Mary was a prostitute in the West End for a while, and met gentlemen who knew how to reward a pretty woman for her favors. A man took her to France, but she stayed only ten days and returned to London. Life in France, she told friends, did not suit her. She lived with a man on Rat-cliff Highway, then with another man on Pennington Street, then with a plasterer in Bethnal Green. Joseph Barnett was not certain how many men she had lived with or for how long, he testified at the inquest.
One Friday night in Spitalfields, the pretty Mary Kelly caught Joseph Barnett’s eye and he treated her to a drink. Days later they decided to live together; this was eight months before he rented Room 13 at 26 Dorset Street. Now and then Mary got letters from her mother in Ireland, and unlike many Unfortunates, she was literate. But when the East End murders began, she got Barnett to read accounts of them to her. Perhaps the news of the slayings was too unnerving for her to take in alone and in the quiet of her own imagination. She may not have known the victims, but there is a good chance she had seen them on the street or in a public house at some point.
Mary’s life with Joseph Barnett wasn’t a bad one, he testified at her inquest, and the only reason he left her was “because she had a person who was a prostitute whom she took in and I objected to her doing so, that was the only reason, not because I was out of work. I left her on the 30th October between 5&6 P.M.” Barnett said he and Mary remained on “friendly terms” and the last time he saw her alive was Thursday night between 7:30 and 7:45, when he dropped by and discovered Maria in the room. Maria left, and Barnett stayed with Mary briefly. He told her he was sorry but he had no money to give her, and “We did not drink together,” he testified. “She was quite sober, she was as long as she was with me of sober habits” and only got drunk now and then.
Mary Kelly was vividly aware of the monstrous murders happening within blocks of her rooming house, but she continued walking the streets at night after Barnett moved out. She had no other way to earn money. She needed her drinks, and she was about to get evicted with no prospect of another decent man to take her in. She was becoming desperate. Not so long ago she was an upscale prostitute who frequented the finer establishments of the West End. But recently, she had been sliding down deeper into the bottomless pit of poverty, alcoholism, and despair. Soon enough she would lose her looks. It probably did not occur to her that she might lose her life.
Few facts are known about Mary Kelly, but a number of rumors circulated at the time. It was said that she had a seven-year-old son and that she would rather kill herself than see him starve to death. If this son existed, there is no mention of him in police reports and inquest testimony. On the last night of her life, she supposedly ran into a friend at the corner of Dorset Street whom she told she had no money. “If she could not get any,” the friend later told police, “she would never go out any more but would do away with herself.”
Mary was quite noisy when she was drunk, and she had been in the drink Thursday night, November 8th. The weather had been wretched the entire month, with days of hard rain and fierce winds out of the southeast. Temperatures were dipping into the low forties and mist and fog enveloped the city like gauze. Mary was spotted several times that Thursday night, apparently heading off to the nearest pub not long after Joseph Barnett left her room. She was spotted on Commercial Street, quite drunk, and then at 10:00 P.M. on Dorset Street. Times cited are not to be trusted, and there is no certainty that when a person saw “Mary Kelly” it was really Mary Kelly. The streets were very dark. Many people were intoxicated, and after the Ripper’s recent murderous spree, witnesses seemed to spring up from everywhere and their stories were not always to be trusted.