Mary Kelly
At 10.45am on November 9th, 1888, the Lord Mayor’s Day celebrations were just getting under way when the horribly mutilated body of a young prostitute named Mary Kelly was discovered in a small room on one of East London’s worst streets.
The murder of Mary Kelly would go down as one of the most heinous murders on record in the history of crime.
Mary Kelly was twenty-five years old, had blue eyes, a rather pale complexion and hair down to her waist.
By April 1887, Mary Kelly was residing in Cooley’s Common Lodging house on Thrawl Street, Spitalfields. It's understood she was working as a prostitute. On April 8th of 1887, she met a man named Joseph Barnett on Commercial Street, and the two had drinks together. Barnett was a thirty-nine-year-old London-born Irishman who worked at the Billingsgate Fish Market as a fish porter. By early 1888, Kelly and Barnett were living in a small room at 13 Miller’s Court, Dorset Street.
The room was about twelve feet square and sparsely furnished with a bed, two tables, and a cupboard.
It's understood that by August 1888, Joseph Barnett had lost his job, causing Mary Kelly to returned to her former occupation as a prostitute. By November, Kelly and Barnett were six weeks behind on their rent.
On 30th November, 1888, Barnett and Kelly separated and he moved to New Road.
Mary Kelly’s movements on the night before her murder are unclear.
- At 11.45 pm, Kelly’s neighbour Mary Ann Cox, another prostitute, was returning home and followed Kelly and a man as they walked up the court through the arched. Kelly’s companion was a man about five feet five inches tall, stout, about thirty-six years of age, and shabbily dressed in a dark overcoat and a round black billycock hat.
- At 2am George Hutchinson saw Mary Kelly back on Commercial Street.
Early Life
Mary Kelly was born in Limerick, in the West of Ireland, in 1863 or 1864.
At a young age Mary Kelly moved with her family to Carmarthen, Carmarthenshire, in South Wales.
Mary's father, John Kelly, was a foreman in an iron works.
Married Life
Mary Kelly married a coal miner, Davies at the age of sixteen. It is unclear how long they were married before Davies died in a pit explosion. It's estimated that she arrived in London in about 1884 and worked as a prostitute in an upscale West End "gay house".
