Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman

annals of crime, the incidence of females using knives in attacks is highly unusual, and the number of females who are driven to murder and mutilate their victims is rarer still. But they are not unheard of and there are in fact, several modern parallels with the Whitechapel murders.
    In 2004 a gruesome news report rocked the United States and shocked the rest of the civilised world. The murdered body of a young woman had been discovered in her own home. She was identified as 28-year-old Bobbie Jo Stinnett from Kansas City, and she was eight months’ pregnant at the time of her death. She had been strangled, her stomach cut open and her unborn baby ripped out of her womb. The baby survived and was presented to family and friends as the murderer’s own child. What made the crime all the more appalling was that the convicted killer, 36-year-old Lisa Montgomery, was a woman.
    On 10 October 2011 another American, Annette Morales-Rodriguez from Wisconsin, was charged with the murder of a pregnant woman. Desperate to have a baby son with her new boyfriend, she invited heavily pregnant Martiza Ramirez-Cruz into her home. There Morales-Rodriguez battered her with a baseball bat before strangling her to death. She then used a knife to cut open her victim’s abdomen, and removed the foetus in an attempt to replicate a Caesarean operation she had seen on the Discovery Channel. At least five other similar cases of attacks on pregnant women in America have been reported.
    In March 2005, two sisters, Linda and Charlotte Mulhall, dubbed the ‘Scissor Sisters’, aged 30 and 32 years respectively, made headline news across Ireland when they demonstrated graphically that women murderers could be as vicious as their male counterparts. They had attacked and killed their mother, Kathleen’s, abusive lover, Farah Swaleh Noor, a Kenyan immigrant and known violent criminal, after he had made repeated sexual advances to Linda in her central Dublin terraced home. Mr Justice Carney, who presided at the sisters’ subsequent trial, made a chilling remark during sentencing when he said: “It was the most grotesque killing that has occurred in my professional lifetime.”
    In the evidence, it was revealed that, encouraged by their mother, Charlotte Mulhall had slit Noor’s throat with a Stanley knife – significantly she cut it twice – while her sister delivered several blows to his skull with a hammer. He was then stabbed repeatedly. But it was what the sisters did to Noor’s corpse that earned them notoriety. In order to dispose of their victim, they dragged Noor’s lifeless body to the bathroom where they dismembered it using a bread knife and a hammer. Over a period of several hours, the victim’s head, limbs and penis were severed; a towel was used to soak up the blood. The sisters then put the body parts into plastic bags. Some were dumped in Dublin’s Royal Canal, where a leg still wearing a sock surfaced ten days later. The bag containing the head was buried in a local park; then, at a later date, it was recovered and taken to a field where Linda Mulhall smashed the head to pieces with a hammer and allegedly buried the remains. Neither the murdered man’s head nor penis have been found.
    Charlotte Mulhall received a mandatory life sentence for murder. Linda Mulhall was given a fifteen-year sentence for manslaughter . Kathleen Mulhall, who initially fled to England, was later captured and brought back to Ireland. She received a five-year sentence for helping to clean the scene of the crime. Her daughters refused to testify against her in court.
     
    In what he saw as an established fact or truth of nature, Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) demonstrated in his poem, ‘The Female of the Species’, penned in 1911, that it is the female , rather than the male, who has the greater propensity to commit violence. Two verses in particular convey this point most effectively:
    When the Himalayan peasant meets the he-bear in his pride,
He shouts to scare the monster, who will often turn aside.
But the she-bear thus accosted rends the peasant tooth and nail.
For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.
     
    When the early Jesuit fathers preached to Hurons and Choctaws,
They prayed to be delivered from the vengeance of the squaws.
’Twas the women, not the warriors, turned those stark enthusiasts pale.
For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.
     
    Having established that women are capable of committing the