The following month, Bury strangled his wife with a rope, stabbed her dead body with a penknife, and hid the corpse in a box in their room.

Bury killed his wife shortly after the height of the London Whitechapel murders, which were attributed to the unidentified serial killer "Jack the Ripper".

[4] William's eldest sibling, Elizabeth Ann, died at the age of seven during an epileptic seizure on 7 September 1859, which may have contributed to Mary Jane's depression.

[6] William was raised initially in Dudley by his maternal uncle, Edward Henley,[7] and by 1871 he was enrolled at the Blue Coat charity school in Stourbridge.

[11] In 1887, he was making a living as a hawker, selling small items such as pencils and key rings on the streets of Snow Hill, Birmingham.

[13] Ellen was born on 24 October 1856 in Walworth, London, at the Bricklayer's Arms public house run by her father, George Elliot.

[16] In March 1888, Ellen and William left Martin's employ and moved to a furnished room at 3 Swaton Road, Bow, where they lived together until their marriage on Easter Monday, 2 April 1888, at Bromley Parish Church.

[19] Haynes subsequently evicted them, and Ellen sold one of six £100 shares in a railway company that she had inherited from a maiden aunt, Margaret Barren, to pay William's debt to Martin.

[23] In June, Ellen sold the remaining shares,[24] and in August they moved to 3 Spanby Road, adjacent to where William stabled his horse.

[28] In January the following year, he told his landlord at 3 Spanby Road that he was thinking of emigrating to Brisbane, Australia, and asked him to make two wooden crates for the journey.

[34] On Monday 4 February, William bought some rope at the local grocer's shop, and spent the rest of the day observing cases at the Sheriff Court from the public gallery.

[37] That evening, he walked into the Dundee Central Police Station on Bell Street and reported his wife's suicide to Lieutenant James Parr.

"[40] Bury retold his story to Lamb, but omitted the reference to Jack the Ripper, and added that he had stabbed his wife's body once.

[56] According to the executioner James Berry and crime reporter Norman Hastings, Scotland Yard sent two detectives to interview Bury, but there is no surviving record of the visit in the police archive.

[60] After a break for supper, Hay presented the defence case, which was heavily dependent on Dr Lennox's testimony that Ellen had strangled herself.

[62] Lord Young asked the jury why they recommended mercy, and one of them replied that the medical evidence was contradictory, referring to Lennox's testimony.

On 1 April, Bury's solicitor, David Tweedie, petitioned the Secretary of State for Scotland, Lord Lothian, for clemency.

Tweedie argued that the sentence should be commuted to life imprisonment on the grounds of the conflicting medical evidence and the jury's initial reservations.

[65] A clergyman whom Bury had befriended, Edward John Gough, minister of St Paul's Episcopalian Church in Dundee, also wrote to Lothian asking for a reprieve.

[66] The Secretary of State refused to intervene in the normal course of the law,[67] and Bury was hanged on 24 April by executioner James Berry.

[71] William claimed that he had strangled Ellen without premeditation on the night of 4 February 1889 during a drunken row over money, and that he had tried to dismember the body for disposal the next day but was too squeamish to continue.

The latter part of this confession does not match the expert testimony of the physicians, who said that the incisions were made "within at most ten minutes of the time of death" rather than the next day.

[73] Traditionally, five murders (known as the "canonical five") are attributed to the notorious serial killer "Jack the Ripper", who terrorised Whitechapel in the East End of London between August and November 1888.

Authorities are not agreed on the exact number of the Ripper's victims, and at least eleven Whitechapel murders between April 1888 and February 1891 were included in the same extensive police investigation.

[76] The Dundee Advertiser of 12 February claimed that the Burys' "neighbours were startled and alarmed at the idea that one whom in their terror they associated with the Whitechapel tragedies had been living in their midst.

[89] Bury was persistently violent to his wife, threatened her with a knife, and cut open her abdomen after death in a manner not dissimilar to the Whitechapel murderer.

[90] In a conversation with her neighbours, Marjory Smith, who ran the shop above the Burys' Prince's Street flat in Dundee, asked them "What sort of work was this you Whitechapel folk have been about, letting Jack the Ripper kill so many people?