William Henry Bury: A Suspect in the Jack the Ripper Case
This is a sketch that appeared in The Dundee Courier on 12 February 1889. He was described as being 5 feet 31/2 and weighing less than 10 stone (140lbs) (64kg). He had dark hair and a beard.
William Henry Bury became a suspect in the Jack the Ripper case after murdering his wife just months after the murders in Whitechapel.
Suspicions were raised when it was realised that before moving to Dundee, Bury had been living in the East End of London at the time of the Whitechapel murders.
He was born in Stourbridge, Worcestershire, on May 25th, 1859, and executed in Dundee, Scotland, on April 14th, 1889, at the age of 29.
William Bury didn’t have an easy childhood. His father died as a result of an accident before William's first birthday.
At the same time, his mother was committed to the Worcester County Pauper and Lunatic Asylum on May 7th, 1860, suffering from melancholia. She remained there until her death, aged 33, on March 30th, 1864.
William was raised initially in Dudley by his maternal uncle, Edward Henley, and by 1871 he was enrolled at the Blue Coat charity school in Stourbridge.
At the age of sixteen, he went to work in a warehouse in Wolverhampton. He left the warehouse after failing to repay a loan.
He then worked for a lock manufacturer until he was dismissed for theft. He was then in his mid-20s, and nothing seems to be known for certain about where he lived or what he was doing.
In October 1887, Bury arrived in Bow, London.
He found work selling sawdust for James Martin at 80 Quickett Street, Bow. He met Ellen Elliot, who worked as a servant for Martin.
Ellen and William left Martin's employ and moved to a furnished room at 3 Swaton Road, Bow, where they lived together until their marriage on Easter Monday, April 2nd, 1888,
The landlady at Swan Road said she caught Bury kneeling over Ellen, threatening to cut her throat. This was just five days after their wedding. Later, the landlady evicted them.
In the following months, they moved to two more addresses in Bow and spent a week on holiday in Wolverhampton in August.
Then, in January 1889, they boarded the steamer Cambria and arrived in Dundee on January 20th.
On the evening of February 10th, William Bury reported the suicide of Ellen to Lieutenant James Parr at the Dundee Central Police Station.
Parr took Bury upstairs to see Lieutenant David Lamb, the head of the detective department. Parr told Lamb, "This man has a wonderful story to tell you.”
Lamb and Detective Constable Peter Campbell proceeded to the Burys' dingy flat, where they discovered the mutilated remains of Ellen stuffed into a wooden box.
Chalk graffiti on the flat’s rear door read, "Jack Ripper [sic] is at the back of this door,” and on the stairwell leading up from the rear of the property, "Jack Ripper is in this seller [sic].”
The press and the police thought they had been written by a local boy before the tragedy, but the writer was never identified.
A large penknife was found with human flesh and blood upon it, and the rope that William had bought on the morning of February the 4th was found with strands of Ellen's hair caught in the fibres.
Ellen's body was examined by five physicians they concluded that Ellen had been strangled from behind.
Her right leg was broken in two places, so it could be crammed into the crate. Incisions made by the penknife ran downwards along her abdomen.
Chief Constable Dewar sent a telegraph detailing the circumstances of the crime to the London Metropolitan Police, which was investigating the crimes attributed to Jack the Ripper.
Detectives from London did not consider Bury a realistic suspect in their investigation into the Ripper murders,.
William Henry Bury became the last man to be hanged in Dundee.
Claims that Bury could have been the Ripper began to appear in newspapers shortly after Bury's arrest.
The New York Times connected Bury directly to the atrocities and reported the theory that William had murdered Ellen to prevent her from revealing his guilt,
The Dundee Courier alleged that Bury admitted to Lieutenant Parr that he was Jack the Ripper, but Parr's version of the story says only that Bury said he was afraid he would be arrested as Jack the Ripper.
Bury denied any connection despite making a full confession to his wife's murder.
More recently William Beadle has dug into the evidence.
In 1995, he published Jack the Ripper: Anatomy of a Myth, and in 2009, Jack the Ripper - Unmasked: The Real Identity of the World's Most Infamous Killer is Revealed at Last.
Inevitably, not everybody agrees with that claim, but William Beadle is unshakeable.
It must be said that just about every investigator who has taken the time and trouble to present the case for their particular favourite is equally convinced.
This makes for passionate writing, which usually makes for a good story.
It does mean the reader probably needs to be alert, possibly keeping in mind Mark Twain’s warning, though maybe reversing it will help most.
Mark Twain said, “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story,” which is good advice if you want to have a good story.
If, however, truth is foremost in your quest, then perhaps we should make certain that we do not allow a good story to get in the way of the truth.
William Baedle begins his 2009 book Jack the Ripper - Unmasked with a good story featuring Annie Chapaman.
“She was only a little woman, no more than five feet tall, and she had clearly seen better days. Her clothes were old and dirty, and the crepe bonnet she wore only emphasised the fact that she was a woman of the streets and doss houses. The human being inside them was fighting a losing battle for her life because, at 47, she had a disease of the lungs that was well advanced and made her feel constantly unwell. On the previous day, she had told a friend, ‘It’s no use my giving way. I must pull myself together and go out and get some money, or I shall have no lodgings.’”
I’m not sure where William got the description of Annie’s clothes being old and dirty.
The description given by Inspector Chandler is:
“An old and dirty pair of lace boots; 2 bodices, one of which was brown, both stained about the neck with blood; 2 petticoats (at least one was striped) which were stained very little; Stockings with no trace of blood on them; A white cotton handkerchief with a broad red border was tied about the neck; A large pocket was under the skirt and tied about the waist. It was empty but was torn down the side and down the front; The rest of the clothes were neither cut nor torn.”
Inspector Chandler commented on the dirty boots, but he didn’t say her clothes were dirty.
William Beadle, however, emphasises that it shows ‘she was a woman of the streets and doss houses’, so a little added colour may not matter too much.
He goes on to say, “She had walked the grimy collection of mean little thoroughfares between Commercial Street and Brick Lane in London’s East End for hour after hour”.
“Five thirty found her in Hanbury Street with at last the prospect of earning some money by renting out her disease-ravaged little body to a young man for whatever use he might want to make of it for a few minutes.”
Now, I have to admit this is the story that has been passed down and reinforced by modern writers on these murders.
Books by respected researchers like Donald Rumbelow, Stewart Evans and Phillip Sugden have repeated as fact that Annie Chapman accosted a man half an hour before she was discovered murdered.
The evidence for this hangs on a single thread: the evidence of one eyewitness.
Mrs Elizabeth Long went to the police to say she had walked down Hanbury Street at 5:30 on the morning of the murder, and she saw a man and woman talking.
In his book The Complete History of Jack the Ripper, Philip Sugden explains these murders by saying, “Indeed his victims, prostitutes all, accustomed to accosting men and taking them to dark and unfrequented byways and yards for sex, greatly facilitated his crimes.”
Mrs Long’s evidence, of course, supports this theory, and Philip Sugden writes that:
“At about 5 in the morning a Mrs Elizabeth Long left her home at 32 Church Street to go to work at Spitalfields Market. It was 5:30 as she walked westwards through Hanbury Street. She was sure of the time because she heard the clock of the Black Eagle Brewery, Brick Lane, strike the half-hour just before she got to the street. A man and a woman were standing on the pavement near to number 29 . . . the woman had her back to Spitalfields Market and hence faced Mrs Long as she approached, and the man’s back was turned towards Mrs Long and Brick Lane. Mrs Long’s evidence is crucial, for she later visited the mortuary and positively identified Annie Chapman as the woman she had seen. Her companion was almost certainly the murderer.”
This is the description given by Mrs Long at the inquest:
“I saw the woman's face. I have seen the deceased in the mortuary, and I am sure the woman that I saw in Hanbury Street was the deceased. I did not see the man's face, but I noticed that he was dark. He was wearing a brown low-crowned felt hat. I think he had on a dark coat, though I am not certain. By the look of him he seemed to me a man over forty years of age. He appeared to me to be a little taller than the deceased. - He looked like a foreigner. - I should say he looked like what I should call shabby-genteel. - They were talking pretty loudly. I overheard him say to her, "Will you?" and she replied, "Yes." That is all I heard, and I heard this as I passed. I left them standing there, and I did not look back, so I cannot say where they went to.”
Mrs Long didn’t give her testimony to the inquest until September 19th, that’s 11 days after the murder.
Why?
Because she missed the first week of the inquest.
Why?
Because she didn’t take her story to the police until three days after the murder.
Think of a busy street you walked down three days ago.
At 5:30, Hanbury Street was packed with vehicles lining up to enter Spitalfields Market, which had opened at 5:00. 29 Hanbury Street was alive with 17 lodgers, many of them readying themselves for work. As Phillip Sugden says, “The killer had thus taken an enormous risk.”
Now add in this piece of information from the inquest.
When Mrs Long was giving her very detailed description of the ‘foreigner,’ the coroner asked:
“Was it not an unusual thing to see a man and a woman standing there talking?”
Mrs Long replied: - “Oh no. I see lots of them standing there in the morning.”
To which the coroner said: “At that hour of the day?”
Mrs Long replied: “Yes; that is why I did not take much notice of them.”
Can you visualise any of the people that you passed on a busy street three days ago?
And then describe them with the amount of detail that Mrs Long gave of the ‘foreigner’?
Of course, if you passed Donald Trump or your mother, you would remember, but Mrs Long did not know Annie Chapman.
I returned from my local shops half an hour ago. During my 20-minute walk, I couldn’t describe any of the people I passed.
Because I didn’t take much notice of them.
Even before the use of DNA testing exposed the unreliability of eyewitness evidence, surely common sense should have alerted the men investigating that Mrs Long’s evidence was invented after she had spent three days reading newspaper reports about the brutal murder of Annie Chapman.
Mrs Long’s story, though, was good enough to get her a viewing of Annie’s body, possibly drinks with journalists desperate for a good story, and, of course, guaranteeing her 15 minutes of fame.
Indeed, it has to be said more than 135 years of fame since once again I’ve written about her.
Now, none of this is to single out William Beadle. Every writer who believes Annie Chapman was accosting “a man to take to a dark and unfrequented yard for sex” accepts Mrs Long’s evidence.
I should add that at 5:30, 29 Hanbury Street was neither dark nor unfrequented.
The case against William Bury begins when Beadle explains that Ellen inherited some shares, which he says, in today’s money, would amount to £15,000.
“Bury used part of the proceeds to buy a pony and cart, which he stabled in Spanby Road, claiming he was going to use it to sell sawdust. In reality, the enterprise provided a useful cover for his drinking.”
However, none of the descriptions of this man’s character that Beadle gives indicate that he was the kind of man who wasted time making excuses to anybody, and certainly not to poor Ellen, about anything he chose to do.
Beadle then explains:
“An ideal place to park a pony in Whitechapel was George Yard, which in 1888 was a stable. George Yard was on the doorstep of Martha Tabram’s murder and is central to those of Annie Chapman, Liz Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Kelly.”
In that sentence, we get a direct connection to a pony and four of the victims of Jack the Ripper. He adds a note that Louis Diemschutz, the man who discovered the body of Liz Stride, stabled his horse there.
This is a time before motor vehicles. Horses and ponies filled the streets, and there was no shortage of stables in London’s East End.
There was even another stable called George Yard. It was in Cable Street.
It was George Yard, Cable Street, where Louis Diemschutz stabled his horse, not the George Yard Stables near George Yard Buildings, where Martha Tabram was discovered murdered.
However, having suggested a connection between the stables and the murders, he writes:
“It is such an obvious location that only the lack of a viable suspect to place there has prevented it from being noticed before.”
From this, Beadle concludes:
“That suspect now exists, and George Yard fits right into the heart of the jigsaw.”
Did William Bury murder Martha Tabram on August 7th and then murder Polly Nichols on August 30th?
Bury and Ellen went to Wolverhampton in August, and as Beadle writes:
“In fact, we do not know when in August the Burys went to Wolverhampton.”
There is no evidence that William Bury stabled his horse in George Yard. Or that he was in George Yard Buildings in the early hours of August the 7th or in Buck’s Row in the early hours of August the 31st.
Yes, he could have been. Just like all of the other hundred or more suspects in this case.
The same is true for the other victims. There’s only the assumption, not the hard evidence, that William Bury could have been at the scene of the crimes.
There is though the evidence of the chalk message at the Bury’s Dundee flat.
William Beadle writes:
“Behind the door leading down to the tenement, they found this message written in chalk: “Jack Ripper is at the back of this door”. On the stairway wall was written: Jack Ripper is in this Seller” [sic].
William Beadle writes:
“These messages were presumably written by Ellen. Presaging Christie over 60 years later, Bury had strangled his wife with a rope because she knew too much.”
Now Ellen had lived in London’s East End throughout the murders. ‘Jack the Ripper’ was on the hundreds of placards right across the whole of London.
‘Jack the Ripper’ was on the headlines of every newspaper day after day.
‘Jack the Ripper’ was on the lips of every East End resident.
Is it at all possible that anybody who experienced that indoctrination day after day could possibly believe the killer was known as ‘Jack Ripper’?
Ellen Bury knew, if she knew nothing else, the monster was Jack the Ripper.
The children living 480 miles north of the killings were less exposed. ‘Jack Ripper’, after all, could be a man’s name.
Jack the Ripper, Jack the Plumber, Jack the Carpenter, just tell you what the guy does.
The press and the police thought they had been written by a local boy. So do I.
Then again, I could be wrong.
Thank you for checking out this post.
I hope to meet you on one of my tours.