Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman

Williams should have stalked the lanes and alleyways of Whitechapel seeking out prostitutes to murder and butcher. He suggested obliquely that the collection of prostitutes’ body parts was for the purposes of his research into the causes of infertility. This, he explained, was why the murderer had excised and taken away uteri from Annie Chapman and Catherine Eddowes. But the suggestion that it was for research was, like the madness thesis, a glib explanation, and Tony Williams gave no credible reason as to why his great- great-uncle should have cut out Catherine Eddowes’s left kidney and taken it away. Even if it were so, research could in no way explain the extent of the ferociousness shown in his mistress, Mary Kelly’s, murder, or the reason why he had not removed her uterus from the scene of the crime. It had been cut out of her body, but had then been pushed under her head, where it was found by the doctors who examined her corpse.
    It seemed unlikely to my father and me that a medical professor, a specialist in gynaecology at the pinnacle of his career in one of the most famous teaching hospitals in the world, would have needed to murder prostitutes for their uteri. That such body parts were required for the purposes of Williams’s research is difficult, if not impossible, to comprehend when he would have been provided with an almost inexhaustible supply by the hospital where he worked. If uteri were needed for his research or to implant in his infertile wife as some sort of ground-breaking experiment, it is hard to believe that he would have chosen two middle-aged prostitutes as donors in preference to the young Mary Kelly, whose uterus had been removed from her body, but not taken away from the scene of the crime. His motive for the particularly vicious murder and horrendous mutilation of Kelly has, regrettably, never been properly explained. Tony Williams suggested that Kelly discovered that Dr John Williams was the Ripper, and tried to blackmail him, and so he killed her, but this explanation, when measured against the appalling litany of injuries the young woman sustained, stretched credulity beyond acceptable limits, and was, we thought, implausible.
    We were unable to find any obvious motive that might have turned Dr John Williams into a vicious serial killer. And why murder Mary Kelly at all? There was no apparent reason that would make Dr Williams want to murder his vivacious, fertile young mistress; to sever her throat to the spine, slash her face beyond recognition, hack her body to ribbons, cut off both her breasts, tear out her viscera, remove her reproductive organs and take away her heart. But as we pondered the mystery, we realised that there was someone who might have had every reason to murder the unfortunate young woman and rip her body to pieces: the doctor’s wife, Lizzie Williams. 

CHAPTER 3
     
     
    I t was clear to us that Dr John Williams’s wife, Mary Elizabeth Ann, whom he called ‘Lizzie’, could have murdered Mary Kelly. She was the woman whose felt hat, cotton twill skirt and velvet cape were found burned in the ashes of the fireplace in Mary Kelly’s room; she was the woman whom Caroline Maxwell had seen in the mist dressed in Kelly’s clothes; and she was the woman who turned to face Maxwell at her call, ‘Mary’, and replied to her in a Welsh accent as she was fleeing from the scene of her crime in Miller’s Court.
    Of all the suspects there have been down through the years, only Lizzie Williams possessed all the attributes the murderer would have needed, including, crucially, a motive, to commit murder. And the reason why she was never caught was because she was intelligent and confident, careful and determined, and – even to this day – few have suspected that the murderer was a woman.
    But did Lizzie Williams really murder Mary Kelly? At almost forty years of age and having led a privileged and protected life, was she capable of murder? Would she know how to kill, even supposing that she wanted to? And it was not just the question of who had killed Mary Kelly that my father and I had to consider; four other murders had been committed that autumn, and the world’s best detectives and doctors considered that they had all been murdered by the same hand.
    In 1889, a year after the murders, Sir Melville Macnaghten, Assistant Chief Constable in the Criminal Investigation Department at Scotland Yard, identified Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride,