Ideas to explain the ferocity of MJK's murder

[pinkmoon]

I think all of the victims would have suffered the same appalling fate as poor mary if they were killed inside and he had the extra time .

[Ausgirl]

A personal relationship with MK would explain the facial damage, maybe extreme hatred, looking at the organ removal. General rage, depersonalisation and humiliation, just incredibly extreme in this case.

I've never seen anything like that stripped-down thigh before though. Unless the killer planned to eat some of it.

[Wickerman]

"She had two false teeth which projected very much from the lips."
Morning Advertiser, 12 Nov. 1888.

Regardless how you mutilate the face, the false teeth remain another indicator.

[Ginger]

But for the sake of an argument, suppose the lady known as Mary Kelly was actually Adelaide, being tracked down by one of her husband's friends, or some member of his family. He finds her, and does his actions on her body, but is determined to make facial recognition impossible as the police would certainly recognize her face if only partly mutilated or if left alone. He may also have craftily started carving up the faces of victims earlier to make what he does to "Mary" seem a natural extension of his insanity.

Oh, my! That would make a magnificent novel!

[Mayerling]

Sorry, but I don't buy into this idea that MJK's killer was trying to destroy her identity. If he was, then he patently failed. There was only one woman living in the hovel called 13 Miller's Court, it wasn't exactly rocket science to figure out who the victim was. You don't attack someone in their own home if you're trying to create a 'Jane Doe' situation. Notwithstanding her injuries, MJK's body was still identified quicker than Stride's.

Also, if the focus was to destroy the face, then I don't believe the extensive mutilations could've been incidental to that. There's no way. Whoever sat in that stuffy, cramped room dissecting her body piece-by-piece did so because they wanted to. If one concedes Eddowes was also a Ripper victim, then we've already seen the killer was extending to facial mutilation. More time, more violence. That's why the whole concept of the escalation in violence fits so snugly with the rest of the murders. A little too snugly for some, maybe. Personally, I'm still not wholly convinced that MJK was a Ripper victim. However, I draw the line at some kind of cover up.

Grant that killing a person in their home or apartment or room in some slum is not going to totally rule out the person's identity ("Oh, that is where Ms Kelly sleeps."), but it could be that the body might have been recognizeable for some facial reason if seen by the authorities. Put it this way (and I am not trying to say this is what happened, but I am inventing a "f'r instance" idea):

In 1886 there was a famous poisoning trial that ended in acquittal of one Adelaide Bartlett for the murder of her husband Edwin. After the trial, Adelaide managed to lose the public attention on herself and drift off into a happy oblivion. Nobody really knows what happened to her, but she may have ended up (like Madeleine Smith and Florence Maybrick) in America. But for the sake of an argument, suppose the lady known as Mary Kelly was actually Adelaide, being tracked down by one of her husband's friends, or some member of his family. He finds her, and does his actions on her body, but is determined to make facial recognition impossible as the police would certainly recognize her face if only partly mutilated or if left alone. He may also have craftily started carving up the faces of victims earlier to make what he does to "Mary" seem a natural extension of his insanity.

Then my suggestion might make a little more sense. At least it did to me. It does not necessarily stand that this is the solution to the carnage in that room, but I offer it as a suggestion.

Jeff

[GUT]

I certainly don't mean to trivialize what took place but think of it as comparable to eating ice cream. One bite of ice cream doesn't satiate you. All it does is make you want more ice cream.

c.d.

I think that is likely.

[c.d.]

I certainly don't mean to trivialize what took place but think of it as comparable to eating ice cream. One bite of ice cream doesn't satiate you. All it does is make you want more ice cream.

c.d.

[Ausgirl]

One detail that puts me in a spin with Kelly's murder is that fleshless section of thigh. I mean. Look at it. It's been completely stripped, down to bone. Like a joint of meat.

And then he puts the meat on a table. Did he take some with? Was he descending into cannibalism, is this why he started taking bits away with him? I dunno. But it crosses my mind.

Mary Kelly wasn't just murdered, she was utterly destroyed. Everything, absolutely everything that made her a woman, a human being, was mutilated into a ruin.

It's like a work of art (and no, I am not being flippant, nor at all Cornwellian here!). Just a way of thinking about this... Keeping in mind the 'decorative' nature of some of the wounds to previous victims. Mary Kelly could literally be a finished work of "art" for this killer. he went to a LOT of trouble to make sure what was seen would never in a million years (well, at least a century or two) be forgotten.

So I am two minds about "frenzy". Is a cold kind of frenzy possible? A slow, horrible dedication to this brutal task? It -looks- frenzied but there's careful elements. How long did he take to strip all the meat off her thigh? Why would he hurry? Did he enjoy it, all that time to -take- his time.. sorry, just riffing out loud there.

Mary Kelley's murder bothers me on several different levels, some of them quite deep.

Was her hand really INSIDE her body cavity? That'd be the first I've heard of that.

[Harry D]

Sorry, but I don't buy into this idea that MJK's killer was trying to destroy her identity. If he was, then he patently failed. There was only one woman living in the hovel called 13 Miller's Court, it wasn't exactly rocket science to figure out who the victim was. You don't attack someone in their own home if you're trying to create a 'Jane Doe' situation. Notwithstanding her injuries, MJK's body was still identified quicker than Stride's.

Also, if the focus was to destroy the face, then I don't believe the extensive mutilations could've been incidental to that. There's no way. Whoever sat in that stuffy, cramped room dissecting her body piece-by-piece did so because they wanted to. If one concedes Eddowes was also a Ripper victim, then we've already seen the killer was extending to facial mutilation. More time, more violence. That's why the whole concept of the escalation in violence fits so snugly with the rest of the murders. A little too snugly for some, maybe. Personally, I'm still not wholly convinced that MJK was a Ripper victim. However, I draw the line at some kind of cover up.

[GUT]

Hi GUT,

That is a problem, and it may be unsolvable. For the government to allow disinternment for a time, it has to be a specific, readily available grave that can be reopened without disturbing other graves. No fishing expeditions would be allowed under normal circumstances. I didn't know this situation.

Jeff

G'day Jeff

Don't take what I said as gospel, it is just what I was told when I made some inquiries.

[Mayerling]

But Jeff as I understand it we don't even know the precise location of her grave, I've been told that the marker is an approximation. The only real hope is if the plate on the Coffin "Marie Jeanette Kelly" remains to assist.

Hi GUT,

That is a problem, and it may be unsolvable. For the government to allow disinternment for a time, it has to be a specific, readily available grave that can be reopened without disturbing other graves. No fishing expeditions would be allowed under normal circumstances. I didn't know this situation.

Jeff

[GUT]

But Jeff as I understand it we don't even know the precise location of her grave, I've been told that the marker is an approximation. The only real hope is if the plate on the Coffin "Marie Jeanette Kelly" remains to assist.

[Mayerling]

Hi all,

First on the possibility of either the cry of "Oh Murder!" being by a party spotting the Ripper covered in blood, holding a knife, or holding Mary's heart in his hand (which would be surprising, even if he felt triumphant), or the possibility of somebody interrupting the dissection of Mary Kelly:

In either case there would have been a second victim, unless that witness was smart enough to have a cocked gun with many bullets in it, and fired it into Jack. He couldn't afford to have been spotted that well by a witness - not like the vague situations about spotting suspects that had pervaded the case on every level so far (and afterwards).

Second - the mutilations of Mary's face to the point of total destruction:

Well if she was pretty it is bad, but he already showed that he was capable of mutilating the faces of other victims in the case. But I keep thinking of all her mutilations leading up to the face. There is a curious suggestion - and it's in a detective story, though not related to this situation.

The story is by G. K. Chesterton: one of his wonderful "Father Brown" tales. It's called "The Sign of the Broken Sword". In discussing a historical mystery of recent events (totally fictitious to us of course), Father Brown poses a question to his friend Flambeau. The question is "Where do you hide a tree?" Flambeaus thinks, and says "In a forest!!" The follow up question is "Where do you hide a body?" This leads to the tale of the so-called event. A recent historical event was the defeat (after an engagement) of a "General Gordon" figure by a charismatic foe in South America, and how the public was shocked when the Gordon figure was found killed on the battlefield after his surrender with a sword through his body (the broken sword). His charismatic enemy has been labelled a cowardly murderer for this, but remains silent. Eventually Father Brown explains to Flambeau that you hide a dead body in a forest of bodies. That is on a battlefield. [I recommend reading the rest of the story to fully understand what this leads to.]

My point is the following: Given the gruesomeness of the body of Mary Kelly and how it was found, the attention of everyone was on the state of the body - not as much on the face of the victim. How to hide the destruction of the face of the victim? On a horribly mutilated body as well!!

I think the killer was intending to destroy Mary's face - to render identification of the body as that of one Mary Kelly hard, and to render further identification of who "Mary Kelly" actually could have been nearly impossible.

But to cut up her face only in that room would have suggested too much - so the killer had to really set a stage up to hide his intentional destruction.

And I think it worked to this day. Look at the threads of discussions on Mary Kelly, and the difficulties of identifying who she actually was!

Photos of other victims as they normally looked are not totally impossible to find and compare to the morgue photos. Just think of Annie Chapman. Hell, think of the New York prostitute known as "Old Shakespeare" as well. Their normal photos appear on this site with other figures in the case like James Kenneth Stephen and Walter Sickert.

But how are you going to compare either of those photos of the destroyed Mary Kelly to any photograph of a 25 year old woman?

There is one idea I once had about this matter - you need the permission of the authorities in Britain for it.

Open up Mary's grave, get the skull out, and have it examined by experts like those who handled the recent recovery of the skeleton of King Richard III. Eventually, with computers, you can rebuild her face. That is, of course, if the skull is still there and in tact!

By the way - I first the photos of Mary Kelly in the 1970s when one was republished in the paperback edition of Donald Rumblelow's "The Compleat Jack the Ripper" in 1976. I still have that book. Now they are commonly (too commonly, I feel) republished in Ripper books and true crime books. That (or those) damned photo (s) bug the hell out of me, and I'm 61 this year. To me they and the photos of the sawn in half Elizabeth Short (the "Black Dahlia") are the worst photographs of atrocities (short of some of the Nazi photos) that I have ever had the misfortune to view. It's one of the reasons that I have rarely commented on any of the threads dealing with Mary Kelly - I don't want to haphazard read a column and see one of those pictures.

Jeff

[John Wheat]

Mary was about 24, how young do you think 'Jack' was?

To Wickerman

I was thinking maybe the name Mary Jane. Or maybe she looked like a young version of Jack's mother.

Cheers John

[Wickerman]

Maybe the greater ferocity was down to Mary Kelly reminding Jack of his mother.

Mary was about 24, how young do you think 'Jack' was?