Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman

Kelly moved to Wales with her family when she was very young. While she lived in Wales, the young Mary learned her new tongue and adopted the accent of her childhood friends. She later lived with a cousin in Cardiff before moving to London in 1884 with her young son. She was just twenty-one.
    Four years later, Mary Kelly was killed in her tiny rented room during the early hours of a cold November morning on the day of the Lord Mayor’s Show. She was more horrendously disfigured than any of the previous victims, and her death posed the most important question of all.
    After that murder, Mrs. Caroline Maxwell, a housewife, gave a written statement to the police, and later also swore on oath at Kelly’s inquest, that she had both seen the victim and carried on a conversation with her at the entrance to Miller’s Court where Mary Kelly had lived. But this had happened, Mrs Maxwell insisted, several hours after it has been conclusively established that Kelly was dead. How was this possible?
    A more general question was why the murderer appeared to have no sexual interest in any of the victims? None of them had been raped, or sexually interfered with, or had their undergarments removed – save for the purpose of cutting up their bodies. And all of them, with the exception of Mary Kelly, appeared to have voluntarily lain down, as though they were expected to perform the sexual act.
    Was it significant that the first four murders took place within the relatively short time-frame of thirty days, while the fifth and last killing took place more than five weeks after the fourth murder? Was there some reason for this delay, and, if so, what might it have been?
    What was the catalyst for the murders? What momentous event or series of events could have turned someone into a brutal, serial killer – carrying out horrific murders, almost beyond comprehension , even by the standards of Ed Gein, on whose character Alfred Hitchcock’s Norman Bates and Tom Harris’s Buffalo Bill were both based? Edward Theodore Gein, born in 1906, a serial killer from Plainfield, Wisconsin, whose gruesome death toll is unknown, adopted the practice of murdering his victims, then fashioning household items from their skin, bones and body parts. Convicted of murder in the first degree, Gein was found legally insane and committed to a mental hospital, where he remained until his death in 1984.
    Why did the murders end with the inconceivably savage disfigurement of Mary Kelly? Had the murderer finally achieved his purpose, and if so, what was that purpose?  
    And finally, the most elusive question of all: why was the murderer never caught?  
    None of these questions has ever been answered satisfactorily.  
    Philip Sugden’s The Complete History of Jack the Ripper (2002), a meticulously researched almanac, provides information on almost everything that anyone could wish to know about the Whitechapel murders – except the answers to the questions who and why? But while Sugden did not actually provide the answers I was looking for, at least he succeeded unwittingly in pointing me in the right direction.  
    I had expected Patricia Cornwell’s book Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper Case Closed (2002) to provide the conclusive evidence for which I was searching. But, regrettably, this book also failed to live up to expectations. Despite the thorough and deep research that Cornwell had undertaken, I was disappointed that her proposed suspect, Walter Richard Sickert (1860-1942), the German-born English impressionist painter, was supported by so little, if any, concrete evidence. Her ‘proof’ seemed to consist of several of Sickert’s drawings, pictures, canvases and a number of anonymous and denigrating letters sent to the police which Sickert may or may not have written. The ‘Dear Boss’ letter, delivered to Scotland Yard almost three weeks after the murder of the second victim, Annie Chapman, which Cornwell claimed Sickert had written, was an important pillar of the writer’s case and it was that letter which gave birth to the infamous sobriquet Jack the Ripper. Sir Robert Anderson, Assistant Commissioner of the Criminal Investigation Department, Scotland Yard, declared in Criminals and Crime (1907) that “the letters were the work of an enterprising journalist”, but was unable to provide the evidence needed to substantiate his claim. It was not until well over one hundred years later that his theory was confirmed, by Dr Andrew Cook,