Weekly Herald
November 16th, 1888
ANOTHER LONDON HORROR.
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A WOMAN FIENDISHLY MUTILATED.
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The "Pall Mall Gazette" of Friday last says -- Another shocking
murder of the now too well-known type was perpetrated this forenoon in
Spitalfields, within a couple of hundred yards of the scene of the Hanbury
Street barbarity. Accurate details of the affair are difficult to discover,
the police, as usual, placing every obstacle in the way of the investigations
of the journalists. But all the floating reports go to prove that there
has been committed a murder far surpassing in fiendish atrocity all the
long catalogue of terrible crimes with which the East End of London has
been familiarized within the past three or four months.
The scene of the murder is in Dorset Street, which opens, we believe,
in front of Spitalfields Church. It is in the same locality as the Jewish
concert hall at which occurred a shockingly fatal fire panic two or three
years ago, and lies off Commercial Street within a hundred yards of Toynbee
Hall.
A woman, some twenty-six years of age, named Mary Jane Kelly, it appears,
has lived for the past three or four months in a front room on the second
floor of a house up an alley known as Cartin's-court. This poor woman was
in service a considerable time ago, but since she came to reside in Dorset
Street, she had been generally recognised by her neighbours as a person
who, like so many unfortunate members of her sex in the eastern end of
the town, managed to live a wretched existence by the practice of immortality
(sic) under the most degrading conditions. Kelly was alive, according
to some accounts, as late as ten o'clock this forenoon. Between eight and
ten o'clock she was in the street at least once, according to some reports
twice. She is said to have been drinking in a public-house, shortly after
eight o'clock; then there is a story that she was out buying her supply
of morning milk. It is surmised in some quarters that a man had spent the
night with her; the more general impression is that the murderer made her
acquaintance in the public-house and accompanied her back to her house.
There the chain of knowledge breaks. When it is caught up again, the
woman is discovered dead on her bed, cut and hacked in the most terrible
fashion that the imagination can readily conceive. Shortly before eleven
o'clock the landlord of the house, who occupies a small huckster's shop
at the entrance to the court, called at the house to collect the rent.
Nobody answering his summons, the landlord broke in the door. Then a horrible
spectacle met his view. The woman's body lay upon her bed mutilated completely
beyond all description. The head rested upon the floor, away from the body;
an arm lay apart from the trunk; the lower part of the body was opened
up in the most inhuman and shocking way; and the entrails lay in a sickening
manner about the bed. It is not surprising that the landlord left the room
in a fainting state, and that all who subsequently saw the body feel absolutely
unable to dwell upon its appearance.
The murderer does not appear to have been identified in any fashion.
But his determination and coolness is evidenced by the fact that he had
locked the door and taken away the key.
