Mary Jane Kelly (1863-9 November 1888) was an Irish prostitute who was the fifth and final canonical victim of Jack the Ripper.
Biography[]
Mary Jane Kelly was born in County Limerick, Ireland in 1863, and she was raised in Wales from a young age. She married a coal miner in 1879, but her husband died in a mining explosion two or three years later. Kelly was forced to move in with a cousin in Cardiff before relocating to London in 1884, working as a domestic servant in Spitalfields and in Fitzrovia before working at a high-class brothel in the West End. By 1886, she resided at a lodging house in Spitalfields, where she formed a relationship with a fish porter and moved to Miller's Court off Dorset Street. She turned to prostitution after her boyfriend lost his employment as a fish porter in July 1888, and her lover abandoned her on 30 October, though he continued to visit her on a near-daily basis. On 9 November 1888, she was approached by a man of Jewish appearance on Thrawl Street, with a friend deducing that Kelly knew the man. She later returned to her home, where she was murdered before sunrise; at 5:45 AM, a man was heard to leave her residence. Her body was discovered by ex-soldier Thomas Bowyer at 10:45 AM as he, while visiting her flat to collect rent, peered through her broken window and discovered her extensively mutilated corpse on her bed. She was undressed, her throat cut, her viscera removed and spread around the room, her breasts cut off, her face mutilated beyond recognition, and her thighs cut through to the bone, with some of the muscles removed. Because Kelly's murder took place in her room, Jack the Ripper had more time to commit his atrocities.