Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman

Anne Street, near Regent’s Park where the Williamses lived. Lizzie Williams knew the streets of Whitechapel would be deserted as huge crowds, and perhaps also her own servants, rushed to watch the soaring flames. There might never be a better time to find a suitable victim.
    The murderers of Emma Smith were still at large almost five months after she had been attacked in April, and Martha Tabram’s murder of just three weeks earlier also remained unsolved. The police did not appear to be making strenuous efforts to apprehend the murderers and this would have strengthened Lizzie Williams’s determination.
    What actually happened on those four fateful nights may never be known for certain, but my father and I thought it would be possible to re-enact the crimes from the information we had to hand. We knew the victims, their backgrounds and, from eyewitness accounts, even their movements during their last hours, sometimes just minutes, of their lives. We knew also the details of the discoveries of their bodies, the manner of their deaths and the subsequent murder investigations. We knew too, something of the strong-minded, resolute character of our suspect, Lizzie Williams; all we had to do now was to fit her to the crimes.
    We believe that our account is the true, or most likely, account of what really happened on the nights of the Whitechapel murders, and just as importantly, why.
     
    It might not have been difficult for Lizzie Williams to slip away from her home unnoticed; her husband was so tied up with his work that he was almost never at home; when he was, it is possible that they slept in separate bedrooms, though we do not know this for certain. There were just two servants in the Williams household: Annie Bartlett, who was almost thirty, their housekeeper who who doubled as a cook, and Mary Kempin, aged twenty-eight, who carried out whatever tasks were considered necessary about the house. Both were English and had been in service to the Williamses for several years, accompanying them from their previous home in Harley Street.
    The servants were usually given bank holidays and special days off, and on Sundays they went to church. Late on the evening of that fateful night, after their work had ended, they may have asked Lizzie for permission to go to watch the Docklands fires. Their absence from the house on that night presented Lizzie with the perfect opportunity to visit Whitechapel herself, to undertake her macabre mission.
    By 2.00 a.m., a raging storm that had started the previous day had passed, although the roads and pavements were still damp. It was at this time that Lizzie Williams found herself in Whitechapel, walking the streets to familiarise herself with her surroundings and to seek out a likely victim. A radiant stain, streaking the night sky over the Docklands, still flickered and glowed as the fires continued to rage, and it would not be until later that morning that they were brought fully under control.
    Lizzie Williams had prepared herself carefully for this night. She knew exactly the type of woman she was looking for, what she would say to entice her victim to come with her, what she would do to her and, finally, how she would get away with her crime. She might have visited the East End often during the early days of her marriage because Dr Williams sometimes worked in the Whitechapel Workhouse Infirmary. She knew how the local women dressed, how they spoke and how they behaved. She could not go to Whitechapel dressed for the West End and, since she had to resemble most of the women who lived and worked there, her dress must allow her to blend in.
    The police officers who patrolled their beats in Whitechapel had taken to nailing pieces of bicycle tyres to the soles of their boots, to reduce the noise made by the iron nails as they struck the stone cobbles. Lizzie Williams may have learned from this and worn shoes fixed with rubber soles which would enable her to walk the alleyways and passages in relative silence. In each case where the murdered body of a victim was discovered out of doors – Nichols, Chapman, Stride and Eddowes – not only was no one seen leaving the scene of a murder, but, significantly, no one was heard either.
    We know that the Williams household possessed the knife that would have been needed to make such an alteration, because a shoemaker’s knife ‘well-used’ was later discovered among Dr Williams’s personal possessions – but we believe that the knife