Mary Kelly Gives Description of JTR?

[mklhawley]

Greetings all,
I found a one-line news summary in The Evening World (New York, N.Y.), November 13, 1888, stating:

Mary Kelly gives a description of the supposed Whitechapel murderer to the London police.

Has anyone seen this report before? Did The Evening World later recant this statement?

Sincerely,

Mike

[Phil Carter]

Hello Mike,

Interesting..I for one have never seen that before. Odd too.

best wishes

Phil

[Wickerman]

I don't recall an instance where we know of Mary Kelly talking to the police.
Unless it was while she lived with Joe Barnett.

[mklhawley]

Sounds to me like they clearly got their facts wrong. Another possibility which would be a great consiracy theory idea is that MK left a few signs at the crime scene! ...sorry, I've been staying up late watching a few too many movies. If the Evening World did get it right, maybe it was a different Mary Kelly.

Mike

[Jonnieola]

I don't recall an instance where we know of Mary Kelly talking to the police.
Unless it was while she lived with Joe Barnett.

Mary Jane Kelly was fined 2/6 by the Thames Magistrate Court on September 19, 1888 for being drunk and disorderly.

Whether this was THE MJK isn't proven and if it was MJK did she have a conversation with the police regarding the Whitechapel murders?

And as she was arrested and drunk and disorderly at the time would anyone have listened to her?

I'm intrigued. Admittedly it doesn't take much....

[Phil Carter]

Hello Jon.

Would you please tell me the provenance of this Sept 19th report?

best wishes

Phil

[Errata]

Wasn't she dead on November 13th?

[Phil Carter]

Hello Errata,

Not meaning to sound "out there" here, but that occured to me too. Could this be an early source that sheds light on the question of whether the woman killed in Miller's Court was "Mary Jane Kelly" or not?

Is this another example of the American newspapers having pieces of information and printing them that the British papers didn't? I refer here of course to the numerous examples of Tumblety, which we know all about.

best wishes

Phil

[Graham]

According to Joe Barnet, Mary Kelly said (presumably to him) that she was worried about the Whitechapel Killer coming after her, so perhaps Barnet kind of assumed that she had some knowledge of who this was, or might have been. If this got picked up by a reporter after her murder, then maybe that's the origin of the Evening World report.

Graham

[Errata]

Well, I think that if Mary Kelly were alive and gave a description on the 13th, and the New York papers found out about it without the London papers finding out about it, it would make sense that the London papers would print similar stories once that paper came out. Since they didn't, and since the New York World was renowned for yellow journalism, my bet is that the headline was fabricated nonsense from two known names. Mary Kelly and Jack the Ripper.

[Addy]

Hi all,

Or they published a rumour they picked up about her after she was murdered.Her name would have been on everybodies lips and all sorts of stories would have started to circulate. It still happens today, if someone is murdered or a famous person dies, all sort of stories of what they said, did or intended to do had they not died start to circulate. The title of the article doesn't give any date for this supposed talk to the police (I'm rather sceptic too) so it could have been a rumour. Anyways, it took a while for news to reacht the US from England in those days, so if you look at it that way it doesn't seem surprising news like this would be published in the States some days after events happened in England.

Greetings,

Addy

[Jonnieola]

Hello Jon.

Would you please tell me the provenance of this Sept 19th report?

best wishes

Phil

I have read it in various places but it is also given on this site in the history of MJK. I'll have to look at the source documents one day. Yet another thing to add to my "To do" list.

http://www.casebook.org/victims/mary_jane_kelly.html

[Phil Carter]

Hello Jon, all,

Yes, I am aware of the mention here on Casebook, but as far as I can tell, it refers only to the "A-Z page 229", the latest of that page version being the 1996 paperback version. In the first paperback version, 4 years or so previously, the page it is mentioned on is page 221. It states..

"...She may well be the Mary Jane Kelley who was fined 2/6 (12.1/2p) for drunken disorderliness at Thames Magistrates Court on 19th September 1888."

In the latest version of the A-Z, 2010, hardback, it is on page 257.

So far, a cursory look through the newspapers has failed to pick up this item as reported. Perhaps somebody can put me on the right track?

best wishes

Phil

[Jonnieola]

Yup. Same old story Phil. What looks like an interesting lead with MJK turns into a blind alley. It seems to good a lead not to be followed up but will undoubtedly need someone to go to the PRO or the like.

[Archaic]

A Closer Look At The 'New York World'

Sounds to me like they clearly got their facts wrong.

Well, I think that if Mary Kelly were alive and gave a description on the 13th, and the New York papers found out about it without the London papers finding out about it, it would make sense that the London papers would print similar stories once that paper came out. Since they didn't, and since the New York World was renowned for yellow journalism, my bet is that the headline was fabricated nonsense from two known names. Mary Kelly and Jack the Ripper.

Hi everyone. I have to agree with Mike, Errata, and Addy on this one. Ever since I started going through the papers published outside of London (with the exception of the New York Times), I've been amazed at how incredibly garbled the basic facts become. I have a file of WCM articles I intend to post in which the names of the victims & principal players become utterly confused, the facts undergo remarkable transformations, and the wildest rumors are printed as soon as they are heard. The results can be extraordinary to say the least. These papers are entirely unreliable as 'source' material, but extremely instructive if one wishes to understand how so many blatant errors came to be mixed in with the story of Jack the Ripper.

In addition to the many obvious reasons for this 'garbling effect', a perhaps not-so-obvious reason is that many stories were dispatched to far-flung newspapers by telegraph. Translating a story from a journalist's jotted notes into dots and dashes, transmitting it by wire over long distances, receiving the dots & dashes, interpreting them, transcribing them back into jotted notes, transforming the result into a written story, and handing it over to the printer who then arranges it into type-set columns, is a method naturally fraught with errors.

And as Erratta pointed out, the New York World is most well-known today for being a glaring example of 'Yellow Journalism'. Publisher Joseph Pulitzer was in a circulation-feud with Charles Dana, and each knew that 'Sensationalism' sold papers. As the news archive 'Chronicling America' puts it, "Such intense competition for readers led the two publishers to embrace "yellow journalism," and they competed over which evening paper would be the most strident, shrill, and loose with the facts. "

The New York World was only 1 year old at the time of the Whitechapel Murders, having been founded in October 1887. It was desperate to gain a toehold in the market.
The following link will give you a look at the front page of its first edition, published on Oct. 10, 1887. This should give you a pretty good idea of its tone.
The first four stories are Murder, Murder, Assault By Clubbing, and Counterfeiting, spiced up with political scandals and tragic accidents.

New York World, 1st Edition, Oct. 10, 1887: http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lc...10/ed-1/seq-1/

Best regards,
Archaic