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Secret of Prisoner 1167: Was This Jack the Ripper? (Tully)
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Secret of Prisoner 1167: Was This Jack the Ripper? (Tully)
Author: Barchimann
Thursday, 19 November 1998 - 01:10 am |        | | I have recently read the book by James Tulley, in which he makes a case for James Kelly as "the ripper". While the book does not totally convince me of Kelly's guilt, it does raise some interesting points to ponder. Certainly it could have been Kelly. |
Author: Paul Begg
Thursday, 19 November 1998 - 01:11 am | | (this review in the main previously appeared in Ripperologist)
A few years ago John Morrison privately published a short booklet - Jimmy Kelly's Year Of Ripper Murders 1888 - in which he advanced James Kelly as Jack the Ripper.
Kelly had stabbed his wife during a domestic argument. He was tried, diagnosed as mentally ill and sent to the high-security Broadmoor criminal lunatic asylum. He is distinguished because he escaped in January 1888, spent eventful decades on the run, and as an old man surrendered himself to the Broadmoor authorities and was readmitted.
James Kelly is the Prisoner 1167 in the title of Jim Tully's book. And whereas Mr. Morrison's thesis was poorly presented and argued and lacked any evidence beyond supposition, Mr. Tully's is not. He has had access to Home Office and Broadmoor papers and can demonstrate that at the time of the murders Kelly was indeed thought of in connection with the Ripper crimes!
In one of Kelly's files there is a document dated 20th November 1888 on which someone wrote: "Would it not be well to make inquiry as to what steps have been taken to recapture this man? It is not likely he is the Whitechapel murderer; but his offence was cutting his wife's throat." As it happens, the Police had already taken an interest in Kelly and we know that on 21st September 1888 'the Detective Police' raided the home of Kelly's mother-in-law and interrogated her.
So, somebody did associate Kelly with the murders! But should any significance be read into this? We know that the Police took great interest in mental patients - Sanders, Puckridge and Isenschmidt immediately springing to mind. - and Mr Tully is himself the first to point out that in I Caught Crippen Walter Dew states that inquiries were made at asylums around the country, including Broadmoor. Is it therefore in the least extraordinary that inquiries should have made inquiries about James Kelly?
Other than this interest in Kelly, there is no other evidence advanced to support the argument that Kelly was the Ripper. Mr Tully claims that James Kelly hated women, particularly prostitutes, but he doesn't give us any factual support for this assertion and indications in the book would seem to suggest the opposite: Kelly came to London when aged 17 and almost immediately made use of prostitutes before developing a passion for the lady he eventually married. He seems to have loved his wife and been highly regarded by his mother-in-law (even after he'd murdered her daughter!).
And if Kelly had been woman and prostitute hating surely that would have been noted on that file paper written in November 1888!
Mr. Tully presents his case well but the case is ultimately unpersuasive: Kelly stabbed his wife in the throat following a heated domestic dispute, other marital difficulties, and perhaps some slight deceptions, all of which seems to have fed Kelly's paranoia. It doesn't make him the Ripper.
Beyond the arguments pushing Kelly, Mr. Tully advocates Michael Kidney as the murderer of Elizabeth Stride - previously advocated by A.P. Wolf (Jack the Myth) and Peter Turnbull (The Killer Who Never Was) and more interestingly, he presents a compelling argument for Kelly having been murdered later than almost universally accepted. Dr. Bond examined the body about 2 p.m. and on the grounds that rigor mortise was 'commencing' and, believing that rigor mortise began between six and twelve hours after death, he estimated that Kelly was murdered between 2 a.m. and 8 a.m. But expert opinion gained by Mr. Tully is that rigor mortise commences some 2 to 4 hours after death, which could put the time of Kelly's death back to about 10 a.m. Could Kelly really have been murdered so late? The possibility certainly throws new importance on the testimony of Mrs. Maxwell and the tailor Lewis. |
Author: Guy Hatton
Thursday, 19 November 1998 - 01:12 am | | Some points pondered - A response to Jim Tully.
As an appendix to his recent book "The Secret of Prisoner 1167", Jim Tully puts forward a number of "Points to Ponder". Some offer useful and straightforward answers to questions which may have troubled students of the Whitechapel Murders - Point 3, for instance, is helpful in making sense of other writers' apparently contradictory reports of the nature and location of the "mortuary in Old Montague St." Others, such as Point 1 - "Was William Turner living off Martha Tabram's immoral earnings?" are purely speculative, but reasonably argued. Others, though, appear to challenge long-established evidence without explaining why such a challenge is thought to be pertinent. Furthermore, the arguments raised appear to hark back to those used by now-discredited theorists of the murders, and seem incongruous in the context of what is, by and large, one of the more carefully reasoned and researched narratives of recent times.
Point 6 is particularly striking. It is titled "At What Time did Annie Chapman Die?". It must be recognised, of course, that there are contradictions in the evidence presented to the inquest on Chapman by various witnesses - in particular the testimonies of Bagster Phillips on the one hand, and of Mrs. Long and Albert Cadosch on the other, regarding the likely time of Chapman's death. According to Phillips, Chapman must have died around, or before, 4:30 am. However, a positive identification of the dead woman by Mrs. Long, and evidence of some sort of disturbance in the back yard of No. 29 Hanbury St. recounted by Cadosch suggest a time of death much closer to 5:30 am. Tully seems keen, for whatever reason, to insinuate that these witnesses may have been "mere publicity-seekers". This concerns me. Cadosch is characterised as "barely-awake". Admittedly, the hour was still quite early, even by the standards of the Victorian working-class lifestyle, and Cadosch had not risen from his bed very long before his visit to the yard at No. 27. I see no reason to conclude, however, without further evidence, that Cadosch was deceived by "scuffling cats" or someone crying out in their sleep. He seems to have been quite clear about where the voices came from, and so if he had caught a snatch of conversation, as Tully suggests as another possibility, then we are left to conclude that two or more people were in the back yard of No.29, along with Chapman's by now clearly visible corpse, "conversing"! This does not strike me as a plausible scenario.
Of course, the testimonies of Long and Cadosch are not the only obstacles to establishing an earlier time of death. An attack on John Richardson's story is also required, and indeed, this is precisely what follows.
Briefly, Richardson testified that he had visited the rear of the house at, or around, 4:45 am in order to check that the padlock on the cellar door had not been tampered with. This he did, glancing down and to his right as he emerged from the passage which led through from the street. Had this been all that he did, he might conceivably have failed to see a body lying to his left. However, while he was there, he took the opportunity to sit on the middle step into the yard, with his feet on the ground, and attempted to trim an annoying and uncomfortable piece of leather from his boot.
It is Tully's contention that even in this position, Richardson could easily have missed the body. Unfortunately, pictorial evidence suggests otherwise.
The "Jack the Ripper A-Z" and Kevin O'Donnell's "Jack the Ripper Whitechapel Murders" both reproduce a photograph of the back yard of No.29 Hanbury St. No date is given for this picture - but the very fact that the house was there at all, and not swept away by the extension of the brewery, puts it back at least to the 1960s, as I understand it. I will err on the side of caution in attributing a probable date to this photograph. The building is in an advanced state of dereliction, and it seems unlikely that any notable alterations had been made to the yard in the 70 or 80 years between the murder and the photograph. There are no obvious signs of major building work having been carried out, for instance.
It is on the basis of this picture that I contend that Richardson was entirely justified in his claim that he would not have missed the body, had it been there at the time of his visit. It strikes me that, in order to check the cellar door, he would most likely have had to stand on the middle step - this would be much easier than leaning out from the top of the steps. It is arguable that at this point, the back door might at least partially obscure his view of the place where the body lay - and, of course, his attention was directed the other way. However, once he is seated on that middle step, attending to his boot, the situation is drastically transformed.
Tully describes the middle step as "nearer the top than the bottom". This is literally true, but falsely implies that Richardson was still some distance from the yard proper. The body would have been "below him" says Tully. Assuming the door to be of standard size and proportion, ie. 2m or so in height, by just under 1m in width, we can estimate the height of the step by reference to the photograph. My guess is that it is barely 30 cm above "ground level". Tully gives the total height of the three steps as 2'6" (75 cm), but this seems to be an exaggerated estimate. (The top and, even more so, the bottom steps can be seen to be considerably shallower than the middle.) There can be little doubt that Richardson's feet rested, as he stated, on the ground in the yard. The body, then, would hardly have been "below" him at all in any meaningful sense.
Further, Chapman is described as being found "in the recess" behind the steps, and between them and the fence. One of the first details that impressed me about this photograph was that the fence is shown to be much nearer to the steps than I had previously imagined. The recess is almost certainly not wide enough to accommodate a body (Tully's figure of 3'6" - 105 cm- appears to be way off), and is definitely not deep enough. Note that in the picture, the back door appears to be resting open against the fence. It is open little more than 90°. There is nowhere near enough room for it open right back against the wall, as Tully suggests it might. And the depth of the recess as formed by the steps, fence and wall is probably no more than about 60 cm - the depth of the middle and bottom steps. (Note that the top step is inside the passage, and thus does not extend beyond the line of the wall). I doubt that Chapman's body would have fitted into this space even if it was huddled up tightly. But it was not - although the legs were "drawn up", the body was essentially laid out flat. If we also take into account the space needed by the killer as he positioned himself to cut the throat, the inescapable conclusion must be that the body was hardly in the recess at all - it must have lain some way out into the yard, in a position where it would have been immediately visible to anyone entering from the passage, notwithstanding any "blind spot" created by the door. Remember that John Davis seems to have had no problem seeing it - and he too would have been heading to his right, towards the privy. True, he had the benefit of more light, as day had been dawning throughout the intervening time, but it strikes me as almost inevitable that Richardson's left foot would have been a matter of only a few centimetres at most from Annie Chapman's head if she had already been left there dead. In such circumstances, I have to conclude that Richardson was not mistaken - he did not see the body, because IT WAS NOT THERE.
Potentially worrying here is Tully's statement that he re-enacted Richardson's movements in situ. It is hard to imagine how he could have done so, and yet still reached the conclusions given in his book. Perhaps we should simply take it that his recollection of the backyard has become distorted in the decades between his visit and the time of writing?
None the less, one is left wondering why Tully is so keen to dispute the evidence. Maybe it is a problem for him that the eye-witness Mrs. Long does not appear to be describing Tully's favoured suspect, James Kelly. Maybe he is simply confused - he describes Chapman and her killer as "creatures of the night", and doubts that they would have been haggling in Hanbury Street in daylight. For Mr. Tully's information, prostitutes DO often solicit during daylight hours. To my surprise, I was once asked if I "wanted business" by a young woman in the vicinity of Kings Cross Station at 8 am on a Sunday. I find it entirely plausible that Chapman may have been doing much the same at 5:30 on a Saturday.
Doubtless, anyone writing on the subject of the Whitechapel Murders is likely to be under pressure from publishers to "name the culprit", and Tully's choice of suspect is much less outrageous than that of some other widely-respected authors. (Despite the value of his contributions in other areas, Melvin Harris unfortunately springs to mind in this connection). It would be a shame, though, if Tully were to resort to compromising the quality of his research and reasoning, and take to distorting or deliberately ignoring evidence which does not support his theory. Surely we have all suffered quite enough of that kind of behaviour in recent times. |
Author: Stuart Dall
Thursday, 01 February 2001 - 06:57 pm | | I found Tully's book compelling and inclusions like, "... buttered no parsnips (with Coroner Baxter)" certainly make it an enjoyable read; however, I'm constantly frustrated by the author's neglect in quoting references.
How does he know that Kelly contracted a venereal disease and became bitter towards prostitutes?
How did he acquire such a comprehensive knowledge of the Brider family - including their emotional reactions to proposed conflicts and confrontations.
Particulary; how he claim that Sarah Brider had a - singularity - in her sexual organs: which frustrated Kelly's attempts to have sex; and which drove him to accuse her family of concealing deliberately? |
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