Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman

with her baby. At about 4 o’clock in the afternoon, the neighbours heard shouting and loud screams. That evening, Hogg’s corpse was found on a rubbish heap in Hampstead, bearing the marks of a vicious assault. Her skull had been smashed and her throat cut so savagely that her head was almost severed from her body. It was eerily reminiscent of the assault on Catherine Eddowes, the Mitre Square victim, whose throat had also been slashed to the spine. A mile away from Mary Pearcey’s home, a baby’s pram was found abandoned, its cushions wet with blood. The body of Hogg’s eighteen -month-old baby was later found dead at a house in Finchley. She appeared to have been smothered.
    A blood-stained carving knife and a poker were found at Mary Pearcey’s home; blood spatters in one of the rooms suggested that the murder had taken place there, and the body removed to the Hampstead rubbish heap some time afterwards. If Pearcey had been responsible for the Whitechapel murders, this latest killing in Hampstead would have represented a sharp change in the murderer’s modus operandi since all the previous victims had been slaughtered where their bodies were discovered. Furthermore, Hogg’s body showed no sign of mutilation – a complete contrast to four of the Whitechapel murder victims.
    Mary Pearcey was charged with Phoebe Hogg’s murder, and, despite her protestations of innocence, she was found guilty and hanged at Newgate prison on 23 December 1890. She was just 24 years old.
    While it seems unlikely that Pearcey was responsible for the Whitechapel murders, the idea that they might have been committed by a woman was at least seriously considered by detectives from Scotland Yard in late 1890.
    Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the fictional private detective Sherlock Holmes, also expressed his opinion that the murderer might have disguised himself as a woman, both to avoid capture and to allow him to meet with women without arousing their suspicions . Sir Arthur also thought that the murderer might have been a midwife.
    Ten days after the murder of Annie Chapman, the Rev. Lord Sydney Godolphin Osborne, a perceptive and regular contributor to The Times who used the acronym S.G.O., wrote in the newspaper ’s letter columns that he thought he could detect the hand of a woman in the murders. The analogy he drew appeared to suggest that jealousy between two women living together (perhaps in a lesbian relationship, though Osborne was unclear on the point) had led to violence, and therefore jealousy might have been the motive for the murders. It was Osborne’s belief “that one or both of these Whitechapel murders [Mary Ann Nichols and Annie Chapman] may have been committed by female hands” ( The Times , 18 September 1888). This premise was almost explored further in Tom Cullen’s Autumn of Terror: Jack the Ripper, His Crimes and Times (1965).
    Joseph Barnett, Mary Kelly’s former lover, hinted in his statement to the police that Kelly was a lesbian. He had enjoyed an 18-month relationship with Mary Kelly which ended ten days before her murder. He implied that Kelly was involved in a sexual relationship with Maria Harvey, a laundress, who lived in nearby New Court off Dorset Street. Earlier that week, on the nights of 4 and 5 November, Harvey had stayed with Kelly in her room. They had also spent the afternoon on the day before the murder in each other’s company. Harvey left Kelly that evening when Barnett arrived, and even though Harvey knew that Barnett could be troublesome, she told the police in her statement that she was unconcerned about leaving the two of them alone together, and she departed.
    Many think that it should have been Tom Cullen’s proposition that Harvey returned to Miller’s Court early the following morning, and murdered Kelly in a fit of jealous rage. But Cullen veered away from the idea and proposed instead Montague Druitt, a failed barrister, who committed suicide a month after the murder of Mary Kelly; Inspector Abberline cleared him as a murder suspect, later describing it as ‘another idle story’. It was a missed opportunity to consider a woman as a suspect for the crime, and there was even a plausible motive. However, there was not a single shred of evidence connecting Maria Harvey with Mary Kelly’s death, or for that matter, the four previous killings, and Abberline never considered Harvey as a suspect.
    On 29 September, exactly three weeks after the murder of Annie Chapman,