Why was Jack the Ripper’s final murder the most appalling of all? Who was the mysterious Mary-Jane Kelly, his unfortunate victim? And, what enduring impact would his crimes have upon the cultural climate of England, and the treatment of women? Join Tom and Dominic as they reach the nightmarish crescendo of Victorian London’s darkest days, as Jack the Ripper’s killing spree culminates with his most horrifying murder so far. Give The Rest Is History Club this Christmas – a year of bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access, the private chat community hosted on Discord, and an exclusive t-shirt! Just go to https://therestishistory.supportingcast.fm/gifts And of course, you can still join for yourself at any time at therestishistory.com or on apple podcasts. For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com _______ Hive. Know your power. Visit https://hivehome.com to find out more. _______ Learn more at https://www.uber.com/onourway _______ Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ https://nordvpn.com/restishistory It's risk-free with Nord's 30-day money-back guarantee ✅ _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Video Editor: Jack Meek Social Producer: Harry Balden Assistant Producer: Aaliyah Akude Producer: Tabby Syrett Senior Producer: Theo Young-Smith Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: Why was Mary Jane Kelly's murder considered the most appalling?
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Some of the reported clues must be received with caution. No end of stories are rife in the neighbourhood, told with an air of circumstantiality which on examination proves to be utterly baseless.
Almost the sole testimony which seems to have any bearing on the affair is that given by a young woman named Pannier, who sells roasted chestnuts at the corner of Widegate Street, a narrow thoroughfare about two minutes' walk from the crime.
Mrs. Pannier is reported to have stated that shortly after noon yesterday, a man dressed like a gentleman said to her, I suppose you've heard about the murder in Dorset Street? And when she replied that she was aware of it, he said, I know more about it than you.
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Chapter 2: Who was Mary Jane Kelly and what do we know about her?
And that means that anyone who is emerging from the passageway, you know, people who are looking out from one of the windows, you know, the upper windows around the garden, they would be able to see whoever was stepping out of the passageway. If that person has stepped out of the passageway and he then turns sharp right, He will then be confronted by a locked door.
And this door in turn leads into number 13 Millers Court. And it is a converted parlor. So just a single room. And it's 10 feet by 12 feet. So not large at all. It's a very sparsely furnished. There's a bed. There's a table. There's a chair. There's a washstand. There's a cupboard. There is also a fireplace and hung over the fireplace.
There is a cheap print the fisherman's widow now the person renting this room is a young woman probably around 25 years old and Dominic you introduced us to her at the end of the last episode. She is called Mary Jane Kelly and And she owes her landlord 29 shillings, which is equivalent to six weeks rent. So she owes a lot. She's badly in arrears.
And we heard in our previous episode how on the morning of the 9th of November, 1888, her landlord, a shopkeeper called John McCarthy, whose shop directly abuts the passageway that leads into Miller's Court. So his shop is looking out onto Dorset Street. And then the sidewall is part of what forms the passageway that leads into Miller's Court. He's decided that, you know, six weeks back rent.
Yeah. He needs the money. It's time that she coughed up. And as you mentioned again in the previous episode, it's the day of the Lord's Mez show. And McCarthy is clearly anxious that Mary Jane might be going off to see the show. She talked about how she was looking forward to it. And he wants to get the money out of her before she can go off and spend it on all the kind of festivities.
But obviously, Mary Jane is never going to get to the Lord Mez show. And in fact, a shadow is going to be cast over the Lord Mayor's show. This day will not be remembered for the Lord Mayor parading through the streets of the city of London. It will be remembered for unspeakable scene of horror.
John McCarthy, the shopkeeper, had sent his young assistant, Thomas Boyer, to knock on Mary Jane's locked door. And as you described in the previous episode, he had seen something horrific happen. And by the late morning, this is bringing police personnel crowding into Miller's Court.
So they're coming into Dorset Street, they're crowding down that narrow alleyway, and they're filling this kind of squalid, cramped space. They're joined by the local police surgeon, Dr. Phillips, the bagster, who we've been meeting periodically throughout this series. He has got there by 11.15, and 15 minutes later, he is joined by Inspector Abberline.
Now, the door is locked, and you might think that there was a certain degree of urgency about breaking into the room. However... Phillips advises Abberline to wait for the bloodhounds to arrive. Dominic, you were talking about the bloodhounds.
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Chapter 3: What was the significance of the location of Miller's Court?
And John McCarthy, he gets a pickaxe and he smashes the door in. Now, what do they find inside? They find that Mary Jane's clothes are neatly folded on the chair. In the fireplace, there are the remains still of a fire that had clearly been so hot that it had burnt off the handle and spout of a tin kettle that had been placed next to the fireplace. Yeah. And lying on the bed is a body.
So hideously, so grotesquely mutilated that Dr. Phillips, when he spoke at the subsequent inquest, opted to suppress the full horror of the details. And it's only in 1987 that a set of notes came to light that had been compiled by a second doctor, Thomas Bond, who also attended the murder scene that morning. He'd arrived shortly after the door had been forced.
He was very experienced in conducting post-mortems and he recorded details in very kind of spare clinical prose and I will read from it now but we've been issuing the warnings throughout this series that the details of the mutilations are horrific and One of the things that people who've listened to them may have noticed is that the mutilations become more and more hideous as each murder is committed yeah, and this is the
the culminating display of horror. There's clearly a sense that Mary Jane has been the victim of a kind of frenzied series of mutilations. So with that warning, I will give you the details. 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, and the tissues of the neck were severed all round down to the bone. The uterus, the kidneys, one of the dismembered breasts had been placed under the head.
Then to quote Bond again, the other breast by the right foot, liver between the feet, the intestines by the right side and the spleen by the left side of the body. Blood, unsurprisingly, had soaked into the bed linen and into the mattress, and there was a still wet pool of blood that had spilled onto the floor. The heart had clearly been cut out and was nowhere to be found.
And again, to quote Bond, 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 a number of separate splashes.
So Mary Jane Kelly is the first of the Ripper's victims to be murdered, not out in the streets or in a yard or something, but in a secluded private room. And that's what's allowed the Ripper to... Take his time. Yes, take his time and to indulge himself, I suppose, by going to the absolute extreme. An extreme such that when the guy...
We mentioned last time Joseph Barnett, a guy who's basically been Mary Jane Kelly's companion, who's been living with her and had lived with her until 10 days before the murder. When he was brought to identify her, she's no longer a recognisable human being. It's a butcher shambles. Yeah, he can identify by the hair and by the eyes, but nothing else.
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Chapter 4: How did the police respond to the discovery of Mary Jane Kelly's body?
It's just a sort of hall of mirrors. So we don't even know... I mean, it's often said that she was Irish, but we don't even know that she was.
She might have been Welsh, right? So she claimed to have come from Ireland. She claimed to come from Wales. The story that she most regularly said was that her parents were Irish, but had moved to Wales when she was very young. But it's striking that she had neither an Irish nor a Welsh accent. And so it's possible that perhaps she had elocution lessons.
or perhaps she was never Irish or Welsh in the first place. And in fact, we can't even be sure that Mary Jane Kelly was her real name, because it's exactly the kind of name that someone pretending to be Irish would come up with. And to quote Hallie Rubenhold in whose book The Five, you know, she gives very
detailed accounts of the lives of the other victims, all of them expertly sourced, kind of drawing on all kinds of written material. But she says of Mary Jane Kelly, not a single statement made by her about her life prior to her arrival in London has ever been verified. You know, people have crawled over the records. They've never found anything.
So we don't know, for example, what class she's from, what her social status is, do we? Because Joseph Barnett would read her stories about the Ripper's crimes, which suggests that she's illiterate. But other people who knew her said, and I quote, an excellent scholar and an artist of no mean degree. Yeah.
So are people making stuff up or is she herself not telling people the truth about her life? So, for example, she says, doesn't she, that her father had been a Welsh steelworks foreman. She says she's got a brother in the Scots Guards. But there's no evidence that either of those things are true at all. And she wouldn't be the only person. Elizabeth Stride made up stories about herself as well.
I mean, it's not an uncommon thing to do if you've fallen down to the bottom, that you take refuge in fantasies.
Yeah, but there are kind of substantiating records in Sweden that enable researchers to work out what her early years might have been like. We don't have those with Mary Jane. For instance, Mary Jane claims that she had married. Again, there's no record of this whatsoever. As for her career, so those who knew her were agreed.
And again, this is a point of difference between her and the previous victims. She was what the police termed a common prostitute, i.e. someone who self-identified as such, whose career had always involved prostitution. The early stories that she tells of her life as a prostitute in London are actually quite reminiscent of You know, Emma Hamilton.
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Chapter 5: What were the details of the gruesome murder of Mary Jane Kelly?
What had changed in those two weeks? And the stories that she tells... are kind of full of melodrama. She strongly implies that she's in the East End because she's hiding from people who are out to get her, but who? She launches an abortive attempt to liberate a chest full of dresses that she says is in a house in Knightsbridge, but nothing really comes of it.
And she also says that a man has appeared near to where she's living, claiming to be her father, but wasn't hunting her down for any of this beyond what she herself is reporting.
Well, I made the comparison with Zola's novel, Nana, about a courtesan in Paris. And this does all feel too literary, doesn't it? A little bit. It feels like the kind of story that you would make up about kind of, you know, mysterious gentlemen, kind of rakes taking you to Paris. The newspapers in the 1880s are full of stories about so-called white slavery.
You know, girls who've been kidnapped and used as sex slaves. I think that she's making this stuff up because it's a good story. It makes her feel important. It makes her customers feel that she is important. You know, it's better than the truth, which is that she's a nobody.
Yeah. I mean, it makes her seem glamorous. And of course, she is selling herself. And if you can make yourself seem glamorous, then, you know, you're likely to create a market for yourself. But obviously Miller's Court, which he'd moved into by March 1888, I mean, it is the opposite of glamorous.
But I think she moves in there and into Whitechapel more generally because by this point she's found herself a steady partner and seems to have given up on the prostitution. She's stopped the soliciting. And this partner, we've already mentioned him, he's Joseph Barnett. This is the guy who will identify her in due course by her eyes and her hair. And he was a porter at Billingsgate Fish Market.
And like Mary Jane, he had blue eyes and he was of Irish extraction, if Mary Jane really was of Irish extraction. And Barnett was very, very keen on her, very fond of her and clearly wanted to make a go of things. He treated her as his wife. That's why she gives up soliciting. They're essentially living as a married couple. But by the autumn of 1888, their relationship is getting slightly rocky.
In July, Barnett had lost his job in the fish market and he gets kind of occasional work as a labourer, but not a regular income. And so there's a need to pay the rent. And so Mary Jane returns to soliciting on the streets. And adding to the strain that I think this obviously places on their relationship is the fact that she is famously warm-hearted.
She's terribly popular among her fellow workers on the street. And I think more generally, very kind-hearted. And she's always inviting fellow prostitutes if it's
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Chapter 6: How did the public react to the murder and the Ripper's identity?
Right. And he's sorry. Why? Because she needs money. Well, of course, we know she needs money because we know that she's behind on the rent by six weeks. Right. So if Barnett doesn't have the money to give her, where is she going to get the money to pay the landlord?
There are various kind of interpretations of McCarthy's character. So Halley in The Five is very down on him, calls him a bully and implies that he's always trying to extort money out of him. Others say that he was quite fond of Mary Jane. And I guess that, you know, six weeks back rent is quite a lot because all the other women that we've been describing, almost invariably,
They're being turfed out of their bed because they don't have money to pay for a single night. Yeah. Whereas Mary Jane is in her room and is there for six weeks. Exactly. But you can see why he, you know, maybe he's running out of patience. Maybe he's trying to turn the screws.
And I think that that is clearly why that evening, despite the fact that the rain is very, very torrential, Mary Jane seems to have been desperate to solicit clients. After Joseph Bennett has gone, she clearly leaves her room and goes out into the streets and is trying to attract custom. And we have two witnesses who would subsequently claim to have seen her with men that night.
And the first of these is a man who is seen accompanying her into her room by someone who is looking down from one of the top stories around Miller's Court. So he is lit by that gas lamp that we mentioned. And he's described as having a thick, carroty moustache. He's dressed in shabby, dark clothes. He's got a dark overcoat. He's got a black felt hat. And he is seen just before midnight.
He's going into the room with Mary Jane. And Mary Jane at the time was reportedly quite drunk. She was in a mood for an Irish ballad. And we know it. And the lyrics I find incredibly sad, kind of so full of pathos. So she sang, scenes of my childhood arise before my gaze, bringing recollections of bygone happy days. When down in the meadow in childhood, I would roam.
No one's left to cheer me now within that good old home. So whoever she was, She'd clearly left her home behind and she had no family that she would acknowledge or who would acknowledge her or maybe even knew where she was. So there is, I find, an incredible pathos about that.
And what about the second witness? So the second witness is an unemployed labourer called George Hutchinson. he had a kind of a bit of a crush on Mary Jane, didn't he?
Yeah.
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Chapter 7: What impact did Jack the Ripper's crimes have on society?
And this is a person who's pale-faced, according to Hutchinson, and very well-dressed. He's wearing an Astrakhan coat. And the two of them haggle, terms are agreed, and Hutchinson then watches the two of them disappear off Dorset Street down the dark alleyway that leads into Miller's Court.
Well, he gives a very detailed description, doesn't he? So I'll just read it. Light waistcoat, dark trousers, and a dark felt hat turned down in the middle. Button boots and gaiters with white buttons. Wore a very thick gold chain, white linen collar. Black tie with horseshoe pin. Respectable appearance. Walked very sharp. Jewish appearance.
Yes. And he will then go on to give another, even more detailed description of this man. And people may wonder, it's dark. They're standing in shadows. How plausible is it that he would have seen every detail? And we will come to this in due course.
But just to finish detailing Hutchinson's evidence, he said that he'd waited by the entrance of Miller's court for just under an hour and that neither Mary Jane nor her client reappeared. If he can be trusted, they had disappeared into her room around two o'clock.
And he, again, if he's to be trusted, is the last witness to see her alive, but not perhaps the last to hear Mary Jane's voice, because there are two separate women. And one of them is a woman called Elizabeth Prater, who is the lodger in the rooms directly above Mary Jane's room.
And the other is a laundress called Sarah Lewis, who has been made homeless and is taking refuge with a couple on the room opposite 13 Miller Court across the courtyard.
and both these women reported hearing screams of murder at around 4 a.m yeah and listeners may be wondering well why didn't they do something about it and in fact the police asked exactly this question and mrs prater said she told the police i did not take much notice of the cries as i frequently hear such cries right and it is worth adding that the um the autopsy the doctors who did that the surgeons
They suggested that the likeliest time of death was around 4 a.m.
Although if that's true and George Hutchinson's story is true, then that means there's been a two-hour interval between the killer going into the room and then the murder actually happening, which would be odd given that in every previous case the Ripper has killed very quickly and efficiently. Now, I can understand the Ripper might want to be alone with the body to do his mutilations for hours.
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Chapter 8: What theories exist about the identity and motivations of Jack the Ripper?
So the glamorous French sophisticated name that she would have always wanted, right?
yes she was clearly a woman who enjoyed attention and she certainly gets attention at her funeral because huge crowds gather to watch the procession and women sob and again men are doffing their caps as the open hearse passes by and as you you suggest dominic um In death, she's become what I think she had always dreamed of being, which is essentially the heroine of a melodrama.
No matter how dark and terrible the melodrama has actually turned out to be. And bystanders weep at the thought of the fate that has befallen her. And they pray to God to forgive her. And they are, I think... hailing her, enshrining her as a symbol of their collective defiance of the fiend who had brought her to her terrible doom.
Well, you call him a fiend, but...
of course Jack the Ripper was all too human and after the break we will come back to look at what people make of the Ripper now that he has struck again and the impact that it has on popular culture because of course this is the age of Sherlock Holmes of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and people are very much interpreting the Ripper's crimes against that backdrop so we'll be digging into all this after the break
Hello, I'm Professor Hannah Fry.
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We're here to tell you about our brand new show, The Rest is Science. Every episode is going to start with something that feels initially familiar, and then we're going to unpick it and tear it apart until you no longer recognize it at all. Yeah, banana flavour doesn't taste like bananas. Yeah, what is that about?
So it is supposed to taste like an old species of banana that was wiped out in a banana-pocalypse. And now you will only find it in botanical collections in the gardens of billionaires.
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