The Mysterious Murderer-Jack the Ripper

 The Mysterious Murderer-Jack the Ripper (Part 3)

Mary Kelly

   Jack the Ripper’s last and sixth victim was a 35 years old prostitute, Mary Kelly. Quite a large crowd had assembled at No. 13, Miller’s Court in East London, when Inspector Beck and Detective Walter Drew arrived to investigate. They felt that they had come to slaughter house. It looked as if her body had been cut up as a demonstration of the art of dissection. Pieces of flesh were hanging from picture nails on the walls. She had been disemboweled. Her heart and kidney were placed on a table beside her severed breasts. Her face had been thoroughly mutilated and the nose and ears sliced off. Her throat had been slit open. Inspector Beck wrote afterwards, “ What I saw when I pushed back an old coat and peeped through a broken pane of glass into the sordid little room which Mary Kelly called her home, was too harrowing to be described. It remains with me–and always will remain-as the most gruesome memory of the whole of my police career.” The police deduced that Jack the Ripper must have spent at least two hours in cutting Mary Kelly. It took a team of surgeons six hours to sew the body together.

Jack the Ripper- The Mysterious Murderer

Jack the Ripper-The Mysterious Murderer (Part-2)

Newspaper headline about Jack the Ripper

   The third victim was 47 years old Annie Chapman, known to her friends as “Dark Annie”. There was a gap only eight days between the second and third murder. It was 7th September and Annie badly needed four pence to hire a bed for the night. She was seen staggering near 29, Hanbury Street around two in the night. Her body was discovered at dawn as passing people shouted “murder, murder”. Her entrails were hanging at the door of a woman who sold cat’s meat. The murder had been carried out in the usual brutal and vicious manner. Some coins and two brass rings were lying at her feet. The stomach had been opened and the intestines had been lifted from the body and placed on the shoulder of the corpse. Her neck had been nearly severed. The knife used must have been at least five inches long and the Coroner declared, “An unskilled person could not have done this, only someone used to the post-mortem room.” Through a handkerchief was tied to the neck, the blood must have flown freely. This led the Times to wonder as to how the murdered could get away from the scene undetected. It wrote, ”reeking with blood, and yet,.......he must have walked in broad daylight along streets comparatively well frequented, even at that early hour, without his startling appearance attracting attention.” The newspaper thought that the killer must be living in that area and must have gone to his house to remove all traces of his hideous crime. Other journals including Punch vehemently criticized the police and their inability to arrest the murdered. George Bernard Shaw, the eminent write, wrote an angry letter to Star.

   It was certain that the killer was an audacious person. In between the murders, he wrote sarcastic letters to the police ridiculing their inefficiency and working methods. He even threw a challenge to them to catch him if they could. He informed that he was going to kill someone in the near future. The police could neither arrest him nor had any idea regarding his identity. The papers were giving wide publicity to these murders by Jack the Ripper. They also vehemently criticized the tardy manner in which the police was dealing with these gruesome murders. The police Commissioner, Sir Charles Warren, would not even send his policemen to the site of murder. He would send his police dogs. His Deputy, Sir Robert Anderson, displayed his indifference to these murders by going out to Switzerland for a month’s holiday.