand carefully, a bruise the size of a sixpence, recent and red, was discovered on the back of the left hand between the thumb and first finger. A few small bruises on right shin of older date. The hands and arms were bronzed. No bruises on the scalp, the back of the body, or the elbows. ... The cause of death was haemorrhage from the left common carotid artery. The death was immediate and the mutilations were inflicted after death ... There would not be much blood on the murderer. The cut was made by someone on the right side of the body, kneeling below the middle of the body. ... The peritoneal lining was cut through on the left side and the left kidney carefully taken out and removed. ... I believe the perpetrator of the act must have had considerable knowledge of the position of the organs in the abdominal cavity and the way of removing them. The parts removed would be of no use for any professional purpose. It required a great deal of knowledge to have removed the kidney and to know where it was placed. Such a knowledge might be possessed by one in the habit of cutting up animals. I think the perpetrator of this act had sufficient time ... It would take at least five minutes. ... I believe it was the act of one person.
Police physician Thomas Bond, disagreed with Brown's assessment of the killer's skill level. Bond's report to police stated: "In each case the mutilation was inflicted by a person who had no scientific nor anatomical knowledge. In my opinion he does not even possess the technical knowledge of a butcher or horse slaughterer or any person accustomed to cut up dead animals."Local surgeon Dr George William Sequeira, who was the first doctor at the scene, and City medical officer William Sedgwick Saunders, who was also present at the autopsy, also thought that the killer lacked anatomical skill and did not seek particular organs. In addition to the abdominal wounds, the murderer had cut Eddowes' face: across the bridge of the nose, on both cheeks, and through the eyelids of both eyes. The tip of her nose and part of one ear had been cut off. The Royal London Hospital on Whitechapel Road preserves some crime scene drawings and plans of the Mitre Square murder by the City Surveyor Frederick Foster; they were first brought to public attention in 1966 by Francis Camps, Professor of Forensic Medicine at London University. Based on his analysis of the surviving documents, Camps concluded that "the cuts shown on the body could not have been done by an expert."
The Eddowes inquest was opened on 4 October by Samuel F. Langham, coroner for the City of London. A house-to-house search was conducted but nothing suspicious was discovered. Brown stated his belief that Eddowes was killed by a slash to the throat as she lay on the ground, and then mutilated.
Though the murder occurred within the City of London, it was close to the boundary of Whitechapel where the previous Whitechapel murders had occurred. The mutilation of Eddowes' body and the abstraction of her left kidney and part of her womb by her murderer bore the signature of Jack the Ripper and was very similar in nature to that of earlier victim Annie Chapman.
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| The spot where Catherine laid dead. |
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Major Henry Smith, acting Commissioner of the City Police, claimed in his memoirs to have discovered bloodied water in a public sink in a court off Dorset Street, and as the water was slowly running out of the basin, he calculated that the Ripper had been there only moments before. Ripper author Martin Fido thought it unlikely that the culprit would wait to wash his hands in a semi-public place about forty minutes after the crime, and Smith's memoirs are both unreliable and embellished for dramatic effect. There is no mention of the sink in the official police reports.
We are then walked through to The Bell Public House on 50 Middlesex Street.
Situated on the corner of Middlesex Street (Petticoat Lane) and New Goulston Street, the age of 'The Bell' is unclear - in the mid 18th-century, a Black Bell Alley stood on the site of the present pub. Whether it was named after this long-demolished thoroughfare or after nearby Bell Lane is unclear. The current structure dates from the 19th century. A depiction of a bell can be seen in the decorative brickwork at the top of the building on the corner.
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| Not quite The Ripper on the art on the side of The Bell PH |
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| Previous artwork here at The Bell PH |
We were walked around to Happy Days Fish Bar on Goulston Street., where Jack The Ripper abandoned a blood soaked piece of apron of one of his victims. The restaurant walls are adorned with many pictures of the murder suspects and other Jack The Ripper memorabilia.
We walked up Bell Lane to White's Row.
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| A dosshouse on Bell Lane j/w White's Row |
We are walked through to Spitalfields Market the location of the fifth and final victim Mary Jane Kelly;
Dorset Street was a street in Spitalfields, east London, once situated at the heart of the area's rookery. By repute it was "the worst street in London" and it was the scene of the brutal murder of Mary Jane Kelly by Jack the Ripper on 9 November 1888. The murder was committed at Kelly's lodgings which were situated at No. 13, Miller's Court entered from a passageway between 26 and 27, Dorset Street.
The road was renamed Duval Street in 1904, before having its north side demolished in 1920 during the rebuilding of Old Spitalfields Market, and the buildings on the south side replaced by a car park in the 1960s. The site was built over during redevelopment of the Fruit and Wool Exchange in the 2010s.
Compared with other Ripper victims, Kelly's origins are obscure and undocumented, and much of it is possibly embellished. Kelly may have herself fabricated many details of her early life as there is no corroborating documentary evidence, but there is no evidence to the contrary either. According to Joseph Barnett, the man she had most recently lived with prior to her murder, Kelly had told him she was born in Limerick, Ireland, in around 1863—although whether she referred to the city or the county is not known—and that her family moved to Wales when she was young.
Barnett reported that Kelly had told him her father was named John Kelly and that he worked in an iron works in either Caernarfonshire or Carmarthenshire. Barnett also recalled Kelly mentioning having seven brothers and at least one sister. One brother, named Henry, supposedly served in the 2nd Battalion Scots Guards. She once stated to her friend Lizzie Albrook that a family member was employed at the London theatrical stage. Her landlord, John McCarthy, claimed that Kelly received infrequent correspondence from Ireland.
Both Barnett and a reported former roommate named Mrs. Carthy claimed that Kelly came from a family of "well-to-do people". Carthy reported Kelly being "an excellent scholar and an artist of no mean degree"—but at the inquest, Barnett informed the coroner that she often asked him to read the newspaper reports of the murders to her, suggesting that she was illiterate.
Around 1879, Kelly was reportedly married to a coal miner named Davies, who was killed two or three years later in a mine explosion. She claimed to have stayed for eight months in an infirmary in Cardiff, before moving in with a cousin. Although there are no contemporary records of Kelly's presence in Cardiff, it is at this stage in her life that Kelly is considered to have begun her career as a prostitute.
Barnett visited Kelly for the last time between 7:00 and 8:00 p.m. on 8 November. He found her in the company of Maria Harvey, a friend of hers, and Harvey and Barnett left at about the same time.[19] Barnett returned to his lodging house, where he played cards with other residents until falling asleep at about 12:30.
Fellow Miller's Court resident and prostitute, Mary Ann Cox, who described herself as "a widow and unfortunate", reported seeing Kelly returning home drunk in the company of a stout ginger-haired man wearing a bowler hat and carrying a can of beer at about 11:45 p.m. Cox and Kelly wished each other goodnight. Kelly went into her room with the man and then started singing the song "A Violet I Plucked from Mother's Grave When a Boy." She was still singing when Cox went out at midnight, and when she returned an hour later at 1:00. Elizabeth Prater had the room above Kelly's and when she went to bed at 1:30, the singing had stopped.
George Hutchinson's statement as seen in the newspaper The Illustrated Police News, 24 November 1888.
Labourer George Hutchinson, who knew Kelly, reported that she met him at about 2:00 a.m. and asked him for a loan of sixpence. He claimed to be broke and that as Kelly went on her way she was approached by a man of "Jewish appearance". Hutchinson later gave the police an extremely detailed description of the man right down to the colour of his eyelashes despite it being the middle of the night. He reported that he overheard them talking in the street opposite the court where Kelly was living; Kelly complained of losing her handkerchief, and the man gave her a red one of his own. Hutchinson claimed that Kelly and the man headed for her room, that he followed them, and that he saw neither one of them again, laying off his watch at about 2:45. Hutchinson's statement appears to be partly corroborated by laundress Sarah Lewis, who reported seeing a man watching the entrance to Miller's Court as she passed into it at about 2:30 to spend the night with some friends, the Keylers. Hutchinson claimed that he was suspicious of the man because although Kelly seemed to know him, his opulent appearance made him seem very unusual in that neighbourhood, but only reported this to the police after the inquest on Kelly had been hastily concluded. Abberline, the detective in charge of the investigation, thought Hutchinson's information was important and sent him out with officers to see if he could see the man again. Hutchinson's name does not appear again in the existing police records, and so it is not possible to say with certainty whether his evidence was ultimately dismissed, disproven, or corroborated. In his memoirs Walter Dew discounts Hutchinson on the basis that his sighting may have been on a different day, and not the morning of the murder. Robert Anderson, head of the CID, later claimed that the only witness who got a good look at the killer was Jewish. Hutchinson was not a Jew, and thus not that witness. Some modern scholars have suggested that Hutchinson was the Ripper himself, trying to confuse the police with a false description, but others suggest he may have just been an attention seeker who made up a story he hoped to sell to the press.
Cox returned home again at about 3:00. She reported hearing no sound and seeing no light from Kelly's room.Elizabeth Prater, who was woken by a kitten walking over her neck, and Sarah Lewis both reported hearing a faint cry of "Murder!" at about 4:00 a.m., but did not react because they reported that it was common to hear such cries in the East End. She claimed not to have slept and to have heard people moving in and out of the court throughout the night.She thought she heard someone leaving the residence at about 5:45 a.m. Prater did leave at 5:30 a.m., to go to the Ten Bells public house for a drink of rum, and saw nothing suspicious.
On the morning of 9 November 1888, the day of the annual Lord Mayor's Day celebrations, Kelly's landlord John McCarthy sent his assistant, ex-soldier Thomas Bowyer, to collect the rent. Kelly was six weeks behind on her payments, owing 29 shillings. Shortly after 10:45 a.m., Bowyer knocked on her door but received no response. He reached through the crack in the window, pushed aside a coat being used as a curtain and peered inside—discovering Kelly's horribly mutilated corpse lying on the bed. She died at about 4:30AM.
The Manchester Guardian of 10 November 1888 reported that Sgt Edward Badham accompanied Inspector Walter Beck to the site of 13 Miller's Court after they were both notified of Kelly's murder by a frantic Bowyer. Beck told the inquest that he was the first police officer at the scene and Badham may have accompanied him, but there are no official records to confirm Badham being with him. Edward Badham was on duty at Commercial Street police station on the evening of 12 November 1888. The inquest into the death of Mary Kelly had been completed earlier that day, when at around 6 p.m. George Hutchinson arrived at the station to give his initial statement to Badham.
The body of Mary Jane Kelly
The wife of a local lodging-house deputy, Caroline Maxwell, claimed to have seen Kelly alive at about 8:30 on the morning of the murder, though she admitted to only meeting her once or twice before;[40] moreover, her description did not match that of those who knew Kelly more closely. Maurice Lewis, a tailor, reported seeing Kelly at about 10:00 that same morning in a pub. Both statements were dismissed by the police since they did not fit the accepted time of death; moreover, they could find no one else to confirm the reports.[41] Maxwell may have either mistaken someone else for Kelly, or mixed up the day she had seen her.[42] Such confusion was used as a plot device in the graphic novel From Hell (and subsequent movie adaptation).
The scene was attended by Superintendent Thomas Arnold and Inspector Edmund Reid from Whitechapel's H Division, as well as Frederick Abberline and Robert Anderson from Scotland Yard. Arnold had the room broken into at 1:30 p.m. after the possibility of tracking the murderer from the room with bloodhounds was dismissed as impractical. A fire fierce enough to melt the solder between a kettle and its spout had burnt in the grate, apparently fuelled with clothing. Inspector Abberline thought Kelly's clothes were burnt by the murderer to provide light, as the room was otherwise only dimly lit by a single candle.
The mutilation of Kelly's corpse was by far the most extensive of any of the Whitechapel murders, probably because the murderer had more time to commit his atrocities in a private room rather than in the street. Dr. Thomas Bond and Dr. George Bagster Phillips examined the body. Phillips and Bond timed her death to about 12 hours before the examination. Phillips suggested that the extensive mutilations would have taken two hours to perform, and Bond noted that rigor mortis set in as they were examining the body, indicating that death occurred between 2 and 8:00 a.m. Bond's notes read:
Additional police photograph of the body of Mary Jane Kelly
The body was lying naked in the middle of the bed, the shoulders flat but the axis of the body inclined to the left side of the bed. The head was turned on the left cheek. The left arm was close to the body with the forearm flexed at a right angle and lying across the abdomen. The right arm was slightly abducted from the body and rested on the mattress. The elbow was bent, the forearm supine with the fingers clenched. The legs were wide apart, the left thigh at right angles to the trunk and the right forming an obtuse angle with the pubis.
The whole of the surface of the abdomen and thighs was removed and the abdominal cavity emptied of its viscera. The breasts were cut off, the arms mutilated by several jagged wounds and the face hacked beyond recognition of the features. The tissues of the neck were severed all round down to the bone.
The viscera were found in various parts viz: the uterus and kidneys with one breast under the head, the other breast by the right foot, the liver between the feet, the intestines by the right side and the spleen by the left side of the body. The flaps removed from the abdomen and thighs were on a table.
The bed clothing at the right corner was saturated with blood, and on the floor beneath was a pool of blood covering about two feet square. The wall by the right side of the bed and in a line with the neck was marked by blood which had struck it in several places.
The face was gashed in all directions, the nose, cheeks, eyebrows, and ears being partly removed. The lips were blanched and cut by several incisions running obliquely down to the chin. There were also numerous cuts extending irregularly across all the features.
The neck was cut through the skin and other tissues right down to the vertebrae, the fifth and sixth being deeply notched. The skin cuts in the front of the neck showed distinct ecchymosis. The air passage was cut at the lower part of the larynx through the cricoid cartilage.
Both breasts were more or less removed by circular incisions, the muscle down to the ribs being attached to the breasts. The intercostals between the fourth, fifth, and sixth ribs were cut through and the contents of the thorax visible through the openings.
The skin and tissues of the abdomen from the costal arch to the pubes were removed in three large flaps. The right thigh was denuded in front to the bone, the flap of skin, including the external organs of generation, and part of the right buttock. The left thigh was stripped of skin fascia, and muscles as far as the knee.
The left calf showed a long gash through skin and tissues to the deep muscles and reaching from the knee to five inches above the ankle. Both arms and forearms had extensive jagged wounds.
The right thumb showed a small superficial incision about one inch long, with extravasation of blood in the skin, and there were several abrasions on the back of the hand moreover showing the same condition.
On opening the thorax it was found that the right lung was minimally adherent by old firm adhesions. The lower part of the lung was broken and torn away. The left lung was intact. It was adherent at the apex and there were a few adhesions over the side. In the substances of the lung there were several nodules of consolidation.
The pericardium was open below and the heart absent. In the abdominal cavity there was some partly digested food of fish and potatoes, and similar food was found in the remains of the stomach attached to the intestines.
Phillips believed that Kelly had been killed by a slash to the throat and the mutilations performed afterwards. Bond stated in a report that the knife used was about 1 in (25 mm) wide and at least 6 in (150 mm) long, but did not believe that the murderer had any medical training or knowledge. He wrote:
In each case the mutilation was inflicted by a person who had no scientific nor anatomical knowledge. In my opinion, he does not even possess the technical knowledge of a butcher or horse slaughterer or a person accustomed to cut up dead animals.
Her body was taken to the mortuary in Shoreditch rather than the one in Whitechapel, which meant that the inquest was opened by the coroner for North East Middlesex, Dr. Roderick Macdonald, MP, instead of Wynne Edwin Baxter, the coroner who handled many of the other Whitechapel murders. The speed of the inquest was criticised in the press; Macdonald heard the inquest in a single day at Shoreditch Town Hall on 12 November. She was officially identified by Barnett, who said he recognised her by "the ear and the eyes", and McCarthy was also certain the body was Kelly's.Her death was registered in the name "Marie Jeanette Kelly", aged 25.
Montague John Druitt
Seweryn Kłosowski
Aaron Kosminski
Aaron Kosminski (born Aron Mordke Kozminski; 11 September 1865 – 24 March 1919) was a Polish Jew who was admitted to Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum in 1891. "Kosminski" (without a forename) was named as a suspect by Sir Melville Macnaghten in his 1894 memorandum[20] and by former Chief Inspector Donald Swanson in handwritten comments in the margin of his copy of Assistant Commissioner Sir Robert Anderson's memoirs. Anderson wrote that a Polish Jew had been identified as the Ripper but that no prosecution was possible because the witness was also Jewish and refused to testify against a fellow Jew. Some authors are sceptical of this, while others use it in their theories. In his memorandum, Macnaghten stated that no one was ever identified as the Ripper, which directly contradicts Anderson's recollection. In 1987, author Martin Fido searched asylum records for any inmates called Kosminski, and found only one: Aaron Kosminski. Kosminski lived in Whitechapel; however, he was largely harmless in the asylum. His insanity took the form of auditory hallucinations, a paranoid fear of being fed by other people, a refusal to wash or bathe, and "self-abuse". In his book, The Cases That Haunt Us, former FBI profiler John Douglas states that a paranoid individual such as Kosminski would likely have openly boasted of the murders while incarcerated had he been the killer, but there is no record that he ever did so. In 2014, DNA analysis tenuously linked Kosminski with a shawl said to have belonged to victim Catherine Eddowes, but experts – including Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys, the inventor of genetic fingerprinting – dismissed the claims as unreliable. In March 2019, the Journal of Forensic Sciences published a study that claimed DNA from Kosminski and Catherine Eddowes was found on the shawl, though other scientists have cast doubt on the study.
Michael Ostrog
Michael Ostrog (c. 1833–in or after 1904) was a Russian-born professional con man and thief. He used numerous aliases and assumed titles. Among his many dubious claims was that he had once been a surgeon in the Russian Navy. He was mentioned as a suspect by Macnaghten, who joined the case in 1889, the year after the "canonical five" victims were killed. Researchers have failed to find evidence that he had committed crimes any more serious than fraud and theft. Author Philip Sugden discovered prison records showing that Ostrog was jailed for petty offences in France during the Ripper murders. Ostrog was last mentioned alive in 1904; the date of his death is unknown.
John Pizer
James Thomas Sadler
James Thomas Sadler was a friend of Frances Coles, the last victim added to the Whitechapel murders police file. Coles was killed with a wound to the throat on 13 February 1891. Sadler was arrested, but there was little evidence against him. Though briefly considered by the police as a Ripper suspect, he was at sea at the time of the first four "canonical" murders, and was released without charge. Sadler was named in Macnaghten's 1894 memorandum in connection with Coles's murder. Macnaghten thought Sadler "was a man of ungovernable temper and entirely addicted to drink, and the company of the lowest prostitutes".
Francis Tumblety
William Henry Bury
Thomas Neill Cream
Thomas Hayne Cutbush
Thomas Hayne Cutbush (1865–1903) was a medical student sent to Lambeth Infirmary in 1891 suffering delusions thought to have been caused by syphilis.After stabbing a woman in the backside and attempting to stab a second he was pronounced insane and committed to Broadmoor Hospital in 1891, where he remained until his death in 1903. In a series of articles in 1894, The Sun newspaper suggested that Cutbush was the Ripper. There is no evidence that police took the idea seriously, and Melville Macnaghten's memorandum naming the three police suspects Druitt, Kosminski and Ostrog was written to refute the idea that Cutbush was the Ripper. Cutbush was the suspect advanced in the 1993 book Jack the Myth by A. P. Wolf, who suggested that Macnaghten wrote his memo to protect Cutbush's uncle, a fellow police officer. Another recent writer, Peter Hodgson, considers Cutbush the most likely candidate. David Bullock also firmly believes Cutbush to be the real ripper in his book.
Frederick Bailey Deeming
Carl FeigenbaumCarl Ferdinand Feigenbaum (executed 27 April 1896) was a German merchant seaman arrested in 1894 in New York City for cutting the throat of Mrs Juliana Hoffmann. After his execution, his lawyer, William Sanford Lawton, claimed that Feigenbaum had admitted to having a hatred of women and a desire to kill and mutilate them. Lawton further stated that he believed Feigenbaum was Jack the Ripper. Though covered by the press at the time, the idea was not pursued for more than a century. Using Lawton's accusation as a base, author Trevor Marriott, a former British murder squad detective, argued that Feigenbaum was responsible for the Ripper murders as well as other murders in the United States and Germany between 1891 and 1894. According to Wolf Vanderlinden, some of the murders listed by Marriott did not actually occur; the newspapers often embellished or created Ripper-like stories to sell copy. Lawton's accusations were disputed by a partner in his legal firm, Hugh O. Pentecost, and there is no proof that Feigenbaum was in Whitechapel at the time of the murders. Xanthé Mallett, a Scottish forensic anthropologist and criminologist who investigated the case in 2011, wrote there is considerable doubt that all of the Jack the Ripper murders were committed by the same person. She concludes that it is possible Feigenbaum committed one of the murders but not all.
Robert Donston StephensonRobert Donston Stephenson (also known as Roslyn D'Onston) (20 April 1841 – 9 October 1916) was a journalist and writer interested in the occult and black magic. He admitted himself as a patient at the London Hospital in Whitechapel shortly before the murders started, and left shortly after they ceased. He wrote a newspaper article in which he claimed that black magic was the motive for the killings and alleged that the Ripper was a Frenchman.Stephenson's strange manner and interest in the crimes resulted in an amateur detective reporting him to Scotland Yard on Christmas Eve, 1888. Two days later Stephenson reported his own suspect, a Dr Morgan Davies of the London Hospital. Subsequently, he fell under the suspicion of newspaper editor William Thomas Stead. In his books on the case, author and historian Melvin Harris argued that Stephenson was a leading suspect, but the police do not appear to have treated either him or Dr Davies as serious suspects. London Hospital night-shift rosters and practices indicate that Stephenson was not able to leave on the nights of the murders and hence could not have been Jack the Ripper.
The 5 Craziest Jack the Ripper Theories
1. Walter Sickert
A renowned painter of the time is a curious candidate for the Whitechapel murders, and mainly falls to the fact that Sickert had made sketches and paintings of the Ripper crimes that were quite accurate.
As the Casebook writes:
Sickert had been tangentially implicated in the Ripper crimes as early as the 1970s, with the release of the now infamous “Royal Conspiracy” theory. But it wasn’t until the early 1990s, with the release of Jean Overton Fuller’s Sickert and the Ripper Crimes, that the peculiar artist became a Ripper suspect in his own right.
More recently, famed crime novelist Patricia Cornwell has claimed to have found DNA evidence linking Sickert to at least one of the ‘Ripper Letters,’ and she has made a case in her book, “Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper Case Closed.”
2. Lewis Carroll
Yes, that Lewis Carroll, author of the Alice in Wonderland books. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll’) taught at Christ Church until 1881, which was at the forefront of the Ripper Murder scenery. ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’ was published in 1865, under the pen-name, ‘Lewis Carroll.’ His pen name was later called into question and became the topic of myth around London.
Richard Wallace later claimed that Dodgson was Jack the Ripper though there is no real evidence to support Wallace’s claim. However, the claim that Dodgson had committed other questionable acts, such as proposing to a very young girl named ‘Alice,’ was considered fact although there was no evidence supporting this either.
The Casebook writes:
Wallace published his theory in 1996, in his book ‘Jack the Ripper, Light-Hearted Friend’. It was, in brief that Dodgson and his Oxford colleague Thomas Vere Bayne, were both responsible for the Whitechapel murders. He based his belief on anagrams he constructed out of Dodgson’s work, which he claimed were hidden confessions of the author’s life of crime in Whitechapel in the autumn of 1888.
The anagrams he presents in his book are not very good, in that they tend to make limited grammatical sense, and Wallace tends to cheat rather by simply leaving out or changing any letters he can’t fit in.
For example he takes this passage from Dodgson’s ‘Nursery Alice’:
‘So she wondered away, through the wood, carrying the ugly little thing with her. And a great job it was to keep hold of it, it wriggled about so. But at last she found out that the proper way was to keep tight hold of itself foot and its right ear’.
and turns it into:
‘She wriggled about so! But at last Dodgson and Bayne found a way to keep hold of the fat little whore. I got a tight hold of her and slit her throat, left ear to right. It was tough, wet, disgusting, too. So weary of it, they threw up – Jack the Ripper.
However, Wallace’s theory is flawed in that one could in fact rearrange the words in any piece of writing anywhere and make half-connected sentences suggestive of almost anything.
Was Lewis Carroll Jack the Ripper? Well, even after Wallace’s anagrams, the general consensus is – unlikely. He was, however quite the man of mystery, that has yet to be fully solved.
3. Jill the Ripper
Maybe Jack wasn’t ‘Jack’ at all, but in fact, a woman, which was a theory that posed by famed Inspector Abberline himself at the time of the killings.
According to Donald McCormick, author of The Identity of Jack the Ripper published in 1959, Abberline raised the theory in a conversation with his mentor, Dr. Thomas Dutton after the murder of Mary Kelly. Testimony given by Caroline Maxwell, who lived in the area, was central to the argument.
The Casebook writes:
Abberline based the brunt of the argument on the fact that it was possible that the killer dressed up in Kelly’s clothes in order to disguise herself, therefore accounting for Mrs. Maxwell’s sighting of her the next day. Dutton answered that he believed it was doubtful, but that if it were a woman committing the crimes, the only kind capable of doing so would be a midwife.
Thus began the theory of ‘Jill the Ripper,’ sometimes referred to as ‘the mad midwife.’
As ludicrous as this theory may initially sound, there are a few points which makes it reasonably credible. The fact that all of London was looking for a man would have allowed a female to have gone relatively uncaught for as long as the killer did. A midwife would have also been seen at all hours of the night, as well as blood on her clothing, which would have been discarded due to the nature of her work. A midwife would have also had the anatomical knowledge needed of the Ripper candidate.
4. Lord Randolph Churchill
There has always been a royal tie with the Ripper Investigations, and even members of the royal family like Prince Albert have been suspects, but Sir Winston Churchill’s father is the most curious within this group.
Considerable speculation grew that Churchill had been infected with syphilis. Some report it was during an encounter with a housemaid during a drunken tirade as a student.
According to the Casebook:
Churchill’s link with Jack the Ripper is tenuous to say the least. According to Author Melvyn Fairclough, Churchill, being the highest freemason in the land and protecting the good name of the royal family and the position of the crown, gathered together a group, which consisted of Sir William Gull, John Netley, Frederico Albericci, and J.K Stephen, in a plan to murder five prostitutes led by Mary Kelly, who had been using their knowledge of Prince Albert Victor’s secret marriage to Annie Elizabeth Crook, for blackmailing purposes.
While there is no evidence to support the claim that Churchill was ever a freemason, there is also no documented evidence to prove such a marriage ever took place. The death certificate of Annie Crook clearly states she belonged to the Church of England, and was not Catholic. There have been many different versions of the royal Masonic conspiracy theory over the years, and none are ever taken seriously.
One other curious aspect to Churchill as a suspect, is that he apparently resembled George Hutchinson’s extraordinarily detailed description of a man seen with Mary Kelly shortly before she was murdered.
The Pall Mall Gazette June 28 1884 described Churchill as, ‘Of average height with a wide turned up moustache, beautifully dressed, his gold chain has the solid appearance of real 18 carat’.
5. James Maybrick
James is voted the #1 suspect in the Jack the Ripper Casebook, which makes him notable. And while some screen shots of his diary may prove rather convincing, these claims are hotly contested and rumored as a hoax.
Michael Barrett, who originally claims he discovered the Maybrick diary, has confessed to the forged documents. These confessions have been retracted and restated many times in the past years, however. See his confession.
James, who was originally from Liverpool, moved to London to live with his mother, and had reportedly contracted Malaria and became increasingly addicted to arsenic and strychnine, which was not uncommon for the 1870s. He soon after married and fathered two children with Florence ‘Florie’ Chandler. After dying in May of 1889, James’s wife, Florie, was accused of his murder. The case for James lies mainly in the contested diaries, which surfaced only in 1992.
While its authenticity remains debatable, Maybrick’s diary has yet to be proven a forgery. Whether it is real or a fake, it maintains sound constancy with the known facts. As the Casebook suggests, “the diary also introduces what some would call startling evidence to support its authenticity.”
A great walk in all,the walk itself was 1.5 miles and recommended! The walk back to Liverpool Street Station should have been straight forward but again Lucys phone got us lost!
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