Mary Jane Kelly: The Fifth Victim Of Jack the Ripper
Illustration of Mary Jane Kelly
You can click play and listen, or you can read the text. It’s your choice!
Mary Jane Kelly was the fifth victim and she was different from the other victims. She is the only victim under 40. Mary Jane Kelly was only 25 when she was killed.
She is the only victim for whom there is no photograph. She is also the only victim to be killed in her own home; she was the only victim who could afford her own home.
She is also the only victim about whose early life we know absolutely nothing for certain. We only know what she told other people, and she told different stories to different people.
In one version she was born in Ireland and then her parents moved the family to Wales where her father got work in the steel works of Carmarthen. When she was 16, she married a coal miner who died in a mining accident. She then moved to Cardiff and was led into ‘a bad life’ by her cousin who was a prostitute.
She told Joseph Barnett that she arrived in London around 1883 or 84 and found work in a gay house a high-class brothel in the West End. She also told him that she went to Paris but only stayed there for a couple of weeks because she ‘did not like the part’.
William Thomas Stead
The editor of The Pall Mall Gazette, William Thomas Stead, reckoned that each year around 250 women were sent to France or Belgium. Mostly they were tricked into going so it’s possible that Mary was trafficked in this way but managed to find a way back to Britain once she realised what had happened.
People trafficking wasn’t the sort of work that attracts gentle souls blessed with empathic natures. Ruthlessness would be a desirable characteristic in the men organising this game. And crossing them would be dangerous.
Possibly this explains why we know so little about her early life. Did this young woman invent a new identity for herself. She certainly didn’t return to the life she had been living in London’s racy West End.
There must be some reason that she chose to make her new home in the streets around the infamous Ratcliffe Highway rather than those around the exclusive St James’s Square.
Pennington Street running parallel to and south of the Radcliffe Highway was close to East London’s docks.
Mary Jane took a room at 79 and it became her business address. The same business she had known in the West End although with a very different clientele.
The social reformer, Edward Thomas observed that, “Ratcliff and Wapping have ways of their own and in no particular could this be better illustrated than in the conduct of the sailors and the women”.
One woman who knew Mary Jane at this time said that she was one of the most decent and nicest girls when sober but very quarrelsome and abusive when intoxicated.
At some time around the end of 1886 Mary attracted the attention of a 27-year-old plasterer called Joseph Fleming. For a few months they lived together a couple of miles north of the Ratcliffe Highway in Bethnal Green.
However, by early 1887 she went back to her old trade. Although not around the Ratcliffe Highway she moved to Spitalfields to find business around Commercial Street, Aldgate and Whitechapel Road.
According to one Metropolitan Police Detective Chief Inspector, Walter Drew, ‘she would be parading along Commercial Street, between Flower and Dean Street and Aldgate, or along Whitechapel Road.’ Always ‘fairly neatly dressed and invariably wearing a clean white apron, but no hat’.
A missionary confirmed this description of Mary as being ‘one of the smartest, nicest-looking women in the neighbourhood’. Others said that she was ‘a good, quiet, pleasant girl’ and ‘well liked’.
On a Thursday night around March of 1887 Mary met a 29-year-old fish porter called Joseph Barnet on Commercial Street. Joseph was besotted and within a couple of days he had found a room in George Street and the couple moved in. It would be the first of four addresses that they would occupy.
13 Miller's Court
The last address was 13 Miller’s Court which ran off Dorset Street. It was just a single room 10 foot by 12 foot for which they paid four shillings and sixpence a week.
In the summer of 1888 Joseph lost his job and they fell into debt. By November they owed six weeks rent. As so often is the case when couples are under financial pressure Mary and Joseph began to argue.
During one of their arguments Mary threw something at Joseph and broke a window. It was never repaired, and they just stuffed it with old clothes to keep the wind and rain out.
On October 30th Joseph moved to Buller’s Boarding House on the corner of nearby Bishopsgate.
At 10:40 on the morning of November the 9th the landlord of Miller’s Court, John McCarthy, sent his assistant around to number 13 to try to collect the rent. There was no answer. When he went round the corner and looked through the window he saw the body of Mary lying on the bed.
Mary Jane Kelly is believed by many to be the last victim of an unknown serial killer known as Jack the Ripper.
Murdered in her bed in a room behind a locked door she received the most extensive mutilations of any of the five victims of ‘The Autumn of Terror’.
Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Liz Stride, Kate Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly are known to ‘Ripperologists’ as the ‘Canonical Five’.
Thank you for checking out this post.