Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman

most terrible acts of murder and maiming, even though they may have never previously committed an act of violence, then using cleverness and cunning to try to avoid detection, my father and I thought it was at least possible that a woman could have been responsible for the Whitechapel murders. The remnants of women’s clothing found in the ashes of Mary Kelly’s fireplace, and the firm, consistent testimony given by Mrs Caroline Maxwell, both to the police in her written statement, and to Dr Roderick McDonald J.P., the coroner who presided over the inquest into Kelly’s death, merely confirmed to us that her murderer must have been a woman.
    Mrs Caroline Maxwell was a respectable married woman, the wife of an assistant lodging-house keeper in Dorset Street, Whitechapel. Despite the caution issued to her by the coroner during the inquest at the Shoreditch Town Hall, “You must be careful about your evidence, because it is different to other people’s,” Maxwell steadfastly maintained that she had told the truth. Walter Dew described her in his memoirs half a century later as “a sane and sensible woman”, adding that “her reputation was excellent”. But Caroline Maxwell’s evidence was not the starting point of our research.
    The list of Ripper suspects is not endless, but it is long. We found ourselves wading through the minutiae of a motley collection of rogues. One of the more popular contemporary suspects was Montague Druitt, the barrister who drowned himself three weeks after the last murder, thereby drawing suspicion to himself as a suspect; Abberline later dismissed him as such. Another suspect was George Chapman – no relation to Annie Chapman – who poisoned three of his wives; however, he was never known to have used a knife (although he had once threatened his wife with one). Then there was Francis Tumblety, a quack ‘doctor’ who collected uteri and kept them in specimen jars; Mary Kelly’s uterus, though cut out of her body, was not removed from the crime scene. Dr Thomas Neill Cream, another poisoner who secretly performed unlawful abortions but was supposedly in prison in the United States on the dates when the crimes were committed, was also an official suspect, and there are perhaps a dozen others, all of whom were, in our opinion, equally unlikely to have committed the murders.
    More recent theories have identified a similar number of candidates , including Sir William Gull, the suspect named by Stephen Knight, but much of Knight’s work was later discredited when Walter Sickert’s son, Joseph, who was then an old man himself, retracted his story which formed the basis of Knight’s tale, and admitted that it was a hoax. Patricia Cornwell also accused the twisted but unlikely artist Walter Sickert. Other popular suspects are Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence, ‘Eddy,’ a grandson of Queen Victoria, who had an alibi for each of the nights when the murders were committed, and Sir John Williams, the sacrificial lamb offered by his great-great-nephew, author Tony Williams.
    However, the one important element missing in every case was that none of the suspects had a motive for committing the murders. We could find nothing in their backgrounds that would drive any of them to carry out such terrible, vicious crimes. None of the suspects had even the slightest connection with any of the victims – except one.
    But after all the research my father had undertaken into this most distinguished of Welshmen, we thought – no, we knew – that Sir John Williams could not possibly have been involved in any of the murders.
     
    John Williams was born on 6 November 1840, the son of a farmer and part-time Methodist minister who died of typhoid fever when John was just two years old. His mother recognised her son’s potential and intellect at an early age and struggled to provide him with a good education. Young John attended school in Swansea, before going on to Glasgow University aged sixteen, where he studied mathematics for a year. His natural aptitude for the sciences took him to University College Hospital in London where he studied medicine for six years, working at both the Brompton Hospital for Consumption (tuberculosis) and the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children. He was, by all accounts, a brilliant student, studying under William Jenner for one, who was credited with the invention of the smallpox vaccine.
    He completed his medical course (M.R.C.S, and M.B., London) in