The House That Jack Built

Epilogue

At four o'clock in the morning on November 9, 1888, the Ripper Watch Team's video cameras captured James Maybrick committing the brutal slaughter of Mary Kelly in the cramped little room at number thirteen, Miller's Court. At eight o'clock that morning, those same cameras captured the arrival of a midwife who was known to perform illegal abortions for girls in trouble. The woman let herself in with a key Kelly had taken from Joseph Barnett after he and Kelly had quarelled and separated.

The horrified midwife, who slipped in the blood and gore, badly staining her clothing, changed into one of Mary Kelly's dresses and shawls and burned her own in the hearth before fleeing the room, too deeply shocked and terrified to go to the police or even scream for help. Doing so would have required explanations for her arrival in the first place, which would have led to a stiff prison sentence. Mrs. Caroline Maxwell, a neighbor in Miller's Court, glimpsed the midwife leaving Kelly's room and mistook her for Mary Kelly, herself, thus confusing police with sober testimony that Mary Kelly had been seen alive at 8:00 A.M.

London police never solved the Ripper mystery and never made a major arrest, although many suspects were named. The case destroyed Sir Charles Warren's career as police commissioner and sparked a massive social reform movement to alleviate the appalling conditions of poverty in which the Ripper's victims—and more than a million other souls—lived. The following spring, James Maybrick died of acute arsenic poisoning. His complicity in the Ripper case did not come to light for another century. His innocent American widow, her unfortunate affair with Mr. Brierly having come to public notice, was convicted of murder—largely because of her adultery—in a trial that shocked all of England and sparked a decade and a half of protests from the American State Department. Florie Maybrick served fifteen years in prison, then returned to the United States and lived in quiet anonymity under an assumed name, never realizing she had lived in the house that Jack built.