Jack the Ripper Revealed, William Bury

Bury was hanged for his crimes in 1889

Jack the Ripper is the most famous cold case in history. It has fascinated me for two decades. Many suspects have been put forward as the serial killer's identity, but no one has ever offered concrete evidence. We have vast information with a case this old, but interpretation requires conjecture.

The problem with this is that you tend to bend the evidence to your theory rather than letting the evidence guide you. American author Patricia Cornwall fell into that trap. She was so convinced that Walter Sickert was the Ripper that she manipulated the evidence to fit her theory.

Over the years, I have written several articles on the identity of the Ripper. To my knowledge, though, I have never said who I thought he was. I offered the evidence and theory and allowed my readers to make their minds up. This was mainly because no theory answered all my questions, and I never wanted to commit. That changes today; I am convinced William Bury was Jack the Ripper.

Still, I want to allow you to judge yourself. Let me introduce you all to Jack the Ripper, enter William Bury.

Three Questions

There have always been three questions that intrigued me about the Ripper case. The first revolves around the biggest misconception in the case that the canonical five were all prostitutes. In truth, only Mary Kelly was ever confirmed as being a working woman. So, if the women are not connected through this, what ties them together?

They were all drinkers, and each of the women had a drinking problem. Mary Ann Nichols, known as Polly, came from a drinking household. Both her brother and father were alcoholics. When her husband left her, she also turned to alcohol. Annie Chapman had a good life as a coachman's wife until her drinking resulted in her being evicted. When Elizabeth Stride became bankrupt, she turned to drink. Catherine Eddowes turned to drink to deal with her abusive relationship; she was arrested for being drunk and disorderly just before her murder.

Mary Jane Kelly, the only confirmed prostitute, was arrested several times in pubs soliciting. She was also known to bring drunk women back to her room.

Looking at the fact all the women were confirmed drinkers then, the common factor between them and the Ripper is more likely to be drinking and public houses than sex.

The second question that has always intrigued me was why he never killed anyone in October. What happened to stop his reign of terror for one month?

Lastly, the question that plagues even the most amateur Ripper enthusiasts is why he stopped killing. Or did he? Is it possible he was still killing, just not in London?

I can now provide the answer to all three of these questions.

William Bury

William Bury was born William Henry Bury in 1859 in the Midlands. At the age of eleven, his father died, and shortly after, his mother was admitted to a Lunatic Asylum with clinical depression. It is now considered she had post-natal depression after the death of her daughter.

Bury found himself orphaned with two siblings, Joseph and Mary. They were taken in by a family friend who treated them well. At fifteen, he was enrolled in a Charity School in Stourbridge. A year later, he was working in a warehouse in Wolverhampton. Catherine Eddowes also lived in Wolverhampton before moving to London.

Bury began to flit between jobs until he moved to London at twenty-eight. What prompted the move is not known.

London

Bury got a job with local businessman James Martin as a sawdust seller in the Bow district, three miles from the killing area. A sawdust seller would collect sawdust from warehouses and then sell them to pubs and butcher shops. The shops would then use it as a carpet in their establishments.

This occupation would place Bury in many local pubs where the women drank and give him knowledge of basic butchery. Some have suggested that the Ripper was a butcher.

The sawdust business, though, was a front for Martin's real brothel business. Before moving to Whitechapel, Mary Kelly had been known to work in high-end brothels in different areas of London. Whether Bury met her here, we do not know. He did, however, meet his wife, Ellen Elliot, there. Some say Ellen was a prostitute; it is not known if this is true. What we do know about Ellen is that she was rich.

When Bury married Ellen in 1888, they left Martin's employment, and Bury decided to start his own sawdust business with his wife's money.

One month after the wedding, multiple accounts exist of Bury being violently drunk. Their landlady reported that she had seen Bury threaten Ellen with a knife whilst kneeling over her so she could not escape; this was a similar position to the one used by the Ripper.

Dundee

Bury would continue to abuse Ellen; however, at the end of the year, he changed dramatically. Rushing home one evening, he showed Ellen a letter from a prospective employer offering him a job in Dundee. The letter would later be found to be fake.

Ellen was reluctant to leave London, but Bury wanted to leave as soon as possible. Mary Kelly was murdered in November. Ellen agreed, and records show that by January 1889, they were living in Dundee.

On 10th February 1889 Bury met an acquaintance, Walker, who lent him a newspaper asking him to look up any news on Jack the Ripper; he was said to throw the newspaper away in fright. That evening, he walked into a police station and stated that he had woken up to find Ellen dead with a rope wrapped around her throat. He said they had been drinking heavily the night before, and she had taken her life.

He then said two strange things; the first was that he had panicked and tried to cut the body up to pack it in a box. When asked why he had panicked, he stated that he feared they would arrest him and accuse him of being Jack the Ripper.

The police left him in the station and went to the flat, where they found Ellen's body mutilated. When they went to the back stairs, they found several messages written in chalk. One said, "Jack Ripper is at the back of this door," and "Jack Ripper is in this seller."

The Ripper also used chalk to write, "The Juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing" on the wall after the murders of Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes.

Jack the Ripper

As the investigation into Ellen's murder continued, the police found many other references to Jack the Ripper.

It was reported that on arrival in Dundee, Ellen remarked to one of her neighbours, "Jack the Ripper is quiet now."

The nature of Ellen's murder and that of the canonical five also were similar with the stab wound to the abdomen and mutilation of the body. Bury was in the area at the time of the murders, and the murders stopped when he left. He had access to the women through their drinking and his frequent pub trips.

As for the second question, why didn't he kill in October? I may have the answer. October 1888 was known to be a very foggy month. The fog mixed with the factory smoke made the visibility extremely bad.

Bury used a horse and cart to transport his goods in his sawdust business. He stabled his horse in the Whitechapel area. He would also have used it as his escape from the murders he committed. Horses find it extremely hard to navigate in fog, so he would not have been able to use his horse and cart in October.

William Bury was found guilty of his wife's murder on 28th March 1889. The jury deliberated for thirteen hours before finding him guilty. He was sentenced to hang for his crime. It is unclear whether the police of the time thought he was Jack the Ripper. They likely did with the similarities between the cases.

However, during the Victorian era, it was not worth wasting time or manpower to prove the case. In the Victorian police's opinion, if Bury was hanged for one crime, what was the point in pursuing him for five others? The Ripper had stopped, and the guilty party had been executed.

The Evidence Doesn't Lie

Using modern techniques, though, we can look at the evidence and decide whether William Bury was Jack the Ripper. Signature analysis would show consistent patterns in Ellen's murder, that of Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly. It can also be linked to the murder of Martha Tabram, long thought to be the first Ripper victim.

Reading the transcribes of the murder trial, evidence from James Martin described Bury as drunk in the Whitechapel area on two separate occasions. Hence, we know he frequented pubs in the area. Incidentally, Frederick Abberline, one of the lead investigators in the Jack the Ripper case, conducted the first interview with Martin.

Bury had the motive for murder, having contracted a venereal disease in 1888. He had the opportunity to meet the women through frequenting pubs. He had the means to transport the women with his horse and cart and the knowledge of butchery. He wrote messages about Jack the Ripper in his house. He murdered and mutilated his wife in the same way as the victims of the Ripper were. And finally, the killing stopped when he left London.

William Bury was Jack the Ripper, and I am not the only person who thinks so. In 2018, two well-regarded Scottish legal figures, Mark Stewart, a Queen’s Counsel, and Len Murray, a former solicitor for the Supreme Courts of Scotland, indicated that there was now enough evidence to convict William Bury of the Jack the Ripper murders.

Have I convinced you?

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One Crime, Three Perspectives

Check out both Edward Anderson’s blog and Karen Marie Shelton’s where they offer you two other possible Jack the Ripper suspects as part of our popular series one crime, three perspectives.