Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman
drafted in from every part of the metropolis and beyond. All two-hundred common lodging houses in the immediate vicinity were searched, and their occupants asked if they remembered a man entering early in the morning with bloodstains on his face, hands or clothing. Lunatic asylums all over London were visited, their inmates examined; none drew suspicion. At least seven men suspected of involvement in the murder were arrested; one, a pensioner named Edward Stanley, was known to have been in the company of the victim. Their descriptions supposedly matched that of the murderer – even though there had been no eyewitnesses to the attack – but all seven were ultimately released. Still the excitement and publicity which their arrests generated in the newspapers convinced a sceptical public that even if the police hadn’t actually caught the murderer, they were leaving no stone unturned in their efforts to do so.
Scotland Yard and the London Metropolitan Police were baffled. Another brutal killing had occurred, this time in broad daylight in the most dangerous circumstances imaginable for the murderer. There was only one way out of the small yard in Hanbury Street, and that was back along the long corridor that ran the depth of the house. Even though the alarm had been raised within minutes after the crime, the murderer had inexplicably escaped, slipped through the patrolling police undetected, and vanished yet again.
We simply could not understand what had compelled Lizzie Williams, an upper-middle-class, middle-aged woman to commit an apparently motiveless crime and act in such a reckless manner: to murder Annie Chapman in a backyard where she could so easily have been discovered, rip open her abdomen and take out her uterus, then leave the scene with her ghastly package and go back onto the streets supposedly covered in blood. It was very strange, and it made us all the more determined to find out how she had done it and, just as importantly, why.
CHAPTER 8
E ven if we could understand Lizzie Williams’s motive for murdering Mary Kelly – jealousy – if still not yet the reason for the extent of the terrible injuries she had inflicted, we were lost for an explanation as to why she might have killed and butchered Mary Ann Nichols and Annie Chapman. But her murderous campaign was far from over, and while the motives behind the murders, and reasons for the injuries she had inflicted, were, thus far, impossible for us to fathom, we felt we were coming closer to finding the answers for which we were searching.
On Sunday, 30 September, two murders were committed during the early hours of the morning, one soon after the other. Two days later Scotland Yard received a postcard dated 1 October, purportedly sent by the murderer and in writing similar to that displayed in the ‘Dear Boss’ letter. It referred to the killings as the ‘double event’, by which name the murders of that night came to be known.
I was not codding
dear old Boss when
I gave you the tip,
you’ll hear about
Saucy Jackys work
tomorrow double
event this time
number one squealed
a bit couldn’t
finish straight
off. had not the time
to get ears for
police. thanks for
keeping last letter
back till I got
to work again.
Jack the Ripper
The body of the first victim, Elizabeth Stride, was discovered at 1.00 a.m. inside the open gates to Dutfield’s Yard in Berner Street, which was south of the Whitechapel Road. The body of the second victim, Catherine Eddowes, was found at 1.44 a.m. three-quarters of a mile away in Mitre Square, off Fenchurch Street, by a lone constable patrolling his beat.
There has been much speculation over the years as to how two murders could have been committed by the same hand, so far apart, in such a narrow time frame.
Stephen Knight suggested that the only possible way was by his imaginative conspiracy theory. It enabled Sickert, Netley and Gull to travel quickly by horse-drawn coach from the scene of the first murder to the scene of the second, collecting and dispatching their unfortunate victim along the way.
But, in our opinion, the murders were accomplished by Lizzie Williams acting on her own. How they were achieved we would discover later, but the hour before the death of Catherine Eddowes would provide the key to at least part of the mystery – and it had nothing to do with Knight’s Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
It was at 8.30 p.m. on Saturday, 29 September, the night before the murders, that
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