Jack the Ripper’s victims all had a back story and one of those was the tale of Limerick’s Mary Jane Kelly, writes Robert Hume.

As the Skibbereen Eagle began preparing its stories for November 17th 1888, including ‘butter-making’, ‘how to feed turkeys’, “and ‘thoughts for quiet moments’, news burst onto the scene of a dreadful incident in London, where ‘The Whitechapel fiend’ had decapitated and mutilated a young woman.

Four women in their forties had already been killed in the East End during late August and September, then all went quiet.

Some thought the murderer had moved abroad, or was dead. 

The latest victim was identified as 25-year-old Mary Jane Kelly.

A girl of this name was baptised in Castleconnell, Limerick, on March 31st 1863, and raised with her parents and eight siblings in Mungret Street.

When she was about sixteen, Mr Kelly moved the family to Carmarthen, South Wales, to look for work.

Mary Jane was hawking ribbon and thread around town to earn a few pennies, when her blue eyes and thick ginger hair caught the eye of local miner John Davies, and they quickly married.

Coal pits were dangerous to work in, and two years later John was killed in an explosion.

In the company of a friend, Mary Jane travelled to Cardiff, hoping to find employment in a shop or hotel.

But the recession made jobs scarce, and men immediately seized those that were available.

For a while, she mopped floors at the Infirmary but soon drifted into sex work, picking up clients in the city pleasure grounds, hotels and docks.

By moving to London she thought she might attract a wealthy gentleman to marry.

Settling in the prosperous West End, she worked briefly in a tobacconist’s shop in Chelsea, as a nanny for artist Walter Sickert, and as lady’s maid to the Marchioness of Londonderry.

When Héleine and Frederica Maundrell persuaded her to come with them to their ‘finishing school’ in Earl’s Court, she began to taste the high life.

The sisters’ premises were in reality, a brothel. 

As one of the most popular girls there, Mary Jane could afford expensive clothes, and even hire a carriage and parade around Hyde Park, just like a lady.

One client, Francis Craig, took her to Paris, promising she could earn enough there to set up her own business.

Clients called her ‘Marie Jeanette’, a name she retained all her life.

But far away from her friends she became homesick, and when the fabulous earnings never materialised, she returned with Craig to London. 

It turned out that the couple were completely unsuited: Craig was quiet and private, Mary Jane vivacious and sociable.

He was a miser, Mary Jane loved to spend.

After three months she walked out on him. 

The best chance for anyone on the run in the 1880s was to head for the East End.

With people coming and going all day and night, it was an ideal place to ‘disappear’, but her existence now became a daily battle for survival.

Sailors’ brothels were a world away from her previous protected existence in the West End and Paris.

Her clients were now beer-sodden clerks and labourers who’d just been paid.

Locals were stunned.

What was a classy-looking young lady doing drinking in the Ten Bells pub, and walking some of the filthiest and most dangerous streets of Whitechapel, where even policemen walked in twos?

She at last found a friend in Irish fish porter, Joseph Barnett.

In January 1888 they moved into No.13 Miller’s Court off Dorset Street, a dingy, rented room, accessed through a murky narrow archway.

The Dublin Mail described it as ‘a miserable apology for a dwelling’.

That autumn, she brought back another prostitute to share their tiny place.

It was too much for Barnett, who left her. 

In the early hours of November 9th, neighbours heard her singing A Violet from Mother’s Grave.

Later that morning, when Thomas Bowyer called at the house to collect rent arrears, he received no answer.

As he peered through the broken window, he shuddered.

The police found the bed covered with blood: the victim had been systematically disembowelled.

In a sustained attack, the killer had even removed the heart and taken it away. 

On Monday November 19th, families lined the pavements to watch Mary Jane’s funeral process slowly through the streets towards St Patrick’s Catholic Cemetery, Leytonstone.

Men removed their hats, women cried.

Some surged forward to touch the coffin of the young Irish woman who’d been murdered so savagely in her own home.

Robert Hume’s book The Hidden Lives of Jack the Ripper’s Victims was reissued in paperback by Pen & Sword on October 7th 2025.