Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman

the reason why Lizzie Williams had been unable to make out her victim’s features, we thought that the darkness might. The effectiveness of the gas street lighting in Bishopsgate, where the police station was located, was reduced considerably by the fog that enveloped the area; in Houndsditch – leading to Mitre Square – it was worse, and in Mitre Square, apart from one light at the entrance to the passageway , it was effectively non-existent.
    But if poor light might have provided the reason why Lizzie Williams had been unable to see her victim properly, we were unhappy with this explanation, and wondered if our theory had reached its nemesis and it was time to call it a day; but then, on an impulse, we decided to take a closer look at Kelly and particularly Eddowes again, to see if they could provide us with an explanation.
    What we discovered surprised us. Mary Kelly was just twenty-five years old and said to be pretty. She was 5’ 7’’ in height, of stout build, had pale blue eyes and light-coloured hair which reached nearly to her waist. Elizabeth Prater, who lived in a room immediately above Kelly’s room, described her as “tall and pretty, and as fair as a lily”, while Walter Dew, one of the detectives assigned to investigate her murder and who had known Mary Kelly by sight, described her as ‘attractive’. She was more or less as we expected her to be.
    But when we looked at Catherine Eddowes, we found that she was not the worn-out, decrepit-looking female we anticipated. She was said to look much younger than her forty-six years. Approximately five feet tall, she was slim, with dark auburn hair and hazel eyes. A contemporary police report describes her as being around forty. From a photograph taken after her death, she might have been a winsome woman, though the clothes she wore were old, raggedy and dirty.
    If Lizzie Williams did not know how old Mary Kelly was, and all she knew about her was her name and that she lived in Spitalfields, she might well have believed that the ‘Mary Kelly’ she met outside Bishopsgate Police Station was the woman with whom her husband was consorting. After all, Dr Williams himself was approaching fifty, and could easily have been drawn to a good-looking woman who was said to appear to be in her late thirties or early forties. Catherine Eddowes’s sister, Mrs Eliza Gold, described her as a “jolly sort”, and Frederick Wilkinson, a deputy (assistant manager) at a lodging house where Eddowes stayed from time to time, remembered her as a “jolly woman, always singing”. An attractive woman who was always happy might have presented the type of personality that Lizzie Williams could have thought her husband found appealing.
    Our contention is that when Lizzie Williams murdered Catherine Eddowes, she believed her to be Mary Kelly, her husband’s mistress. She dispatched her with such terrifying ferocity that her throat was cut to the spine and her head almost severed from her shoulders. The murderer was possessed with burning anger and destroyed every feature of Eddowes’s face which gave her a feminine appearance: her eyelids, nose, an ear, her cheeks and mouth. Lizzie Williams had a plain, unattractive face, and that was why she ruined Eddowes’s good looks. It was jealousy, pure and simple.
    She cut open Eddowes’s abdomen, from her privates to her ribs, taking pains to guide her knife around the navel, so as to avoid damaging the uterus. She cut away the intestines and placed them on her victim’s upper body and right shoulder. They were not placed there for any Masonic purpose as Stephen Knight has suggested; they were put there because that was the most convenient place for them, and out of her way, as she continued with her gruesome task.
    At some time during the attack, the murderer took the apron from around her victim’s waist and held it taut; a large square of dirty white cloth secured in place by string. She sliced off one half with a single stroke of her knife, and placed it on the ground to one side. Turning her attention back to the body, she cut out Eddowes’s uterus and laid it on the severed part of the apron. Next, she inserted the knife deep into her victim’s corpse once more. This time she directed the blade to the upper body and into the chest cavity. There she excised the left kidney and set that on the cloth also. Then she collected her bundle and silently made good her escape.
     
    We conjectured why the murderer wanted those