Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman

the crime? We assumed the latter option unquestionably.
    My father and I shared the same view on the matter: the possibility of two women, both prostitutes, both living in Spitalfields, both murdered, one after the other, and both using the same name, was extremely unlikely to be mere coincidence. The fact that Mary Jane Kelly was the last of the Ripper’s victims merely increased our doubts of such likelihood. The only reasonable conclusion to be drawn is that the death of one of the victims must have been a tragic case of mistaken identity.
    Having reached this finding, we looked at the statements and medical records of all the murders again, and it wasn’t long before we were able to work out a likely chain of events.
    Simple logic told us that Catherine Eddowes, aka Mary Ann Kelly, must have been murdered in the belief that she was Mary Jane Kelly.
    What was also clear to us was that, even though Lizzie Williams knew that her husband was enjoying an intimate relationship with a woman called Mary Kelly, she possessed no description of her, though she might have guessed that the young woman would be comely, if not beautiful. Perhaps all she knew about her was her name, and that she lived in Whitechapel’s district of Spitalfields. In order to murder Mary Kelly, Lizzie Williams first had to find her. How would she do this? She would have to go to Spitalfields and ask around until she found someone who knew her.
    She may have offered money, perhaps a sovereign, to anyone who could help. She might have asked a dozen people, or perhaps only one. What is certain is that, somehow, she chanced upon someone who said that she knew Mary Kelly, though, unbeknownst to them both, this acquaintance was in fact Catherine Eddowes.
    And then I remembered. It was Mary Ann Nichols’s alias that rang the small bell in my head earlier and which now provided another piece of the puzzle. In the same way that Ellen Holland knew the first murder victim only as Polly, whoever identified Catherine Eddowes to Lizzie Williams knew her only by her alias, Mary Kelly. If that person also confirmed that ‘Kelly’ lived in Spitalfields, then Lizzie Williams would have been confident that she had found the right woman.
    For another coin, Lizzie Williams’s informant might have told her what ‘Kelly’ was wearing: a black straw bonnet trimmed with black and green velvet; a red silk handkerchief about her neck; a black fur-trimmed jacket; a brown linsey bodice with a black velvet collar, and a white apron over a dark-green chintz, flower-patterned skirt. If her informant knew that ‘Kelly’ had been arrested for drunkenness in Aldgate High Street on Saturday, 29 September, it is possible that the likely time of her release from custody would also be known.
    This would explain how Lizzie Williams managed meet up with Catherine Eddowes so quickly after the murder of her last victim in Berner Street. She knew exactly where Eddowes was, what she was wearing and when she would be released – perhaps even the location of the street door by which she would leave the police station. And there she met the woman with whom she believed her husband was involved, who would, if allowed to live, destroy her marriage.
    And this, we thought for the first time, was where our theory was about to founder.
    From the outset, we decided that we would never twist the facts to suit the circumstances. We intended to present all the evidence we found honestly and objectively. To do otherwise would undermine the value of any findings we might make. So far, the pieces of the jigsaw had all fitted neatly into place, with nothing needing to be altered in any way or forced to fit, so we were confident we were on the right track. But now we found ourselves faced with a situation where Lizzie Williams was going to meet, and murder, the woman she believed to be her husband’s mistress. But the woman was not bewitching Mary Kelly who had lured Dr Williams away from her; she was middle-aged Catherine Eddowes; and from what we thought we knew, the two women could hardly be more different.
    Eddowes was only four years short of fifty at the time of her death, whereas Kelly was just in her mid-twenties. So how, we wondered, could we possibly explain Lizzie Williams’s mistaken belief that Eddowes was her husband’s mistress, if indeed we could explain it at all?
    While the fog, which hung like a dirty net curtain over London’s East End at that time of year, would not provide