Murder Facts

❝What I did was not for sexual pleasure, rather it brought me some peace of mind.❞
– BUTCHER OF ROSTOV,  Andrei Chikatilo 

❝The demons wanted my penis.❞
– SON OF SAM, David Berkowitz

There’s a new theory on the potential identity of Jack the Ripper. The body of his last victim, Mary Kelly, is set to be exhumed. The theory is that Mary Kelly was a fake name used by Elizabeth Weston-Davies after her marriage to Dr. Wynne Weston-Davies ended in failure after a few months, and that he used the murders as a cover in order to kill her. The following article from the London Telegraph has more details about the theory and evidence.

Family Secret ‘led to Jack the Ripper’ by David Barrett

A drawing from the Illustrated London News for October 13, 1888, around the time Jack the Ripper was terrorising Whitechapel, entitled “A Suspicious Character”.

Dr Wynne Weston-Davies was idly looking through Victorian ledgers at the National Archives in spring 2011, researching his family tree.

A result popped up on the computerised index that, at first glance, did not appear to help him in his quest to trace a missing great aunt, Elizabeth.

She had, in the late 1880s, vanished from all records kept by the family in the Dovey Valley, mid-Wales, although she was thought to have gone into respectable domestic service in London.

The surname in the archive file only partially matched Weston-Davies’ own, but he requested to see it anyway, almost on a whim, even though the reading room was about to close.

When the papers - divorce documents in elaborate Victorian copperplate - arrived the former surgeon quickly realised they revealed a heartbreaking story of love and loss.

It was this document that set him on the road to unmasking Jack the Ripper.

His book, The Real Mary Kelly, sets out how the Ripper’s final victim Mary Jane Kelly - murdered in London’s East End on November 9 1888 - was actually the pseudonym of Elizabeth Weston Davies.

The From Hell letter, attributed to Jack the Ripper, was sent with half a kidney. Photo: Metropolitan Police Service, National Archives

Plans to exhume the body of Mary Jane have been disclosed in the hope that DNA evidence will prove his theory she is Elizabeth. The author says that by uncovering the final victim’s true identity he can show that her estranged husband was Jack the Ripper.

His name was Francis Spurzheim Craig.

At the time of the murders Craig was living in Mile End Road, Whitechapel, seven minutes’ walk from the scene of the first murder.

Aged 51, he worked as a “penny-a-line” reporter covering inquests, courts and crime in the East End, a job that gave him intimate knowledge of police methods.

Weston-Davies hypothesises that Craig carried out the four earlier murders as a “cover” for his true aim: revenge on a wife who had left him and returned to a life of prostitution.

“I’ve already obtained an indication from the Ministry of Justice that they are minded to issue an exhumation licence,” said Weston-Davies.

“There’s some red tape to complete but I believe that exhuming her body will solve the Ripper mystery once and for all.

"I didn’t know more than the average person about Jack the Ripper when I started out researching my family history more than 10 years ago.

"My father, who died in 1996, always refused to speak about his family, saying they were a ‘bad lot’.”

Weston-Davies, 71, said the National Archives papers showed a story “about a woman marrying a man much older than herself, Francis Craig, and how this marriage only lasted a few months, and then turned sour”.

“It was several years before I made the connection with Jack the Ripper. I ordered Francis Craig’s death certificate and then tracked down reports of the inquest into his death.

"It was another bombshell. I realised he had committed suicide by slitting his own throat with a blade, exactly the same way the Ripper’s victims had been murdered.”

Born in 1837, in Acton, west London, Francis Spurzheim Craig was the son of a well-known Victorian social reformer.

His father, ET Craig, was a writer and advocate of phrenology - interpreting personality types based on measurements of the skull - a so-called “science” that by the time of the Ripper murders was already falling out of fashion.

However, the family moved in influential west London circles, counting William Morris, the socialist and founder of the Arts and Crafts movement, among their friends.

Craig was a journalist, but not a successful one. While editing the Bucks Advertiser and Aylesbury News, his career suffered an almost terminal blow when he was caught cribbing reports from The Daily Telegraph, and was exposed as a plagiarist.

It is not known how he met Elizabeth Weston Davies - it may have been at William Morris’ social gatherings - but they married on Christmas Eve 1884, in Hammersmith.

Just a few months later - on May 19 1885 - she was seen entering a private hotel near their marital home in King’s Cross with a “young man … at 10 o'clock at night”.

It was a crushing blow for Craig, who had been unaware of his wife’s involvement in prostitution, the book says.

She left and went into hiding in the East End.

Having tracked her movements, Weston-Davies believes she used the pseudonym Mary Jane Kelly.

Francis Craig was a peculiar man by all accounts.

The author believes he was suffering from schizotypal personality disorder, or STPD.

“A psychiatrist friend of mine has indicated this is the most likely diagnosis,” said Weston-Davies.

He has now located a forensic undertaker prepared to perform the task of exhuming his great aunt’s body.

But because Mary Jane/Elizabeth was buried in a pauper’s grave, there are more bureaucratic hurdles to overcome.

For example, a notice must be displayed by the grave for three months warning relations that their loved one’s grave may also be disturbed.

“I understand there have been previous applications to exhume her body and they were all refused,” said Weston-Davies.

“I think it is my family connection to her which persuaded the authorities, after months of deliberations. I will proceed with the exhumation depending on the reaction to the book.

"If someone can show me clear evidence that Mary Kelly was not Elizabeth then of course there will be little point in proceeding.”

Weston-Davies highlights other cases when disgruntled men killed innocent strangers to obtain revenge on a specific person.

“There is evidence Francis Craig spent a long time looking for her in the East End, even employing private detectives,” said the author. “His initial aim - to win her back - turned to hatred.”

Mary Jane/Elizabeth was killed at Miller’s Court, a Whitechapel slum.

After her throat was slit, she suffered heinous disfigurement and - unlike all the other victims - was rendered unrecognisable. “He went to great lengths to ensure that her real identity could not be discovered,” said Weston-Davies.

“Elizabeth was only known by her pseudonym. He mutilated her face so her friends and family would never know it was her if the police published photographs of her face.

"He did not want her linked to him.”

Weston-Davies, who worked as a general surgeon before moving into medical research, added: “Craig also went to great lengths to remove her heart, going for it through the diaphragm. The heart was never found despite an extensive search by police who arrived at the murder scene the following morning. It’s my belief there was a further piece of symbolism in her terrible evisceration.

"She had taken his heart, and now he was stealing hers.”

- The Telegraph, London, original article

Ann Rule was best known for her friendship and insight into Ted Bundy. She met Ted in the seventies when they worked at a Suicide Prevention Hotline together. Their friendship continued for years, and she ended up writing a novel about Ted Bundy titled, “The Stranger Beside Me”. Below is a great article from the Washington Post about Ann Rule and Ted Bundy.

Washington Post Article by Justin Wm. Moyer (original here)
The Twisted Friendship of Crime Writer Ann Rule and Serial Killer Ted Bundy

Few journalists are lucky enough to stumble into stories that grab the national consciousness for decades. And when they do, even fewer are lucky enough to know their subjects intimately enough before the news breaks to offer readers not just a scoop, but a kind of dual biography.

Ann Rule, who died Sunday at 83, was one of these. Though she would become a prolific writer — a woman who “reinvented the true crime genre and earned the trust of millions of readers who wanted a new and empathetic perspective on the tragic stories at the heart of her works,” as the president and chief executive officer of Simon and Schuster put it — Rule was just another anonymous writer in Seattle in 1971. A former police officer turned crime reporter on the wrong side of 40 with four children at home and a dissolving marriage, Rule volunteered at suicide crisis hotline one night a week.

There — fortunately and unfortunately — she befriended a young man who would commit dozens of horrific murders a few years later: Ted Bundy. This friendship between a great crime writer and her greatest subject was as unlikely as it was fated: the equivalent of Bob Woodward sharing a schoolyard see-saw with Richard Nixon.

“I liked him immediately,” Rule wrote in “The Stranger Beside Me,” the book about Bundy that brought her fame in 1980, ultimately selling more than 2 million copies. “It would have been hard not to. He brought me a cup of coffee and waved his arm over the awesome banks of phone lines.” Bundy’s first words to Rule: “You think we can handle all this?”

In an era when a mass killing seems to happen every week and David Duchovny stars in a TV series about Charles Manson, Bundy’s notoriety may have faded somewhat. But for a generation raised on true-crime pulp and TV movies about Bundy, he remains the face of serial murder in America — the killer of at least 30 women who was so terrifying because, unlike Manson and many of his ilk, he seemed like a stand-up guy.

”Ted Bundy was a complex man who somewhere along the line went wrong,” a prosecutor of one of his crimes said when Bundy was executed in 1989. ”He killed for the sheer thrill of the act and the challenge of escaping his pursuers. He probably could have done anything in life he set his mind to do, but something happened to him and we still don’t know what it was.”

If it’s rare to hear a district attorney pay a tribute of sorts to a man who beat women to death and sexually assaulted their corpses, it wasn’t for Bundy. People loved him. He volunteered for the Republican Party; with Rule beside him, he convinced people not to kill themselves over the phone; he dated; and he was kind of hot.

Rule, for one, thought he was smokin’.

“His physical attractiveness helped to make him a mythical character, an antihero who continues to intrigue readers, many of whom were not even born when he carried out his horrendous crimes,” Rule wrote in “The Stranger Beside Me.” Even further: “As far as his appeal to women, I can remember thinking that if I were younger and single or if my daughters were older, this would be almost the perfect man,” she wrote.

Yet, down the line, it became clear that Bundy fell far short of Mr. Right.

Beating the streets of the Pacific Northwest for stories, Rule, in 1974, followed the bloody path of a killer who preyed on young women. A witness reported hearing a suspect identify himself as “Ted” and police thought he drove a Volkswagen. Though Rule didn’t think Bundy owned a car, she was concerned that her old friend from the suicide hotline matched a description authorities were circulating, and tipped off an officer she knew.

The ensuing interaction went beyond tragedy into comedy.

“I don’t really think this is anything, but it’s bugging me,” Rule wrote she told police. “… His name is Ted Bundy. B-U-N-D-Y. Call me back. O.K.?”

The officer reported back: “Would you believe [he drives] a 1968 bronze Volkswagen Bug?”

Rule thought the officer was kidding. “Come on … What does he really drive?” she asked.

Officer: “Ann, I’m serious.”

Unfortunately, flooded with leads, police didn’t recognize Rule’s hot tip for what it was. Bundy continued to kill — and Rule continued to be his friend. Even after Bundy was initially arrested for kidnapping in 1975 in Salt Lake City, Rule had lunch with him in Seattle while he was out on bond and bought him a carafe of Chablis.

Really.

“When this is all over,” Bundy told Rule, “I’ll take you out to lunch.”

“I knew that he was a prime suspect but that was all I knew at the time,” Rule wrote. “I had no knowledge at all beyond the few innuendos I’d read in the papers.” She asked Bundy if he had read about the missing women — after all, she was writing a book about them. He shrugged the questions off. In early 1976, they hung out again and talked for “five hours,” Rule reported.

“I have to tell you this,” she told Bundy. “I cannot be completely convinced of your innocence.”

Bundy: “That’s O.K.”

It was the last time Rule would see Bundy “as a free man,” she wrote. Bundy was convicted of kidnapping in 1976 and began a prison sentence as authorities in other states tried to build murder cases against him.

Still, Rule corresponded with him. She visited him. She sent him $20 — he paid for a haircut with the money. Then, in 1977, Bundy escaped, was arrested and escaped again. After the second escape, he killed three more women before he was arrested in Florida.

The jig was up. And even as she was being courted by Hollywood, Rule was trying to facilitate Bundy’s confession.

“I tried, literally, to save his life,” Rule wrote. “I began to phone Washington state agencies to try to arrange something that would allow Ted to confess to me, and, through plea bargaining, to be returned to Washington for confinement in a mental hospital.”

It wouldn’t work. Bundy was found guilty of capital murder in Florida in 1979 and sentenced to death.

Rule was on board — sort of.

“I believed that the verdict had been the right verdict, but I wondered if it had been for the wrong reasons,” she wrote. “It had been too swift, too vindictive. Was justice still justice when it manifested itself as it had in the less than six hours of jury deliberation?”

Ten years later, after his execution in the electric chair, she offered a postscript that stood in marked contrast to those who shouted: “Burn, Bundy, burn!”

“At long last, peace Ted,” she wrote. “And peace and love to all the innocents you destroyed.”

And 10 years after she wrote those words, Rule’s fondness for Bundy seemed to have faded.

“People like Ted can fool you completely,” she said in 1999. “I’d been a cop, had all that psychology — but his mask was perfect. I say that long acquaintance can help you know someone. But you can never be really sure. Scary.”

She added: “I felt sick when Ted was executed — but I would not have stopped it if I could. He was going to get out, and he would have killed again and again and again.”