Thursday, November 08, 2018

THROWBACK THURSDAY: Rock 'n' Roll Loves The Ripper


From the true-crime website Casebook
It was 130 years ago this Saturday -- Nov. 10, 1888 -- in the Spitalfields district in London that Thomas Bowyer, who was helping his boss collect back rent from a tenant, Irish-born Mary Jane Kelly, a 25-year-old prostitute, came upon a ghastly scene.

Kelly wouldn't be paying any back rent. She is believed to be the fifth and final victim of the serial killer known as Jack the Ripper.

From the website White Chapel Jack, which is all about the Ripper:

When Bowyer arrived at #13 Miller’s Court, he knocked on the door twice. Receiving no answer, he rounded the corner of the yard to see that a couple of glass windowpanes were broken. He reached in through the knocked-out glass and moved the curtain to see whether Mary Kelly was at home or not. The first thing he saw were what looked like two lumps of meat sitting on the bedside table.

The autopsy by Dr. Thomas Bond describes what the killer had done to Kelly

"The body was lying naked in the middle of the bed, the shoulders flat but the axis of the body inclined to the left side of the bed. The head was turned on the left cheek. The left arm was close to the body with the forearm flexed at a right angle and lying across the abdomen.

The right arm was slightly abducted from the body and rested on the mattress. The elbow was bent, the forearm supine with the fingers clenched. The legs were wide apart, the left thigh at right angles to the trunk and the right forming an obtuse angle with the pubes.

The whole of the surface of the abdomen and thighs was removed and the abdominal cavity emptied of its viscera. The breasts were cut off, the arms mutilated by several jagged wounds and the face hacked beyond recognition of the features. The tissues of the neck were severed all round down to the bone.

There are more gruesome details. You can read them all HERE.

If you must.

It's probably pretty twisted, but somehow Kelly's killer became a rock 'n' roll hero -- or at least the subject of a lot of songs.

Guitar hero Link Wray led the way with this rumbling instrumental in 1961. Below is a latter-day live performance.



A few years later, Screaming Lord Sutch was possessed by the spirit of the Ripper, at least during this performance:



Skip ahead a few decades to the early '90s and Nick Cave came up with this terrifying tune



Also in the '90s, another Jack did this version of Sutch's song



Finally, I'm not crazy about this next song by Danish pop-metal group Volbeat. But it's the only one I could find about Kelly herself .





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