Richard III team in Ripper victim probe
THE British scientists who discovered the remains of King Richard III have been trying to identify the last known victim of Jack The Ripper.
Mary Jane Kelly was said to have been the prettiest of the notorious killer’s prey – and died the most grisly death. But mystery surrounds who she really was.
Now the lead geneticist on the Richard III project has been recruited to find and identify the real Mary – using the same DNA techniques that pinpointed the king’s final resting place to a car park in Leicester.
Author Dr Wynne WestonDavies, a former surgeon, believes “Mary” was living under a fake name and was his great aunt, Elizabeth Weston-Davies.
He also believes his great uncle, Francis Craig, was the Ripper and carried out the previous murders to cover up a plot to kill his wife because she had returned to the streets as a prostitute.
Mary was buried in a communal grave in St Patrick’s Catholic Cemetery in Leytonstone in 1888 after her badly mutilated remains were found at her Whitechapel home in London’s East End.
Dr Turi King, of Leicester University, said: “If the DNA is of sufficient quality you could carry out a DNA test to see if there is a match.”
Her researchers were commissioned by crime writer and Ripper expert Patricia Cornwell to examine the feasibility of finding the exact burial location and the likely condition of Mary’s bones.