The Mary Jane Kelly project .pdf.

Now, in a new report, ‘The Mary Jane Kelly Project’, the research team has revealed the likelihood of locating and identifying the last known victim of Britain’s most infamous serial killer known as ‘Jack the Ripper’, who is thought to have killed at least five young women in the Whitechapel area of London between August and November 1888.
The team conducted a desk-based assessment of the burial location of Mary Jane Kelly and visited St Patrick’s Catholic Cemetery, Leytonstone, on 3 May 2016 in order to examine the burial area. Research was carried out in the cemetery’s burial records and a survey of marked graves in the area around Kelly’s modern grave marker was undertaken.
Dr King concluded: “As information presently stands, a successful search for Kelly’s remains would require a herculean effort that would likely take years of research, would be prohibitively costly and would cause unwarranted disturbance to an unknown number of individuals buried in a cemetery that is still in daily use, with no guarantee of success.
“As such it is extremely unlikely that any application for an exhumation licence would be granted. The simple fact is, successfully naming someone in the historical record only happens in the most exceptional of cases.
“Most human remains found during excavations remain stubbornly, and forever, anonymous and this must also be the fate of Mary Jane Kelly.”

Killer Connection

Killer Connection. B.J. Helston. Edwardian Crime Tales.

Black aprons and Goulston Street

I reread Walter Dew's memoirs - the link? North London and hair curlers! Anyway, Walter Dew stated that Catherine Eddowes wore a black apron. I’d always imagined Victorian working-class women wore white aprons, so I checked. There are photographs of women in dark-hued aprons with and without patterns. It takes little thought to understand a dark apron is more practical than white. If Eddowes apron was black or dark, how would Alfred Long see it in a dark entry? In the gloom, white cloth would have been difficult enough to see on that overcast, drizzly, night, but black? A mere shadow at the foot of the jamb that’s how it would have appeared and, at that stage, PC Long wasn’t yet aware a murder had occurred, or so he said. Peculiar he found the cloth so interesting – strange that he saw it at all.

Connection. BJ Helston

A tweak. Getting there, at least it no longer looks like the cover of Vogue. I might just change the title... Bully, a pimp/bouncer at a brothel.

Connection. Billy Helston

First sketch of book cover. Whether this remains, I've no idea. I like the idea of the postcards scattered on newspaper -- as the book is in part about Emily Dimmock -- whose rising sun postcard was discovered tucked behind a sheet of newspaper lining a drawer.
Not sure the font is right ...

1897 police statement

1897 police statement: There are three theories. The unfortunate lady might died accidentally, or there is the possibility of suicide, or there is the still more terrible supposition of murder. All these possibilities are the subject of consideration and investigation. Erm, with that degree of intelligent detection the mystery surprisingly remained unsolved . . .

Phyllis Dimmock.

The Camden Town Murder, 1907. On 11th September 1907, Emily Dimmock (known as Phyllis), was murdered in her home at 29 St Paul's Road, Camden. Bertram Shaw discovered Phyllis naked on the bed with her throat cut so deeply she was nearly decapitated.

1887. A Whitechapel Court

Mercedes Marie : The Story of Mary Jane Kelly.

Mercedes Marie : The story of Mary Jane Kelly
The dreadful events in Miller’s Court are only touched on at the end of this novel. For most of the book Billy Helston concerns herself with Mary Kelly’s life growing up in a colliery village near Wrexham and her years as a prostitute in Cardiff, London, and Paris. On the surface it’s a gritty tale of Victorian working class life shaped by poverty, tragedy, and violence. But what gives this novel special resonance is the author’s perceptive evocation of the close-knit mining communities of north Wales and the impoverished neighbourhoods of the East End: she delineates wonderfully the ties of love, resentment, need, and sympathy that bind people together and the reserves of toughness and compassion they draw on to survive. What starts out as the story of an ‘ordinary’ life in the Denbighshire hills quickly develops into something much bigger: by delving deeply into one person’s tragedy, Mercedes Marie illuminates broader truths about life and death.
Familiar figures jostle for space with characters not usually associated with the Mary Kelly story, such as Charlie Hammond, the violent landlord of the Cleveland Street brothel, and Alfred Long, the Metropolitan police constable who strikes up an intense bond with Mary. Helston has her own ideas about the identities of Mary Kelly and Jack the Ripper, and at the back of the book (separate from the story) there is a hefty appendix containing census data, newspaper reports, explanatory notes, and other material.
The book is full of sorrow and anguish, but there is humour as well, and bawdiness, and warmth. Even amid the brutality and the drab routine of Mary Kelly’s life there are small triumphs and moments of joy and surprise - a slice of Dundee cake in a Marylebone café, a dwarf in a Paris whorehouse with a parrot on its shoulder, Welsh dragons caught in the flue at Miller’s Court. Ripperologist NO 151 August 2016 Ripper Fiction Reviews, DAVID GREEN

Mary Bailes.

The cross marks the spot where a lavatory attendant discovered the broken body of six year old Mary Bailes.

Robert Wood's arrest

Robert Wood, a talented artist, accused of the murder of Emily Dimmock 1907. His arrest.

Marie Ellen Bailes.

Marie Ellen Bailes. B J Helston. Opening chapter -- at the moment.

Pretty little six-year-old Marie Ellen Bailes left her home on Friday 30th May 1908, and her parents never saw her alive again. She had her mother’s colouring, with fair hair, blue eyes, a pale skin but topped with rosy cheeks. She wore a black skullcap dressed with two silk-ribbon rosettes, black stockings; boots, slightly scuffed at the toes, a white pinafore, a blue-check dress, and a pure silver necklace with a medal of the Virgin Mary about her neck. Her father, Alfred, was ex-army. Unlike most men at his work, he didn’t spend his lunch hour at the pub. He went home and ate with his family. Not that he was a teetotaller. He liked a drink as much as the next man, but he felt he’d done that. He’d seen much and experienced more than most in his military career. He now took his pleasure in his family – one boy and one girl.

Frederick Abberline reminisces

Curious.
1901. Frederick Abberline, Chief Inspector of Police, has a lodger. His name is John Philip Collins, author, and prominent journalist, variously on the staff of the Pall Mall Gazette, Daily Telegraph and other papers. He worked for forty years as London correspondent of the Civil & of Lahore and wrote two books..

Frederick Abberline wrote, twelve pages, of manuscript, headed Reminiscences of Ex-Detective Chief Inspector F G Abberline C.I.D. Scotland Yard.
So Abberline isn’t averse to recording his memoirs ...
Although Abberline is quoted as promising not to write about The Ripper case, I wonder what form that pledge took? How pedantic was Abberline? Did he promise not to give his name to such a work? Could there possibly be another work, written under a pseudonym, dating from 1901 onwards, when Collins was Abberline’s lodger? My point is: did Collin’s ghost-write Abberline’s memoirs? Or perhaps fictionalise an account ...

Just thinking aloud ...

Camden Town murder mystery. 1907.

Daily Mirror front page. December 1907.

Something, somewhere, doesn’t make sense.

The most popular ten female names in Ireland of the 19th century, in descending order, were Mary, Bridget, Margaret, Ellen, Catherine, Kate and Annie. Kelly was the most common surname after Murphy. So Mary Kelly is the Irish equivalent of John Smith. Of course that doesn’t mean Mary Kelly wasn’t her birth name, but if she wanted to hide it’s easier amid a shoal of Marys and a herd of Kellys.
And she certainly recoiled against the moniker, stating she was really Marie Jeanette and not plain Mary Jane.
And just to add to the anonymity she says her father's name is John – or John Smith if she were English. I don't believe her.
She did state she came from a well to do family, this is I do believe. “She was an artist of no mean degree.” All middle class and upper girls were taught drawing, painting, sewing and singing as one of their accomplishments. The middle classes became interested in revolutionary ideas some, if Irish, involved the Fenians, others explored socialism.
Barnett claimed Mary Kelly had six or seven brothers living in London depending how we interpret his statement: There were six brothers living in London, and one was in the army. One of them was named Henry.
Six or seven males, sharing the same surname, shouldn’t be difficult to find!

Mary told Julia Venturney, a German charwoman who lodged opposite her in Miller's Court, that a man called Joe continued to visit her after she had taken up with Barnett. But we know next to nothing about this or any other of Mary's early relationships. Our sources, too, leave important questions unanswered.
Why did Mary leave Wales for London?
What was the truth behind the stories of the West End brothel and that mysterious jaunt to France?
And why was a girl of Mary's youth and reputed good looks thrust into the desperate squalor of an East End lodging house
Mary had a trunk of good quality clothes, which she collected from a French woman in The West End. As she owned expensive clothes, she could have sold some garments and worn others, which would have granted her access to a better class and therefore richer punters. But she didn’t do that. She returned with her trunk to Ratcliffe Highway.
Why did she return to Ratcliffe Highway?
If we compare Mary Kelly to Emily Dimmock, a woman of a similar age and livelihood, why wasn't Mary taking more money for her services? Why did she sell herself short? Emily Dimmock earned at least two guineas in three days. Mary Kelly couldn't pay her rent ...

Something, somewhere, doesn’t make sense.
Sherlock Holmes: Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.

The snaring of Irish girls

 An interesting concept if applied to Mary Jane Kelly:
The snaring of Irish girls is accomplished with more art than by the lassoing method that used to prevail in Ratcliff-highway. One of the most ingenious, but most diabolical methods of capture is that which consists in employing a woman dressed as a Sister of Merry as a lure. This I have been assured by ladies actively engaged in work among the poor is sometimes adopted with great success.
The Irish Catholic girl arriving at Euston is accosted by what appears to be a Sister or Mercy. She is told that the good Lady Superior has sent her to meet poor Catholic girls to take them to good lodgings, where she can look about for a place. The girl naturally follows her guide, and after a rapid ride in a closed cab through a maze of streets she is landed in a house of ill fame.
After she is shown to her bedroom the Sister of Mercy disappears, and the field is cleared for her ruin. The girl has no idea where she is. Every one is kind to her. The procuress wins her confidence. Perhaps a situation is found for her in another house belonging to the same management, for some broth-keepers have several houses. Drink is constantly placed in her way; she is taken to the theatre and dances. Some night, when worn out and half intoxicated, her bedroom door is opened – for there are doors which when locked inside will open by pressure from without – and her ruin is accomplished. After that all is easy – except the return to a moral life.
W T Stead.

Reminiscences of ex Detective, Chief inspector Abberline.

Reminiscences of ex Detective, Chief inspector Abberline CID Scotland Yard. Abbeline worked for Pinkerton when he wrote this twelve-page chronicle -- demonstrating Abberline enjoyed writing. Very likely, therefore, that he kept a diary about his work with the Met...

Fleet Street 1895

Fleet Street 1895.

It's personal

I researched my family tree and discovered an assortment of colourful and monochrome characters. My Irish great-grandmother travelled to England and married an Englishman who divorced her for drunkenness, aggression, and adultery. After her marital breakdown she drifted south, arrived in London in 1881, and remained in the same area, Whitechapel, until 1891. After that, I lose her. She doesn’t appear in the death records or the census. Perhaps she returned to Ireland . . . It seemed an easy sojourn from researching my ancestor and the area in which she lived (Mile End Road) to Jack the Ripper. My relative followed the same sad course of many Ripper victims. Divorced or widowed women who drifted from doss to doss house and earned money where and how they could. I wondered what it was like for her, sharing the years and cobbles with a serial killer.
1901: Registered she's listed in the census as a pauper, hawker Mile End Old Town.
Update : Found her. Her death registered Whitechapel, March 1903.

Bloody Streets. Billy Helston

Ripperologist NO 151 
Ripper Fiction Reviews. DAVID GREEN

London Vampire: Bloody Streets Billy Helston

I felt I needed another fix from this fascinating writer, so I hunted down this dark, sensuous little vampire tale set in London during the time of the Jack the Ripper murders.

Master George returns home suddenly from a European tour suffering from an unspecified illness. He retreats to his bedroom with the curtains drawn against the daylight. But the contagion/infection spreads like a lurgy among the servants: first Eliza, then William… and in Whitechapel, women are being feasted upon and drained of their blood…

It’s the voluptuousness of the prose that lifts this story above the commonplace. Potent images of sensory gratification are set alongside scenes of death and bodily decay. I was reminded of Tanith Lee – the same decadent sensibility, the same exquisite blend of myth, Gothic horror, and erotic supernatural fantasy. The finest passages in the book are the most lusciously perverted and the most horribly gruesome. Everything dribbles and throbs with abnormal lust! Fingers are plunged into pots of strawberry jam and veins haemorrhage onto fresh white sheets. Meanwhile, Buck’s Row and Hanbury Street fall prey to the beautiful biting machines.

 A delicious piece of macabre fiction.

Sickert, Cornwall, and paper.

Basically paper is made by crushing wood pulp, sending the slip through rollers, drying on racks and imprinting a watermark – or not. Drying and cutting is the end of the process, which part of this manufacture is Patricia Cornwall suggesting was limited to a thousand sheets?
The dryings racks, pulp, cutting, or watermark?
The drying racks would leave marks on the paper, would be an expensive item for a manufacturer to purchase, and expected to last five years. A watermark could be commissioned by an artist or anyone, but it’s a bulk order of ten thousand or more – the size of a bucket of pulp. The nature of the pulp perhaps? That would take forensic examination of  all likely paper – i.e date range, cut size, and geographic region, produced, discovered and recovered in the last one hundred years. So how many sheets of Victorian paper did Patricia Cornwall compare? A thousand?
Well, that explains that theory.
To which “Jack the Ripper’ letter is Sickert’s handwriting compared? If we take the most likely, the Dear Boss letter, it bears no comparison to Sickert’s writing.

The Whitechapel murders. Pinkerton

The Pinkerton detective series.  Inspector Frederick Abberline worked for the Pinkerton detective agency for twelve years after his retirement from the Metropolitan police.

The Eagle pub

The Eagle public house where Emily Dimmock was seen drinking with Robert Wood on the night of her death.

Closing speech.

Sir Edward Marshall Hall: I have nothing more to say than to remind you that the responsibility is yours now, and not mine. If you are satisfied beyond all reasonable doubt that the man standing there murdered Emily Dimmock, though it breaks your heart to do it, find him guilty and send him to the gallows. But, if, under guidance of a greater than any earthly power, making up your minds for yourselves upon this matter, if you feel you cannot truthfully and consciously say you are satisfied that the prosecution have proved that this man is guilty, then I say it is your duty, as it must be your pleasure, to say that Robert Wood did not murder Emily Dimmock.