S3 – 8: Solitary

for his leadership. If anyone in the ranks had been unsettled by his order to beat down poor Londoners in the street on Bloody Sunday, of those concerns didn't make it into the police records, but Warren had always gone to bat on the men's behalf, and the new boots they were wearing were bought on Warren's orders. Others, though, felt the smallest amount of glee that Warren had been

pushed aside. Among them was the surgeon who had served at Scotland Yard for years until that spring, Dr Thomas Bond. He was a distinguished police surgeon with an incredible record of providing expert forensic and medical analysis in tough cases. What's more, he was also paid to serve as the doctor for the police themselves, so he was well known to many of the officers at Scotland Yard, and when it came to wane in on medical evidence, he was

no stranger to high profile tests. After all, he was the surgeon who had consulted on the Brighton railway murder. Since then, Dr Bond had joined the central hub of Police in London, making a pretty penny and doing his parts on tricky cases when it came to medical matters, But in eighteen eighty eight Charles Warren decided to see him off. Here's historian Adam Wood to tell us more.

The story was that, as always we've Warren, he was looking to make changes to them to make it more fishing and as a majority of the detectives lived a wife from Scotland Jawdean Ld Division which is self of the Thames, with the new recruits were also by associated the training in early he moved their care to the

divisional surgeons there, Dr George Farr. When Bond discovered this, he complained, but he obviously had had no choice and he resigned as a medical officer attached the Detective Department

and the Commissioner's office on the full of Ottober. It wasn't long, though, before their situations were reversed, because all that took place just weeks before Charles Warren would tender his own resignation, and the senior officers of the Criminal Investigation Department came to Dr Bond with an urgent plea. They were facing a series of grizzly murders and the medical evidence was nearly the sum total of what they

had to go on. There was no doctor the detectives trusted more than Thomas Bond, so they asked him to forgive Charles Warren's treatment and provide his expertise in the matter of the Whitechapel murders. Charles Warren was out and Dr Bond was back in. Among the reporting on Warren's stepping down was a note in The Times that the Commissioner's flight from his he created an opportunity to emphasize the distinction between the Criminal Investigation Department and the ordinary

members of the force. Warren had always sided with the constables, but now the detectives were reasserting control. Warren was a general, sure, but he had been outmaneuvered. It seems that he never grasped that the politics of the Metropolitan Police were a different kind of battlefield than he was ready for. In fact, in all the history of British policing, the eighteen eighties were a pivotal moment. Two attitudes were battling for dominance.

The standard set by Robert Peel and then pursued by Charles Warren was crime prevention, to put armed police forces in the streets and threaten such violence against the so called criminal class that crimes would simply never occur. On

the other hand, there were the detectives. They weren't setting out to prevent crimes by force so much as to solve them with clues, to make sure that wrongdoers would suffer the consequences of their actions and thus ward our future crimes by imposing a sense of power of the police that was inescapable. But the idea of oppotent and inescapable secret police wasn't always treated kindly by the British public.

Here's Drew Gray with more on that. There's a certainly a divide between uniform and playing clothes, the detectives and detection has a bad press. In England. It took a long time, so there wasn't a detective agency in England in eighteen twenty nine when the police was first formed. It took until eighteen forty two, and it took actually a couple of catastrophic failures of the police to catch murderers and high profile criminals for them to create the

detective apartment in eighteen forty two. And that was a very small number of officers. You could ask ordinary uniform officers to go into playing clothes, but the British kind of didn't like the idea of playing clothes police in at the time it kind of smacked as Napoleonic spies. They had quite strong memories of Napoleon's secret police and we didn't really want to have a detective in that way.

If Londoners feared that a police force given the authority to investigate crimes would also become a clandestine agency with a political agenda, well they didn't have to wait long. Soon enough a branch of the detectives would be ferreting out members of a political movement that we're making themselves

known in London. But of course, as these things go, certain members of the public who might have rejected the idea of playing clothes officers sneaking around in alleys and back gardens of Londoners might eventually change their tune because as much as they hated a secret police, there were other things that they feared far more. This is unobscured. I'm Aaron Manky. The bomb had been placed in a

public urinal. The urinal was for a pub, the Rising Sun, but when it detonated, the bomb hit its intended target, the police buildings at Whitehall Scotland Yard. The Special Branch building was ripped apart, including the office of the head of the Criminal Investigation Department. It was that was just one of the bombs that were set that night. In fact, there were explosions throughout the city, exactly as the warning

letter had promised. It had arrived addressed to the head of the c i D the year before, saying that it would blow the head of Scotland Yard off his stool and dynamite all the public buildings in London they came close to. Here's historian Adam Wood to tell us more about who was behind the attack, The Irish Fenians. The Fenian bombing campaign started in eighty one and it lasted for four years. There was a previous campaign in the eighteen sixties and again they were trying to establish

Irish independence. But in the eighteen sixties heads of state and other notable people were attacked in an attempt to highlight the campaign. But the eighties they were they were a little bit more direct in that they realized that if they targeted landmarks around London and elsewhere around the UK, that they did in still fear in the public and

achieve an audience with the government. And in the eighties of the nineteen bombs exploded in Brittany Levin in London, and these were places such as Scotland Yard itself was attacked. There were there were bombs put around the base of Nelson's column which failed to explode. London Underground saw four explosions, with the bomb blowing up his own officers. The head of the Criminal Investigation Department resigned in shame and that

created an opening. But there was a man at hand who was ready to step into the post, James Monroe. The government was looking for a man who was experienced in dealing with political crime, and Monroe certainly fit the bill. Like so many of the men we've met so far. James Monroe was trained and molded in the administration of

the British Empire. A Scotsman like Donald Swanson, Monroe made his way to Bengal as part of the legal branch of the Indian civil Service, but by eighteen seventy seven he had worked his way up far enough that he was made Inspector General of the Police. The stairs he climbed that height were the bodies of those he killed

when he crushed freedom movements in Northeast India. His investigations and his convictions of Indian Muslims for conspiracy to wage war against the Queen even went as far as convicting another magistrate, the deputy tax collector for the city of Putna, so his view of the Queen's justice was already formed. By the time he returned home. Political crime had become his specialty. The story is a familiar one to us

by now. Like Charles Warren and like Robert Peel who founded the London Police, James Monroe's experience was in tightening the chokehold on people who had been seized by the British Empire. It was his job to bring that mentality home, but his position was certainly a complicated one and thoroughly political.

He was made head of the Criminal Investigation Department, but given two more posts as well, the head of the Special Irish Branch, the set of detectives investigating the Fenny and bombings, and also the head of a separate section also called Special Branch, which reported only to government, not to the Police Commissioner. As well as serving under the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Monroe immediately began working with the government's

spymaster General, a man named Edward Jenkinson. He wasn't officially a policeman, but he had his own private force of spies, a network spread throughout London that acted in secrets without taking orders from the government or the police. It was everything suspicious. Britain's feared a detective service might become. Surveillance

and information gathering were the order of the day. After all, there were Irish rebels to be caught and stopped, as well as crime to be solved and prevented, and one young officer working down the ranks from James Monroe found himself in the midst of all that work, Donald Swanson, Partnering with a senior Officer Adolphus Williamson. Here's Adam Wood

once again. The two officers worked to give a a quite number of vistigations and in both the Fenian Campaign and later with the Bloody Sunday Roots and Trafical Square, they worked to give a looking at the overall picture rather than individual incidents, and they were patient to give a direction for the investigation. And that's exactly what happened later on in the Ripper case when Swanson was appointed by the Commissioner, Shovel was warrant to leave the investigation

from Scotland Chide. So it was still years before the Whitechapel murders when an incendiary bomb roared through the Tower of London and burned its way into historical infamy with the nickname Dynamite Saturday. That had been the twenty four of January in eighty five. The tower was crowded at the time by two d visitors touring the site. The attack, though, was blunted, the fire was put out before anyone was hurt.

And what's more, the tower was locked down by a White Chapel detective who ordered the gates closed so that he could question everyone there and that detective name was Frederick Alberlein. Aberleine noticed one of the men he questioned spoke with an Irish American accent, not to mention that

he couldn't keep his story straight. So Aberleine collared him and when the detectives asked questions at his lodging house, it put them on the trail of yet another man, one who was setting a bomb at the House of Commons. But that wasn't even the biggest moment in scotland Yards efforts to stop the fenny and bombs. No, that came in two years later in eighteen eighty seven, during Queen

Victoria's Golden Jubilee. That's when James Monrose, network of espionage contacts and the head of the Criminal Investigation Department, boiled a plot to bomb the Cell Libration. It was a high point in the efforts of the London detectives to bounce back from the wrongdoing of the turf fraud scandal and to ingratiate themselves not just with the public, but with the Crown as well. It seemed that the era of the detective was about to bloom. She told her

own story. We can say that at least the truth and the fabrication are interwoven, and official records are silent. There's only what she told her most intimate friends. It's their testament to who she was that gives us the life of Mary Jane Kelly. She said she was born in Ireland, like so many families, though they went where the jobs were. They followed her father to the iron works in Carnarbonshire in Wales, and to make matters more stressful,

Mary was one of eight children. Together with her sister and six brothers, she no doubt drove her father to find any work he could. What Mary found was a partner, a coal miner, who married her and took her out of that large family when she was just sixteen. But mining coal is dangerous work, and if Mary's story is true, she lost her first husband in a mine explosion just a couple of years later. That didn't push her back toward her father's house, though, because she was sick and

that full house wasn't one of care and nurture. Instead, she spent a long stay in an infirmary in the Welsh city of Cardiff, where her cousin lived, and that might have been a comfort to her, not least because the family there had a little money, or so Mary said. But when those stories were later repeated for the papers and the police, they said that it was through that moneyed cousin that Mary first came into a bad life.

That's the way it was passed down. At least, we can't know for sure if Mary thought the life she found was bad, but we do know that it brought her to London. Her first stop was in the city's west side, a gay house there, she said, a west end bordello by a frenchwoman near Knightsbridge, possibly a social connection of her wealthy Cardiff family. It may even be

that they struck up a friendship. Mary would later recount the times that the two of them had ridden through London on a carriage together and even traveled to Paris. One woman would later tell The Star that Mary had a reputation for being a cultured young woman, an excellent scholar and artist. She said. One friend said that she spoke fluent Welsh, and she may have spoken French as well, and the contacts and connections she made eventually brought her

back to life in France. If that sounds charming, it could have been anything, but it may have been that the French brothel owners lured her there with false promises of a life that they never intended to give her. Whatever the case, Mary was able to escape their grasp and find her way back to London. But this time it wasn't to the wealthy gay houses of the West Side. It was toward the East End, and things in Mary's

life had taken a turn for the worse. She once went back to her former West End home, hoping to reclaim him a box full of the valuable dresses she had owned when she lived there. But she didn't go alone. She asked one of her new East End connections to come along with her. It was clear that something about the life she left behind wasn't quite right in the East End too, She moved around. She had a couple

of different landlords and a couple of different partners. She was a young woman in her early twenties trying to find a place for herself in a growing and tumultuous city. Eighteen eighties six found her living in a lodging house in Thrall Street in spittle Fields, and that's where she met Joseph Barnett, a market porter who sold fruit and bought drinks for pretty women like Mary. Soon the two were living together. Joseph even remembered a time when Mary's

father came to London to look for her. She asked Joseph to help her hide from him, not from the others in her family, though one of her brothers, a soldier in the Scott's Guard, had visited them once. They were carving out a sort of life for themselves in the East End, and in the fall of eighteen eighty seven they even had an pulled together to make their

way to a little apartment off of Dorset Street. That might not mean much to us today, but when Mary Kelly and Joseph Barnett took their room there, it was a street with a reputation. Here's Paul Beg to tell us more. Dorset Street was a fairly narrow street. It had a pub one end and a bigger pub the other end, and a small pub in the middle, and it was otherwise pretty much lined with what we're called

common lodging houses or doss houses. There was a little shop there run by a man called John McCarthy, which was basically an all night grocer's shop, and really nothing

about it to be alarmed about it. It started out its life being known as Datchett Street, that became Dorset Street, and the locals used to call it Dorset Street because of the number of doss houses that it contained, And it was the doss houses which had a really bad reputation for being plays of immorality, because not too many questions were asked if a man and a woman turned up wanting a bed together, and they were thought to be hotbeds of crime and thievery, and so they weren't

really looked upon very kindly. But in fact they were fairly horrible places, but especially by today standards, but they really were the poor man's hotel. They were where you went you could buy a bed for the night, and it's popularly argued that sometimes some just strung a rope from one side of the room to the other and for a penny you could lean on the rope and go to sleep there. There are photographs of this sort of thing happening, but I think that was a fairly

uncommon practice. But so that yeah, the doss houses were thought to be fairly dangerous, and to some extent they were, and the that gave Dorset Street really bad name, which grew worse over the whereas more Millagers were committed there. So that was Mary's new neighborhood. But it wasn't her situation though. No. Mary still had enough to her name that she and Joseph were able to rent a small room in a nook off of Dorset Street called Miller's Court.

Maybe Joseph was making enough from his work in Spittlefield's Market that they could afford the four shillings that the landlord charged each week. Over the course of things started to slip. We don't know whether it was because Joseph's work as a porter dried up, or if events in the East End made their lives too dangerous. In the later records, Joseph insisted he wasn't out of work, but by the end of October the couple were seven weeks behind in their rent and Mary was drinking. Of course,

there was a shadow looming over both of them. Joseph said that Mary closely followed the news of the White Chapel murders. He would buy papers and Mary would have him read her everything. They said. It must have cast a chill in a room. On October, Joseph stormed out, it wasn't because of the drinking, though it was because Mary took in a woman who Joseph said was a prostitute. To him, that was an offense and one he couldn't bear. But we can imagine why Mary might want to offer

shelter to a friend. In fact, Joseph would tell one newspaper that she was welcoming a number of sex workers into that narrow room. She was goodhearted, Joseph said, it did not like to refuse them shelter on cold, bitter nights. We can imagine the solidarity that Mary felt for the sex workers of White Chapel and the women who were being murdered in their neighborhood. Women who couldn't pay the fees for White Chapel lodging houses were being killed on

the streets and in dark corners. In fact, there was a lodging house with rooms for three hundred sleepers just across Dorset Street. But Mary had a private room, a roof over her own head. She wanted to offer what she had. For some reason, this put Joseph in a fury. Was he per apps in denial about Mary's own past. We can't be sure, but we do know the fight between them was so bitter it even broke a window

of their room, But it didn't change Mary's mind. So Joseph left and made his way to a lodging house in Bishop's Gate. With him gone, Mary was free to open the doors of her room in Miller's Court and provide refuge to other women. Clearly, Mary felt just how dangerous life was for poor women in the East End. She felt it so deeply she was willing to trade her lover and her partner to offer what shelter she

had to her sisters in need. It was a ministry of compassion and mercy that we can only look back on with admiration. Of course, her door opened to other things too, and to other people, those who came with intentions that were much more sinister and far more evil. There was no way he could have known, but when Joseph stopped in to talk with Mary on a Thursday evening, it was only hours before or she would be murdered. It was around seven thirty at night, and Mary had

just come back from the Ten Bells Pub. At some point, Mary and Joseph had lost the key to their little room, so to open the door, Mary had to reach in through the broken window and trip the spring lock from the inside. Her friend Lizzie all Brook was with her, and when Joseph joined them, the three struck up a conversation. He didn't stay long, maybe fifteen minutes, despite the fight that had separated them. He said their talk was friendly.

Of course, not much about Mary's situation had changed. She was regularly welcoming her friends in and even held onto some of their belongings in clothing. Her Miller's courtroom was a haven in Whitechapel. It seems Joseph would have known this. To one journalist, he said he would stop in at Miller's Court to talk with Mary almost every day. If he had money, he said he would give her some, But on that evening he told her he hadn't gotten any work, and he apologized for coming with empty pockets.

She would have to go on earning her own keep for now. Lizzie left the pair together, and as she was going, Mary called out to her, whatever you do, don't you do wrong and turn out as I have. When Lizzie talked to the press later on, she said Mary would often give her these warnings. Life in the East End was hard, and with her partner out of

work and anger pushing them apart. Mary wished there was a way for her to go back to Ireland, where her people lived, but the money wasn't there to pave the way toward a new life somewhere else, and those dreams would be cut short in the coming hours. One of her neighbors in Miller's Court was headed home about fifteen minutes before midnight. As she turned onto Dorset Street, she claimed she saw a couple walking in front of her and recognized Mary, wearing a warm, practical frock under

her red shawl, headed for the same place. They ambled into the passage together. The neighbor woman said, Mary and her escort stepped into the little room. She called good night to Mary, who answered back, I am going to have a song. She said, The words were slurred. The neighbor realized that Mary was drunk, but the man slammed the door shut behind them. She caught a look at him, though she guessed he was about thirty six years old. He was stout, she said, with a blotchy face under

his black felt hat and a thick carroty mustache. His long dark overcoat was shabby, and he had a court can of beer. Clutched in his hand. From her own room, the neighbor heard the sound of a song floating out of Miller's court, and she recognized the song too, a popular tune from the music halls. It was a song of sorrow and nostalgia for a lost time, a violet plucked from mother's grave. It was called something Small and Beautiful,

Held onto in the midst of Grief. A nearby flower seller also remembered hearing this song that night as it passed from Thursday into Friday. It was a half hour after midnight, and she said that if her husband hadn't stopped her, she would have banged on Mary's door and complained it was late for drunken ballads. But it wasn't too late for Mary Kelly. In fact, she was seen again that night out on the street. An unemployed laborer from the area named George Hutchinson recognized her standing on

a corner. In fact, the two knew each other, and as George went by, Mary asked him to lend her a sixpence. George had spent all of his money, though he didn't have anything to lend her or anything to pay for her services. Mary was disappointed, but there was another man on the streets, a man George had walked by earlier, who was wearing a felt hat pulled down over his eyes. So far, George hadn't paid any attention to the man. He was just someone standing in the

street now, though George watched Mary walk toward him. The two exchanged a few words before they threw back their heads in quiet laughter. Then George saw the man put his arm around Mary's shoulders and set off with her toward the room at Miller's Court. They had to pass George, though as they went by. Something made him lean down and try to get a look at the man's ace.

The look that George got back was a stern glare, so stern that George felt compelled to follow the pair from a distance, and he took note of the man's appearance. He had a dark mustache that curled up at the ends, button boots and a black necktie, and a heavy gold chain that dangled from his waistcoat. In his right hand, he was carrying a pair of brown kid gloves even as he draped it over Mary's shoulder. Under his arm he had a small parcel. It was about eight inches long.

George guest covered in what he called a dark American cloth, bundled together with a strap. George followed until a pair disappeared into Miller's court. He decided to wait until they came out again. So wait he did. In fact, he waited until the clock of the White Chapel Church struck three, but no one reappeared. Tired of waiting and watching, George moved on, and then it started to rain. In the dark hours that followed, a single cry went up in

Miller's court. Two of the neighbor is remembered hearing the single words split the dark, followed by silence. They assumed it was some fearful passer by a drunk shout to be ignored. But they were wrong. It seems it was Mary's last testimony of her life. With her very last breath, she cried out a single word, murder. The room that Mary had rented with Joseph was small, about twelve ft square. The furniture came with the place and belonged to the landlord.

A bed and washstand that stood in as a bedside table, a small table, and a single chair. We already know what it cost four shillings a week when he walked into Miller's court on Friday morning. Thomas Boyer knew how many times that four shillings had failed to appear. He was there on behalf of the landlord to collect Mary Kelly owed twenty nine shillings, and it wasn't like she was knocking on the landlord's door to hand it over, so he sent Thomas to do the knocking. He pounded

his fist on the door and got no answer. It was around ten thirty in the morning, so he decided to step inside and see what he could see. When he tried the latch, though, he found the door was locked, so he knocked again, then leaned over and put his eye to the keyhole, but it didn't give him a good view of the room. When he stepped back, Thomas

Bowyer realized the window was broken. He could just reach inside, so he stepped forward and pulled back the old coat that was hanging in the window frame as a curtain to block the draft, and that's when he saw two pieces of flesh that were resting on Mary's bedside table. Then he looked to Mary's bed and found blood pooling around it on the floor, and he saw what the killer had done to Mary. Thomas rushed back to the landlord. He would later tell the corner that he went as

quietly as he could. The man who owned the property ran a small grocery out of the front of the building, and Thomas found him in the shop and told him what he had seen. Together they set out for the police station, and we can be sure that with every step they felt the growing weight of history. One of the officers who was at the station when the men arrived said Thomas's eyes were bulging out of his head, and he was so terrified that he could hardly speak.

Two inspectors went together and followed Thomas's example. First they tried the lock door, then one of them pushed the old code aside. When he looked in, he saw what sent him reeling. For God's sake, don't look, he choked out, but the second officer ignored him and stepped forward to glance inside. When he later wrote his memoirs, the inspector said that what he saw was unprintable. The body on the bed was cut to pieces. Mary's face and the front of her body had all been carved away except

for her eyes. The inspector said that they were the site that remained with him most vividly. When Joseph Barnett would later identify the body, he said it was only by the eyes and ears that he recognized me Ry. The rest of her body had been monstrously mutilated beyond recognition. The inspectors telegraphed Scotland Yard and sent constables running with messages, and one of them remembered the plans that Charles Warren had put into place. He sent for the bloodhounds. Soon enough,

both ends of Dorset Street were blocked. The entrance to Miller's Court was put under guard. The call went out for the surgeons to come view the body, and they did come. Dr Phillips was the first to get the message, and he was just a few minutes away. He arrived at eleven fifteen that morning. The door was still locked. He made a simple assessment of Mary's mutilated body through the window and then waited with the other officers. Inspector

Aberline arrived a few minutes later. Inspectors and constables all milled in the open space. They were waiting for the dogs and keeping the scene in the room undisturbed until their man hunters could come and catch the scent so they waited and waited. Two hours passed before another police inspector arrived on the scene. He informed Aberleine and the others that the order to send bloodhounds to the site had been overturned. They had waited for nothing and time

was passing by then. The group was so impatient that they demanded the landlord opened the door immediately. Of course, the key was gone. He fetched a pick axe and levered it against the jam until under the strain the door leapt open, smashing into the bedside table as it opened.

Onto the brutal scene. Dr Phillips was followed by Dr Brown, the surgeon from the London City Police who had examined Catherine Etto's body and suggested that perhaps a butcher would have carried out the mutilations, and then Dr Thomas Bond arrived too at around two pm, just after the head

of Scotland Yard. The men took down, in medical detail, a horrifying catalog of violence to Mary's body, her face gashed in all directions, every cut to the bone, every organ that had been slashed out and placed around her in the bed, and when a photographer arrived, he took the photograph that would survive down through the years in the police files, offering a glimpse of the stomach, turning horror to later investigators. The first to examine Mary's body

found that she was very cold. The doctors estimated that she had been dead for hours. The horse cart to move the body arrived just before four in the afternoon. Crowds of people who had caught wind of the news rushed the police cordons at the ends of Dorset Street. The writer for the time said that they were of the humblest cast, But as they came near the cart

and its cargo, men pulled off their ragged caps. The women of the neighborhood pushed closer, and the reporter noticed that even as the cloth was draped over the rough wooden coffin that held Mary's remains, and it rolled out of Miller's Court, deep feelings moved through them. Another of their own had died, and the women of Dorset Street wept. It was Aberline who did the questioning. George Hutchinson came

forward himself to the Commercial Street police station. Under Aberleine's eye, he described his observations of the night Mary Kelly died. George told the inspector that he was surprised to see such a well dressed man in Mary's company. His testimony about the man with the dark mustache struck Aberline as important, and what's more, he wrote in his report that he

believed the statement was true. In fact, Aberline found Hutchinson so convincing that he sent two officers to patrol Whitechapel with Hutchinson that night to see if they could find the curled mustache. Again. It was back to the same old techniques, pounding the pavement looking for a needle in a haystack. Of course, questions persisted. Aberleine wanted to pursue Hutchinson's lead. What about the man that the other neighbor had seen, the one with the blotchy face and the

charity mustache. The police and the press took her seriously too, and she gave her testimony at Mary Kelly's inquest and there were arrests made too. Eberleine said several people were detained. Hutchinson and Barnett were both carefully questioned, but he wrote everyone had been able to account for their movements that night, and when the questions ran out and no answers came, they were released. Any plans that had been laid came to nothing. The dogs that had been kenneled and Whitechapel

were never used. The detectives had neither solved nor prevented one of the most monstrous crimes in British history. It was felt as far away as Scotland, where Queen Victoria was holding court at bell Moral. News of Mary's death reached her the day after the killing, and it must have been described in some detail. She sent a telegraph to the Prime Minister and it buzzed with her displeasure. This new, most ghastly murder, she wrote, shows the absolute

necessity for some very decided action. All these courts must be lits and our detectives improved. If that wasn't clear enough, the Queen doubled down on the detectives and wrote, are not what they should be. A displeased monarch and a displeased people. The detectives at Scotland Yard were in over their heads, but with Charles Warren leaving his post, there was now a chance to make another change to London's police.

The Home Secretary put forward his man once again, and James Monroe grabbed the reins that didn't leave everyone convinced, though. For journalists unfamiliar with Warren's fight against the Home Secretary, his resignation on the day of Mary Kelly's murder seemed like a clear admission that the police were incapable of the task, and this was the time that journalists also began to make note of just how many officers had vacated their posts for summer holiday when the murders began.

On November twelve, one man who had been a member of the White Chapel Vigilance Committee wrote to the Evening News to suggest that no matter who took over at Scotland Yard, the police could no longer be trusted with the investigation of the crimes. He looked to the other armies in Whitechapel, the Salvation Army and those like them, and he wanted to start something like a recruiting drive.

Surely a body of matrons from the West end of London, he wrote, of all classes, the higher the better, might meet a body of matrons from the East End and take common counsel for the relief of their airing sisters. There was, as we might expect, a pinch of Charles Warren's victim blaming in his note to his eyes, the trouble was the women that the murderer was targeting, and the solution was better more respectable women to step in and shape them up. The police were failing, the man's

vigilance committee had failed. Maybe there was something that respectable women could do. He was even less ambitious than activist Francis power Cob. She had already suggested that a fleet of women detectives would actually be able to solve the case and catch the killer where Scotland Yard had come

up short. After all, as the feminists of the day knew well, women were more willing to talk with each other than to answer the probing questions of Scotland Yards baton wielding sergeants, and the police were already casting around for better answers. A keen eyed woman might do as well, she wrote, as those keen nosed bloodhounds. And in many ways she was right. Women in the East End were already hard at work doing for themselves, but no one

else would do. Of course, as we've seen over and over so far, it wasn't the respectable women who were making life more secure in Whitechapel, but Whitechapel women weren't making history. They had already identified their true foes, and they were doing battle with them in a way no one had expected. After all, white phosphorus had killed more women than the murderer's knife ever could. And when Fossey Jaw wasn't taking their health and their lives, the factory

bosses were squeezing their paychecks. Yes, a killer was cutting East End women apart, following the most vile impulses of his imagination. But East End women were pulling together in ways they never had before. Here's Dr Louise Raw to tell us more. And the union was so busy because you see, they didn't rest on their laurels. They kept unionizing. They kept taking the message to other groups of workers.

So the girls that worked in nearby confectionary factors, the sweetie girls who worked in jam factories, the wives of eastern dockers, they were constantly having meetings and trying to unionize them as well. And there was a really amusing account from one of the leagues of mother class women, philanthropic women who were trying to organize working class women, but in a bit of a middle class top down where we didn't always go down very well with the

women themselves. But they recorded at the time that they were absolutely worn out with these match women because they kept coming to them and saying, all right, um, we want you to help us, because we want to have another union meeting please with the jam Factory girls. And we'd like you to help us find a venue please, and then we would like tea and cakes. Um would like some Irish music. And they're like, oh my god, you know, I've got to try and find an Irish musician.

How it short noticed, But I love this idea of a union meeting that involves t and kach and Irish dancing. How fantastic. But even as the press and the police leaned into the darkness, even as they focused on the murderer and made the most vicious London or the loudest story in the Empire, other things were afoot, and the Match Factory women weren't content to wallow in the same

fear that paralyzed their wealthy neighbors. Neglected by the nation storytellers, the match women nevertheless said about building something much more powerful than the story of Jack the Ripper. And it was a case that the women of the East End had already cracked wide open. The surgeons all agreed Dr Thomas Bond would be the one to write their report.

He was joined in the Shortitch mortuary by all of the doctors who had come to Miller's court, and they even added the police surgeon for the White Chapel Division, Dr Dukes. Together, this small parliament of surgeons conducted the autopsy of Mary Kelly on Saturday afternoon, the day after her murder, and it brought together every medical mind that had considered the case. The work took them two and a half hours. Once they had discussed the job, they

divided the duties up. Dr Phillips prepared to present their findings at the coroner's inquest. Dr Bond, who had already been commissioned to assess the White Chapel murders as a whole with a report to the police, agreed to write a specific report on the details of Mary Kelly's death. What he wrote took into account the work of his

fellow surgeons. There was Dr phillips first guess that the killer brought some sort of medical background to his crimes, and there was Dr Brown's suggestion that perhaps the vicious hacking at Katherine Etto's body betrayed the work of a butcher or slaughter man, but taken together with the deaths of Liz Stride and Polly Nichols, Dr Bond came to a different conclusion. Here's Adam would to tell us more.

In his report to the tenth of November, on concluded that all five had been killed by the same hand, with the fruit cut from left to right being the first attack while the women were lying down. The mutilations were carried out after death, and he believed a murderer did not have anatomical knowledge, not even to the degree of a butcher. He said the knife was that commit carried out the mutilations, was at least six years long, with a sharp point, such as a butcher's or surgeon's knife.

And he went on from there too. The last two sections of Dr Byrd's report collected the thoughts and speculations of the other examiners and coroners who had endeavored to come up with a criminal profile. Reflecting these ideas through his own perspective, Dr Bond offered the Metropolitan Police his own perspective on the killer's character. Bond said that he worked alone it was likely to be ordinary looking, probably

middle aged, and neatly dressed. Bond wrote, he must be in the habit of wearing a cloak or overcoat, and he could hardly have escaped notice in the streets if the blood on his clothes or hands were visible, and he would be and I quote solitary and eccentric in

his habits, and likely without regular occupation. And finally, Bond guests that the murderer might even live among respectable persons who have some knowledge of his character and habits, and who may have grounds for suspicion that he is not quite right in his mind at times. In signing off, Dr Bond made the suggestion that the prospects of a reward might overcome the trouble or notoriety that could be

keeping back informants from turning in their man. It was a measured sketch of the killer, and while it took pains to overturn the earlier stabs that identification from the other doctors, it did little to narrow the search. It was nearly a declaration that unless there was someone who could be moved to turn in the murderer, a man would never be caught. But with London turn on one of their own, just as the killer had turned on London.

It was a question that would have been on many minds a week later, when Mary Kelly's body was carried to the churchyard of St Leonard's and Shortitch, the parish clerk was also keeper of the Shortitch mortuary, and he had prepared to lay Mary to rest to the best of his ability. No wealthy relatives appeared from Cardiff to pay for Mary's burial, but the mortuary keeper decided not

to let her slip into a pauper's grave. In death, Mary received what life never gave her, a polished elm and oak coffin gleamed on its metal mounts under ornaments of artificial flowers. Two horses drew the open carriage through the enormous crowd that assembled in the thoroughfare. As it rolled by, the carts was covered with cards. As the church bell rang out the noon hour, four pall bearers

lifted the caskets and carried it into the cemetery. Hands reached out from every side to touch the polished box as it went by, and again the sound of weeping wept through the crowd. Joseph followed, and despite all the questions that remained unanswered, He did the least that he could do. He joined the men and women of the East End to lay married, to rest with dignity. That's it for this week's episode of Unobscured. Stick around after this short sponsor break for a preview of what's in

store for next week. The arguments swirled back and forth through the causes and consequences of the murders. What could the Home Office do about the East Ends lodging houses with their cramped conditions housing crowds of unknown persons? What could the Home Office do to stop the police from publishing the names of suspects who turned out to have no connection to the murders but were stained with a connection to Jack the Ripper. When all the questions were asked, though,

Parliament would be left unsatisfied. They could demand the afture of the killer. Sure, they could demand a change. But even after Charles Warren stepped away from his post and James Monroe stepped out from his shadowy corner of the Home Office to take command, Home Secretary Matthews had nothing more to give them. Like the police of the world's largest city, the government of the world's most commanding empire was at a loss because the answers to their questions

just weren't there. Unobscured was created by me Aaron Manky and produced by Matt Frederick, Alex Williams, and Josh Thane in partnership with I Heart Radio. Research and writing for this season is all the work of my right hand man Carl Nellis, and the brilliant Chad Lawson composed the brand new soundtrack. Learn more about our contributing historians, source material and links to our other shows over at history unobscured dot com, and until next time, thanks for listening.

Unobscured is a production of I Heart Radio and Aaron Benkey. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit I heart Radio, app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.