The alleged female Jack the Ripper: Mary Eleanor Wheeler

Mary Eleanor Wheeler was a cold-blooded murderer. She was born in 1866 to Mary Eleanor Wheeler and Thomas Wheeler, but little is known about her childhood. When Mary was 14 years old, her father Thomas was found guilty of murdering farmer Edward Ansteen and was hanged at St. Albans Prison on November 19, 1880. Mary herself would later suffer the same fate. At the time of her arrest, Mary was 24 years old and was described as 5’5“ tall with ”beautiful reddish hair and fine blue eyes.” She had a normal build and well-formed hands. Although her face was not overly pretty, she apparently had no trouble attracting men. In her late teens, she had a relationship with a carpenter named John Charles Pearcey. Although they never married, Mary took his name and continued to use it even after they separated. It was under this name that she was arrested, charged, and brought to trial. Mary associated with wealthy men and had never worked or needed to. One of her many admirers, Charles Creighton, rented a room for her at 2 Priory Street in the fashionable London district of Kensington around 1888. Mary, who suffered from depression and had only her elderly mother and an older sister as relatives, drank heavily. In addition to Mr. Creighton, who visited her once a week, she also fell in love with Mr. Frank Samuel Hogg, a furniture mover who impressed Mary with printed business cards. Mary signaled to Frank that she was available by leaving a light on in the window, and he had a key to the house. But there was a serious obstacle to Mary’s happiness: Frank was married and had a daughter, both also named Phoebe. Phoebe Hogg was 32 years old at the time of her death and had been very ill in early 1890. She had married Frank Hogg in November 1888 when she was three months pregnant with his child and gave birth to her daughter Phoebe Hanslope Hogg in the summer of 1889. Frank’s affair with Mary existed both before and during the marriage. On the morning of October 24, 1890, Mary is said to have asked a boy to do her a favor. She gave Willie Holmes a penny to deliver a message to Phoebe Hogg, inviting her to afternoon tea. At around 4 p.m., Charlotte Priddington, Mary’s neighbor, heard the sound of breaking glass coming from Mary’s house and called over the fence to check if everything was all right, but received no answer. At 7 p.m., a man on his way home discovered a woman’s body on the sidewalk on Crossfield Road and immediately reported it to a police officer. The woman’s head was wrapped in a cardigan, which the man removed, revealing Phoebe Hogg’s blood-stained face with a large cut on her neck. The body was first taken to Hampstead Police Station and then to the mortuary. It turned out that the deceased had a fractured skull and a cut to her neck so severe that her head was almost severed. There were also bruises on her head and arms, indicating that she had defended herself. An examination of the site where the body was found indicated that the murder had taken place elsewhere. At this point, the police still had no identity for the body. Later that evening, a patrol officer discovered a heavily bloodstained pram on Hamilton Terrace, about a mile away from where the woman’s body had been found. The following morning, the body of a little girl was found. It turned out that the girl had died of suffocation but had no other injuries except for a few scratches. Frank Hogg and his sister Clara reported Phoebe missing after reading about the discovery of the woman’s body in the Saturday newspaper. Frank sent Clara to Mary to ask if she had seen Phoebe, which Mary denied, but agreed to accompany Clara to the morgue to see if it was really Phoebe’s body. Mary’s behavior there was very strange. After agreeing to go with Clara, Mary said at the first sight of the body, “That’s not her,” even though Clara identified Phoebe’s clothes. Mary tried her best to prevent Clara from identifying the body and became almost hysterical when the full extent of Phoebe’s injuries became apparent. The police asked Mary and Clara to examine the pram, which Clara identified as Phoebe’s property. A neighbor of Mary’s said she saw Mary pushing the pram with a large object inside on the evening of the murder. Frank Hogg was informed of the positive identification of his wife. He confessed to the affair with Mary when the key to her house was found. The police decided to question Mary as the next suspect, as she had already exhibited suspicious behavior at the morgue. So they went to Priory Street and searched her house thoroughly. They found significant bloodstains and splatters in the kitchen, along with a bloodstained carving knife and a fire poker. There were also clear signs of a struggle, with two broken windows in the kitchen. A carpet showed bloodstains and smelled strongly of paraffin, where an attempt had been made to clean it. Mary’s behavior became increasingly bizarre during the police search. She sat at the piano, singing and whistling loudly, and tried to justify the bloodstains by explaining that she was “killing mice, killing mice,” which seemed hardly credible. Inspector Banister decided to arrest Mary at this point and charge her with the murders of the mother and child. A search of Mary revealed bloodstains on her clothes, scratches on her hands, and two wedding rings on her fingers, one of which was later identified as Phoebe Hogg’s. Mary was taken into custody. While awaiting her hearing at the police court, she told Sarah Sawhill, the woman who was looking after her, that Mrs. Hogg had indeed come for tea that afternoon and that during the visit, Mrs. Hogg had made a remark that offended Mary, whereupon an argument broke out. Mary realized that she was incriminating herself and refused to talk about it any further. Mary was charged before Judge Denman at the Central Criminal Court of the Old Bailey. Her three-day trial began on December 1, 1890. The prosecution was led by Mr. Forrest Fulton, assisted by Mr. C.F. Gill, and her defense was led by Mr. Arthur Hutton. Mary entered a formal plea of not guilty, and then the prosecution began to present its case. They read various letters that Mary had written to Frank Hogg, which allegedly showed the depth of her passion for him before his forced marriage to Phoebe, caused by her pregnancy. Mary had told Frank that she did not want to leave him, even if he had to marry Phoebe, and that she would treat Phoebe as a friend. The suggested motive for the murder was jealousy of Phoebe, now that Mary had to share Frank with her. Evidence was also presented regarding the crime scene and the nature of Phoebe’s injuries. John Pearcey identified the cardigan found around Phoebe’s head as one he had given Mary, and evidence was presented that the blinds in Mary’s house had been drawn on the afternoon of the murder. Arthur Hutton questioned the circumstantial evidence against her and also asked whether a woman of her size and stature would be capable of inflicting such terrible injuries on the deceased. Mary made no statement during the trial and remained impassive throughout. She was found guilty after only 52 minutes on the third day at noon. In accordance with standard practice, Mary was asked if she had “anything to say as to why the court should not sentence her to death in accordance with the law,” to which she replied, “I say I am innocent of this charge.” Judge Denman then put on his black hat and sentenced her to be hanged. At that time, there was no appeal—the Court of Criminal Appeal was not established until 1907. However, her lawyer tried to save her by claiming that she was not in her right mind at the time of the crime due to epileptic seizures she had suffered since birth. On December 16, the Home Office wrote to Mr. Freke Palmer informing him that a medical examination had been authorized under the Criminal Lunatics Act. This was to be carried out on Friday by three doctors, Bennett, Gilbert, and Savage, whose hour-long interview with Mary revealed no evidence of legal insanity. After careful consideration of her report, her case files were marked with the fatal words “the law must take its course.” This decision was communicated to her lawyer on Saturday. At Mary’s request, Frank Hogg was given permission to visit her at Newgate Prison on Monday afternoon, but he did not appear, which greatly upset Mary, who lay crying on her bed when she realized he would not be coming. Apart from that, she remained very composed during her last day and night. On her last afternoon, Mary was visited by Mr. Freke Palmer, her lawyer, whom she asked to arrange certain bequests and also to place a personal advertisement in a Spanish newspaper. Mary steadfastly refused to make a confession to Mr. Palmer, despite his repeated questions and promise to present relevant facts to the Home Secretary in a last-ditch attempt to obtain a pardon. Mary was to be hanged by James Berry two days before Christmas 1890 at Newgate Prison in London. After her return from Old Bailey to Newgate, she was bathed and given a prison uniform—a simple gray dress—before being taken to death row, where she was guarded around the clock by three teams of guards. The Sheriff of London, Sir James Whitehead, had decided to exclude newspaper reporters from her execution, presumably out of consideration for her gender and age. The execution was scheduled for Tuesday, December 23, and Berry arrived at the prison on Saturday. Her guards reported that she showed “remarkable strength” the night before her execution. The gallows at Newgate was a large structure built in 1881 that could accommodate up to four prisoners side by side, although on this day only a single noose hung from the six links of the iron chain attached to the center beam. Outside the prison, in the bitterly cold December morning, about 300 people, including many women, had gathered to hear the bells of St. Sepulchre’s Church and see the black flag above the prison, signaling that the execution had been carried out. Mary apparently aroused little public sympathy, presumably because of the murder of the child, and there was a cry of jubilation from the crowd when the flag was hoisted. Her body was left hanging in the brick-lined ditch under the trapdoor for the usual hour and then removed and placed in a coffin on the closed trapdoors to be viewed by the coroner’s inquest. That same day, she was buried in an unmarked grave within Newgate. Madame Tussaud’s, as was customary in famous cases, made a wax model of her for the Chamber of Horrors and purchased Frank Hogg’s pram along with some other paraphernalia. Mary’s exhibition attracted 30,000 people. The rope used to hang Mary is on display at Scotland Yard’s Black Museum. There was reliable evidence that Mary had been epileptic since childhood, and her lawyer, Mr. Freke Palmer, gathered extensive evidence of her epilepsy and two suicide attempts, which suggested that Mary was not entirely sane. However, it should be noted that epilepsy is not considered a mental illness today. Suffering from epilepsy means having recurrent seizures. A seizure is a temporary state of abnormal electrical activity in the brain. The word “temporary” is important because these occasional seizures do not in themselves indicate mental illness. Epileptic automatism has been successfully used as a defense in murder trials because it proves that the person could not have formed the intent to kill during the seizure. In Mary’s case, however, all this did not result in a legal defense of insanity, which at the time was governed by the McNaughten rule. This arose from the case of Daniel McNaughten, who in 1843 attempted to kill the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, against whom he harbored an imaginary grudge, but instead shot his secretary, Mr. Drummond. The court found him not guilty of the crime on the grounds of insanity because at the time of the act he either did not know what he was doing or, if he did, did not realize it was wrong. In McNaughten’s case, it was determined that he did not know what he was doing at the time of the shooting. The McNaughten rule was interpreted very strictly in Mary’s day, and there was little leeway for this defense to succeed. Mr. Palmer publicly expressed his disappointment with the Home Secretary, saying that it seemed as if the whole world was against them. There is some truth to this – probably due to the murder of the baby and her promiscuous behavior. Mary was even suspected of being Jack the Ripper by London Metropolitan Police Inspector Frederick Abberline. Arthur Conan Doyle had given him this idea, speculating that Jack the Ripper might have been female. A woman could have posed as a midwife and appeared in public with bloody clothes without arousing suspicion. William Stewart also shared this theory of a female Jack the Ripper in his 1939 book. In May 2006, DNA testing revealed that the saliva on the stamps affixed to the letters allegedly sent by Jack the Ripper to London newspapers came from a woman. Whether Jack the Ripper was female or male is still the subject of wild speculation to this day.