Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman

particular organs; what possible use could anyone have for either of them? They would have been useless for any practical purposes, including medical research. After much deliberation, we realised that the murderer had not intended to take Catherine Eddowes’s left kidney at all – it had been a mistake. When the murderer cut out Mary Kelly’s heart, that was what she intended to take from Catherine Eddowes and not her kidney. Dr George Sequeira’s comment, as the first doctor to arrive at the crime scene, certainly supported this contention; “perhaps the murderer had come across the victim’s left kidney by accident and cut it out without knowing what it was”.
    We agreed and thought it would have been a simple error to make. Working quickly in the near darkness and with the ever-present danger of discovery, fumbling about inside Catherine Eddowes’s chest cavity, her fingers slippery with blood, the murderer found what she believed was her victim’s heart. It was on the left side of her chest, covered only by a membrane and held in place, and protected by, a layer of fat – so her left kidney would have been in the approximate position that her heart would have occupied, and that organ was removed instead.
    We were certain this could be the only rational explanation why the murderer had cut out and taken Catherine Eddowes’s left kidney. The normal surgical method of extracting the kidney was from the side, not the front – which merely reinforced our belief that the murderer had not intended to take the kidney. But if this provided the answer to one question, it raised another question equally obscure: for what purpose did the murderer require Catherine Eddowes’s uterus and heart? We could only speculate.
    My father and I wondered who might have passed the fatal information to Lizzie Williams which enabled her to find and murder the person she believed to be Mary Kelly. Would it be possible to identify whomever it was? Our first thoughts were that it could have been almost anyone in Whitechapel.
    During the mid-1880s, London was a magnet for immigrants from many parts of the world. Whitechapel, in particular, was teeming with Jews escaping from the Tsarist-Russian pogroms, who formed their own close-knit communities. Thousands of Russians, Poles, Irish, Italians, Hungarians and many other nationalities crowded into slums that equalled the most squalid ghettoes to be found anywhere in eastern Europe. So where, we asked ourselves, in this pitiful, seething mass of humanity, were we going to find the person who had identified Catherine Eddowes to Lizzie Williams as Mary Kelly? It seemed an impossible task.
    On further reflection, it occurred to us that Lizzie Williams had placed herself in a very dangerous position by asking where she might find Mary Kelly. When Catherine Eddowes’s dead body was discovered, her informant might come forward, and Lizzie Williams, if found, would become a suspect, with the unthinkable consequences that her detection and arrest would bring. Lizzie Williams would have realised this awful truth and must have striven to find a way out of her difficulty. We believe she reached the rapid conclusion that the only course of action open to her was to eliminate her informant. It was not part of her master plan, but it was essential if she was to avoid the gallows, and get away with her dreadful crimes.
    But, still, who was Lizzie Williams’s informant?
    The answer soon presented itself to us when we remembered that there were two victims murdered on the early morning of Sunday, 30 September. Catherine Eddowes was the second victim; the first was Elizabeth Stride!
    It seemed both feasible and likely to us that Lizzie Williams had murdered Elizabeth Stride to ensure her silence. But how could we be sure we were right? There was only one way: we needed to find hard evidence and to see if it supported our theory. If Lizzie Williams just wanted to kill Elizabeth Stride to save her own neck, she would have no reason to mutilate her body. So we reviewed the report Dr Phillips presented on 3 October 1888 at Elizabeth Stride’s inquest:
    The body was lying on its left side, face turned towards the wall, head towards the yard, feet towards the street, left arm extended from elbow, which held a packet of cachous in her hand. Similar ones were in the gutter. I took them from her hand, and handed them to Dr Blackwell. The right arm was lying over the body, and the back of the hand and wrist