Pushkin. When rent collector Thomas Boyer wraps on Mary jen Kelly's door, he receives no answer. She's in arrears and the slum landlord who owns this building has sent him to settle the matter. Boyer spots a smashed window whose jagged pane is stuffed with rags. I put my end through the broken pane and lifted the curtain. I saw two pieces of flesh lying on the table. Horrified, he flees and returns to his boss. Another one, Jack the Ripper.
When police officers break down the door to the little room, they are confronted by a dreadful scene. Mary Jane has been horribly mutilated. Every part of her body has been defiled. No one really knew Mary Jane in life and now in death. It's almost as though her murderer sought to obliterate her completely. But what happens next is curious. Mary jen Kelly is somehow set apart from the other dead women.
Her youth, her mystery, her life as a quartersan, and the grisliness of her death are used to fetishize and sexualize her. A cult of Mary Jane Kelly emerges, and its followers would even go as far as trying to dig up her bones. I'm Hallie rubinhold you're listening to bad women. The Ripper retold a series about the real lives of the women killed by Jack the Ripper and how we got their stories so wrong. One side, money plenty and friends too by the score. Then fortune smilder
upon me. I now one pass my dome, aloney, and not with her, seems to loney. I'm com fe walk. We followed Mary gen Kelly to extravagant and decadent parties in London's fashionable West End, and traced her route to Paris, where she may have been cruelly tricked into confinement in a state sanctioned brothel. Then we shadowed her as she hid from her aggrieved traffickers in the heart of London's grim East End. We left Mary Jane as she escaped
a volatile love affair with an ordinary working man. With each of these moves, she was circling closer and closer to notorious Whitechapel. And then, in March eighteen eighty seven, another living arrangement presented itself. Mary Jane met twenty nine year old Joseph Barnet, a blue eyed local man who sported a fashionable mustache. Not forty eight hours after meeting Mary Jane, he was in love. He quickly proposed that
they move in together, and Mary Jane agreed. Joe was a quarter at a local fish market and earned a good living. Nevertheless, the couple still struggled for money. Both of them enjoyed a drink, and perhaps this is where their troubles began. In the roughly eighteen months they were together, Mary Jane and Joe Barnet moved a dress four times, living in a series of cramped, shabby dwellings. At one point they were evicted for drunkenness and for failing to
pay their rent. Eventually they settled in Miller's Court, in a ten by twelve foot room at the end of a dark alley. Here Mary Jane charmed her neighbors with her humor and kindness. They claimed that she was a good, quiet, pleasant girl who enjoyed singing. She would regale them with her stories about her time in the West End and rhapsodize about returning to her people in Ireland. What was true and what was invented is now unknowable. In a
rare moment of openness. She spoke candidly to her neighbor, twenty year old Lizzie Albrook. Lizzie seemed enchanted by her worldliness, but Mary Jane warned her off embarking down a similar path. She was heartily sick of the life she was laid in, and then, during the late summer of eighteen eighty eight, Joe lost his job. The couple again fell behind on
their rent, and their debts began to mount. Perhaps it was Mary Jane's landlord, a notoriously unscrupulous local business man, who had a word with her about a return to soliciting. After more than a year of sharing a bed with only one familiar partner, she would hardly have embraced this prospect willingly. For over a year, she had not needed to inspect a strange man for signs of syphilis. She had not stood on a corner in the rain without
a hat or a shawl, but having to smile. Nonetheless, she had not had to consider what she might do if the unwashed man she had just pleasured refused to pay her or made her pregnant. It was Joe Barnett who said she needn't solicit while they lived together, and that he would provide for them. She must have resented him for failing on this promise. But however hard Joe tried, he was unable to find any work beyond odd laboring jobs, which did not even cover the cost of their rent.
The couple began to argue frequently and furiously. On one occasion, while drunk, Mary Jane broke a pane of glass in the window beside their door. In place of a proper repair, she stuffed it full of rags to stop the draft. Jack the Ripper's Killingsbury was terrorizing the district. During those tense months, Joe and Mary Jane read the newspapers daily,
hoping to learn that the murderer had been caught. For as long as the river remained at large, Mary Jane offered sanctuary in their little room to friends and acquaintances from the sex trade. After the fights and recriminations, these nocturnal guests were the final straw for Joseph Barnet. He left Mary Jane on October thirtieth, though he said he
felt a great deal of remorse. Mary Jane stayed on at thirteen Millers Court, but if she felt its grubby, peeling walls would offer a safe haven from a killer still on the loose. She was awfully, tragically mistaken. In spite of their difficulties, Joe obviously still cared for Mary Jane and hoped they could be reconciled. He took a bed at a local boarding house and made certain to look in on her as he continued to search for work. Early on the evening of November eighth, he knocked on
her door. A candle was burning inside, and Barnet noted that she was not alone. She'd been chatting with her neighbor Lizzie, who then excused herself. Mary Jane had just returned from drinking in the Ten Bells pub, though she seemed perfectly sober. The couple were together for about an hour. They may have conversed softly, or quarreled, or given into their desires, but whatever occurred failed to shift their impasse. In the end, Joe rose to leave, apologizing to Mary
Jane as he went. I told her that I had no work and that had nothing to give her, for which I was very sorry. One neighbor, Mary Ann Cox, believed Mary Jane then went out and returned her lodgings later with a man a last saw her alive on Thursday night at Court to twelve, very much intoxicated, yet none of the area's publicans claimed to have seen or served her. That night. Cox stated that Mary Jane and her company disappeared into her room, though not before she
had uttered the words good night. I am going to have a song. Then the door bang shut, and a glimmer of light began to shine from behind her crudely curtained window. After a moment or so of silence, Cox heard Mary Jane's voice rise, scenes of my childhood, her rise before my gaze, bringing wreck collections of by gone happy days when down in the middle childhood, I would
a rome. No one's left to Jimmy. Now within that good old home, Cox seemed certain that she heard her neighbor singing until around one am at least, But as with so many of the witness testimonies in the Ripper Murders, there are omissions, questions, and inconsistencies, And what precisely happened to Mary Jane's male visitor in the course of this hour and fifteen minute concert is anyone's guess. The small wilt I plucked from mother's gray A woman who lived above.
Mary Jane claimed that she could hear most sounds clearly through the thin walls and floor, and at one thirty am nothing stirred in her neighbor's room. At some point in the very early hours of November ninth, Mary Jane decided to bring an end to her day and retire to sleep. She removed her clothes, piece by piece, a few shabby items from a once resplendent wardrobe now diminished by wear hems, dragged along the uneven pavements of white chapel and fabric splashed with beer and gin all the same.
She folded each article neatly and placed them on her chair. The flame of her only candle, which she had balanced on a broken wineglass, would have gutted and bobbed until snuffed out. The following day, police inspector Abeleine examined the crime scene and took an inventory of the room. There were traces of a large fire having been kept up in the grate, so much so that it had melted the spout of the ket love. It appeared as if
a large quantity of women's clothing had been burnt. I could only imagine that it was to make a light for the men to see what he was doing. The ripper appeared to have spent considerable time inflicting Mary Jane's wounds. Her injuries were extensive and elaborate, such that it would have been difficult for even those who knew her to
recognize her. Certain detail of the murder, deemed too horrific for any audience, were suppressed from the coroner's inquest, though many of them were printed by the press around the world. Foul Fiend resumes his ghastly work in London. The city has again stirred to its very center, and again mysterious murder is the cause. And yet, despite the extensive coverage, not one friend or relation from the past appears to have recognized her name or any part of her story
enough to come forward and verify her history. Mary Jen Kelly remained an enigma. Figures like Mary Jane raised questions of historical responsibility. There are gaping voids in her life story, and as a historian, I can use my knowledge of the Victorian world to suggest likely scenarios to fill these gaps, But without reliable sources names are birth certificates, passenger lists, or rent b I simply cannot say anything concrete or
definitive that hasn't stopped others. Though writers and filmmakers have fabricated all kinds of stories about Mary Jane, often presenting them as fact. She's popular on the Ripper Ology forums too. Threads about Mary Jane Kelly musing over her injuries and identity vastly outnumber discussions on any of the other four victims. Crucially, Mary Jane often receives special treatment. The nineteen sixty five book Autumn of Terror is a case in point, says
expert on Ripper writings, Rebecca Frost. It calls the first four victims dregs of wretched humanity. It was among this flatsum that Mary Kelly drifted borne along by the tide, yet remaining aloof as befits an Amazon queen. When some women are called gliding queens while others are dismissed as drifting trash, it's a certainty that something has gone very wrong. But more on that. After this short break, all we know about her is what she told to her boyfriends.
Rebecca Frost is correct. After Mary Jane's murder, Joseph Barnett became the primary narrator of her life. Story. The little we know of Mary Jane is thanks to his earnest but fraught testimony stammered out before a judgmental coroner's jury. Everyone else has multiple points of comparison, So you have like Polly's husband can say this, her children can say this, Kate's long term boyfriend says this, her daughter says this. But Mary Jane Kelly exists only in the stories she
told about herself. As with the Ripper, a lack of corroborated knowledge about Mary Jane has made her a blank page on which to inscribe fanciful theories. Over the years, it's been suggested that Mary Jane was the victim of ritual religious sacrifice, or she fell prey to a deranged abortionist Jill the Ripper. Others claim she faked her own death, leaving a faceless corpse. Even in the earliest coverage of the Ripper murders, there was something special about Mary Jane,
something different. She's already separated from the others because she is younger, and she gets described as being beautiful. We don't actually know what she looked like because all of these descriptions says she's blonder, brunette, or she's got black hair, or she's a righthead, but there's this idea that she
was absolutely young and gorgeous and truly attractive. The reading public in the Victorian era would have been primed by the conventions of Gothic literature to appreciate beauty and death in combination, and to see the dead body as somehow an object of desire. The death of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world a
Girl and Poe had declared. One enterprising publisher even placed newspaper adverts for pose novella Murders in the Room Morgue beside coverage of Mary Jane's death, saying it would be read with special interest at the present time. Mary Jane was known to have been involved in the sex trade, and she was the only victim to have the word prostitute actually listed on her death certificate. In books and films, she also tends to be the most overtly sexualized of
the Ripper's victims. She's often played by an attractive Hollywood star and given a storyline that singles her out. Take the two thousand and one movie from Hell, where Heather Graham takes up the Mary Jane Kelly Mantle in this particular ripper myth, Mary Jane and Inspector Abeline, an opium addict played by Johnny Depp, are in love. In this fiction, the doomed women are all friends, and they share the screen in costumes that owe more to victorious secret than
Victorian poverty. That's not what they would have looked like, That's not how they would have dressed. But if Johnny Depp is going to be talking to them and spending so much time concerned about them, we need to have that sort of visual indication that these women are worthy of that time and attention. Not unlike Gothic fiction, which connected cruelty and pain with beauty and sexual desire from hell, also links sex and violence. Julia Skelly, an art historian,
remembers watching the film as a teenager. Heather Graham had this super artificial red hair. I remember that very clearly. They tried to make it a love story between her and Johnny Depth, an opium addicted detective, And what I remember most from that movie was this moment that's supposed to be sexually titillating, romantic, even God forbid, where Johnny Depp pushes this woman up against the wall to kiss her.
In hindsight, very much part of this normalization of violence towards women, where rape behavior on the part of male subjects is supposed to be romantic. Billy Jensen, a journalist who focuses on unsolved murders and missing persons, sees the conflation of violence and sex crop up time and again in the most popular crime coverage. When you look at the biggest stories of true crime, the cases are all
about young, attractive females. And I've been in newsrooms and I've been on TV shows where if the victim is not up to a certain part, that story is only going to get five minutes as opposed to thirty minutes. And when you take a look at Mary Jane Kelly, yes, she was quote unquote the last victim, and she was brutalized more than the other women. But I also think as well it is because of her youth and sexualization
of her. For some Mary Jane's murder also seems to hold the unique promise of unlocking the entire Ripper mystery. Mary Jane Kelly is last, and she is the most brutally murdered, So therefore we want to look at the question of motive. We want to explain why was she last.
Some authors and ripporologists have answered that question by stating that Mary Jane must have been the true intended target of the Ripper killings, and it's all censored around this idea that Mary Jane Kelly had to deserve it because she was the most mutilated, this idea that it was personal. Back in nineteen twenty nine, Australian journalist Leonard Matters published
the first full length book investigating Jack the Ripper. In Matters account of killing a physician he calls Doctor Stanley, sets out to avenge the death of a son who fatally contracted syphilis from Mary Jane Kelly. He's going looking for Mary Jane Kelly, and he's just killing anybody who gives him any advice on it so that nobody can trace his path. But Mary Jane Kelly is the person he has a personal She's at fault because she didn't
care that she was passing on this disease. The idea that Mary Jane Kelly was somehow to blame for all the murders recurs again and again. Often it goes all the way to the top Mary Jane meets her end because she's embroiled in some royal scandal. There are several
variations on this theme, which we've touched on before. One of my favorites because it's absolutely awful but super creative, says that Mary Jane Kelly was actually pregnant by the Prince of Wales in John Wilding's nineteen ninety three book, The Prince's Friends go on a murderous rampage designed at
first to eliminate the secret of Mary Jane's pregnancy. We get to the point though, where Queen Victoria finds out what is happening, and she does not want any possible descendant of her beloved Albert to be murdered, so it changes to we're going to keep murdering so we can fake Mary Jane Kelly's death. So she personally chooses Liz and Kate to die, and then she also puts somebody in her room that night to be killed and mutilated to the point where nobody can tell it wasn't her.
She ends up participating in these murders so that she can go on have her baby and level life of luxury. Of course, there's not a shred of evidence for any of this. What others see in Mary Jane's disfigured and outraged body is the chance to reveal the identity of the killer from the knife marks left on her bones during the hours he spent elaborately mutilating her. The ripper might just have left behind some key evidence, a unique
part of himself that will expose him. Unlike the previous Ripper victims, she was killed in a private room, were her murderer lingered that enclosed space was a source of intrigue. Even in the earliest coverage of the crime, newspapers published sketches of her room and its layout. The readers to pull over. You're supposed to be able to sort of shut off the empathy part in your brain that acknowledges this was a person and turn on that CSI laser
eyesights that's going to show you all the clues. Seeing the crimes through the eyes of a detective can be thrilling, but it can also be dehumanizing. Forensic photography, a relatively new practice at the time, was used to document the scene. Mary Jane's lifeless and brutalized form was forever fixed in two horrifying snapshots you're looking not at even the body as a whole. You're looking at the wounds, at the injuries, and you're already starting to tell yourself a story about them.
So if you start with the description of a woman whose throat was slits, your mind is meant to already go to was the killer left or right handed? What weapons did he use? Was it he or she? Can we tell how tall they were? Everything about that dead woman is meant to be a signpost pointing you towards the Mary Jane Kelly. The real flesh and blood woman has vanished, and the figure in her place belongs to
the realm of make believe. Somehow, this Mary Jane manages to be both the archetype of youthful charm and beauty to admire and desire, and simultaneously a defiled object at which to gork. The ripper retold would be back after this short break. In the wake of Mary Jane's murder, the police conducted house to house inquiries and searches, interviewing possible witnesses about what they had seen and heard on that fateful night, But nothing concrete or conclusive came of
all these efforts. Doctor Thomas bond, who had conducted Mary Jane's postmortem, theorized that all the victims must have been lying down when they were murdered, and profiled the offender as a man of physical strength and of great coolness and daring acquired inoffensive looking man, probably neatly and respectably dressed. Suspects were investigated, but no one was charged with any of the murders. Yet again, the ripper had evaded captured.
The excitement in the neighborhood is intense, and some of the low women with whom that street abounds appear more like fiends than human beings. Terror once more gripped Whitechapel, fermented, of course by the press. Some parts of the murdered bodies are missing. Why because this fiend has possessed himself of as the Indian warrior did the scalps of his victims. So great was the panic that reportedly the police struggled to maintain law and order on the streets. At one point,
a mob threatened to lynch a suspicious looking man. It turned out that this fellow fancied himself as a detective and had been criss crossing the East End in various disguises hoping to catch the ripper himself. Even Queen Victoria intervened with a telegram to the Prime Minister. This new ghastly murder shows the absolute necessity for some very decided action. It seemed that the Queen had some theories of her own. Is there sufficient surveillance at night? The murderer's clothes must
be a saturated with blood and kept somewhere. Has any investigation been made as to the number of single men occupying rooms to themselves? Half the cattle boats and passenger boats being examined. But the Ripper's murderous campaign had apparently come to an end. Impoverished women continued to be killed in Whitechapel, but the police did not attribute these murders to the culprit thought to have claimed the live of Polly Anny, Elizabeth Kate and Mary Jane. It was supposed
that the ripper stopped killing for various possible reasons. Perhaps he had died or emigrated, perhaps he'd been locked away in a lunatic asylum. While ripproology has ill served the memories of Jack's victims, it ins introduced many other bystanders too. When popular, albeit reductive vein of riproology is to accuse Whitechapel locals from professions that employ blades and who also had mental health problems, to demonstrate how idiotic, tasteless, and
hurtful this approach can be. In a later episode, I'll introduce you to Jacob Leavey, a Jewish butcher from Whitechapel who struggled with mental illness and ended his days in a nearby asylum, leaving a young widow, several children, and a swirl of unsubstantiated claims that he was the Ripper. In life, Mary Jane's identity have been whatever she wished it to be, but in the wake for death she
became whatever Joseph Barnett wished to commemorate. It was he who insisted that the name on her brass coffin plate read Mary Jeannette Kelly, a moniker brimming with all the flounts and flamboyance of a Saturday night in the West End. In death, Mary Jane became something of a local heroine. Her open hearse, two mourning carriages, and polished oak and elm coffin, decorated with two floral wreaths and a cross of heartseed, was as much a show of defiance against
the killer. As a mark of respect for Mary Jane. This cortege attracted those wishing to gawk and drink and exclaim at the carnival of mourning as it passed through the streets, trailed by publicans and their best customers, as well as the sorts of females that newspapers called unfortunates. Women with infants on their hips watched from their doorsteps. Men removed their hats as she passed. God forgive her, they were said to have cried out through their sobs.
We will not forget her because she called herself Kelly, and because she claimed to have been born in Ireland. Mary Jane was interred at a Catholic cemetery in East London. A headstone bearing her name can still be found here, the product of a later campaign to honor her memory. Today, visitors pay homage to Mary Jane at her supposed graveside, leaving behind gifts of flowers, candles, and tiny bottles of gin. But in the one hundred and thirty years since her burial,
Mary Jane hasn't entirely rested in peace. One of the crowning affronts to Mary Jane's memory have been the attempts to exhume her body. Her remains in particular are of enormous interest because he spent more time with her body. If we had a chance to find her remains. Are their tool marks on it? Are there knife cuts on it? What might we learn about what Jack the Ripper did from looking at her? And what did they miss at
the time, which would have been a lot. A few years ago, crime writer Patricia Cornwell reached out to my friend doctor Torry King, a leading expert on genetics, who had led a successful project to identify the remains of English King Richard the Third, and she just said, look, I am very interested in Jack the Ripper? Is this true?
Could we do this? The idea of exhuming Mary Jane's body was on patricious radar because of a man named Win Weston Davis, who claimed to be a descendant so his great aunt, a woman called Elizabeth Weston Davies, who, as far as we can tell from what he says, does appear to have become a prostitute in London. She doesn't appear to be in the eighteen ninety one census,
but that's not uncommon. People do disappear from censuses, and I understand that there was a family story that his great aunt had met sort of with a nasty end, and somewhere along the way this has gotten conflated with her being Mary Jane Kelly. I find it all incredibly tenuous. However, he was in the press claiming that if you could find a lab, he could get a license from the Ministry of Justice to exhume her remains. Patricia wanted to know if they could analyze Mary Jane Kelly's DNA and
restore her real name. Yes, that's possible, we could do genetic analysis. But what's really critical for this is that you have to know that the remains that you are looking at are those of Mary Jane Kelly. So that then brought us to the question of okay, so where are Mary Jane Kelly's remains. Mary Jane was buried in a communal grave that at the time was unmarked. She had a number of people who were buried below her, and then they put in graves with multiple people all
around her. So this is an eighteen eighty eight years later, the land was reclaimed and a new burial system imposed, so her present day headstone probably has no relevance to the actual location of her remain. You don't know how the two different kind of grave row systems match with one another. What you can do is you can kind of go, Okay, she's likely to have been in this area. Well, there could be around a thousand over a thousand people
in here. The chances of us being able to come down on a coffin that says on it, Mary Jane Kelly is so far out there and ethically so not right to be potentially disturbing the remains of so many people to do this, you just wouldn't even break ground on this project. What was Patricia's response, I mean, she was she reasonable completely. When we talked this through, we sort of said, look, you know this is really important.
You have to know that you've actually got Mary Jane Kelly in order to be able to do the DNA and elsis to compare with her great nephew. And she was completely completely on board with all of that. She's like, yep, okay, yeah, no, coun't go down that, but I'm going to be able to ask about all of this for myself. I've heard back from my agent and Patricia has agreed to talk next time on Bad Women. It's nice to meet you,
however distantly and virtually nice to meet you too. To be honest, I've been a little bit nervous about it as well. Jack the Ripper should make everybody nervous. First of all, if you value your life and your sanity and your well being, you'll stay as far away from the subject as you possibly. You know, you may have similar tales to tell, but it's quite a journey when
you get on it. Bad Women The Ripper Were Told is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and Me Hallie rubin Hold, and is based on my book The Five. It was produced and co written by Ryan Dilley and Alice Fines, with help from Pete Norton. Pascal Wise's Sound designed and mixed the show and composed all the original music. You also heard the voice talents of Soul Boyer, Ben Crow,
Sarah Bows, Melanie Gutridge, Gemma Saunders, and rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of mir La Belle, Jacob Weisberg, Jenguera, Heather Fane, Carla mcgliori, Maggie Taylor, Nicolemarino, Natal Mullard, Eric Sandler, and Daniella Lakhan with special things to my agents Sarah Ballard and Ellie Karen