Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman

Spitalfields and that her name was Mary Kelly.
    Lizzie Williams found herself in the invidious position of being married to a man who no longer loved her because she was infertile, and who was conducting a sexual relationship with another woman. She had already lost her inheritance; now she was in danger of losing her husband too. The future must have looked very bleak. He would never leave her, of course – custom and convention would not allow it in Victorian England – but perhaps she thought that he might, and it was what Lizzie thought, her subjective view, that was all-important to my father and me.
    What any woman’s feelings might be towards another woman upon discovering that her husband is having an affair with her are intolerable enough, but the jealousy and anger of Lizzie Williams, compounded by her highly charged emotional state, can only be imagined; what she would have liked to do to her rival is beyond our comprehension, except that the level of violence that was inflicted upon Mary Kelly during those early hours on Friday, 9 November, reflected exactly what one might have expected Lizzie Williams to have wished upon her victim.
    She decided that the only way to safeguard her marriage and her future was to kill Mary Kelly, and take from her the one organ that identified her as a woman – her uterus. It was then that she began to devise her murderous plan to do away with her husband’s mistress.
    Those thoughts would have grown and festered within her. Lizzie Williams may have spent hours, perhaps even days, thinking of what she would do to Kelly if she could: kill her, rip her uterus from her body, and perhaps even throw it at her husband’s feet in a grand, triumphal gesture.
    But could she do it? She did not know. Perhaps she knew how to kill, if, as seems likely, she had watched her husband decapitate the small white rats he experimented upon: pinning them down on their backs with his finger and thumb, then easing the head back to expose the neck which he severed quickly with one swift stroke of a razor-sharp knife.
    Lizzie Williams’s thoughts of killing Mary Kelly, cutting her uterus out of her body, thus destroying her as a woman, would have continued to fester. They would have tormented her, and she would have planned every aspect of the murder: how she would first discover if she was even capable of killing someone; find a helpless victim; lure her away to a dark lonely place; throttle her; cut her throat; open her abdomen; cut out her uterus; finally, and most importantly, get away with her crime. Then, confident in the knowledge that she was capable of performing such a hideous task, find Mary Kelly and perhaps tell her what she thought of her deplorable behaviour, so the woman would understand why she was going to die.
    But no matter how well she planned the murder, Lizzie Williams may never have believed that she would be able to carry it out. As she became more frustrated, so the injuries she wanted to inflict increased in their severity: cut the woman’s throat; destroy every feature of the face that her husband found so much more agreeable than her own; tear out her uterus; rip her body to pieces. And, as a final touch, leave a small, indelible reminder; a single character carved on each of Kelly’s cheeks: the inverted letter V. The reason for the choice of this particular letter we shall explore later.
    At some point, Lizzie Williams realised that the murder she had considered so carefully was indeed possible; two prostitutes, Emma Smith and Martha Tabram, had been brutally killed in Whitechapel earlier that year, and the murderer or murderers had got clean away with their crimes. My father and I believe that that moment arrived on the night of the London Docklands fires in a manner worthy of the best efforts of Shakespeare. As the tragedy Macbeth opens to an accompaniment of thunder and lightning, so the first of the Ripper murders takes place following a raging storm, complete with blinding flashes of lightning and deafening crashes of thunder, while the sky above London Bridge turned a vivid blood-red from the furious raging flames. It was an angry, violent night, and it suited Lizzie Williams’s darkest emotions perfectly.
    In the light of what we now know, it was clear to us that Mary Kelly was Lizzie Williams’s true and only objective all along. The murders of Nichols and Chapman were ancillary to her plan; they were unimportant to her, an irrelevance, merely the