Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman

face and abdomen with a sharp, pointed knife … with a blade at least six inches long.”
    The knife was the ‘smoking gun’ that Tony Williams required to help establish his case. There was no question in his mind that this was not the surgical knife that his ancestor, Dr John Williams, had used to commit four out of the five murders. It was a natural and understandable assumption to make, given everything he had discovered so far, and, of course, it fitted perfectly with his hypothesis. He thought that DNA analysis of the knife at some future time might provide the hard evidence that would prove beyond reasonable doubt that Dr John Williams was Jack the Ripper.
    But Dr Williams was not the murderer and we had strong reservations about the knife Tony Williams had discovered which, he was sure, was the murder weapon. My father and I found it hard to believe that so cautious and careful a murderer as Lizzie Williams, who had, thus far, left no clue or trace of any kind behind her, would have disposed of the murder weapon so carelessly that it had been found by someone else, even her husband, unless she had deliberately provided it to him for some reason. We believe that after committing each of the murders – where a surgical knife had been used – she cleaned and replaced the weapon in her husband’s medical bag, where it would lie unnoticed amongst all his other surgical knives and medical equipment. She may have considered that it was, in some ways, poetic justice; that the knife he had used to save lives had been used by her to destroy them.
    So what exactly, we asked ourselves, was the knife that Tony Williams had found?
    Also now kept in its own special closed box, sandwiched between two sheets of safety glass so that it can be viewed from either side but not touched, the knife with the broken tip that Tony Williams believes is the murder weapon also attracts a great deal of interest in the reading room of the National Library of Wales.
    But as soon as my father and I saw the knife, we recognised it for what it was. However plausible and attractive the prospect might have seemed to Tony Williams, we knew at once that it was not, and could not have been, the murder weapon as described by Dr Bond.
    A cursory inspection showed that the tip had not broken off; the knife had been designed and manufactured in that style deliberately , for where the blade now ended, it was both straight and machine-bevelled into a small but sharp edge. A second sharp edge ran along the lower part of the blade from the tang (handle) to the tip, where the two edges met at a point angled at almost 90 degrees. Northamptonshire, where I grew up, was, for many years, the world centre of the boot-and-shoe-making industry. A close friend of mine owned a shoe factory in the town and I was well acquainted with the tools of his trade. The knife so proudly displayed in the small glass case is not a broken surgical knife, though claimed; it is nothing more sinister than a shoemaker’s lasting knife.
    Such knives are still readily available today and are identical to the knife that had once belonged to Dr John Williams. If further confirmation is needed, stamped into the metal of the blade – easily seen with the aid of a magnifying glass – is the letter ‘A’ and a clear outline of a small workman’s boot, each about ¼ inch high. Immediately underneath, the following words in tiny letters are also stamped into the blade: ‘George Barnsley’ and ‘Damascus Steel’.
    George Barnsley of George Barnsley and Sons Ltd, Sheffield (founded 1836) was a master cutler who, by 1883, produced cutting tools for workers in the leather and shoe industries. By 1944 they had increased their range by adding “files and blades, shoe knives and leather workers’ tools”. No surgical knives were listed as being available from this company.
    Yet the knife may not be discounted as a murder weapon quite so easily. Elizabeth Stride, the first of the murder victims on the night of the double event, had been killed, according to the medical report of Dr George Bagster Phillips, by a single cut to her throat, “a clean incision 6 inches in length, incision commencing two and a half inches in a straight line below the angle of the jaw”. It was performed in a manner similar to the two earlier murders, the cut having been made from left to right. The evidence of Dr Frederick William Blackwell given at the coroner’s inquest on 5 October, was that the