When Melville Macnaghten wrote this, Robert Mann was still living in the Whitechapel Workhouse Infirmary, although how much work he was now able to do, is debatable.

Where was he on the night of Thursday/Friday 8–9 November 1888? All that we can say for sure is that he was at Miller’s Court at some time around three o’clock in the morning and Mary Ann Cox, who lived at No 5, probably heard him leaving at 5.45 am. That would have given him a mere fifteen minutes to be back at the Infirmary for breakfast, which is tight, allowing for his having to return the knife to the mortuary first. But, as we have seen throughout, the Whitechapel murderer thrived on fast times, with sudden disappearances being his speciality. As The Astrologer put it in 1888:

How does this diabolical monster succeed in his infernal work time after time, in the midst of teeming millions of individuals? No one, out of all those multitudes, so far as we are aware, ever get a glimpse of him.⁵

Several people said they saw men talking to all the victims prior to the attacks, but no one saw anyone leaving George Yard, Hanbury Street, Dutfield’s Yard or Mitre Square. And no one saw him leave Miller’s Court either. It is partially this that has led to the legend of Jill the Ripper – the police and vigilantes were looking for a man, whereas they should have been looking for a woman. It is also occasioned by the fact that however much doctors at inquests explained that the killer would have little blood on him, the average member of the public – and the average copper on the beat – was still looking for a blood-soaked maniac with rolling eyes.

What Robert Mann left behind in that room in Miller’s Court was the most enigmatic of his victims. She was at once Marie Jeanette; she was ‘Black Mary’, ‘Fair Emma’, ‘Ginger’. She was Irish, she was French, she was Welsh. She had a six-year-old son. She was linked to the royals via the nonsense of the ‘highest in the land’ and was at one time a maidservant to the artist Walter Sickert. She was pregnant when Jack found her. Some of this is the nonsense created by Ripperologists over the years; some of it is the nonsense of 1888 and the gossip of the streets.

So what do we know? She was born in Limerick, Ireland, about 1863, by which time her killer was possibly working as a labourer in London Docks; Robert Mann would then have been twenty-eight. Mary’s father was John Kelly (no relation of Kate Eddowes’ partner) and he had a large family. The 1860s were a bad time for the Irish (which decade was not?) with Fenian agitation coming to mainland Britain exactly as the Kellys did. They probably settled in Carmarthenshire where John worked as a foreman in an ironworks. When she was about sixteen, Mary married a collier named Davis who was killed in a mining explosion. The Irish girl drifted to Cardiff and became involved in prostitution, spending several months in Cardiff infirmary, but exactly why is unknown.

From there she came to London and worked at a high class bordello, possibly in Knightsbridge where the madame paired her up with a Frenchman who took her to Paris. Although she soon returned, she adopted the French-sounding Marie Jeanette as a result. All of this sounds the stuff of fairy story, but pretty girls like Mary from the country did end up in West End prostitution. At their highest levels, they were courtesans like Catherine Walters, known as Skittles, and had aristocrats and even royalty as their ‘patrons’. We are once again faced with the tall tales and embellishments of a street woman, like those of Liz Stride. For them, elaborate stories of elegance and splendour were a kind of escapism.

Whatever the truth, Mary was in the East End by 1885 living briefly with a Mrs Buki in St George’s Street,⁶ north of the docks. She may or may have not lived with a man named Morganstone before moving into what may have been a brothel at Breezer’s Hill, St George’s-in-the-East run by a couple named McCarthy (no relation to her future landlord). There may have been another lover, Joseph Fleming, to whom Mary seemed quite attached.

She met Joseph Barnett, a Billingsgate market porter, on Good Friday 1887, while she was dossing at Cooley’s in Thrawl Street. At the Kelly inquest, Barnett mentioned Mary’s family, with estranged parents, and brothers scattered all over London and a ‘respectable’ sister who travelled from marketplace to marketplace. There is an air of superiority about Mary Kelly. Some reported her as very bright and a good artist. One said she spoke fluent Welsh. Walter Dew, who, as a young detective knew her by sight, found her pretty and not much of a drinker. Others said that drink turned her from a quiet woman into a terrifying harpy.

Kelly and Barnett moved from lodgings to lodgings, getting drunk and failing to pay rent until they came to 13 Miller’s Court, a single-roomed apartment that was actually at the rear of 26 Dorset Street. This was one of the worst areas of the Abyss, described as a ‘cesspool’ by the social reformer Charles Booth the following year. Mary’s rent was 4/6d a week and when she died she was several weeks in arrears.

On the last day of her life, Mary spent the afternoon and early evening with Lizzie Albrook who also lived in Miller’s Court. Lizzie was only twenty and remembered Mary warning her gently not to turn out as she had. Between 7.30 and 8.00 pm Joe Barnett turned up. He had left Mary on 30 October because she persisted in bringing prostitutes to stay. If her line to Lizzie can be taken at face value, it may well be that, ironically, Mary was trying to give up prostitution and do what she could for her ‘scarlet sisters’. Not unnaturally in a room as small as No 13, Barnett resented this intrusion and left. He may have disliked the way that Mary made her living and Ripperologist Bruce Paley has put him in the frame for the five Whitechapel murders, the other four being attempts to frighten Mary off the streets. He was in a friendly mood that night, however, and the next we hear of Mary Kelly she was with Barnett and Julia Venturney, another Miller’s Court resident, drinking in the Horn of Plenty down the road. She may also have been in the Britannia at the other end of the street with another prostitute, Elizabeth Foster.

By a quarter to midnight, she was weaving her way drunkenly back to Miller’s Court, in the company of a client. Widowed prostitute Mary Ann Cox from No 5, and who had a record for assault, described Kelly’s client as wearing a billycock hat, carrying a pail of ale and wearing shabby clothes. He was in his thirties and had a carroty moustache and blotchy face. As Mary Cox called ‘Goodnight’, Mary Kelly told her she was going to sing. The client closed the door of No 13. Through the thin-partitioned walls, Cox could hear the music-hall favourite Only a violet I plucked from my mother’s grave warbled by Kelly as Cox went out at midnight in search of a client. When she came back at one, Mary was still singing.

It is the next witness that has raised most eyebrows in the case of the Kelly murder. George Hutchinson, a military-looking man who lived in the Victoria Home in Commercial Street, met Mary in Thrawl Street at about two in the morning. Clearly they knew each other because Mary addressed him by name and asked to borrow sixpence. Probably she’d just drunk away the money from the blotchy-faced client, but no one seems to have seen her in a pub between one and two. Hutchinson could not help, as he was broke and watched her pick up a client along Thrawl Street. They laughed together and the snatches of conversation that Hutchinson remembered were Mary saying ‘All right’ and the client saying ‘You will be all right for what I have told you’ (presumably her ‘fee’). Hutchinson was standing against the lamppost outside the Queen’s Head and noticed that the man was carrying a small parcel with a strap.

Hutchinson watched them walk past him, then followed them to the corner of Miller’s Court. More conversation – ‘All right, my dear; come along, you will be comfortable,’ she said. It was the typical mock-affection of a prostitute and client and the pair went into the Court, presumably to Mary’s room. Hutchinson waited outside the court for forty-five minutes. Since the client did not come out, Hutchinson went away.

His description of the man with Mary Kelly defied belief, because it is impossibly detailed. He was ‘foreign’ i.e. Jewish, with an astrakhan-trimmed coat, dark jacket and trousers, light waistcoat with a Homburg-style hat (‘turned down in the middle’), button boots, spats, a black tie with horseshoe pin and a thick gold chain. He was mid-thirties with dark hair and eyelashes [!] and a moustache curled up at the ends. And this, at night, in dim lamplight when most people can do no better than the vaguest outline. It is likely that George Hutchinson was a time-waster. He missed the inquest but no doubt enjoyed the limelight of his time talking to the police and the Press. He may have been a voyeur, hoping to watch Mary and her client in bed, or perhaps he was an ex-client with a grudge against a particular individual he wanted to frame. If so, it backfired – historian John Eddleston believes that he, Hutchinson, may have been the Ripper!

At about 3.45 am (Hutchinson, according to his own estimation had left about 3) two residents in Miller’s Court both heard a single weak cry, ‘Oh, murder!’ Sarah Lewis had had a row with her husband and gone to stay with Mrs Keyler at No 2. She arrived at 2.30 by the Christ Church clock. It is likely that this witness was the same Mrs Kennedy who talked to the Press because ‘both’ women (Lewis and Kennedy) described a would-be assailant with a shiny bag who threatened them in Bethnal Green Road days earlier. This sighting, with its archetypal knife-containing bag is typical of the now-terrified mindset of East End women. If Hutchinson’s timings (although not description) are correct, then the man and woman Sarah Lewis saw across the road from Miller’s Court at 2.30 have no bearing on Mary Kelly’s murder; she was already in her room with the client by then. The man she saw, apparently waiting or looking for someone, was probably Hutchinson. The other witness, who appeared at the inquest, was Elizabeth Prater, the wife of a boot machinist, who lived above Mary’s room (her husband having left her five years before). Probably a prostitute herself, she came home at one o’clock that Friday morning and stood on the corner for twenty minutes. She popped into McCarthy’s chandler shop and then went to bed. There was no light in Mary’s room. By half past one Elizabeth was in her bed, her door barricaded with two tables – either this was her habit or the Ripper scare was being taken very seriously by some women of the Abyss. She was woken by her scampering kitten at half past three or quarter to four and heard the ‘Murder’ cry. It was common enough to hear such words in the early hours and Elizabeth went back to sleep. She was up again by quarter to six and drinking in the Ten Bells, diagonally opposite Dorset Street.

Another huge red herring flopped into the Ripper net when Caroline Maxwell, wife of a dosshouse deputy, insisted she talked to Mary Kelly some four hours after medical evidence said she was dead. She was very definite about it, even remembering details of the conversation, with Mary feeling ill because of drink. Nothing else fits, so either Caroline had the wrong woman or the wrong day or both. Even this honest mistake has been seized upon by Ripperologists, who claim that a ‘ringer’ died in Miller’s Court and that Mary was somehow spirited away.

The inquest into the death of Mary Kelly opened and closed on Monday 12 November. It was held at Shoreditch Town Hall with Dr Roderick Macdonald, Coroner for North-East Middlesex presiding. Before proceedings got under way, a juror protested over jurisdiction. ‘I do not see why we should have the inquest thrown upon our shoulders, when the murder did not happen in our district, but in Whitechapel.’ Macdonald was furious and tried to put the juror in his place. He would not shut up however – ‘Mr Baxter is my coroner.’ Politics reared its head here. Macdonald was an MP, a Scotsman with a radical bent who had lost out (perhaps through impropriety) to Wynne Baxter. Macdonald slammed the juryman, telling him, quite correctly, that the jurisdiction for coroners lay where the body was taken, not where it was found. Since Mary Kelly’s corpse had been taken to Shoreditch mortuary, that fell into Macdonald’s jurisdiction. If it had gone to Robert Mann’s mortuary in Eagle Place, of course, then Wynne Baxter would have handled proceedings.

The inquest was extraordinarily brief, not helped by the fact that the coroner and at least some of his jury were at odds from the start. Some Ripperologists have seen Macdonald’s early closure as being part of a massive police cover-up. Others have excused it because Macdonald had previously been Police Surgeon to K Division and perhaps disliked the juicy forensics that Baxter seems to have enjoyed. Either way, it was woefully unsatisfactory and meant that witnesses like George Hutchinson, who went to the police that same day, did not take the stand.

Thomas ‘Indian Harry’ Bowyer told Macdonald’s court that he had gone, on behalf of his boss, landlord, shop-owner and probable pimp, John McCarthy, to collect Mary’s overdue rent on the morning of Friday 9 November. There was no reply to his knock, but Bowyer parted the flimsy curtains beyond a broken windowpane and saw two pieces of flesh lying on the table. Then he saw the body. Shocked and appalled, he fetched McCarthy and the pair ran to Commercial Street police station. From there, Inspector Walter Beck followed them back to the crime scene, possibly with Badham and Godley and Constable Dew. Abberline was there by half past eleven.

The long-suffering Dr George Phillips was there already, but all proceedings were held up by police dithering at the highest level and an argument about whether bloodhounds should be brought in. It was Lord Mayor’s Day in London and many East Enders were making their way west to St Paul’s and the Mansion House to see the gilded carriages and the pikemen of the Honourable Artillery Company. It is likely that some sort of treat was laid on for the inmates of the Whitechapel Workhouse Infirmary. It was also the day that Charles Warren resigned as Commissioner of the Met, which added to the delay.

Eventually, by 1.30 pm, Superintendent Thomas Arnold of H Division arrived to tell the waiting Abberline there would be no dogs and ordered the door to be forced. Between Abberline’s inquest evidence and Dr Phillips’, we have a clear picture of the murder room. ‘The mutilated remains of a woman,’ Phillips deposed, ‘were lying two-thirds over [the bed] towards the edge of the bedstead, nearest the door. Deceased had only an under-linen garment upon her and by subsequent examination I am sure that the body had been removed, after the injury which caused death, from that side of the bedstead… nearest to the partition.’ Cause of death, Phillips said, was loss of blood from the right carotid artery. Abberline took an inventory of the room’s contents and noted that a large fire had been lit in the grate, so hot that a kettle’s spout had melted. The ashes revealed pieces of women’s clothing, part of a hat and a skirt. He put forward the idea that the fire may have been to light the killer’s work as the only other light source in the room was a solitary candle.

It was at this stage, with no medical details of mutilation given, that Macdonald urged the jury to come to a decision. They did, of course, bullied by the man, and it was the by now inevitable ‘wilful murder by some person or persons unknown’.

And so it has remained.

Dr Thomas Bond’s post-mortem report on Mary Kelly was not delivered at her inquest. Curiously, it was one of those original documents that vanished from the archive, fuelling all sorts of conspiratorial speculation. It was returned, anonymously, in 1987 and makes grisly reading, even in précised form:

The body was lying naked [although the in situ photograph of the corpse clearly shows a chemise around the shoulders] in the middle of the bed, the shoulders flat but the axis of the body inclined to the left. The head was turned on the left cheek. The left arm was close to the body and rested on the mattress, the elbow bent and the forearm supine with the fingers clenched. The legs were wide apart, the left thigh at right angles to the trunk and the right forming an obtuse angle with the pubes.

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. The tissues of the neck were severed all round down to the bone.

The viscera were found in various parts viz: the uterus and kidneys with one breast under the head, the other breast by the right foot, the liver between the feet, the intestines by the right side and the spleen by the left side of the body. The flaps from the abdomen and thighs were on a table [these would show clearly in the second photograph in Mary’s room].

The face was gashed in all directions, the nose, cheeks, eyebrows and ears being partly removed. The lips were blanched and cut by several incisions running obliquely down to the chin. There were also numerous cuts extending irregularly across all the features.

The neck was cut through the skin and other tissues right down to the vertebrae, the 5th and 6th being deeply notched. The skin cuts in the front of the neck showed distinct ecchymosis [indicating bruising made by a slow, deliberate cut]. The air passage was cut at the lower part of the larynx through the cricoid cartilage.

Both breasts were removed by more or less circular incisions, the muscles down to the ribs being attached to the breasts. The intercostals [muscles] between the 4th, 5th and 6th ribs were cut through and the contents of the thorax visible through the openings.

The skin and tissues of the abdomen from the costal arch to the pubes were removed in three large flaps. The right thigh was denuded in front of the bone, the flap of skin, including the external organs of generation and part of the right buttock. The left thigh was stripped of skin, fascia and muscles as far as the knee.

The left calf showed a long gash through skin and tissues to the deep muscles and reaching from the knee to 5 inches above the ankle.

Both arms and forearms had extensive and jagged wounds. The right thumb showed a small superficial incision about 1 in. long, with extravasation of blood in the skin and there were several abrasions on the back of the hand moreover showing the same condition.

On opening the thorax it was found that the right lung was minimally adherent at the apex and there were a few adhesions over the side. Her pericardium was open below and the heart absent.

Although this is Bond’s report, the post mortem at Shoreditch was actually carried out by the ubiquitous Dr Phillips, with Bond, Brown and possibly doctors Dukes, Hebbert and Clarke in attendance. The number of medical men there is testimony to the hysteria the Ripper was causing and the unparalleled butchery involved. The most controversial line in Bond’s narrative is the last one – ‘the heart absent’. A number of Ripperologists have taken this to mean that the heart had been cut out of the body, but, like other internal organs, was elsewhere in the room. Since Bond comments on the lungs and stomach contents, it is clear that he and Phillips carried out a complete necropsy, examining all organs under the Virchow method. He would therefore have described the condition of the heart had it been anywhere in the room. It is possible that the killer burnt it along with the clothes in the fireplace, but it is far more likely that it was slipped into his pocket by Robert Mann on its way to another glass jar in his mortuary.

Luck had followed Robert Mann again, although he could not have known it. The timings in the early hours of the morning mean that the only sound of his leaving was Kelly’s door closing at 5.45 (although Elizabeth Prater could not be totally sure it was Kelly’s door). Since Hutchinson left his spot opposite Miller’s Court at about three o’clock and Mary Cox saw no light in Kelly’s room at the same time, then she was probably still entertaining the man whose incredibly detailed description Hutchinson gave to Inspector Abberline.

Medical experts at the time and since have estimated that the killer spent two hours hacking Mary’s body to pieces. This means that she had gone out again, after three o’clock and met Robert Mann. We have always assumed that the man seen watching Miller’s Court earlier was George Hutchinson, but what if it wasn’t? Did Robert Mann linger in the shadows, accost Mary Kelly (already drunk and probably not very choosy) and go with her into her room?

As she turned to take off her coat, did she see the look on Mann’s face and just have time to scream ‘Murder!’ before his fingers closed on her throat?