In 2014, I published an article, “Identifying William Bury as Jack the Ripper,” in Ripperologist: The Journal of Jack the Ripper, East End and Victorian Studies. I showed that the Ellen Bury murder can be closely mapped to Jack the Ripper’s unique combination of signature characteristics, as described by the late Robert D. Keppel, who was one of the world’s leading authorities on signature evidence, and his team of researchers. Since that time, no effective criticism of that identification, later updated as The Bury ID, has appeared, either in print or in the Ripper media. I was disappointed, then, to see the Ellen Bury murder included in Paul Williams’s chapter, “Jack the Ripper: Copycat and Legacy Killings,” in the recently published Routledge Handbook of Jack the Ripper Studies. While Williams only states that Bury might have been a copycat, and while he does grant that “Some researchers have argued that William Bury was Jack the Ripper” (1), this seems like a useful occasion to review the claim that William Bury was merely a copycat or an imitator of Jack the Ripper, a claim that is still prevalent among Ripperologists today.
What, exactly, is the evidence that William Bury was a copycat killer? Let’s review some of the points that are commonly made.
Williams writes that “Ellen was strangled…and her throat was not cut” (2). This objection is frequently raised by those who contend that Bury was no more than a Ripper “wannabe.” The research on serial killers, however, tells us that the MO of a serial killer can vary among crime scenes. William Bury murdered his wife in his own residence, where he was under no constraint of time, and so it wouldn’t have been necessary for him to cut her throat in order to make sure that she was dead. Since the MO of a serial killer can change, the absence of a cut throat in the Ellen Bury murder is not useful evidence that William Bury was simply a poor imitator. The absence of a cut throat would also be consistent with his being Jack the Ripper.
Williams further writes that “Bury lived in the house with the body for six days, whereas the Whitechapel murderer walked away from his crimes” (3). While it is true that Bury stayed with the body, the circumstances surrounding his behavior merit a closer look. William Bury strangled his wife, and he mutilated her face, abdomen and genitals around the time of her death. When Bury visited the police station in Dundee in an effort to persuade the police that his wife had committed suicide, Bury mentioned, no doubt in reference to these mutilations, that he feared being apprehended as the Ripper. William Bury and his wife were known, by name, to be living at their Princes Street residence in Dundee. An obvious explanation, then, for why the Ripper didn’t immediately leave the body on this occasion is that he feared that there would have been a massive manhunt for him, this time with the police knowing his name, if he had fled the scene. Since there is a plausible explanation for why the Ripper would have deviated from his previous practice, that Bury remained in the house with the body isn’t useful evidence that he was simply a bad imitator, as his behavior would also be consistent with his being the Ripper and his having a desire to avoid apprehension.
Williams also mentions that in the case of the Ellen Bury murder, “no organs were extracted” (4), and that leads us, next, to one of the most common arguments against Bury being the Ripper, namely, that Ellen Bury’s mutilations paled in comparison to the devastation that was perpetrated upon Mary Kelly’s body in what had been the Ripper’s most recent murder. The Ellen Bury murder was an indoor murder, like that of Kelly, and if Bury really were Jack the Ripper, then he would have produced a set of mutilations similar to those of Kelly, these Ripperologists argue. The research on serial killers, however, tells us that a given signature characteristic, such as mutilation, can be reduced in expression at a given crime scene in connection with the specific circumstances of that murder. Since William Bury was known by name to be living at his Princes Street residence, he could not have mutilated his wife’s body to the same degree as that of Kelly, and left his victim on display for others to see, as was also part of his signature, without revealing to the world that William Bury was Jack the Ripper. The significant reduction in mutilations, then, cannot be viewed as worthwhile evidence that Bury was only a weak imitator. That reduction in mutilations would equally be consistent with his being the Ripper.
Many Ripperologists have expressed the view that Jack the Ripper would not have gone to the police following the murder, as Bury did. Some have even described Bury’s behavior as his “turning himself in,” although of course this is not true, as Bury went to the police station not to confess to his wife’s murder, but to deceive the police. He evidently didn’t like his odds in a manhunt if the police knew exactly who they were looking for, and so he tried to con his way out of his predicament. What we know about serial killers, again, pulls the rug out from beneath this objection to Bury. The serial killer, Edmund Kemper, for example, went to the police following his final murders, and he went much further than Bury did, actually confessing to his crimes. That William Bury went to the police, then, is not meaningful evidence that he was merely an imitator, as it would also be consistent with his being a serial killer.
Another point that the copycat theorists make is that Scotland Yard looked at William Bury and it obviously decided that he wasn’t the Ripper. Robert Anderson, and possibly Donald Swanson, imagined that the Ripper was a Jew. Melville Macnaghten favored Montague Druitt, and Frederick Abberline liked George Chapman as a suspect. But did Scotland Yard really conclude that Bury wasn’t the Ripper? We have two historical sources, James Berry, William Bury’s executioner, and Norman Hastings, a well-known crime reporter, who were both in frequent contact with the police and who both claim to have spoken to Scotland Yard detectives about the Bury investigation. James Berry said that the detectives told him that they had become convinced that William Bury was the Ripper. Norman Hastings said that the detectives told him that Scotland Yard was sharply divided as to whether or not Bury was responsible for the London murders. Apparently, the ground-level detectives who investigated Bury had concluded that he was the killer, while those in higher positions had not. Since there was disagreement within the Yard about Bury, the copycat theorists can’t really argue that it decided against him.
Given how frequently Ripperologists continue to characterize Bury as nothing more than a wife murderer, many readers might be surprised to learn, then, that there is actually no worthwhile evidence that William Bury was a copycat killer.
In contrast to that, we have some good reasons to believe that Bury was indeed Jack the Ripper, behaving differently under different circumstances, and not simply an imitator.
As I demonstrated in The Bury ID, the Ellen Bury murder can be closely mapped to Jack the Ripper’s unique combination of signature characteristics. It matches Jack the Ripper’s signature in subtle ways that we would not expect a copycat to reproduce. For example, the element of incapacitation is present in the Ellen Bury murder, but not in the copycat murder of Alice McKenzie. William Bury positioned Ellen Bury’s legs in a sexually degrading way, but the murderer of Alice McKenzie did not.
In The Bury ID, I showed just how well Bury aligns with the eyewitness descriptions in the case. In the sense that he is a very good fit with these, we can say that William Bury looked like Jack the Ripper. No mere imitator could control his own height, for example.
We also know that William Bury was involved with prostitutes prior to there being any press reports that a serial killer was targeting them. He married a prostitute, and he contracted venereal disease, in all likelihood from a prostitute, in the first half of 1888.
At William Bury’s trial, James Martin, Bury’s former employer, testified that on two occasions, in April and June of 1888, he observed William Bury striking his wife in the face, one incident occurring inside a pub, and one outside one. Brazenly assaulting a woman in a public place was within Bury’s demonstrated range of behavior prior to any public awareness that a serial killer was on the loose.
According to Martin, both of these incidents occurred in Whitechapel. Bury lived in Bromley-by-Bow at the time of the incidents, which was some distance away, but for some reason, he was apparently spending a lot of time drinking in Whitechapel. This suggests that Bury had a special interest in the Whitechapel area before there was any public consciousness that a serial killer was looking for victims there.
Finally, let us return to James Berry and Norman Hastings, the men who claimed to have spoken to Scotland Yard detectives about the Bury investigation. Hastings wrote that Scotland Yard had learned, among other things, that Bury was continually changing his address during the period of the Ripper murders, that it had been able to trace where he was staying at the times of four of the murders, and that in the opinion of those who lived nearby, it was quite possible that Bury committed them. Hastings also reported that when Bury came up for trial, there was a common feeling around the Yard that Bury was the Ripper, and that if he were convicted of and sentenced to death for his wife’s murder, that he would confess to the London murders as well. For his part, James Berry said that one of the detectives who visited Dundee for Bury’s execution told him, “We know all about his movements in the past, and we are quite satisfied that you have hanged ‘Jack the Ripper’” (5). Hastings and Berry both reported hearing much the same thing, and so their accounts corroborate each other. It’s not believable that a mere imitator would have been able to produce a set of movements in advance of the murders that had Scotland Yard detectives convinced that Bury was the Ripper.
Many Ripperologists will, of course, ignore all of this. They will continue to hunt innocent Jews, and they will continue to daydream about someone who’s yet to be named. We’ll continue to see this man, who was actually Jack the Ripper, downplayed or dismissed as a copycat or an imitator in Ripper books and in the Ripper media. So the world turns. But wiser heads within the Ripper community will keep their eyes focused on William Bury.
References
(1) Williams, Paul. “Jack the Ripper: Copycat and Legacy Killings.” The Routledge Handbook of Jack the Ripper Studies. Ed. Anne-Marie Kilday, David Nash and Katherine D. Wilson. New York: Routledge (2026): 128.
(2) Ibid.
(3) Ibid.
(4) Ibid.
(5) “The Life and Strange Experiences of Berry the Hangman.” Thomson’s Weekly News. 12 Feb. 1927: 13.