(April 14, 1842-September 30, 1888) The fourth recognized victim of Jack the Ripper. Called "Kate" by her friends.
Born in Wolverhampton, Kate was one of twelve children and was raised between there and
London. Intelligent and bubbly throughout her
life, Kate, who was five-foot-two with hazel eyes and auburn hair, took up with ex-soldier Thomas Conway at age 21 and had three children with him (Annie, born 1865;
George, born 1868; and Thomas, born 1873). Kate and Conway's
marriage was common law and unstable to its end in 1881, due to Conway's violence and Kate's drinking; Conway took
the boys and Kate
left with Annie.
Soon after leaving Conway, Kate moved to Whitechapel and met John Kelly, with whom she would live until her
death. She and John were apparently quite happy together and went together from dosshouse to dosshouse, with Kate occasionally prostituting herself to bring money. Annie, meanwhile, married and regularly moved around to avoid her mother's scrounging. Although Kate had helped Annie through her first pregnancy, Annie could not stand more drunken begging from her mother.
Catherine Eddowes spent September 29 trying to secure money, in the morning pawning a pair of John's work
boots for food money. That afternoon, she
set off to ask her daughter for money (unaware that
Annie and her husband had moved again), reassuring John that she wouldn't meet the
Ripper.
Kate never reached Annie, but somehow found some money, enough to become roaring
drunk; she was found at 8:30 PM surrounded by a crowd in the middle of Aldgate High Street, giving them a drunken impersonation of a fire engine, after which she curled up on the pavement to sleep.
The
police took an unwilling Kate to Bishopsgate Station, where she was locked in a cell to sleep off her stupor. At 12:15, she was heard singing softly in the cell and was judged sober enough. After a scolding about her drinking, Kate left the station at about 1 AM. Meanwhile, the body of Elizabeth Stride had just been found in Berner Street, a mile away.
At 1:30 AM, a police officer saw Kate in Mitre
Square (in the City of
London itself) speaking with a
man; when he returned fifteen minutes later, he found Kate's mutilated body.
Her throat was cut, "V" shapes cut into her cheeks and pointing to her eyes, her eyelids split vertically, the end of her
nose cut off, her right cheek gashed. Her skirts were hiked up to her belly and she'd been disemboweled, with her uterus and one kidney taken away.
