Speaker 1: Pushkin. When rent collector Thomas Boyer wraps on Mary jen
Speaker 1: Kelly's door, he receives no answer. She's in arrears and
Speaker 1: the slum landlord who owns this building has sent him
Speaker 1: to settle the matter. Boyer spots a smashed window whose
Speaker 1: jagged pane is stuffed with rags. I put my end
Speaker 1: through the broken pane and lifted the curtain. I saw
Speaker 1: two pieces of flesh lying on the table. Horrified, he
Speaker 1: flees and returns to his boss. Another one, Jack the Ripper.
Speaker 1: When police officers break down the door to the little room,
Speaker 1: they are confronted by a dreadful scene. Mary Jane has
Speaker 1: been horribly mutilated. Every part of her body has been defiled.
Speaker 1: No one really knew Mary Jane in life and now
Speaker 1: in death. It's almost as though her murderer sought to
Speaker 1: obliterate her completely. But what happens next is curious. Mary
Speaker 1: jen Kelly is somehow set apart from the other dead women.
Speaker 1: Her youth, her mystery, her life as a quartersan, and
Speaker 1: the grisliness of her death are used to fetishize and
Speaker 1: sexualize her. A cult of Mary Jane Kelly emerges, and
Speaker 1: its followers would even go as far as trying to
Speaker 1: dig up her bones. I'm Hallie rubinhold you're listening to
Speaker 1: bad women. The Ripper retold a series about the real
Speaker 1: lives of the women killed by Jack the Ripper and
Speaker 1: how we got their stories so wrong. One side, money
Speaker 1: plenty and friends too by the score. Then fortune smilder
Speaker 1: upon me. I now one pass my dome, aloney, and
Speaker 1: not with her, seems to loney. I'm com fe walk.
Speaker 1: We followed Mary gen Kelly to extravagant and decadent parties
Speaker 1: in London's fashionable West End, and traced her route to Paris,
Speaker 1: where she may have been cruelly tricked into confinement in
Speaker 1: a state sanctioned brothel. Then we shadowed her as she
Speaker 1: hid from her aggrieved traffickers in the heart of London's
Speaker 1: grim East End. We left Mary Jane as she escaped
Speaker 1: a volatile love affair with an ordinary working man. With
Speaker 1: each of these moves, she was circling closer and closer
Speaker 1: to notorious Whitechapel. And then, in March eighteen eighty seven,
Speaker 1: another living arrangement presented itself. Mary Jane met twenty nine
Speaker 1: year old Joseph Barnet, a blue eyed local man who
Speaker 1: sported a fashionable mustache. Not forty eight hours after meeting
Speaker 1: Mary Jane, he was in love. He quickly proposed that
Speaker 1: they move in together, and Mary Jane agreed. Joe was
Speaker 1: a quarter at a local fish market and earned a
Speaker 1: good living. Nevertheless, the couple still struggled for money. Both
Speaker 1: of them enjoyed a drink, and perhaps this is where
Speaker 1: their troubles began. In the roughly eighteen months they were together,
Speaker 1: Mary Jane and Joe Barnet moved a dress four times,
Speaker 1: living in a series of cramped, shabby dwellings. At one
Speaker 1: point they were evicted for drunkenness and for failing to
Speaker 1: pay their rent. Eventually they settled in Miller's Court, in
Speaker 1: a ten by twelve foot room at the end of
Speaker 1: a dark alley. Here Mary Jane charmed her neighbors with
Speaker 1: her humor and kindness. They claimed that she was a good, quiet,
Speaker 1: pleasant girl who enjoyed singing. She would regale them with
Speaker 1: her stories about her time in the West End and
Speaker 1: rhapsodize about returning to her people in Ireland. What was
Speaker 1: true and what was invented is now unknowable. In a
Speaker 1: rare moment of openness. She spoke candidly to her neighbor,
Speaker 1: twenty year old Lizzie Albrook. Lizzie seemed enchanted by her worldliness,
Speaker 1: but Mary Jane warned her off embarking down a similar path.
Speaker 1: She was heartily sick of the life she was laid in,
Speaker 1: and then, during the late summer of eighteen eighty eight,
Speaker 1: Joe lost his job. The couple again fell behind on
Speaker 1: their rent, and their debts began to mount. Perhaps it
Speaker 1: was Mary Jane's landlord, a notoriously unscrupulous local business man,
Speaker 1: who had a word with her about a return to soliciting.
Speaker 1: After more than a year of sharing a bed with
Speaker 1: only one familiar partner, she would hardly have embraced this
Speaker 1: prospect willingly. For over a year, she had not needed
Speaker 1: to inspect a strange man for signs of syphilis. She
Speaker 1: had not stood on a corner in the rain without
Speaker 1: a hat or a shawl, but having to smile. Nonetheless,
Speaker 1: she had not had to consider what she might do
Speaker 1: if the unwashed man she had just pleasured refused to
Speaker 1: pay her or made her pregnant. It was Joe Barnett
Speaker 1: who said she needn't solicit while they lived together, and
Speaker 1: that he would provide for them. She must have resented
Speaker 1: him for failing on this promise. But however hard Joe tried,
Speaker 1: he was unable to find any work beyond odd laboring jobs,
Speaker 1: which did not even cover the cost of their rent.
Speaker 1: The couple began to argue frequently and furiously. On one occasion,
Speaker 1: while drunk, Mary Jane broke a pane of glass in
Speaker 1: the window beside their door. In place of a proper repair,
Speaker 1: she stuffed it full of rags to stop the draft.
Speaker 1: Jack the Ripper's Killingsbury was terrorizing the district. During those
Speaker 1: tense months, Joe and Mary Jane read the newspapers daily,
Speaker 1: hoping to learn that the murderer had been caught. For
Speaker 1: as long as the river remained at large, Mary Jane
Speaker 1: offered sanctuary in their little room to friends and acquaintances
Speaker 1: from the sex trade. After the fights and recriminations, these
Speaker 1: nocturnal guests were the final straw for Joseph Barnet. He
Speaker 1: left Mary Jane on October thirtieth, though he said he
Speaker 1: felt a great deal of remorse. Mary Jane stayed on
Speaker 1: at thirteen Millers Court, but if she felt its grubby,
Speaker 1: peeling walls would offer a safe haven from a killer
Speaker 1: still on the loose. She was awfully, tragically mistaken. In
Speaker 1: spite of their difficulties, Joe obviously still cared for Mary
Speaker 1: Jane and hoped they could be reconciled. He took a
Speaker 1: bed at a local boarding house and made certain to
Speaker 1: look in on her as he continued to search for work.
Speaker 1: Early on the evening of November eighth, he knocked on
Speaker 1: her door. A candle was burning inside, and Barnet noted
Speaker 1: that she was not alone. She'd been chatting with her
Speaker 1: neighbor Lizzie, who then excused herself. Mary Jane had just
Speaker 1: returned from drinking in the Ten Bells pub, though she
Speaker 1: seemed perfectly sober. The couple were together for about an hour.
Speaker 1: They may have conversed softly, or quarreled, or given into
Speaker 1: their desires, but whatever occurred failed to shift their impasse.
Speaker 1: In the end, Joe rose to leave, apologizing to Mary
Speaker 1: Jane as he went. I told her that I had
Speaker 1: no work and that had nothing to give her, for
Speaker 1: which I was very sorry. One neighbor, Mary Ann Cox,
Speaker 1: believed Mary Jane then went out and returned her lodgings
Speaker 1: later with a man a last saw her alive on
Speaker 1: Thursday night at Court to twelve, very much intoxicated, yet
Speaker 1: none of the area's publicans claimed to have seen or
Speaker 1: served her. That night. Cox stated that Mary Jane and
Speaker 1: her company disappeared into her room, though not before she
Speaker 1: had uttered the words good night. I am going to
Speaker 1: have a song. Then the door bang shut, and a
Speaker 1: glimmer of light began to shine from behind her crudely
Speaker 1: curtained window. After a moment or so of silence, Cox
Speaker 1: heard Mary Jane's voice rise, scenes of my childhood, her
Speaker 1: rise before my gaze, bringing wreck collections of by gone
Speaker 1: happy days when down in the middle childhood, I would
Speaker 1: a rome. No one's left to Jimmy. Now within that
Speaker 1: good old home, Cox seemed certain that she heard her
Speaker 1: neighbor singing until around one am at least, But as
Speaker 1: with so many of the witness testimonies in the Ripper Murders,
Speaker 1: there are omissions, questions, and inconsistencies, And what precisely happened
Speaker 1: to Mary Jane's male visitor in the course of this
Speaker 1: hour and fifteen minute concert is anyone's guess. The small
Speaker 1: wilt I plucked from mother's gray A woman who lived above.
Speaker 1: Mary Jane claimed that she could hear most sounds clearly
Speaker 1: through the thin walls and floor, and at one thirty
Speaker 1: am nothing stirred in her neighbor's room. At some point
Speaker 1: in the very early hours of November ninth, Mary Jane
Speaker 1: decided to bring an end to her day and retire
Speaker 1: to sleep. She removed her clothes, piece by piece, a
Speaker 1: few shabby items from a once resplendent wardrobe now diminished
Speaker 1: by wear hems, dragged along the uneven pavements of white
Speaker 1: chapel and fabric splashed with beer and gin all the same.
Speaker 1: She folded each article neatly and placed them on her chair.
Speaker 1: The flame of her only candle, which she had balanced
Speaker 1: on a broken wineglass, would have gutted and bobbed until
Speaker 1: snuffed out. The following day, police inspector Abeleine examined the
Speaker 1: crime scene and took an inventory of the room. There
Speaker 1: were traces of a large fire having been kept up
Speaker 1: in the grate, so much so that it had melted
Speaker 1: the spout of the ket love. It appeared as if
Speaker 1: a large quantity of women's clothing had been burnt. I
Speaker 1: could only imagine that it was to make a light
Speaker 1: for the men to see what he was doing. The
Speaker 1: ripper appeared to have spent considerable time inflicting Mary Jane's wounds.
Speaker 1: Her injuries were extensive and elaborate, such that it would
Speaker 1: have been difficult for even those who knew her to
Speaker 1: recognize her. Certain detail of the murder, deemed too horrific
Speaker 1: for any audience, were suppressed from the coroner's inquest, though
Speaker 1: many of them were printed by the press around the world.
Speaker 1: Foul Fiend resumes his ghastly work in London. The city
Speaker 1: has again stirred to its very center, and again mysterious
Speaker 1: murder is the cause. And yet, despite the extensive coverage,
Speaker 1: not one friend or relation from the past appears to
Speaker 1: have recognized her name or any part of her story
Speaker 1: enough to come forward and verify her history. Mary Jen
Speaker 1: Kelly remained an enigma. Figures like Mary Jane raised questions
Speaker 1: of historical responsibility. There are gaping voids in her life story,
Speaker 1: and as a historian, I can use my knowledge of
Speaker 1: the Victorian world to suggest likely scenarios to fill these gaps,
Speaker 1: But without reliable sources names are birth certificates, passenger lists,
Speaker 1: or rent b I simply cannot say anything concrete or
Speaker 1: definitive that hasn't stopped others. Though writers and filmmakers have
Speaker 1: fabricated all kinds of stories about Mary Jane, often presenting
Speaker 1: them as fact. She's popular on the Ripper Ology forums too.
Speaker 1: Threads about Mary Jane Kelly musing over her injuries and
Speaker 1: identity vastly outnumber discussions on any of the other four victims. Crucially,
Speaker 1: Mary Jane often receives special treatment. The nineteen sixty five
Speaker 1: book Autumn of Terror is a case in point, says
Speaker 1: expert on Ripper writings, Rebecca Frost. It calls the first
Speaker 1: four victims dregs of wretched humanity. It was among this
Speaker 1: flatsum that Mary Kelly drifted borne along by the tide,
Speaker 1: yet remaining aloof as befits an Amazon queen. When some
Speaker 1: women are called gliding queens while others are dismissed as
Speaker 1: drifting trash, it's a certainty that something has gone very wrong.
Speaker 1: But more on that. After this short break, all we
Speaker 1: know about her is what she told to her boyfriends.
Speaker 1: Rebecca Frost is correct. After Mary Jane's murder, Joseph Barnett
Speaker 1: became the primary narrator of her life. Story. The little
Speaker 1: we know of Mary Jane is thanks to his earnest
Speaker 1: but fraught testimony stammered out before a judgmental coroner's jury.
Speaker 1: Everyone else has multiple points of comparison, So you have
Speaker 1: like Polly's husband can say this, her children can say this,
Speaker 1: Kate's long term boyfriend says this, her daughter says this.
Speaker 1: But Mary Jane Kelly exists only in the stories she
Speaker 1: told about herself. As with the Ripper, a lack of
Speaker 1: corroborated knowledge about Mary Jane has made her a blank
Speaker 1: page on which to inscribe fanciful theories. Over the years,
Speaker 1: it's been suggested that Mary Jane was the victim of
Speaker 1: ritual religious sacrifice, or she fell prey to a deranged
Speaker 1: abortionist Jill the Ripper. Others claim she faked her own death,
Speaker 1: leaving a faceless corpse. Even in the earliest coverage of
Speaker 1: the Ripper murders, there was something special about Mary Jane,
Speaker 1: something different. She's already separated from the others because she
Speaker 1: is younger, and she gets described as being beautiful. We
Speaker 1: don't actually know what she looked like because all of
Speaker 1: these descriptions says she's blonder, brunette, or she's got black hair,
Speaker 1: or she's a righthead, but there's this idea that she
Speaker 1: was absolutely young and gorgeous and truly attractive. The reading
Speaker 1: public in the Victorian era would have been primed by
Speaker 1: the conventions of Gothic literature to appreciate beauty and death
Speaker 1: in combination, and to see the dead body as somehow
Speaker 1: an object of desire. The death of a beautiful woman
Speaker 1: is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world a
Speaker 1: Girl and Poe had declared. One enterprising publisher even placed
Speaker 1: newspaper adverts for pose novella Murders in the Room Morgue
Speaker 1: beside coverage of Mary Jane's death, saying it would be
Speaker 1: read with special interest at the present time. Mary Jane
Speaker 1: was known to have been involved in the sex trade,
Speaker 1: and she was the only victim to have the word
Speaker 1: prostitute actually listed on her death certificate. In books and films,
Speaker 1: she also tends to be the most overtly sexualized of
Speaker 1: the Ripper's victims. She's often played by an attractive Hollywood
Speaker 1: star and given a storyline that singles her out. Take
Speaker 1: the two thousand and one movie from Hell, where Heather
Speaker 1: Graham takes up the Mary Jane Kelly Mantle in this
Speaker 1: particular ripper myth, Mary Jane and Inspector Abeline, an opium
Speaker 1: addict played by Johnny Depp, are in love. In this fiction,
Speaker 1: the doomed women are all friends, and they share the
Speaker 1: screen in costumes that owe more to victorious secret than
Speaker 1: Victorian poverty. That's not what they would have looked like,
Speaker 1: That's not how they would have dressed. But if Johnny
Speaker 1: Depp is going to be talking to them and spending
Speaker 1: so much time concerned about them, we need to have
Speaker 1: that sort of visual indication that these women are worthy
Speaker 1: of that time and attention. Not unlike Gothic fiction, which
Speaker 1: connected cruelty and pain with beauty and sexual desire from hell,
Speaker 1: also links sex and violence. Julia Skelly, an art historian,
Speaker 1: remembers watching the film as a teenager. Heather Graham had
Speaker 1: this super artificial red hair. I remember that very clearly.
Speaker 1: They tried to make it a love story between her
Speaker 1: and Johnny Depth, an opium addicted detective, And what I
Speaker 1: remember most from that movie was this moment that's supposed
Speaker 1: to be sexually titillating, romantic, even God forbid, where Johnny
Speaker 1: Depp pushes this woman up against the wall to kiss her.
Speaker 1: In hindsight, very much part of this normalization of violence
Speaker 1: towards women, where rape behavior on the part of male
Speaker 1: subjects is supposed to be romantic. Billy Jensen, a journalist
Speaker 1: who focuses on unsolved murders and missing persons, sees the
Speaker 1: conflation of violence and sex crop up time and again
Speaker 1: in the most popular crime coverage. When you look at
Speaker 1: the biggest stories of true crime, the cases are all
Speaker 1: about young, attractive females. And I've been in newsrooms and
Speaker 1: I've been on TV shows where if the victim is
Speaker 1: not up to a certain part, that story is only
Speaker 1: going to get five minutes as opposed to thirty minutes.
Speaker 1: And when you take a look at Mary Jane Kelly, yes,
Speaker 1: she was quote unquote the last victim, and she was
Speaker 1: brutalized more than the other women. But I also think
Speaker 1: as well it is because of her youth and sexualization
Speaker 1: of her. For some Mary Jane's murder also seems to
Speaker 1: hold the unique promise of unlocking the entire Ripper mystery.
Speaker 1: Mary Jane Kelly is last, and she is the most
Speaker 1: brutally murdered, So therefore we want to look at the
Speaker 1: question of motive. We want to explain why was she last.
Speaker 1: Some authors and ripporologists have answered that question by stating
Speaker 1: that Mary Jane must have been the true intended target
Speaker 1: of the Ripper killings, and it's all censored around this
Speaker 1: idea that Mary Jane Kelly had to deserve it because
Speaker 1: she was the most mutilated, this idea that it was personal.
Speaker 1: Back in nineteen twenty nine, Australian journalist Leonard Matters published
Speaker 1: the first full length book investigating Jack the Ripper. In
Speaker 1: Matters account of killing a physician he calls Doctor Stanley,
Speaker 1: sets out to avenge the death of a son who
Speaker 1: fatally contracted syphilis from Mary Jane Kelly. He's going looking
Speaker 1: for Mary Jane Kelly, and he's just killing anybody who
Speaker 1: gives him any advice on it so that nobody can
Speaker 1: trace his path. But Mary Jane Kelly is the person
Speaker 1: he has a personal She's at fault because she didn't
Speaker 1: care that she was passing on this disease. The idea
Speaker 1: that Mary Jane Kelly was somehow to blame for all
Speaker 1: the murders recurs again and again. Often it goes all
Speaker 1: the way to the top Mary Jane meets her end
Speaker 1: because she's embroiled in some royal scandal. There are several
Speaker 1: variations on this theme, which we've touched on before. One
Speaker 1: of my favorites because it's absolutely awful but super creative,
Speaker 1: says that Mary Jane Kelly was actually pregnant by the
Speaker 1: Prince of Wales in John Wilding's nineteen ninety three book,
Speaker 1: The Prince's Friends go on a murderous rampage designed at
Speaker 1: first to eliminate the secret of Mary Jane's pregnancy. We
Speaker 1: get to the point though, where Queen Victoria finds out
Speaker 1: what is happening, and she does not want any possible
Speaker 1: descendant of her beloved Albert to be murdered, so it
Speaker 1: changes to we're going to keep murdering so we can
Speaker 1: fake Mary Jane Kelly's death. So she personally chooses Liz
Speaker 1: and Kate to die, and then she also puts somebody
Speaker 1: in her room that night to be killed and mutilated
Speaker 1: to the point where nobody can tell it wasn't her.
Speaker 1: She ends up participating in these murders so that she
Speaker 1: can go on have her baby and level life of luxury.
Speaker 1: Of course, there's not a shred of evidence for any
Speaker 1: of this. What others see in Mary Jane's disfigured and
Speaker 1: outraged body is the chance to reveal the identity of
Speaker 1: the killer from the knife marks left on her bones
Speaker 1: during the hours he spent elaborately mutilating her. The ripper
Speaker 1: might just have left behind some key evidence, a unique
Speaker 1: part of himself that will expose him. Unlike the previous
Speaker 1: Ripper victims, she was killed in a private room, were
Speaker 1: her murderer lingered that enclosed space was a source of intrigue.
Speaker 1: Even in the earliest coverage of the crime, newspapers published
Speaker 1: sketches of her room and its layout. The readers to
Speaker 1: pull over. You're supposed to be able to sort of
Speaker 1: shut off the empathy part in your brain that acknowledges
Speaker 1: this was a person and turn on that CSI laser
Speaker 1: eyesights that's going to show you all the clues. Seeing
Speaker 1: the crimes through the eyes of a detective can be thrilling,
Speaker 1: but it can also be dehumanizing. Forensic photography, a relatively
Speaker 1: new practice at the time, was used to document the scene.
Speaker 1: Mary Jane's lifeless and brutalized form was forever fixed in
Speaker 1: two horrifying snapshots you're looking not at even the body
Speaker 1: as a whole. You're looking at the wounds, at the injuries,
Speaker 1: and you're already starting to tell yourself a story about them.
Speaker 1: So if you start with the description of a woman
Speaker 1: whose throat was slits, your mind is meant to already
Speaker 1: go to was the killer left or right handed? What
Speaker 1: weapons did he use? Was it he or she? Can
Speaker 1: we tell how tall they were? Everything about that dead
Speaker 1: woman is meant to be a signpost pointing you towards
Speaker 1: the Mary Jane Kelly. The real flesh and blood woman
Speaker 1: has vanished, and the figure in her place belongs to
Speaker 1: the realm of make believe. Somehow, this Mary Jane manages
Speaker 1: to be both the archetype of youthful charm and beauty
Speaker 1: to admire and desire, and simultaneously a defiled object at
Speaker 1: which to gork. The ripper retold would be back after
Speaker 1: this short break. In the wake of Mary Jane's murder,
Speaker 1: the police conducted house to house inquiries and searches, interviewing
Speaker 1: possible witnesses about what they had seen and heard on
Speaker 1: that fateful night, But nothing concrete or conclusive came of
Speaker 1: all these efforts. Doctor Thomas bond, who had conducted Mary
Speaker 1: Jane's postmortem, theorized that all the victims must have been
Speaker 1: lying down when they were murdered, and profiled the offender
Speaker 1: as a man of physical strength and of great coolness
Speaker 1: and daring acquired inoffensive looking man, probably neatly and respectably dressed.
Speaker 1: Suspects were investigated, but no one was charged with any
Speaker 1: of the murders. Yet again, the ripper had evaded captured.
Speaker 1: The excitement in the neighborhood is intense, and some of
Speaker 1: the low women with whom that street abounds appear more
Speaker 1: like fiends than human beings. Terror once more gripped Whitechapel, fermented,
Speaker 1: of course by the press. Some parts of the murdered
Speaker 1: bodies are missing. Why because this fiend has possessed himself
Speaker 1: of as the Indian warrior did the scalps of his victims.
Speaker 1: So great was the panic that reportedly the police struggled
Speaker 1: to maintain law and order on the streets. At one point,
Speaker 1: a mob threatened to lynch a suspicious looking man. It
Speaker 1: turned out that this fellow fancied himself as a detective
Speaker 1: and had been criss crossing the East End in various
Speaker 1: disguises hoping to catch the ripper himself. Even Queen Victoria
Speaker 1: intervened with a telegram to the Prime Minister. This new
Speaker 1: ghastly murder shows the absolute necessity for some very decided action.
Speaker 1: It seemed that the Queen had some theories of her own.
Speaker 1: Is there sufficient surveillance at night? The murderer's clothes must
Speaker 1: be a saturated with blood and kept somewhere. Has any
Speaker 1: investigation been made as to the number of single men
Speaker 1: occupying rooms to themselves? Half the cattle boats and passenger
Speaker 1: boats being examined. But the Ripper's murderous campaign had apparently
Speaker 1: come to an end. Impoverished women continued to be killed
Speaker 1: in Whitechapel, but the police did not attribute these murders
Speaker 1: to the culprit thought to have claimed the live of
Speaker 1: Polly Anny, Elizabeth Kate and Mary Jane. It was supposed
Speaker 1: that the ripper stopped killing for various possible reasons. Perhaps
Speaker 1: he had died or emigrated, perhaps he'd been locked away
Speaker 1: in a lunatic asylum. While ripproology has ill served the
Speaker 1: memories of Jack's victims, it ins introduced many other bystanders too.
Speaker 1: When popular, albeit reductive vein of riproology is to accuse
Speaker 1: Whitechapel locals from professions that employ blades and who also
Speaker 1: had mental health problems, to demonstrate how idiotic, tasteless, and
Speaker 1: hurtful this approach can be. In a later episode, I'll
Speaker 1: introduce you to Jacob Leavey, a Jewish butcher from Whitechapel
Speaker 1: who struggled with mental illness and ended his days in
Speaker 1: a nearby asylum, leaving a young widow, several children, and
Speaker 1: a swirl of unsubstantiated claims that he was the Ripper.
Speaker 1: In life, Mary Jane's identity have been whatever she wished
Speaker 1: it to be, but in the wake for death she
Speaker 1: became whatever Joseph Barnett wished to commemorate. It was he
Speaker 1: who insisted that the name on her brass coffin plate
Speaker 1: read Mary Jeannette Kelly, a moniker brimming with all the
Speaker 1: flounts and flamboyance of a Saturday night in the West End.
Speaker 1: In death, Mary Jane became something of a local heroine.
Speaker 1: Her open hearse, two mourning carriages, and polished oak and
Speaker 1: elm coffin, decorated with two floral wreaths and a cross
Speaker 1: of heartseed, was as much a show of defiance against
Speaker 1: the killer. As a mark of respect for Mary Jane.
Speaker 1: This cortege attracted those wishing to gawk and drink and
Speaker 1: exclaim at the carnival of mourning as it passed through
Speaker 1: the streets, trailed by publicans and their best customers, as
Speaker 1: well as the sorts of females that newspapers called unfortunates.
Speaker 1: Women with infants on their hips watched from their doorsteps.
Speaker 1: Men removed their hats as she passed. God forgive her,
Speaker 1: they were said to have cried out through their sobs.
Speaker 1: We will not forget her because she called herself Kelly,
Speaker 1: and because she claimed to have been born in Ireland.
Speaker 1: Mary Jane was interred at a Catholic cemetery in East London.
Speaker 1: A headstone bearing her name can still be found here,
Speaker 1: the product of a later campaign to honor her memory. Today,
Speaker 1: visitors pay homage to Mary Jane at her supposed graveside,
Speaker 1: leaving behind gifts of flowers, candles, and tiny bottles of gin.
Speaker 1: But in the one hundred and thirty years since her burial,
Speaker 1: Mary Jane hasn't entirely rested in peace. One of the
Speaker 1: crowning affronts to Mary Jane's memory have been the attempts
Speaker 1: to exhume her body. Her remains in particular are of
Speaker 1: enormous interest because he spent more time with her body.
Speaker 1: If we had a chance to find her remains. Are
Speaker 1: their tool marks on it? Are there knife cuts on it?
Speaker 1: What might we learn about what Jack the Ripper did
Speaker 1: from looking at her? And what did they miss at
Speaker 1: the time, which would have been a lot. A few
Speaker 1: years ago, crime writer Patricia Cornwell reached out to my
Speaker 1: friend doctor Torry King, a leading expert on genetics, who
Speaker 1: had led a successful project to identify the remains of
Speaker 1: English King Richard the Third, and she just said, look,
Speaker 1: I am very interested in Jack the Ripper? Is this true?
Speaker 1: Could we do this? The idea of exhuming Mary Jane's
Speaker 1: body was on patricious radar because of a man named
Speaker 1: Win Weston Davis, who claimed to be a descendant so
Speaker 1: his great aunt, a woman called Elizabeth Weston Davies, who,
Speaker 1: as far as we can tell from what he says,
Speaker 1: does appear to have become a prostitute in London. She
Speaker 1: doesn't appear to be in the eighteen ninety one census,
Speaker 1: but that's not uncommon. People do disappear from censuses, and
Speaker 1: I understand that there was a family story that his
Speaker 1: great aunt had met sort of with a nasty end,
Speaker 1: and somewhere along the way this has gotten conflated with
Speaker 1: her being Mary Jane Kelly. I find it all incredibly tenuous. However,
Speaker 1: he was in the press claiming that if you could
Speaker 1: find a lab, he could get a license from the
Speaker 1: Ministry of Justice to exhume her remains. Patricia wanted to
Speaker 1: know if they could analyze Mary Jane Kelly's DNA and
Speaker 1: restore her real name. Yes, that's possible, we could do
Speaker 1: genetic analysis. But what's really critical for this is that
Speaker 1: you have to know that the remains that you are
Speaker 1: looking at are those of Mary Jane Kelly. So that
Speaker 1: then brought us to the question of okay, so where
Speaker 1: are Mary Jane Kelly's remains. Mary Jane was buried in
Speaker 1: a communal grave that at the time was unmarked. She
Speaker 1: had a number of people who were buried below her,
Speaker 1: and then they put in graves with multiple people all
Speaker 1: around her. So this is an eighteen eighty eight years later,
Speaker 1: the land was reclaimed and a new burial system imposed,
Speaker 1: so her present day headstone probably has no relevance to
Speaker 1: the actual location of her remain. You don't know how
Speaker 1: the two different kind of grave row systems match with
Speaker 1: one another. What you can do is you can kind
Speaker 1: of go, Okay, she's likely to have been in this area. Well,
Speaker 1: there could be around a thousand over a thousand people
Speaker 1: in here. The chances of us being able to come
Speaker 1: down on a coffin that says on it, Mary Jane
Speaker 1: Kelly is so far out there and ethically so not
Speaker 1: right to be potentially disturbing the remains of so many
Speaker 1: people to do this, you just wouldn't even break ground
Speaker 1: on this project. What was Patricia's response, I mean, she
Speaker 1: was she reasonable completely. When we talked this through, we
Speaker 1: sort of said, look, you know this is really important.
Speaker 1: You have to know that you've actually got Mary Jane
Speaker 1: Kelly in order to be able to do the DNA
Speaker 1: and elsis to compare with her great nephew. And she
Speaker 1: was completely completely on board with all of that. She's like, yep, okay, yeah, no,
Speaker 1: coun't go down that, but I'm going to be able
Speaker 1: to ask about all of this for myself. I've heard
Speaker 1: back from my agent and Patricia has agreed to talk
Speaker 1: next time on Bad Women. It's nice to meet you,
Speaker 1: however distantly and virtually nice to meet you too. To
Speaker 1: be honest, I've been a little bit nervous about it
Speaker 1: as well. Jack the Ripper should make everybody nervous. First
Speaker 1: of all, if you value your life and your sanity
Speaker 1: and your well being, you'll stay as far away from
Speaker 1: the subject as you possibly. You know, you may have
Speaker 1: similar tales to tell, but it's quite a journey when
Speaker 1: you get on it. Bad Women The Ripper Were Told
Speaker 1: is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and Me Hallie
Speaker 1: rubin Hold, and is based on my book The Five.
Speaker 1: It was produced and co written by Ryan Dilley and
Speaker 1: Alice Fines, with help from Pete Norton. Pascal Wise's Sound
Speaker 1: designed and mixed the show and composed all the original music.
Speaker 1: You also heard the voice talents of Soul Boyer, Ben Crow,
Speaker 1: Sarah Bows, Melanie Gutridge, Gemma Saunders, and rufus Wright. The
Speaker 1: show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of
Speaker 1: mir La Belle, Jacob Weisberg, Jenguera, Heather Fane, Carla mcgliori,
Speaker 1: Maggie Taylor, Nicolemarino, Natal Mullard, Eric Sandler, and Daniella Lakhan
Speaker 1: with special things to my agents Sarah Ballard and Ellie
Speaker 1: Karen