The Law Killers by Alexander McGregor Page B

money then killed her in a rage; a one-off domestic murderer. If, indeed, he had been the same man who had such a pathological and lethal interest in prostitutes, would he not also have confessed to their murders when he knew his last day was nigh, just as he had unburdened himself about Ellen?
    Maybe. But there is no escaping that a strong circumstantial case can just as easily be made to indict him. Why, for example, did he so dramatically set sail from London with his belongings to start a new life in a city hundreds of miles away where he had never previously set foot? If there was no particular reason to take him to Dundee, a fair conclusion is that he was fleeing London and wished to put many miles between his past there and his new future. But what was he fleeing from? A string of unsolved murders?
    Bury was certainly familiar with the activities of the whores of Whitechapel, the chosen victims of the Ripper, and had even married a woman who had worked as a brothel maid. He was clearly a man of violence, who slept with a knife under his pillow and who savagely ripped his wife apart to such an extent that her bowels protruded. He had, too, trained as a horse butcher. The slight figure could also be calm and methodical, a plotter who could forge a business letter to help induce his wife to abandon her friends and relatives in her native city. While the attack on the unfortunate Ellen was frenzied and brutal, it might not have been as spontaneous as it appeared. Some hours earlier, in complete sobriety, did he not visit the Police Court in Dundee and intently follow proceedings, then a short time later go on to coolly purchase the cord which he used to strangle his victim? The foul deed committed, he behaved perfectly normally for almost a week, even using the impromptu coffin he had fashioned to play dominoes on. When he finally went to the police with his strange story of how his bride of less than a year had met her death, one of the first things he said was that he was afraid he might be mistaken for Jack the Ripper, just as a few hours earlier, during his visits to pub acquaintance David Walker, the Ripper had been a topic of conversation.
    Bury may have been religiously devout, attending church within days of settling in the city and spending much of his last days on earth reading the Bible. Yet he did not recoil from packing the mutilated corpse of his wife into a makeshift coffin which also contained the New Testament, and prayer and hymn books. His religious zeal might even have formed an integral part of the split personality he so frequently revealed.
    What of all the jewellery he carried in his pockets when he called at police headquarters? It was identified as having belonged to the tragic Ellen Bury, purchased even before she had first met the man who would so horribly end her life. But might some of it, such as the two rings Bury wore on the little fingers of each hand, not have once belonged to the women who had been the victims of Jack the Ripper? In the same way as some of the serial killers who have followed in the century since the London atrocities, did Bury collect his ‘trophies’ and treasure them?
    There can be no disputing the strong similarities in how Ellen and the Whitechapel victims – some, or all, of whom might have been known to her – came to end their days. Just like those who met their fate in the back alleys of the East End, Ellen was first strangled then mutilated with a knife, though the ‘surgical’ skills might have been better in London. The diminutive man, whose own life ended with a rope round his neck, may have had what he considered a compelling reason for throttling his wife. If Ellen had known or suspected that the man she so quickly became infatuated with was indeed the Ripper, and had colluded with him to flee London for a fresh start hundreds of miles away, might she not also have threatened to expose him after some argument? In that scenario, Bury’s premeditation