Did Bury write Openshaw?

This may be something or perhaps nothing but, as with From Hell, there are some curious similarities between Bury’s handwriting in ‘From Ellen’ and the Openshaw Letter (see comparison images below). In all cases Bury on the left, Openshaw right. Commentary text below.

Bs: Bury consistently does a joined-up lower-case b that is open at bottom and has a strong horizontal stroke joining the next letter – there are examples of this in Openshaw.

Ds: now this is interesting. In his salutation of ‘dear’ in From Ellen the d is very unusual looking and embellished and it looks a hell of a lot like the D for doctor on Openshaw envelope. There is a slight difference, but I think that is because in From Ellen the d of dear is joined-up where in Openshaw it is stand alone.

Ps: Bury does a very distinctive and quite angry looking p with a rather exaggerated vertical bar and angular back sweep. Although there is a lot of variation in Openshaw, you can see similar in the Ps of ‘coppers’ and elsewhere. In the middle set you can just see the same sweeping connection that Bury nearly always does in the join to 'e' in the Openshaw example.

Rs: although these are pretty much identical in both, caution is needed because many of the joined up Rs in Openshaw are classic stylized Victorian handwriting. This does beg the question, why is someone with a hand that looks like a village idiot using letters of an educated person that conform to stylistic norms of the times? The same trait is evident in From Hell with the letters that look so much like Bury’s. The answer is provided in the many texts on disguised handwriting – an accomplished and neat writer can easily pull-off the idiot look and this is indeed one of the go to methods of disguise. On the other hand, someone with fundamentally bad handwriting would find it impossible to imitate neat handwriting.

Now anyone can suggest their suspect of interest wrote a ripper letter, but with Bury there is more to go on. Aged 16 Bury was working as a factor’s clerk – this required the ability to write neatly, spell accurately and copy text into ledgers. I can’t imagine there were many 16 year olds doing this in the 1870s. By this time Bury must have been something an accomplished hand and this may provide indirect evidence to back up the Rev Gough’s opinion that Bury was ‘very intelligent’. Bury also forged a copper-plate style letter to con Ellen into leaving the east end. Bottom line is, Bury had the skills to pull off the necessary disguise for From Hell and Openshaw, both of which have the same comedy misspelling whilst giving away their secrets in the neat stylized areas.

I’m pretty sure everyone else will disagree, but I reckon Bury wrote from Hell and Openshaw. Also bear in mind From Hell relates to Eddowes – Bury mutilated his wife’s genitals in a way that was described in a virtually identical fashion by two different medical men at other ends of the country. He is the only suspect that carried out a sexually motivated murder. He slept with a penknife under his pillow, used prostitutes, was violent and abusive, fits many descriptions of the ripper, fits virtually every aspect of the FBI profile of the killer (except letter writing of course - I think the key here is Bury was a clever man who wanted to show his superiority).

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