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I never took a class, even an introductory one, to physics; so forgive me if my understanding of it is somewhat deficient.

    They tell me that Einstein believed that human knowledge could achieve a single equation that would explain and account for the four forces of nature:  strong and weak atomic bonding, gravity, and electomagnetism.

     I learned of this long before it became part of some television comedy that I never liked; and it inspired me to seek a single explanation of the anomalies that exist in the case of the supposed murder of Mary Kelly, the outcall girl (not a street-walker) who was the youngest, most beautiful, and last of the Ripper's five canonical victims.  Or was she?  The anomalies of this case are:

1.  The murders, and the Ripper's taunting letters, ceased; although the Ripper had threatened to keep on killing until killed.

2.  The murder was perpetrated within a private residence, Mary's apartment at 13 Miller Court, and not outdoors---as had been the Ripper's previous habit.

3.  The physical mutilation to the victim's body was much more extensive, and time consuming, than had been the Ripper's previous habit.

4.  Mary Kelly was said to have been seen alive, and uninjured, by two documented, and three other undocumented, witnesses.  

5.  The door to Mary Kelly's apartment was locked, from the outside.  The Ripper was a show-off; the murders were all about surprise and shock.  A mutliated corpse behind a locked door does not fit the "logic" of the Ripper's previous habits.

6.  In August, 1888, Mary Kelly claimed to be newly pregnant, and that she intended to abandon her outcall business for the sake of her baby.  According to the subsequent coroner's report, an examination of the womb of the body found on Mary Kelly's bed had never been pregnant.  Since Kelly's admission, the previous August, would have worked against her best interests, it was most likely true---by judicial standards of truth.

That Mary Kelly survived her ordeal is not a new theory.  It has been considered by Ripper historians whose scholarship is far greater than my own very amateurish interest. 

That interest began in the spring of 1974, to impress a young lady on who I had a crush; having not yet met BlueLevels; and I, with all the grandeur which a sixteen year old geek can muster, promised her that, some time in my life, I would contribute original research or theory to the Ripper history.

I remember two personal incidents I experienced while visiting friends in California.  These incidents took place between January 5th and February 28th, 1981; and involved, I assure you, no drugs or booze.  (I had on the previous October 30th, 1980, received, by long distance telephone, a notice from my then fiancee that our relationship was over and not to visit her when I returned to my home from my temporary stay in Texas.  I was so haunted by her presence, and by the moments we had spent in various mundane places in my home town, that some friends invited me to an extended stay with them in Los Angeles in order to escape this torment.)  In each of the incidents I am about to describe, I was alone in the living room of my friends' apartment, listening to "See Me, Feel Me" by The Who---and I had the very distinct sense of Mary Kelly's presence.  That presence was not ghostly, not horrific or threatening in any way.  In point of fact, it felt sympathetic toward me for what had happened the previous Autumn.  And, in each incident, I felt that she had whispered to me, "Tell the truth about me."  I cannot explain these incidents.  I cannot remember what I did immediately following each incident.  I have no conscious recollection of the remainder of each of those evenings.  But, after the second incident, I began to refocus my Ripper interest from generality to the specificities of Mary Kelly's case.

One night, in early December, 2000, I was reading a book on the Ripper murders, and it provided one of the two very grisly (and I do mean grisly) photographs of the body found at 13 Miller Court by the rent collector the morning after the murder.  I was sort of stunned, once more, by the horrific depiction.  I thought back to the two incidents, nineteen years earlier.  And I said, to my wife, "That is not Mary Kelly laying there."  My wife, patiently indulgent with my Ripper interest, politely asked who it was.  My head seemed to spin, like the beginning of one of those incidents in 1981,  Then, I said, as if it was a proven fact, "That is Jack the Ripper, who must have been female, and Mary Kelly killed her in self defense."  Then, not yet having internet access, I had to rely on memory to assemble the anomalies you have read above,  Taken individually, each one is not particularly remarkable.  Taken as a whole, they form a verbal contour of Mary Kelly's presence.  I began, almost immediately, to compose the poem I subsequently entitled, "Whitechapel Woman."  A friend recommended submitting it to CasebookJacktheRipper, a scholarly website operated in England by scholars for scholars.  It was a very discriminating website:  I had to pass an editorial board review---for both plausibility and originality.  And they took their good old time about it.  For three weeks, I sat and wrung my hands; paced and wrung my hands; questioned my sanity and wrung my hands; and, more than once, during that three weeks, I felt like throwing up.  Had I fulfilled the request I believe I heard in 1981---to tell the truth about her?  Had I shown her sufficient understanding in response to the sympathy I felt, from that incident, about the break-up?

At the end of the three weeks, the friend who had emailed "Whitechapel Woman" to England received an email from the website, addressed to me.  I did not think I was capable of driving to the office where the email had arrived; and not having a computer yet, it could not be forwarded to me.  So I asked that it be read.  "Your poem will be posted to the site within 24 hours of the arrival of this email."  That was in late January.  To help me secure an American copyright, Jessee Poet, an editor who had previously accepted and published poems from me, published "Whitechapel Woman" in the March/April 2001 edition of his magazine, Poets At Work.

I believe that the Cosmos created by our Lord Jesus Christ for the Undivided Trinity had answered me, and had confirmed that, yes, I had told the truth about and for Mary Kelly.  And in writing the poem, I did my prep.  I knew that Mary Kelly, who was only sixty inches tall in her stockinged feet (delicious image, that!), and very polite and refined (her clients often asked her to dinners and theatrical performances in the West End of London, because her company was sought even beyond the sexual element of her prostitution) could---when boozed up---cause physical damage to a much larger male.  At the time of her encounter with the Ripper, she was facing charges of having severely beaten a sailor who had touched her inappropriately during her drinking time at the Ten Bells pub (which is still in operation today).  I asked a friend who had psychology training if an expectant mother, experiencing a rush of adrenaline that accompanied a sudden, dire, and terrifying threat upon her life, could have mustered the strength required to perform the damage documented in those two grisly photographs.  The answer I received was affirmative.  My friend suggested that the instinct to self preservation, coupled with the even more powerful maternal instinct, and a temper that was sometimes violently unleashed during intoxication, would have generated a fury and a frenzy that did not stop until there was nothing left of the assailant to damage.   Mistaking the corpse of the assailant for the corpse of the supposed victim?---yes, in those days before fingerprints, dental records, and identification documents.  And before the days when British Law recognized self-preservation as a defense against the charge of murder.  Some believe Mary Kelly had some very highly placed acquaintances---one of whom may have been in the cabinet itself.  Some also believe that, having posed for the painter Walt Sickert, she met his royal pupil, Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence and Avondale, eldest grandson of Queen Victoria, and, in the seventies, was suspected of being the Ripper.  Certain politicians might have had good reason to swing Mary Kelly from rope on the gallows at Newgate Prison before she could talk too much.  The body found in her apartment was subsequently identified by her ex-lover, Joe Barnett, who was boozed up during his testimony before the coroner's jury; and made the identification because one surviving earlobe looked like Mary's.  Really?  An earlobe?  One of the two documented witnesses saw her, that next day, talking with a tall, dapper looking man, whom the witness was unable to identify clearly.  After that, Mary Kelly walks out of history and into anonymity.  I suggest the man with whom she was talking was Albert Victor; and that he helped arrange for her passage to France, where Walt Sickert (who, according to Joe Sickert, never stopped loving her) visited repeatedly' and may have painted a clue in his painting, A French Kitchen.

The last obstacle to completing the poem was finding a word to rhyme with "Kelly."

Should you wish to view tbe poem it appears in two places:

https://www.casebook.org/diversions/fiction.jere.html

https://www.postpoems.org/authors/starward/poem/1098399

I should like to finish by acknowledging my deep gratitude to the following persons:  the late Tom Cullen, the journalist whose monograph, When London Walked In Terror, was the first book I ever checked out of my college's library, reading in, in its entirety, from a little before midnight on Friday, September 10th, 1976, through a little after dawn on Saturday, September 11th; to Stephen P. Ryder, founder and operator of the Casebook in England, and to Jessee Poet, who helped me secure my American copyright; and . . . to Jason, whom I consider my publisher, for creating and operating Postpoems, and giving me a place within it.  To all these, and to Mary Kelly, herself, I am grateful for the assistance to be able to publish what she asked me, to "tell the truth about me."

Starward