The Ripper’s final victim gets marble tombstone

Press, 24 December 1986, Page 16

The Ripper’s final victim gets marble tombstone

By

MARCUS ELIASON,

of the Associated Press, in London

Mary Kelly, last known victim of Jack the Ripper, finally got a tombstone, given by one of the legions of amateur sleuths who claim to know the identity of the mysterious Victorian mass murderer.

Nobody knows for sure who stabbed and disemboweled at least five London prostitutes in the northern autumn of 1888. And who, one might wonder, still cares?

John Morrison cares — passionately. The 60-year-old unemployed truck driver has spent four years investigating Jack the Ripper. His house is a Jack the Ripper museum of drawings, maps, and photographs. He has files of correspondence with Scotland Yard, the Home Office, and the British Prime Minister, Mrs Margaret Thatcher. The truth, he believes, is that Mary Kelly was murdered by one James Kelly, her former lover, who had escaped from a hospital for the criminally insane and gone looking for her in the East End, murdering prostitutes who happened to cross his path

during his search and in the process earning the sobriquet of "Jack the Ripper.” Mr Morrison, an engaging, effusive bachelor with wavy black hair, is obviously in love with the memory of Mary Kelly. Gazing fondly at the marble tombstone he had just dedicated on her grave in a Catholic cemetery in East London, he said: “She was very very pretty. Twenty minutes before her death — and this is in Scotland Yard records — she was heard singing Only a Violet I plucked from My Mother’s Grave.

“She was the prettiest, the youngest, Everything about Mary Kelly was gorgeous ... She was mixed up religiously, pregnant, in arrears with her rent. The poor little thing was the victim of circumstances, do you understand. So your heart goes out to Mary Kelly, and I’m a fellow, right, so naturally you feel more romantically to Mary Kelly than you did to the other victims.”

Mr Morrison’s near-obsession is not rare. Nearly a century later the Ripper killings still

enthrall the world. Theories abound as to his identity: he was an insane doctor, a sane doctor, a lawyer, an Indian or Polish immigrant, a pawn in a Russian plot, a woman abortionist. The most elaborate theory identifies him as Queen Victoria’s grandson and says the establishment carried out a cover up to sheild the straitlaced monarch from scandal. Mr Morrison holds all rival theories in contempt.

He says it is on record that Kelly escaped from Broadmoor Prison 65 days before the murders began, using a key fashioned from the wiring of a woman’s corset and making off with the staff’s weekly pay packet. He also says there is evidence that 39 years later he turned himself in claiming to be Jack the Ripper. Mr Morrison says the affair was hushed up because of the embarrassment that would be caused had it become known that Jack the Ripper had escaped from Broadmoor so easily.