Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman

have to rely for her financial support on a man who no longer cherished her because she was incapable of giving him the child he wanted. But he was in a relationship with a woman who could bear him an heir – a captivating, fertile, Irish girl who spoke with a Welsh accent and lived in Whitechapel: Mary Kelly.
    My father and I had little doubt that, up to this point, Lizzie Williams would have tolerated her husband’s sexual flings, albeit reluctantly. But in her distressed emotional state, her fears – however ill-founded – that her husband might father a child by another woman, and finally, the unexpected and shattering loss of her inheritance was the final straw, and this, we believe, was the catalyst that drove Lizzie Williams to commit murder.
    If there was to be any hope of saving her marriage and keeping her husband, Mary Kelly had to be removed from Dr Williams’s life, both as the woman he desired, and as the potential mother of his child: and it was in the autumn of that same year that the Ripper murders began.
     
    Lizzie Williams’s motive for murdering Mary Kelly we could understand, if not at that point the reason for the extent of the horrendous injuries she had inflicted on her victim’s dead body. We were sure that our research would enable us to discover why she had acted as she did, but now we had to find out why she had previously murdered four other women. If we were right in our assumption, there had to be a motive for each of the murders, and my father and I were determined to find out what they were.
    We were convinced that the answers to at least some of our questions were hidden in the mountain of books, documents and papers that we had accumulated in the course of our research. There were copies of witness statements, maps and plans with crosses marked on them; copies of medical reports, some with marginal notes; transcripts of inquests; copies of police reports and records; reference books; newspaper articles and cuttings. Altogether, we had acquired many hundreds of documents, all now to be read, re-read, analysed, discussed, compared and cross referenced ; contents memorised and anomalies noted, and, where necessary, further thorough research to be undertaken. It was hard to know where to start. With Mary Ann Nichols seemed to be the obvious answer, but we already knew that she was not the first prostitute to have been murdered in Whitechapel that year.
    On Easter Monday, 3 April, Emma Smith, a forty-five-year-old widow who supported herself by prostitution, was attacked by three or four men in Osborn Street, just off the Whitechapel Road. She was raped, beaten, and had a blunt object, perhaps a stick, pushed into her private parts. She managed to get herself back to her lodgings at 18 George Street, and the assistant manageress, Mary Russell, and a lodger, Annie Lee, took her to the London Hospital on the Whitechapel Road. There, she described her attackers to George Haslip, the house surgeon who attended upon her, before slipping into a coma from which she never recovered. She died four days later. Following an intensive but brief murder investigation, during which her murderers were never found, the hunt was called off.
    On Bank Holiday Monday, 7 August, the body of another prostitute , Martha Tabram, thirty-nine years old, was discovered lying in a pool of blood in George Yard buildings, in Wentworth Street, just north of Whitechapel High Street, close to where Emma Smith had been attacked. Her arms and hands were close by her sides, her fingers tightly clenched, and her legs were open in a manner that suggested that sexual intercourse had taken place. Martha Tabram had sustained multiple stab wounds. According to Dr Timothy Killeen, who examined her, she had no less than 39 injuries – one wound for every year of her life. Whether this was deliberate or a macabre coincidence has never been established. Following two unsuccessful identity parades, the murder investigation ground to a halt within a month; her murderer was never found.
    What these two cases unequivocally demonstrated was that, to a certain upper-middle-class, middle-aged woman, with more than just a passing interest in crime, it might have appeared that during the latter years of the nineteenth century, neither Scotland Yard, nor the London Metropolitan Police Force were capable of detecting a murderer who did not wish to be caught. It was the dawn of forensic science, and there was so much to learn about so