the Rent arrears

[ianincleveland]

i still wonder how kelly got away with owing the best part of 6 weeks rent and seemed pretty unconcerned as well,drinking in the pub and not working that much as a prostitute.

Now maybe mcCarthy did "feel sorry for her" but as a slumlord with a burgeoning empire of slum properties,if word got out that one tenant was able to "knock" him then others would start.i cant imagine to run the business empire he did in the tough Spitalfields of 1888,mccarthy was exactly a softie.Hed be walked all over at best by the semi criminal element in the district.now either he could shall we say "look after himself" or he knew some heavies who could do his dirty work for him.That i imagine we shall never know.

i wonder if when he revealed that kelly owed 6 weeks rent how many others tried it on with him??

the other thing i just dont believe is when he claimed he couldnt produce a key,but i shall leave that for the mccarthy suspects thread

[Sam Flynn]

i cant imagine to run the business empire he did in the tough Spitalfields of 1888,mccarthy was exactly a softie. Hed be walked all over at best by the semi criminal element in the district.

... amidst all this goodly speculation, let me offer the possibility that Joe Barnett might have "known" a few people, too. Barnett was of Irish descent, after all, and McCarthy could have found himself "leant upon" to be nice to Mary. I daresay that loyalty between certain families might have caused a few favours to be done along the line too.

Not that I personally have need for such devices for, as we've seen, McCarthy himself says that "arrears are got as best you can", which doesn't seem to paint his policies to be as inflexible as one might suppose.

[j.r-ahde]

Hello Sam!

It's quite possible, that Joe Barnett knew some tough guys in the hood!

But; MJK herself was also known for being good in self-defence. So, it's pretty possible too, that she didn't use her defense skills only for difficult customers...

In another words; if it is a true-saying about her being able to use just one punch to knock down a cart-horse, how many punches she needed for McCarthy?!

All the best
Jukka

[caz]

A vaguely amusing comedy routine my dear old Dad taught me.

1. You get a bow tie and stick it under your nose like a moustache and in a deep pantomime villain voice you say PAY THE RENT.

2. Then you lift up the bow tie to your hair and say in a high Betty Boop type voice BUT I CAN'T PAY THE RENT.

3. Repeat steps 1 and 2.

4. Lower the bow tie to where it ought to go and say in a smug male voice I'LL PAY THE RENT.

And maybe that’s why Kelly wasn’t flitting in and out like Cox the night before Bowyer was sent to collect: she could have found a more direct method of cracking the same nut, which ended up costing her a lot dearer than the sleepless night Cox spent fretting about her debts.

The only conclusion we are entitled to reach from McCarthy sending the rent man round when he did is that he was not a completely soft touch, who was letting Mary’s arrears mount up indefinitely, because he evidently wanted and expected her on this occasion to cough up a bit of hard cash from her latest efforts to earn some, whatever those efforts were and however successful.

Bang goes any speculation that his trousers were in control and he was letting her pay him in kind. You don’t send another man round to collect your weekly fondle. He would have done all the ‘collecting’ himself, in his own sweet time, and it would have been their little secret. But in that case he would have been better off denying the extent of her arrears, or keeping a doctored rent book to suggest she was gradually paying them off.

The only reason I could think of for McCarthy exaggerating how much Mary owed by November 9 would be to put himself in a better light as a compassionate landlord. But the flip side of that would be exposing himself to accusations of being a dirty old landlord, more passionate than compassionate when it came to his more comely tenants. I expect his wife would have had some idea of which was more likely.

If he routinely had a third party collect from Room 13, I think it’s highly doubtful that anything irregular was going on re the rent, and he’d have been foolish to lie about the amount of arrears or his reasons for tolerating them.

What we don’t know is anything at all about Mary’s attitude towards either the rent she owed or her landlord’s attempts to collect it. But unless she was thick, or permanently too drunk to care, she must have had some awareness that she could be living there on borrowed time, and if McCarthy’s patience ran out anytime soon, she would be looking for shelter during the long winter months ahead. She must also have been expecting the next knock on her door, asking again for something to show for the money-making ‘talents’ nature had given her and not yet snatched away.

Mary only needed to find one man in one pub to promise her a way of cracking the nut in one go and having just enough rent money ready to keep McCarthy happy until next time. Just one man to respond to her promises of a good time with a promise of his own. If Mary promised this man the world if he could help her keep the roof over her head, who is to say he would not have promised this woman the roof if he could help himself to her body?

No, ahem, see it works like this. Kelly, a woman with unusual charms, NEVER has to give Hutchinson, or McCarthy, ANYTHING in return! Zero! Nothing. She has mastered the art of "maybe one day, but today, I need a favor." And as I theorized yesterday, if McCarthy knew Kelly was going to get more than her usual, as with payment for her room, let's say, he would naturally then send Bowyer around as early as possible to get it before it's gone...

I see Marlowe’s point, although Mary would not have needed particularly ‘unusual’ charms to make them work for her in this way. If she knew that they wouldn’t work directly on the landlord, she could have used them on just one likely looking ‘victim’ picked up down the pub - Blotchy for instance - and he could have claimed to be good for the favour she needed: a bit of rent money. McCarthy only had to get wind of Mary taking some ale-carrying chap back to her room and serenading him for ages, to chuckle to himself: “Mary’s having to learn a trick or two now she’s on her own. I bet she’s charmed her way into this chap’s wallet and now she’s singing him off to sleep and he’ll be too drunk to care”.

Another thing we don’t know is when Blotchy left and whether Mary was alive or dead at the time. But we do know there was no rent money ready. So if Mary was hoping to ‘borrow’ or coax some from Blotchy before he left (which is hardly a far-fetched notion if she was used to asking men for favours and the worst she got was an apology when their pockets were genuinely empty) she was disappointed.

And I think that may be important in piecing together the night’s events.

Why did she fail to get a penny piece out of Blotchy towards the rent?

Love,

Caz
X

[perrymason]

I think one answer for your last line may be that he wasnt a client. As you suggest she may have tried to borrow a coin or two for all we know, but the report of singing off and on doesnt sound like a "trick" that anyone would have to pay for. It sounds like entertaining to me...a bit of company since she has lived alone since Maria got her own room.

If that song and visit are as suggested by the evidence, then how do you reconcile that with a woman desperate to scratch up something for the landlord next morning....in fact so much so that she would leave her warm room after letting Blotchy out, while still drunk, and in the pouring rain seeks a client or two to meet the growing arrears threat.

Blotchy isnt dispatched quite as easily as that, .. since we have a believed witness that saw him enter before midnight and none that see him leave, addressing his whereabouts is critical to a theory that Mary goes trawling after him. Its a question of just how many comings and goings were then missed by court residents still awake as of 2am...one still out of her room.

Best regards Caz.

[Sam Flynn]

Its a question of just how many comings and goings were then missed by court residents still awake as of 2am...one still out of her room...

... and none of them keeping particular watch over Room 13

[perrymason]

... and none of them keeping particular watch over Room 13

Agreed...but 2 witnesses of record have ingress/egress issues that make them walk right past her door twice, or right opposite of it once....after 1:30am.

They werent tasked to look or take note but they may well have...and neither Mary Ann or Sarah say anything that changes the state of the room from its reported state at 1:30, when Elizabeth sees no light and hears no noise.

Its kind of odd to me that they didnt address that specific question in a forthright manner with each of those 2 women during the Inquest.

Cheers Sam

[Chava]

Well Blotchy is my new favourite candidate after having seen all those descriptions and all which match him to a 't'. I agree with Caz, you don't send anyone round after the rent if you're banging the rentor! You go round yourself and have a nice time with it. I always thought that McCarthy knew what was waiting in #13 for Bowyer. It was just too pat for him to send round to collect money just when the poor woman had been murdered. But in those days I thought it was because McCarthy had killed her. Now I think it's more likely that McCarthy himself went round there after closing his shop, expecting payment in kind. Didn't get an answer. Looked through the window. Saw what he saw. And walked away. Because otherwise he would have to explain to Mrs McCarthy how come he was hanging around #13 at all hours of the night. Then he sent his man around as soon as he saw him the next morning.

This is, of course, pure supposition.

[perrymason]

Well Blotchy is my new favourite candidate after having seen all those descriptions and all which match him to a 't'. I agree with Caz, you don't send anyone round after the rent if you're banging the rentor! You go round yourself and have a nice time with it. I always thought that McCarthy knew what was waiting in #13 for Bowyer. It was just too pat for him to send round to collect money just when the poor woman had been murdered. But in those days I thought it was because McCarthy had killed her. Now I think it's more likely that McCarthy himself went round there after closing his shop, expecting payment in kind. Didn't get an answer. Looked through the window. Saw what he saw. And walked away. Because otherwise he would have to explain to Mrs McCarthy how come he was hanging around #13 at all hours of the night. Then he sent his man around as soon as he saw him the next morning.

This is, of course, pure supposition.

Blotchy is a fine candidate for this murder for sure Chava, Im not as convinced that some of the other witness accounts of suspects of other Canonicals are credibly him though. McCarthy has a very good reason for not killing Mary Kelly...she owes him money. Then whats his good reason for doing so? Hes a slumlord... not a demon.

I think looking hard at either Bowyer or McCarthy is like watching a film and only looking at the set decoration.

Cheers Chava.

[Sam Flynn]

Then he sent his man around as soon as he saw him the next morning.

At 10:45, Chava? McCarthy must have been a rather generous employer

[claire]

Agreed, Sam. As tempting as it may be for me to believe that McCarthy saw what had happened, and cleared out, the only reason for him to wait at all would be if he had suspicions about who might have been responsible. And, even if he did, surely he'd want to deflect any such suspicions as early as possible, by getting someone to that door well before quarter to eleven in the morning.

The only alternative would be that McCarthy was such a monster that he really wasn't moved at all by what he saw...which suggests that either he was responsible (or felt responsible) in some way, or he just didn't see it first at all.

To go back several pages, I'd have to stick fast to the idea that rent arrears were the norm. He was a slumlord, not a slick property manager with des-reses to rent to the highly paid.

[richardnunweek]

Hi,
Refering to the visit by Bowyer, one question has to be asked.
Why was Bowyer sent to call on Kelly for the rent, when at that very moment his wife and 14 year old son were doing just that with the other residents?.
Why was room 13 not included amongst the others? questions should be asked...
Was McCarthy aware of what the room contained?
If so, how?, and why was it not reported at the time discovered.
Why would 'Indian Harry' be seen to be the best bet, to obtain some cash from Mary?
Was the visit made at the request, of some residents of the court, who according to a press report, were concerned that kelly was not up and about, and informed the landlord?
The events of that morning are very odd, in more ways then one, and i for one have major doubts ,of events being ,as recorded.
Regards Richard.

[Nothing to see]

Yeah, I'm not sure about McCarthy and Bowyer in all of this. Now I understand that McCarthy's shop was at the entrance to Miller's Ct and the back window would have looked onto MJK's room.

There's the disagreement in time that strikes me. McCarthy sent Bowyer, Bowyer came back and told McCarthy. McCarthy sends Bowyer to the cops. McCarthy follows Bowyer to the cop station about 15 mins later, I think. I know if I'm wrong someone will correct me. So what was McCarthy doing in that period between sending Bowyer to the cops and following him there?

Shutting up shop. Possibly. But wouldn't he have been human to wander along and have a second look through the crack in the window? Why couldn't anyone just unlock the door? Why did McCarthy have to break the door down? Wouldn't he have had a spare key?

[Supe]

Nothingtosee,

You might check out this dissertation for a possible answer to the question you pose: Time is on My Side

Don.

[Chava]

At 10:45, Chava? McCarthy must have been a rather generous employer

I imagine it was more that McCarthy, who we know was at his shop until 1.30 am at least the night before, didn't get in much earlier than that. He had a wife and a couple of kids who could serve in the shop while he got his head down for a few hours. He probably came in around that time, collared Bowyer, and sent him on his errand.