It may be that the most reliable witness to time of death in Mary Kelly’s murder is the kitten that began walking over Elizabeth Prater at around 4:00 A.M. Cats have extraordinarily good hearing and the kitten may have been disturbed by sounds directly below. It may have sensed the pheromones secreted by people who are terrified and panicking. About the time the kitten woke up Elizabeth, she said she heard from nearby someone cry, “Murder!”
Mary Kelly would have seen what was coming. She was undressed and on the bed. She was face-up. She might have seen him pull out the knife. Even if the Ripper threw a sheet over her face before cutting her throat, she knew she was about to die. She would have lived for minutes as she hemorrhaged and he began slashing her. We can’t assume the Ripper’s victims felt no pain and were already unconscious when he began mutilating them. It isn’t possible to know in Mary Kelly’s case if the Ripper started on her belly or her face.
If the Ripper hated Mary Kelly’s sexually alluring, pretty face, he might have started there. Or it may have been her abdomen. She may have felt the cuts as the loss of blood quickly caused her to shiver. Her teeth might have begun to chatter, but not for long as she grew faint, went into shock, and died. She may have drowned as blood gushing out of her carotid artery was inhaled through the cut in her windpipe and filled her lungs.
“The air passage was cut through at the lower part of the larynx through the cricoid cartilage,” reads page 16 of the original autopsy report.
She could not have screamed or uttered a sound.
“Both breasts were removed by more or less circular incisions, the muscles down to the ribs being attached to the breasts.”
This would require a sharp, strong knife with a blade that was not so long as to make the weapon unwieldy. A dissecting knife has a four- to six-inch blade and a handle with a good grip. But a common killing knife available to the Ripper would have been the kukri, with its unique blade that sweeps into a forward bend. The blade lengths can vary, and the knives are sturdy enough for chopping vines, branches, or even small trees. When Queen Victoria was the Empress of India, many British soldiers wore kukris, and the knives would have found their way into the English market.
Jack the Ripper wrote in a letter dated October 19th that he “felt rather down hearted over my knife which I lost comming [sic] here must get one tonight.” Two days later, on the Sunday night of October 21st, a constable discovered a bloody knife in the shrubbery not far from where Sickert’s mother lived. The knife was a kukri. Such a knife could have been used on Mary Kelly. The kukri was used in battle to cut throats and sever limbs, but because of its curved blade, it is not a stabbing knife.
“The skin 8t tissues of the abdomen… were removed in three large places…. The right thigh was denuded in point to the bone…. The lower part of the [right] lung was broken and torn away…. The Pericardium was open below 8t the heart absent.”
These autopsy details come from pages 16 and 18 of the original report and seem to be the only pages from any of the autopsies to have survived. The loss of these reports is truly a calamity. The medical details that would tell us the most about what the killer did to his victim are not as clearly defined in the inquests as they would be in autopsy reports. It was not mentioned in Mary Kelly’s inquest that her heart was taken. That was a detail the police, the doctors, and the coroner thought the public didn’t need to know.
Mary Kelly’s postmortem examination was held at the Shoreditch mortuary and lasted six and a half hours. The most experienced forensic medical men were present: Dr. Thomas Bond of Westminster, Dr. Gordon Brown of the City, a Dr. Duke from Spitalfields, and Dr. George Phillips and an assistant. Accounts say that the men would not complete their examination until every organ had been accounted for. Some reports suggest no organs were missing, but that isn’t true. The Ripper took Mary Kelly’s heart and possibly portions of her genitals and uterus.