Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman

matter. A piece of about two feet was quite detached from the body and placed between the body and the left arm, apparently by design.”
    If you wish to propose a certain hypothesis, all the pieces must fit together. You cannot just pick and choose those that suit your theory while rejecting others that do not. That such a fundamental error might have been committed once was bad enough, but twice was unforgivable. They were two loose ends that most definitely did not tie up, and were glaring deficiencies in Knight’s case.
    That it was Lizzie Williams who took Eddowes’s uterus and left kidney, wrapped in the severed piece of apron, is certain. That she remained in Whitechapel for more than an hour before writing the incomprehensible message on the door surround and depositing the blood-soiled part of the apron on the ground immediately beneath it, is not.
    The meaning of the chalk message and the discovery of the part apron baffled the best brains of Scotland Yard and have continued to bemuse scientists and scholars ever since. My father and I were puzzled too, as we tried, unsuccessfully, to unravel the mystery and establish if the two discoveries somehow incriminated Lizzie Williams. It was not until we remembered that every good murder mystery has its red herring – the false clue that throws one off track – that we realised that the world’s greatest murder mystery, Jack the Ripper, would likely be no exception. This, we thought, was it.
    The statement ‘The Juwes are The men That Will not be Blamed for nothing’ is pretty meaningless, except that, on the face of it at least, and taken together with the soiled apron part, it appears to implicate Jews in the murders. Since it was the missing part of the apron and not the chalk writing which drew the attention of P.C. Long, it is quite possible that the writing had already been chalked up for some time before the apron part was deposited where it was later found, and not at the same time, as is commonly believed.
    We thought that the true explanation is both straightforward and has little to do with the murders – or with Lizzie Williams. We considered that it was unlikely that someone who had been so meticulously careful as to escape, both unseen and unheard, from the scene of every murder, would delay their getaway by more than an hour to chalk up a message that no one, to this day, has been able to make sense of. A more likely explanation was that someone had dealt with a Jew who lived in the apartments, and felt aggrieved that he had somehow been tricked or cheated out of his money. It may have been someone who used chalk in the everyday course of his business – perhaps a butcher or fishmonger, to mark up the day’s prices – and as he walked past the apartments, he seized his opportunity to scribble an insult as best he could. A Jew who lived in the apartments had seen the writing as he left his home during the early hours, and made a mental note to rub it off if he could find a piece of suitable material. Some time later as he (or she?) returned home, he found the folded piece of apron that the murderer had discarded. As he opened the apron part to rub off the writing, he discovered that it was covered with blood on the inside and dropped it in shock and disgust. It fell to the ground in the doorway, where it lay until it was found by P.C. Long. Whoever had brought the part apron back to the apartments might not wish to become involved in a murder investigation. It could all have been as simple as that.
     
    Elizabeth Stride, the Berner Street victim, died from excessive blood loss when her throat was cut. While the witness Israel Schwartz observed a man attacking her and was able to provide the police with a good description of this man, he could not say if he was in possession of a knife. If Stride’s attacker, the man wearing the peaked cap, had not cut the woman’s throat, but had left the scene immediately after Schwartz had seen him and run off, which would make sense, it would have allowed Lizzie Williams a window of opportunity of almost fifteen minutes before Louis Diemschutz arrived with his pony and cart. It would have taken no longer than a few seconds for the murderer to cut Stride’s throat, Dr Blackwell thought; so it was entirely possible for Lizzie Williams to commit the murder, and make her getaway, well before Diemschutz arrived.
    Steven Knight’s version of events was that Stride was too drunk to enter the carriage,