Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman

Highgate; moved to plain clothes in 1867 with orders to investigate Fenian activity, for which he was commended; promoted to inspector in 1873 and transferred to Whitechapel where he remained for fourteen years, ten of them as inspector; promoted to Scotland Yard in December 1887 and promoted again to Inspector First Class. He was quiet, unassuming, methodical and patient, a skilled amateur watchmaker in his spare time, and the ideal choice to head the murder investigation.
    Detective Sergeant George Godley, assigned the same day to assist Inspector Abberline, was already involved in the investigation . He was thirty-one years old, had joined the Metropolitan Police eleven years previously, and was now a sergeant stationed in Bethnal Green Police Station. Earlier that morning, following the discovery of the body, he had assisted Inspector Spratling in a search of Buck’s Row, the East London and District Railway embankment, the railway lines, and the Great Eastern Railway yard – but no weapon, blood nor evidence of any kind was found.
    Later on the evening of the same day when the initials ‘Lambeth Workhouse, P.R.’ were found stitched into the corpse’s petticoats, an inmate of Prince’s Road Workhouse, Mary Ann Monk, was traced who had shared a bed with the murdered woman earlier that year. Only then was the victim, Polly, properly identified: she was a middle-aged, penniless prostitute, and her name was Mary Ann Nichols.
    The police investigation concluded that there had been no robbery; Dr Llewellyn’s examination had showed that the murder was not sexually motivated. Since there was no trail of blood, Abberline concluded that the murder had taken place at the stable gates where the body was found.
    The inquest into the death of Mary Ann Nichols commenced on 1 September, the day after the murder, and unusually, it appeared to have been arranged in haste. It was held at the Whitechapel Working Lads’ Institute and conducted by Mr Wynne Edwin Baxter, the coroner for South-East Middlesex, a well-known and popular local solicitor. The police were represented by Inspector John Spratling and Detective Inspector Frederick Abberline, the latter of whom took the jury to view the body, along with Mr Banks, the coroner’s assistant. In his testimony, the victim’s father, Mr Edward Nichols, said: “She had no enemies that I knew of; she was too good for that.” Yet the fact remained that Mary Nichols’s butchered body was found in a Whitechapel street after what appeared to have been a vicious and pointless attack.
    When P.C. Neil gave his evidence, the coroner asked him if he had heard any noise that night. He replied, “No; I heard nothing.” When pressed further by the coroner, and asked if anybody could have escaped into the Whitechapel Road, he replied, “Oh yes, sir. I saw a number of women in the main [Whitechapel] road going home.”
    On the fifth and final day of the inquest, the jury brought in a verdict of ‘Wilful murder by a person or persons unknown’. It prompted the coroner to remark notably that “it was a murder of no ordinary character”.
    The murder investigation proved fruitless; no one living in Buck’s Row, close to the stable gates where the body was found, had seen or heard a thing – this included Walter Purkiss and his wife, both light sleepers, whose first-floor bedroom almost overlooked the scene of the murder. Neither were the night watchmen from the warehouse and factory nearby able to provide any information. All common lodging houses were visited and their occupants questioned; enquiries were made among tradesman, shopkeepers and prostitutes who were, in this instance, uncharacteristically eager to assist the police, but without result. Inspector Abberline was perplexed and almost two weeks later he was forced to admit, “not the slightest clue can at present be obtained”.
    Quite apart from our obvious question – why had Lizzie Williams murdered Mary Ann Nichols? – there was another more puzzling issue. Nichols had been throttled to death before her throat was cut. So why had the murderer twice cut the throat of someone who was already dead?
    As my father and I were to discover, Lizzie Williams did have a motive to murder Mary Nichols; we just hadn’t found it yet. We also made an astonishing discovery that led us to unravel the mystery, and the dawning realisation that, no matter how hard the police, or we, may have looked, nothing could even begin to make