Catherine Eddowes
Encyclopedia : C : CA : CAT : Catherine Eddowes
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The canonical five Jack the Ripper victims |
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| Mary Ann Nichols |
| Annie Chapman |
| Elizabeth Stride |
| Catherine Eddowes |
| Mary Jane Kelly |
Catherine (Kate) Eddowes (spelled "Catharine" in her birth certificate but not commonly used) is widely believed to be the fourth victim of the notorious unidentified serial killer "Jack the Ripper," who killed and mutilated prostitutes in the Whitechapel area of London during the late summer and autumn of 1888. She used the aliases "Kate Conway," "Kate Kelly," and "Mary Ann Kelly", after her two common-law husbands. She was forty-four at the time of her death, killed on the night of the "Double Event" that had seen the murder of Elizabeth Stride less than an hour earlier.
Eddowes' body was discovered at 01:44 in the early morning of Sunday, September 30, 1888, lying in a dark corner of Mitre Square. She was the only victim killed within the City of London, though close to the boundary of Whitechapel. Eddowes' killing was very typical of Ripper murders, and similar to that of Annie Chapman three weeks earlier. Eddowes was found with her throat slashed, her abdomen cut open and completely disembowelled, her intestines thrown over her right shoulder and facial mutilations besides. Her killer had taken away her uterus and left kidney. The police constable who found her body had seen nothing there on his previous visit twelve to fourteen minutes before, and he saw and heard nobody in the area at the time of the body's discovery. Eddowes had been killed only minutes earlier, and her killer fled into Whitechapel, where a piece torn from Eddowes' apron was later found in a doorway off Goulston Street.
Eddowes, who never formally married, was the daughter of George Eddowes, a tinplate worker, and his wife, also named Catharine. She was born in Wolverhampton on April 14, 1842. Soon after her birth the family moved to London. Eddowes' mother eventually bore twelve children, but the large family later fell into poverty and misfortune. Two younger children died in infancy; Eddowes' mother died of tuberculosis on November 17, 1855, and her father died two years later. By then, two older sisters were in domestic service and another married, while some of the younger children were sent to the Bermondsey Workhouse and Industrial School. Her sister Emma sent Eddowes, in her mid-teens, back to Wolverhampton to live with an aunt, but she became restless and ran away to Birmingham to live with a shoemaker uncle for a while.
In the next few years Eddowes met Thomas Conway in Birmingham, and the couple started living together. They had a daughter Annie, born around 1865, and two younger sons. By 1881 they had returned to London, but separated shortly after, having been together nearly twenty years. One of Eddowes' sisters blamed the breakup on Conway, who drank and beat Eddowes frequently, though Eddowes herself was also a drinker. That same year, Eddowes met John Kelly in a Whitechapel lodging house. He was her companion for the last seven years of her life.
Witnesses' accounts suggest the couple had an amicable enough relationship, though Eddowes continued to drink. Kelly took casual labouring jobs, while Eddowes found housecleaning work or sold trinkets on the streets. Friends insisted that she was never a prostitute, but the evidence of her death suggests she supplemented their income that way occasionally.
The previous Thursday, September 27, 1888, she and Kelly returned on foot to London from Kent, where they had been hop picking but they arrived virtually destitute. After pawning some remaining items for food, on Saturday, September 29, Kelly resolved to look for casual work while reportedly, Eddowes told her she was going to visit her married daughter Annie (Annie had previously moved away, and some believe that Eddowes should have known about it by this date). Whether she proposed a family visit to cover her intention to earn money by prostituting herself or for some other reason is unknown. Somehow, in the hours after parting from Kelly at 02:00 pm, Eddowes acquired enough money to feed her alcoholic tendencies, possibly through prostitution. Found lying in the street at 08:30 pm, incapable of standing, she was taken into custody by a City of London police officer and kept in the cells until she sobered up and was released close to 01:00 am. She was last seen alive by men leaving a club close to Mitre Square about 01:30am, talking to a man most scholars believe to have been her killer, based upon the timing.
Further reading
- The Complete History of Jack the Ripper by Philip Sugden, ISBN 0786702761, is widely held to be one of the best on the topic.
External links
- [Casebook: Jack the Ripper] has numerous articles covering many aspects of the case, and reproduces many original source texts relevant to the case.
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