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In 2015 it was widely reported that Dr Wynne Weston-Davies wanted to extract DNA from the remains of Mary Jane Kelly, the last canonical victim of Jack the Ripper.
He wanted to do this because his family history research had led him to believe that Mary Jane Kelly was actually his great aunt Elizabeth Weston-Davies, and therefore Jack the Ripper could have been her ex-husband, Francis Spurzheim Craig.
Patricia Cornwell the internationally renowned crime writer, who is known her meticulous research, contacted me to find out whether or not it would be even possible for a project such as this to go ahead and paid for desk-based study.
However, what’s crucial for a case such as this, is that we have to know that the remains that we’re looking at are actually those of Mary Jane Kelly. So, we carried out research to determine the likelihood of finding her remains.
Mary Jane Kelly was buried here in St Patrick's Catholic Cemetery in November 1888. She was buried in a communal grave on top of five other burials. We know in the 1940’s the land was reclaimed, any grave markers removed and a new burial system laid over the top of the old one but with no information about how they related to one another. So we simply don't know the precise location of Mary Jane Kelly’s grave.
In order to carry out this project we would have to disturb the remains of potentially hundreds of individuals, all of whose relatives would have to give consent for the project to go ahead and the Ministry of Justice would be highly unlikely to grant a license for the excavation.
Secondly, we know of exhumations of remains, from as recently as the 1950’s, show that the graves are heavily waterlogged and remains are in very poor condition, which would affect the retrieval of any usable DNA for a project of this nature.
Given the quality of the research question and extremely unlikely chance of success we felt that breaking ground on this project simply wasn't justifiable.
Since this time, independent researchers, Pat Marshall and Chris Philips have found documentary evidence proving Elizabeth Weston-Davies died in Wales, in 1929, thereby bringing this case to a close.
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