Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman

steps she needed to take on the journey to achieve her aim: the murder and annihilation of her husband’s mistress.
    An interesting note appears at the end of Chapter 9 in Stephen Knight’s Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution , which almost seems to have been added as an afterthought. An elderly nun, interviewed by the BBC in 1973, claimed that in 1915, when she was a novice in Providence Row, Whitechapel, a sister nun who was there at the time of the Ripper murders, told her: “If it had not been for the Kelly woman, none of the murders would have happened”. It was a very short, simple sentence with no embellishing detail, unlike George Hutchinson’s description of the suspect who had been with Mary Kelly on the night of her murder which was filled with so much information that it became impossible to believe that it could all have been true.
    The statement appears to support Knight’s incredible claim that Mary Kelly was the principal conspirator of a small group of prostitutes who were trying to blackmail the Crown; Nichols, Chapman, Stride and Eddowes were all murdered and she, Mary Kelly, it is alleged, was directly responsible for their deaths.
    While we had also reached the same conclusion – that Kelly was the cause of the murders – it was for an entirely different reason, and the elderly nun’s claim fitted our own hypothesis just as well. Kelly’s affair with an influential London doctor had brought the wrath of his vengeful wife down on them all. She might have added the truism – if such were needed: Hell has no fury like a woman scorned.
    What the evidence showed us was that Lizzie Williams wanted to be confident that when she met Mary Kelly, she could kill her, destroy her as a woman, and live out the fantasy of what she wanted to do to her. She would not, however, act so impulsively as to place her own life in danger. On the contrary, she made her plans carefully, to prevent any possibility of detection, and this she achieved far beyond her own lifetime.
    We had little doubt that while Lizzie Williams knew what she wanted for Kelly, she did not know if she could murder her. Was it all just wishful thinking? But the consequences of allowing Kelly to live were unthinkable, and so she embarked on her murderous crusade.
    She was not a violent woman, nor was she a murderer out of choice. The circumstances she found herself in forced that unwelcome decision upon her; nothing could have been further from the personality who had sung and acted at Eisteddfodau and played the organ in her local chapel. But neither was Lisa Montgomery, the American woman who cold-bloodedly tore the living uterus from a woman she had strangled to death, nor the Irish Scissor Sisters who slashed and battered their mother’s abusive lover to death and then dismembered his body with a bread knife, nor Mrs Mary Pearcey, who smashed her victim’s skull, then cut her head almost clean from her shoulders. None of them were born killers; it was just the circumstances they found themselves in which directed the course of action they were ultimately bound to follow.
    In the civilised western world, a number of attacks upon women have been reported involving the theft of their uteri. All were cunningly planned, all were carried out by a lone assailant who then escaped from the crime scene undetected, and all, so far as we have been able to ascertain, were women. This does not appear to be the type of crime likely to have been committed by a man.
    The first part of Lizzie Williams’s plan was to discover if she was capable of killing a woman. Would she have the physical strength to overpower her and, even if she did, could she then kill her? She had already decided how she would kill Kelly – by cutting her throat in the very same way that her husband killed the small white rats he used in his experiments. If she discovered that she could kill, then she would move on to the next stage of her plan: to rip out her victim’s uterus, to obliterate her as a woman. Only then, when she was sure that she could do all these things, would she be ready to face Mary Kelly, confident that she could wreak her terrible revenge.

CHAPTER 14
     
     
    T he night of the London Docklands fires proved fortuitous for Lizzie Williams, if not for Polly Nichols. Most of central London was aware of the fires, which broke out at about 9 p.m., from the crimson glow in the sky over the river Thames by London Bridge. It was easily visible as far as Queen