The inquest began and ended on November 11th. Dr. Phillips had barely described the crime scene when Dr. Roderick McDonald, the coroner for Northeast Middlesex, said that it would not be necessary for the doctor to go into any further particulars at that time. The jurors – all of whom had viewed Mary Kelly’s remains at the mortuary – could reconvene and hear more later, unless they were prepared to reach a verdict now. They were. They had heard quite enough. “Wilful murder against some person unknown.”
Immediately, the press fell silent. It was as if the Ripper case was closed. Scans through days and weeks and months of newspapers after Mary Kelly’s inquest and burial reveal few mentions of the Ripper. His letters continued to arrive and they were filed “with the others.” They were not printed in respectable newspapers. Any subsequent crimes that might have brought up the question of the Ripper were eventually dismissed as not being the work of the Whitechapel fiend.
In June 1889, dismembered female remains were found in London. They were never identified.
On July 16, 1889, an Unfortunate named Alice McKenzie, known to “be the worse for drink” now and then, went out to the Cambridge Music-hall in the East End and was overheard by a blind boy to ask a man to treat her to a drink. At close to 1:00 A.M., her body was found in Castle Alley, Whitechapel, her throat cut, and her clothing pushed up to display severe mutilation to her abdomen. Dr. Thomas Bond performed her autopsy and wrote, “I am of the opinion that the murder was performed by the same person who committed the former series of Whitechapel murders.” The case was never solved. Little public mention was made of the Ripper.
On August 6,1889, an eight-year-old girl named Caroline Winter was murdered in Seaham Harbour on England’s northeast coast, not far from Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Her skull was bashed in, her body “bearing other terrible injuries,” and she was dumped in a pool of water near a sewer. She was last seen playing with a friend who told police that Caroline was talking to a man with black hair, a black mustache, and dressed in a shabby gray suit. He offered Caroline a shilling to come with him, and she did.
The female torso found in the railway arch off Pinchin Street on September 10th showed no sign of mutilation, except for dismemberment, and there was no evidence her death was caused by a cut throat, even if she had been decapitated. An incision down the front of the torso could not have been the work of the Ripper, according to the official report. “The inner coating of the bowel is hardly touched and the termination of the cut towards the vagina looks almost as if the knife had slipped, and as if this portion of the wound had been accidental. Had this been the work of the previous frenzied murderer we may be tolerably sure that he would have continued his hideous work in the way which he previously adopted.” The case was never solved.
On December 13, 1889, at the Middlesbrough docks, also on England’s northeast coast, just south of Seaham Harbour, decomposing human remains were found, including a woman’s right hand that was missing two joints of the little finger.
“I am trying my hand at disjointing,” the Ripper wrote December 4, 1888, “and if can manage it will send you a finger.”
On February 13, 1891, a prostitute named Francis Coles was found with her throat cut in Swallow Gardens, Whitechapel. She was approximately twenty-six years old, and “of drunken habits,” according to police reports. Dr. George Phillips performed the postmortem examination and was of the opinion that the body wasn’t mutilated and he did “not connect this with the series of previous murders.” The case was never solved.
A case involving dismembered female body parts found in London in June 1902 was never solved.
Serial killers keep killing. Sickert kept killing. His body count could have been fifteen, twenty, forty before he died peacefully in his bed in Bathampton, January 22, 1942, at the age of 81. After Mary Kelly’s butchery, Jack the Ripper faded into a nightmare from the past. He was probably that sexually insane young doctor who was really a barrister and who threw himself into the Thames. He could have been a lunatic barber or a lunatic Jew who was safely locked up in an asylum. He could be dead. What a relief to make such assumptions.