‘Johnto’ wasn’t her brother.

The inquest of  Mary Jane Kelly

•    Joseph Barnett: She said she had one sister, who was respectable, who travelled from market place to market place. This sister was very fond of her.
•    That’s a curious sentence. Does it mean she had just one sister? Or, alternatively, she had several sisters, of which, only one was respectable?
•    Joseph Barnett: There were six brothers living in London, and one was in the army. One of them was named Henry. I never saw the brothers to my knowledge.
•    Joseph Barnett doesn’t state that Henry was the brother in the army. One of her brothers was in the army. All six lived in London. Joseph never met her brothers. Ergo the man ‘Johnto’, who visited Mary at Millers Court, wasn’t her brother.
•    . . . The one obvious drawback with this hypothesis concerns the fact that 'Johnto' knew her as both Mary Kelly and the occupant of 13 Miller’s Court, rendering the concept of familial confusion somewhat less than cogent. Yet this objection remains valid only if the two really were brother and sister, a claim for which there is not the slightest evidence beyond the word of Kelly herself. - Garry Wroe
•    But Barnett states: ‘Johnto’ wasn’t her brother. He doubted whether he’d met any of her brothers.
•    She was sometimes visited by Joseph Fleming, the plasterer’s mate with whom she had formerly lived in Bethnal Green. And Maria Harvey spoke of another admirer, a coster named Joe, for whom Mary Jane retained a certain tendresse. So the truth of the matter may be that Johnto, far from being her brother, was yet another of these paramours. Perhaps he and Kelly met while he was on leave in London, enjoyed a night or two together, then began exchanging letters once he rejoined his regiment. They possibly planned to meet up again come Johnto’s next period of leave. This would have entailed Kelly setting up a smokescreen as a means of forestalling any objections raised by Barnett – hence the specious contention that Johnto was her brother. - Garry Wroe