Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman

his police statement, but he later told newspaper reporters that as he left Miller’s Court, he heard the bell of the Spitalfields clock in Commercial Street strike three. Whichever time was correct, Hutchinson had certainly departed Miller’s Court by 3.00 a.m. at the latest, and there were no further witnesses to say when Kelly’s male visitor had left – if indeed there ever had been a male visitor.
    Tony Williams mentioned that Dr John Williams’s friend and assistant Herbert R. Spencer described his employer in the late 1880s as “of middle height, robust build, that he usually wore a frock coat, silk hat, stand-up collar and a dark silk tie held by a pin set with a red stone”. The implication seemed to be that the man Hutchinson saw entering Mary Kelly’s room was Dr John Williams.
    Clearly it was not the man whom Hutchinson described. The photograph of Dr John Williams which appears in Uncle Jack does not resemble Hutchinson’s description of the man whom he said accompanied Mary Kelly to her room. This man was in his mid-thirties , had dark eyes, dark eyelashes, a moustache and dark hair; Dr Williams, by contrast, was forty-eight, had pale, light-blue eyes, light hair and no moustache. His dress was normal for that era. As for the red stone Hutchinson and Spencer mention, the former said that it was hanging from his watch chain along with a seal, whereas the latter stated that it was set in a pin used to secure his tie, so the stone would have been much smaller. While Dr Williams would almost certainly have been described as ‘respectable’, he did not look Jewish. Whomever Hutchinson had seen entering Mary Kelly’s room on that fateful morning, it was not Dr Williams.
    Since Kelly’s screams were heard an hour after Hutchinson had left Miller’s Court, it is likely that at some time after 3.00 on that cold November morning the man Hutchinson had seen going with Kelly into her room had left, and the murderer entered. She wore a felt hat, a brown twill skirt and a black velvet cape; she spoke with a Welsh accent and carried with her a strong knife, very sharp, pointed at the top, about an inch in width and at least six inches long … a surgeon’s knife. And she was determined to exact her bloody revenge.

CHAPTER 10
     
     
    I t was time to collect all the evidence, to see if it was possible to make any sense of it. My father and I planned to go through the papers from start to finish; from Mary Ann Nichols, the first murder victim, to Mary Jane Kelly, the fifth and final victim. We were sure the answers we wanted were there somewhere. We intended to review the essential points of each case briefly to see if a pattern, or even anything unusual, emerged. If it did, we would explore our findings further, but if not, we would move on to the next case.  
    We started with the first of the Ripper’s victims, Mary Ann Nichols, aka Polly, age forty-three, whose body was discovered in Buck’s Row at 3.40 in the morning on Friday, 31 August, the night of the London Docklands fires. The mother of five children and a common prostitute, she was drunk, throttled to death, her throat cut twice from left to right, her abdomen ripped open from top to bottom, her intestines made visible. There were no signs that the victim had struggled with her attacker or tried to fight back. Afterwards, the murderer had escaped, leaving no trace or clue behind.  
    No one had been heard or seen leaving the scene of the crime; the only people whom P.C. Neil noticed were a number of women walking in the Whitechapel Road. None were traced, none were identified.  
    There had been no rape or sexual assault, and detectives investigating the case thought it was strange that the murderer had shown no sexual interest in the victim during what appeared, at least on the face of it, to be a sexually motivated attack. Emma Smith and Martha Tabram, the two prostitutes murdered in Whitechapel earlier that year, had both been sexually assaulted before their deaths, while Smith had been raped.  
    There was nothing in those few brief facts that we didn’t already know, but there was something about the case that rang a small bell in my head, though I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was, so we moved on to the next case.  
    Annie Chapman: forty-seven, the mother of three children, occupation common prostitute, whose body was discovered at 6.00 a.m. on Saturday, 8 September in the enclosed backyard of 29 Hanbury Street.