Kajamba: I didn't feel like cluttering the IC thread, so I'll write it here. I'm more and more of the opinion that McCarthy, as helpful as he acted when the police got there, was mixed up in it horribly. If he wasn't Jack, I bet he knew who it was. First and foremost in my mind is why Mary was allowed to rack up such a large amount of back rent and not be evicted. I wonder if it's really a coincidence that it wasn't McCarthy who was out and about and first found Kelly's body. Also: this is fairly recent I think, so you might not have turned this up: McCarthy owned practically everything in Dorset Street as of 1888. All the victims had connections to Dorset Street - so conceivably they were all known to McCarthy.
Another interesting tidbit was that No. 26, McCarthy's home, and No. 27, his shop, both of which were directly in front of Miller's Court, were owned by another man, McCarthy only leased them. The man who owned the buildings was named M. Barnett. I raised a question on some messageboards about that - is it a coincidence Kelly's boyfriend was Joe Barnett? And that she was killed very soon after kicking him to the curb?
My paper was mostly focusing on the idea of murder as an aesthetic, using Thomas de Quincey's "On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts" (I always maul that title) as a launching point into a quasi-imaginative reading of the Ripper murders, so after a point, my knowledge into the murders gets a bit scattershot (hell, after a point the entire paper got scattershot -- the professor told me that it was "baffling" -- oops). I had encountered the bit about McCarthy owning most of Dorsett Street, but not any of the rest. Now that I'm done with school (at least for the next two or three years), I'm going to try and get a hand on it again, do some of the reading that I never finished from that paper.
