Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman

1866, and in 1867 he qualified as a doctor (M.D., London). At University College Hospital, he made several friends among his student colleagues, one of whom, Markus Beck, was the nephew of Joseph Lister, pioneer of antiseptic which he used to prevent death from infected wounds and injuries. By early recognition and adoption of Lister’s discovery, this later helped Dr Williams to become an outstanding surgeon. His work was unpaid at this time, so lack of money, rather than ability, forced him to return to Swansea, where he practised for five years as a local GP.
    During the time he worked in Swansea, Williams had the good fortune to meet Mary Elizabeth Ann Hughes, who was then quite young. She was the daughter of Richard Hughes, a wealthy businessman and tinplate factory owner. On 3 April 1872, the couple married in Libanus Chapel in the industrial town of Morriston, three miles to the north-east of Swansea. Following the wedding, they enjoyed a short working honeymoon abroad, which allowed Dr Williams to visit a number of hospitals and make acquaintances within the European medical profession. Markus Beck, incidentally, was to have been Williams’s best man at the wedding, but he missed the ceremony when he overslept on the train, although he arrived at the family mansion in the small village of Ynystawe, just north of Morriston, in time for the reception. On 23 July in that same year, and with his father-in-law’s generous financial assistance, the couple moved to London, where Williams pursued an extremely successful career in medicine.
    Not only did Dr Williams work at University College Hospital, but at the Westminster General Lying-in Hospital in Lambeth, London, where Joseph Lister was both President and consulting surgeon. In 1880, Dr John Williams was appointed Physician Accoucheur, along with Dr Francis Champneys, and they were the first to practice antiseptic midwifery in Britain. He also worked at the Royal Waterloo Hospital for Women and Children near Waterloo Station in London, and the Whitechapel Workhouse Infirmary in London’s East End.
    Williams became as well known for his skill as a surgeon as for the care he took of his patients, whether rich or poor, whom he is said to have treated alike. He was once described by a fellow practitioner from France as “un opérateur sûr de sa main”. The literal translation of which is: a surgeon who knows his job.
    Tony Williams produced records to show that Dr John Williams had attended two of the subsequent murder victims in the Whitechapel Workhouse Infirmary where he practiced on an irregular and voluntary basis. He had performed an abortion on a Mary Ann Nichols, the first murder victim, in 1885, and he had treated Catherine Eddowes, the fourth victim, for Bright’s Disease, a chronic inflammation of the kidneys in 1887. Therefore his connection with at least two of the Ripper victims was, according to Tony Williams, well established. He might also have known a third, Mary Kelly, the fifth and final victim.
    Rumour within the Williams family had it that Sir John was something of a ladies’ man, and had indulged in numerous affairs during the course of his marriage. One of these relationships involved a girl called Mary. It is Tony Williams’s suggestion that in 1881 Dr Williams met the youthful, pretty Irish girl, Mary Kelly, when he had visited the Cardiff Infirmary where she was receiving treatment as an in-patient. She was the mother of a young child and had recently become widowed when her husband Jonathan Davies (or Davis) was killed in a mining accident, Williams maintained. He allegedly died in an explosion at Cwmparc Colliery, near Treorchy in the Rhondda Valley, which also claimed the lives of three other miners. Williams met Mary Kelly again when she moved up to London in 1884; they became lovers, conducted a torrid affair and even went to France together.
    A report appearing in the Daily News of 10 November 1888, the day after the murder, stated that an unnamed girl, who had known Mary Kelly for two years before her murder said, “Kelly was a Welsh woman, and could speak Welsh fluently”. But though Mary Kelly had lived in Wales, and all the available evidence suggests that she had lived in South Wales, she was in fact originally from Limerick in Ireland.
    While Tony Williams unwillingly attributed Mary Kelly’s brutal murder, and all four earlier murders, to his illustrious ancestor, he was vague as to the reasons why Dr John