Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman

it is certain that she could not have seen her clearly, so perhaps her face looked ‘different’. Mary Kelly’s clothes would persuade Maxwell that she was talking with her. Lizzie Williams’s Welsh accent would have completed that illusion.
    There was something else that persuaded my father and me that we were right in our deduction. At the inquest into Mary Kelly’s death, Caroline Maxwell’s sworn testimony was that when she called across the street to the person she believed to be Mary Kelly, she addressed her by her first name. ‘What, Mary, brings you up so early?’ Lizzie Williams’s first name was also Mary – she had been christened Mary Elizabeth Ann, and that was why she had responded instinctively to Caroline Maxwell’s call.
    After each of the murders, the killer would wish to avoid capture: to disappear by some means, blend into the passing crowds and walk unnoticed through tight police cordons. Inspector Frederick Abberline had issued specific orders to police patrolling Whitechapel that they should “observe every man carefully”, and “men and women out together were to be watched too, in case the woman might be protecting the man”. A woman on her own would have been ignored by the police hunting for the murderer. Perhaps Lizzie Williams had adopted the guise of a midwife. It would have been well within her acting abilities and, after each murder when the hue and cry was raised and the police were frantically searching for a man, the murderer would seem to have vanished into thin air, while remaining in plain sight all the time.
    Our proposition is this: Dr John Williams desperately wanted a child, but his wife was infertile and unable to conceive. Mary Kelly, on the other hand, was youthful, good-looking and, most importantly , fertile. Williams and Kelly were having an affair and his wife had somehow found out. She might have turned a blind eye to the relationship; after all, Tony Williams suggested that Dr Williams had enjoyed many affairs during the marriage. But Lizzie was becoming increasingly fragile emotionally, and deeply distressed by her infertility. She might have feared that her husband would father a child by Mary Kelly, and this her pride would not allow. So she plotted to murder her; it was an act of revenge committed out of that oldest of emotions, jealousy; the “green-ey’d monster” of Shakespeare’s Othello , and close cousin of envy, the sixth of the Seven Deadly Sins.
    All this was straightforward, except for the unanswered questions, such as what was the catalyst that compelled the jealous wife to kill Mary Kelly, and why had she inflicted such terrible wounds upon the unfortunate young woman? Why had she murdered and mutilated Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman and Catherine Eddowes, and why too had she murdered Elizabeth Stride? She might merely have resigned herself to her unhappy situation; after all, her family money would have given her all the comforts and security she needed.
    These were some of the more obvious questions; there were at least a dozen others, and we wanted to find the answers to them all. So we decided to re-examine the crimes, to see what evidence we might find to support our theory that the Whitechapel murders were committed not just by a woman, but by the wife of a world-renowned medical specialist, a professor and a physician to Royalty.
    First, we would have to look again into the backgrounds of John and Lizzie Williams, and this time even more thoroughly. Now, we conducted our research on the assumption that Lizzie Williams would one day be driven to commit murder. We wondered if perhaps we might find a clue somewhere in her past that would unlock the mystery, and provide us with an explanation as to why a respectable upper-middle-class, middle-aged Victorian housewife might have turned into a brutal serial killer.
     
    It was probably the winning combination of driving ambition, ruthless determination and exceptional good fortune that, by the mid-1850s, had made Richard Hughes, a maltster (beer-maker) from Llanbrynmair in the old Welsh county of Montgomeryshire (now part of Powys), one of the richest men in the country; by today’s standards he would have been a multi-millionaire. Hughes, one of eight children of farming stock, was born on 12 February 1817. At the height of his success he lived with his family and their four servants in a large imposing mansion, a few miles north of Swansea, just off the Brecon road near the