Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman

had on them clotted blood. The legs were drawn up, the feet close to the wall, the body still warm, the face warm, the hands cold, the legs quite warm, a silk handkerchief around the throat, slightly torn but I since find it is cut. This corresponded to the right angle of the jaw; the throat was deeply gashed, and an abrasion of the skin about an inch and a quarter diameter, apparently slightly stained with blood, was under the right clavicle.
     
    The report was clear. Elizabeth Stride’s throat had been cut and that was all; there were no mutilations to her body.

CHAPTER 13
     
     
    N ow we were pretty certain why Lizzie Williams had murdered three of her victims: Mary Kelly because she feared the woman would destroy her marriage, and might bear her husband the child for which he craved; Catherine Eddowes, in the mistaken belief that she was Mary Kelly; and Elizabeth Stride, merely to silence her and to prevent her from giving Lizzie Williams away to the police. We were left with the murders of Mary Ann Nichols and Annie Chapman to explain, and of course the dozen or more questions with which we had started out.
    We were minded of the words of advice delivered by Harper Lee’s Atticus Finch to his young daughter, Scout, in the 1960 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, To Kill a Mockingbird: “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view … until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.” We had to look at the situation from the murderer’s point of view, to understand why she had acted in the ways she had. It meant ‘taking a subjective view’.
    And it is the subjective view that is of importance here, because in all criminal cases, except those where ‘strict liability’ is imposed – for road traffic offences and the like, two elements are required to be present at the same moment for a crime to be committed. In criminal law they are known as an actus reas (a wrongful act) and mens rea (a guilty mind). Should either element be absent, no crime will have been committed. In all criminal cases, except for murder where the jury is asked to decide upon the question of guilt, its members are required to look at the events from the point of view of the average man. The example most often cited in days gone by, and even now, is ‘the man on the Clapham omnibus’, and to ask themselves what he might have thought. This is known as the objective view. In the case of murder, however, the jury is asked to look at the crime from the point of view of the accused; in other words, what he or she might have thought. This is the subjective view.
    We decided to climb into Lizzie Williams’s skin, metaphorically, and walk around in it for a while, looking at things the way she might have done, to see if we could find the answers for which we were searching. When we did we began to understand why she had committed murder.
     
    In 1867 Dr John Williams returned from London and set up his surgery in Swansea. He was then twenty-seven years old. It was a moderately successful practice because we know from his biographer , Ruth Evans, that one of the first things he did when he got on his feet was to repay his mother all the money she had loaned him while he was working in London. It was also the time when he began his life-long hobby of collecting Welsh language books and manuscripts.
    But Dr John Williams must have been frustrated. He was a brilliant and gifted doctor, with ambition and drive, but he lacked the money he needed to propel his career to the great heights to which he aspired. This was when Mary Elizabeth Ann Hughes entered the picture. It is doubtful that they were a well-matched couple. She was from an extremely wealthy family and had been brought up as a lady; he was from humble farming stock and had struggled to become a doctor. But there was an age difference to consider too. At the date of their marriage in April 1872, he was thirty-one and had already spent a year in Glasgow and six years in London where he undoubtedly had gained some experience of life; she, at almost ten years his junior, was twenty-two and might never have been out of Wales.
    How long Dr Williams and Lizzie Hughes were courting before they got married we do not know, though it appears to have been a whirlwind romance. Ruth Evans says the couple became engaged in 1872 (and married in April) while “important negotiations were going on”. This was at the time when Dr Williams was appointed to