Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman

notoriety was that he was never caught.
    There was great conjecture about the murderer’s identity; was he a doctor, a lawyer, or even a member of the Royal Family? Some of those whose enthralling discussions I absorbed so readily had been young themselves in 1888. The impact that the events of that year made on them must have been immense, because more than 70 years afterwards, they were still talking about the murders.
    So it has been for me too. From my early introduction to the present day, I have theorised endlessly about the murderer’s identity and possible motives for the terrible crimes. I devoured anything and everything on the subject, from books, newspaper and magazine articles, to cinema, television and radio programmes. Cuttings about the ‘latest discovery’ are crammed inside the covers of more than fifty books about the Ripper on my bookshelves.
    Four authors in particular have influenced my views on the Whitechapel murders. Stephen Knight, in his best-selling book Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution (1976), declared that he had solved the mystery once and for all. The Manchester Evening News review of the book asserted that Knight had “tied up so many loose ends”. Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence, a grandson of Queen Victoria, had married a Catholic in a secret ceremony and she had given birth to his child, Knight claimed. When the Establishment found out about the affair, the young woman was abducted and disappeared following a police raid, and her friends, five prostitutes from Whitechapel, then tried to blackmail the Royal Family. Sir William Gull, the Queen’s surgeon, had taken it upon himself to solve the problem. As a high-ranking Freemason, he set about his task in what was alleged to be true Masonic style; tracking down each of the conspirators, then cutting their throats and disembowelling them. The bodies of one of the victims was discovered in Mitre Square, which, Knight maintained, held great symbolic significance for Freemasons, while another had her intestines thrown over her shoulder, as further evidence of Masonic ritual and involvement.
    For a while, this hypothesis satisfied me and I convinced myself that the case had been solved at last, but it troubled me at the same time. Though I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, something was wrong, including the question of which shoulder was demanded by Masonic ceremony, and all the loose ends had most definitely not been tied up.
    The Whitechapel murders raise many questions, most of which have never been satisfactorily answered or explained. Why was the throat of the first victim, Polly Nichols, cut twice – when she was already dead? She had been suffocated or strangled – as evidenced by the dark blue colour of her tongue according to the medical report of Dr Rees Ralph Llewellyn, the police surgeon who performed the post mortem.
    Why, when the second victim, Annie Chapman, was murdered, was the pocket of her apron almost torn off? For what reason were a number of personal items arranged neatly by her feet? Why, and for what reason, was Chapman’s uterus ripped out of her body and taken away by the murderer?
    When Elizabeth Stride’s body was discovered, lying inside an open gateway in Berner Street, only her throat had been cut and nothing more. Why just a cut throat when, up to that point, the injuries inflicted on the two previous victims had been getting worse in their severity?
    When Catherine Eddowes’s mutilated body was found in a dark corner of Mitre Square, why was the inverted letter ‘V’ carved into each of her cheeks and what did it mean? Why were her nose, ears, lips and eyelids slashed? And why had her uterus and left kidney been cut out of her body and removed from the scene of the crime?
    What was the meaning of the cryptic message inscribed on the black brick door surround at the Wentworth model apartments in Goulston Street?
    The Juwes are
The men That
             Will not
be Blamed
       for nothing
     
    Were they written in the murderer’s own hand? And did the murderer deposit a bloodied part of Catherine Eddowes’s apron on the ground in the doorway, to draw attention to the strange message, as has been supposed, or might there be an entirely different explanation for both the writing and the severed part of the soiled apron?
    Mary Jane Kelly, a young, pretty Irish girl, was the murderer’s fifth and final victim. Said to have been born in Limerick in Ireland, Mary