The purpose of this website is not to glorify or rehabilitate a convicted murderer. Rather, it is to provide information and opinion about a man who can be linked to the Jack the Ripper murders.
William Henry Bury was born in 1859. On April 2, 1888, he married Ellen Elliott. The couple lived in the East End of London throughout the period of the Jack the Ripper murders. In January, 1889, William and Ellen Bury moved to Dundee, Scotland. William Bury forged an offer of employment from a company in Dundee to persuade Ellen to move with him. On one day early in February, 1889, William Bury murdered his wife, possibly in connection with a domestic dispute. He was convicted of her murder on March 28, 1889 and was executed by hanging on April 24, 1889.
William Bury can be linked to the Jack the Ripper murders through signature analysis, which is a modern crime scene assessment technique that is used in investigations of serial homicide. There is signature evidence placing William Bury at the Martha Tabram, Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly crime scenes. In addition, there are supporting pieces of circumstantial evidence that help to confirm that Bury was indeed the Whitechapel murderer.
In 2018, two well-regarded Scottish legal figures, Mark Stewart, a Queen’s Counsel, and Len Murray, a former solicitor for the Supreme Courts of Scotland, both indicated that there is now enough evidence to convict William Bury of the Jack the Ripper murders (“Beyond Doubt,” Dundee Courier, Sep. 22, 2018). While no one can be certain of the outcome of any fair trial, the fact that we now seem to be in a position to convict one of the suspects in the case is obviously a momentous development for the field of Ripperology.
“When a major serial killer case is finally solved and all the paperwork completed, police are sometimes amazed at how obvious the killer was and how they were unable to see what was right before their noses.” —Robert D. Keppel and William J. Birnes, The Psychology of Serial Killer Investigations
[updated January 27, 2024]