Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman

murder weapon in that case was a “short knife, like a shoemaker’s well ground down”, which may have made the cut.
    It was the oddest of ironies: author of Uncle Jack , Tony Williams, had found a knife with ‘a broken tip’ among his ancestor’s personal effects, which, with the exception of Elizabeth Stride, he believed was the murder weapon. Yet the diametrically opposite was true. The knife he had found was, incontrovertibly, a shoe-maker’s knife, and while it could not possibly have been used in the murders of Nichols, Chapman, Eddowes and Kelly, its description matched exactly that which Dr Blackwell had provided of the murder weapon which, he said, had been used to cut the throat of Elizabeth Stride.
     
    We know that Dr John Williams retired from the hospital by 1893 and his lucrative private practice in 1903. He gave ill-health and strain brought on by overwork as the reason, but the simple facts do not support this explanation. Dr Williams’s workload increased considerably after his retirement. He became a Justice of the Peace, High Sheriff of the County of Carmarthenshire and accepted a government appointment to the Royal Commission on Welsh Disestablishment. Furthermore, he involved himself in the affairs of the village of Llanstephan where he lived from 1903 to 1909 with his wife, her stepmother, Mary, and their four female servants. There were, according to Ruth Evans, many more appointments too, not including the huge amount of work he took on to establish the National Library of Wales, the foundation stone of which was laid on 15 July 1911.
    It seemed to my father and me that all the evidence suggested that it was not Dr John Williams who had become ill, but his wife Lizzie.
    If Dr Williams had sent Lizzie to live with her family in Wales soon after the murders, so that they could care for her, especially Edward R. Morgan, it would explain why she wrote to her husband in London early in 1889. It would make perfect sense. It was he who was “at the centre of” her world, not she at the centre of his. It would explain the enigmatic line, “Thank you for the forgiveness and for keeping my secret”. He had perhaps forgiven her for the murders, in particular the murder of his mistress, Mary Kelly; he could hardly do otherwise because his affair was the direct cause of Kelly’s death, and indirectly the cause of the other deaths too. Similarly, he had no option but to keep his wife’s secret, and perhaps this was the reason why he had removed the pages from his diary; as her husband, he was duty bound to protect her and keep her confidences – no matter how serious they were. He could not, in any event, disclose her crimes to anyone without involving himself in the scandal, and the dire consequences, which inevitably would follow. It would be far better for both of them to keep their terrible secret to themselves.

CHAPTER 12
     
     
    W e thought it had to be more than coincidence that the last two victims of Jack the Ripper shared the same name, Mary Kelly. But if we thought this was an incredible discovery, we were even more astonished to find that little or no importance had been given to the anomaly by any previous author. Philip Sugden and Patricia Cornwell both stated flatly that Catherine Eddowes gave a false name and address at Bishopsgate Police Station before her discharge from custody, but failed to pursue the matter further; Tony Williams merely mentioned that the police believed the alias given by Catherine Eddowes was in fact her true name – and left it at that.
    Stephen Knight, however, states that Catherine Eddowes used the alias Mary Ann Kelly, and suggested that she was murdered in the mistaken belief that she was Mary Jane Kelly – which was exactly the same conclusion we had reached, though, whereas we considered the discovery to be of the utmost importance, Knight seemed to consider the name similarity an unimportant side-issue, and did not even know how the error had come about.
    We wondered what Sherlock Holmes would have made of it? Would he merely have accepted as a coincidence that the final two murder victims in his latest case just happened to use the same name? Or is it more likely that he would have pondered the matter carefully while playing his violin behind the locked door of his study at 221B Baker Street, before reaching the elementary conclusion that it was not just a simple quirk of fate, but the key that enabled him to unlock the mystery and solve