Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman

friends, her alias. It consisted of just three names, two forenames and a surname.
    Upon her discharge from custody, the name that Catherine Eddowes gave to Sergeant Byfield, and which was the name he duly recorded on his form was Mary Ann Kelly. The seductive young Irish girl who was murdered in Miller’s Court nearly six weeks later was Mary Jane Kelly. With each middle name removed, we thought it was almost beyond belief – and it had to be more than just mere coincidence – the last two victims of Jack the Ripper shared the same name, Mary Kelly!

CHAPTER 11
     
     
    T he first clue, mentioned briefly at the opening of the Prologue, which led my father to the sudden realisation about the possible identity of the murderer, was provided by Tony Williams’s book, Uncle Jack . Tony Williams assumed that a letter he had found amongst his great-great-uncle’s personal effects, held by the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth, was written by Dr John Williams and sent to an old friend, his childhood sweetheart and second cousin, Annie Roberts, whom he once hoped to marry. We were much less sure.
    The letter, in an envelope apparently postmarked ‘early 1889’ (no specific day or month was given), the year following the murders, contained the potentially incriminating sentence, “Thank you for the forgiveness and for keeping my secret”. But while Tony Williams included most of the text in his book, he omitted the signature of the letter’s author, either by accident or design, though he included the valediction, ‘See you,’ and there it ended. It seemed to us a strange omission to make, because, according to our research, Dr Williams routinely signed his letters; we thought that perhaps he was not really sure if the author was Dr John Williams.
    In a letter written by Dr Williams in reply to one sent to him by Queen Victoria, both of which are reproduced in Ruth Evans’s book John Williams 1840-1926 , Williams’s letter is dated, ‘November 2, 1887’, and his full signature is included, ‘John Williams’. Again, a letter which he wrote to Dr Morgan Davies, Assistant Medical Officer in the Whitechapel Workhouse Infirmary, explaining why he is unable to meet with him on 8 September 1888, is also reproduced in full, including the date, ‘23 August 1888’, and the signature, ‘John’. So why Tony Williams had chosen to omit the signature this time seems very odd and, perhaps, blatant ‘cherry picking’.
    It was not just the missing signature that made us wonder if Dr Williams had written the letter, but the quality of the handwriting. Tony Williams said the writing was ‘poor,’ and did not, apparently, reflect the doctor’s usual neat handwriting. In other words, it looked different. If Dr Williams wrote the letter and sent it to someone else, what was it doing amongst his personal belongings? Why had the recipient of the letter given it back to him?
    But it was not these questions that concerned us; it was a single sentence in the body of the text which read, “You are the centre of my world.” These seven words immediately rang alarm bells with us because they simply sounded out of character for Dr Williams.
    For one thing, Annie Roberts, a childhood friend of the young John Williams, who had lived on a neighbouring farm, was now a respectable married woman. We did not think it likely that Dr Williams would commit such sentiments to paper, even if he thought them, no matter how close their early friendship as children might have been. For another, what was it that Annie Roberts had forgiven him for? It would hardly be for the brutal murders and hideous disfigurement of five London East End prostitutes, an offence that carried the death penalty. Such a secret he would be unlikely to confide to anyone, least of all a woman who was married to somebody else.
    More importantly, from what we knew about Dr Williams, no one – with the possible exception of his mother, Eleanor Williams, who died in 1895 – was at the centre of his world. He had been brought up to think highly of himself and it was even mentioned by his biographer, Ruth Evans, that he was arrogant and vain. Whoever had written that letter early in 1889, it was certainly not Dr Williams. Since the letter was now in his archive, we thought it more likely that he was its recipient, and the sentence, included in the letter, referred to him. This also explained why he was in possession of the letter.
    So who, we wondered, might have