Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman

Partially throttled, throat cut from left to right, abdomen cut open, her uterus cut out and taken away. No rape or sexual assault, although her legs were found wide apart, as though she expected to perform the sexual act. Again, there were no indications that Chapman had tried to fight off her attacker or defend herself in any way. It appeared that she had merely lain down on the ground and accepted her fate. As before, the murderer silently and mysteriously vanished just minutes before the victim’s body was discovered.
    By this point, it was already obvious that a pattern of sorts had been established. The victims had been throttled, their throats cut and their abdomens ripped open. Mary Ann Nichols’s abdomen had been cut so extensively that her intestines were protruding, while Annie Chapman sustained a similar injury, except that her uterus had been removed. But the long jagged tear that Chapman sustained, from her privates to her breasts, had avoided the navel, leaving the uterus undamaged, as a result of which Dr George Phillips concluded that it was the work of an expert – “of one, at least, who had such knowledge of anatomical or pathological examinations as to be enabled to secure the pelvic organs with one sweep of a knife….”
    One thing was rapidly becoming clear to us: the victims were attacked and murdered so quickly and unexpectedly that they were taken entirely by surprise, and perhaps that was the reason why they had not fought back. There had simply been no time to react. They might have been on their guard if in the presence of a man, but if their attacker was a woman, they would have felt more at ease and unprepared for the assault when it came. Moreover, the injuries sustained by the victims were not just the result of random slashing. The wounds were inflicted deliberately, with precision and deadly purpose.
    The reason why the murderer had not raped the victims, or shown any sexual interest in them was, of course, as clear as day to my father and me. In the light of what we knew, we could not understand why the police had not considered the obvious possibility that the murderer might have been female. Abberline did ponder the matter with a colleague after Mary Kelly’s death, but, it seems, only briefly even then.
    Elizabeth Stride, known as Long Liz, age forty-five; mother to a stillborn child. Occupation: common prostitute; murdered just before 1.00 a.m. on Sunday, 30 September inside the entrance to Dutfield’s Yard in Berner Street; throat cut from left to right. Dr Frederick William Blackwell’s very though medical report revealed no other injuries. Unsurprisingly, again there had been no rape or sexual assault, nor was there any sign of Elizabeth Stride’s murderer who, yet again, seemed to have disappeared into thin air.
    All the evidence suggested that, up until Stride’s death, the murders were becoming ever more horrific. Louis Diemschutz, the steward who discovered Stride’s body, said the “blood was still flowing from the open neck wound”, when he found her, so it was clear that the murder had only just taken place. The generally held view was, and perhaps still is, that the murderer was interrupted before he (or she) could attack the body. We wondered, however, if this was the correct interpretation of the events in this case. Perhaps murder was all that the killer had in mind for Stride. But if this was so, why?
    The next victim was Catherine Eddowes; age forty-six, mother of three children, two boys and a girl. Occupation: common prostitute . She was the second victim to be murdered that night in the ‘double event’. Her body was discovered at 1.44 a.m. in a dark corner of Mitre Square. It appeared to have been a ferocious attack: her throat had been slashed from left to right, her face cut to ribbons, her abdomen ripped open, uterus and left kidney both torn from the body and taken away. There had been no rape or sexual assault.
    It had all happened in an almost impossible time frame. P.C. Watkins’s beat took him through the square at 1.30 that morning when he found nothing amiss. At about 1.41 or 1.42 a.m. P.C. James Harvey looked into the square from Church Passage and he, too, said he saw nothing unusual. At 1.44, P.C. Watkins returned to the square and found the body.
    At some time after 1.30, we surmised, Lizzie Williams and Catherine Eddowes had entered the square, found the dark corner, Eddowes had lain down on the ground on her back; Williams,