London fog: Ripper eludes sleuths, again

Latest hunch leads to a dead end

MOST HUMAN REMAINS FOUND DURING EXCAVATIONS REMAIN STUBBORNLY ... ANONYMOUS.

Following their blockbuster success in discovering the remains of the hated hunchback King Richard III under a Leicester parking lot in 2012, a team of British researchers in genetics, archeology and history set their sights on the enigmatic final victim of a similarly loathed figure in British lore, Jack the Ripper.

But where Richard was discovered in the first place they dug, based on historical research, the Ripper project ran into far greater obstacles, and has now ended in failure.

Finding the body of Mary Jane Kelly, and testing her DNA against that of a man who thinks she was his greataunt, would require digging up perhaps hundreds of bodies, something the government would never allow, let alone next-of-kin.

The research was commissioned by Patricia Cornwell, the American crime novelist, who has long pursued a theory that Jack the Ripper was in fact Walter Sickert, a well-known painter who died in 1942, and would have been a young man during the murders in Victorian London.

Cornwell, whose bestselling novels are about the fictional medical examiner Kay Scarpetta, first put forth the Sickert theory in 2002, and today has a new book called Ripper: The Secret Life of Walter Sickert.

In her research, she got in touch with Wynne Weston-Davies, a former surgeon who shares her fascination with Ripper theories, and has his own about Francis Spurzheim Craig, a journalist.

Weston-Davies published a book in 2015, The Real Mary Kelly, claiming that the Ripper’s fifth and final canonical victim, Mary Jane Kelly, was in reality his great-aunt, Elizabeth Weston Davies, living under a fake name.

Proving that link might go some way to proving the identity of the killer, which is how this research came about. It is the latest in more than a century’s worth of gory conjecture, which has made Jack the Ripper’s identity one of the great whodunnits of modern true crime. Nobody knows who he was, but everybody knows who he is.

In this case, the goal was to compare Mary Jane Kelly’s DNA to Weston-Davies, which would likely be enough to prove a familial link, and thereby support his theory.

Mary Jane Kelly, aged about 25 and working as a prostitute, was murdered in November, 1888. Her mutilated body was found in her rented room in Spitalfields, trendy and famous today for its covered market, but in Victorian times a slum.

While the first four murders were reported in gleeful detail, by the fifth, a panic had set in among police and press, such that details were withheld, and her death has become the most enigmatic of all the Ripper victims.

The researchers arranged by Cornwell included Turi King, the lead geneticist of the Richard III project; Matthew Morris, an archeologist who discovered the Richard III remains; Kevin Schurer, an historian who studied Richard III’s genealogy; and Carl Vivian, a video producer. All are with the University of Leicester.

They went to Kelly’s gravestone in St. Patrick’s Catholic Cemetery in Stratford, near the Olympics sites in East London.

Unfortunately, the location of her headstone is no longer a definitive guide to the location of her corpse.

It has likely been moved, as it is set up in a geometric system that originated 50 years after her death.

Working from old burial records and maps, the researchers determined they would have to look in an area that contained as many as 394 sets of human remains. And even then, it is likely her grave has been either disturbed or destroyed by more recent grave-digging.

After going through the cemetery’s burial records, and studying the marked graves in the immediate area, they concluded it would take a “herculean” effort, and be “prohibitively costly.”

It would also require the approval of the Ministry of Justice, which does not agree to exhumation on a whim, and it would require the consent of next-of-kin to other bodies that might be affected.

In all, it was basically impossible.

This is not an unusual problem for ancient DNA investigations. When researchers dug up graves of Titanic victims in Fairview Lawn cemetery in Halifax, N.S., in 2001, for example, all they found were some remnants of coffin.

“There have been several modern markers in the cemetery which have commemorated Kelly since the 1980s and its location is likely to have little or no relevance to the real location of the grave,” Morris said.

So the team concluded that their incredible success of finding a 15th-century British monarch buried in a parking lot — coincidentally under a spray-painted “R” for “reserved,” but fitting with the Latin marker of “Rex” or “King” — was not to be repeated for a Ripper victim.

“The simple fact is, successfully naming someone in the historical record only happens in the most exceptional of cases,” King said.

“Most human remains found during excavations remain stubbornly and forever anonymous, and this must also be the fate of Mary Jane Kelly.”

I LIKE RUNNING IN THE CEMETERY. COMPARED TO EVERYONE ELSE THERE, NO MATTER HOW YOU LOOK WHEN YOU’RE RUNNING, YOU LOOK PRETTY GOOD. — THE LATE ED WHITLOCK ON HIS TRAINING REGIMEN IN MILTON, ONT.