Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman

this time, going much further and cutting out Eddowes’s left kidney too. There was no good medical reason for her to take either of the organs; neither would be of any practical use for research, or for any other reason we could think of. It seemed to be an act of wanton barbarity.
    While it was Dr Brown’s view that the murderer had deliberately removed Catherine Eddowes’s left kidney, Dr Sequeira thought that it might have been removed with no knowledge of what it was. One thing that all the doctors agreed upon, however, was that the murderer possessed some, if not great, anatomical knowledge and surgical skill. This opinion appears ambiguous, but a second reading clarifies the fact that ‘the murderer’ did not possess the skill or knowledge of a qualified surgeon; rather, the rudimentary skill and knowledge that one might acquire from watching another, more qualified practitioner, perform his task. This, of course, suggests Lizzie Williams as a suspect, but excludes Dr John Williams, who was an exceptionally talented and experienced surgeon.
    It was all very strange and the questions we wanted to ask went way beyond our search for just the motive to murder. Why had the murderer deliberately destroyed Catherine Eddowes’s face? Why did she carve what appeared to be the inverted letter V into each of her cheeks? What, if anything, did the letter stand for? Why had she cut out and taken her victim’s uterus, and for what possible reason did she remove her left kidney?
    My father and I thought that Catherine Eddowes was more than just an innocent victim. We wondered if the manner of her death, the facial injuries that were inflicted, the careful surgery to her abdomen, the organs cut from her still warm body – her uterus and left kidney – somehow held a key to the mystery, though we did not then know why.
    Since all the injuries to Catherine Eddowes seemed to have been inflicted deliberately and with purpose, the logical extension of this notion was: could our theory be extended to the other victims too? We believed the prospect was well worth investigating, and we began by making a brief comparison of the injuries that Catherine Eddowes and Mary Kelly had sustained.
    Catherine Eddowes died from severe blood loss when her throat was cut. All her facial features were individually attacked, her abdomen surgically divided, and two organs were cut out of her body and taken away from the scene of the crime: her uterus and her left kidney, both intact.
    When the murderer confronted Mary Kelly in her small room, the young woman was attacked and murdered in much the same way as Catherine Eddowes. Her throat was slashed, her face was ripped to shreds, her abdomen was opened, her uterus torn from her body and, significantly, her heart was cut out. Far greater injuries were ultimately inflicted upon Mary Kelly but, nevertheless , there were strong parallels to be drawn between the two murders – a major difference was that Eddowes’s left kidney had been taken from the crime scene, whereas Kelly’s heart had been removed. We asked ourselves, why?
    We were still sure that the answers to our questions were in the mountain of paperwork in front of us; but they weren’t going to give themselves up voluntarily and without effort. We would have to work hard to find them, no matter how long it might take.
    And we did. It was as we were working our way through the Mary Ann Nichols papers again that we were reminded of a concurrence with the Eddowes case. It was something that, at first, seemed unimportant, but now it appeared to provide a vital piece of the jigsaw. The breakthrough came in the form of a police record which contained little enough, but the information it did reveal was crucial. It was Ellen Holland’s statement that reminded us. She was a friend of the first victim, Mary Ann Nichols. When she went to the Whitechapel mortuary to identify the body, she knew her friend only as Polly, her nickname or alias. That was the first clue, but then it led us to the next one.
    It was a single sheet document – a copy of the release record of Catherine Eddowes. She had been found drunk in Aldgate High Street, arrested and taken to Bishopsgate Police Station where she was locked in a cell until she sobered up. She was released at 1.00 a.m., and within the hour she was dead.
    But it was the name on the form of release that was of immense importance; it was the name by which Catherine Eddowes was known to some of her