Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman

also once had a darker, and more deadly, purpose.
    Lizzie Williams wanted to find a woman of low class, someone who would do what she was asked for money. But her requirements were specific; it had to be someone she could overpower easily, someone unlikely or unable to resist. There were few people about on the dimly lit streets of this poorest part of the city, and two haggard-looking women talking on a street corner may well have caught her attention. One of them, wearing a straw hat, was small, shabbily dressed, middle-aged and, importantly, very drunk. She was the ideal choice.
    Three years before, in 1885, and quite unbeknown to Lizzie Williams, Dr John Williams had aborted the child that this woman was carrying. She was merely one of the many hundreds of nameless prostitutes walking the streets of Whitechapel, trying to earn enough for a glass of cheap gin, a doss for the night or just as a means to survive. Any pains they suffered or disease that they might contract they learned to live with, but a pregnancy could not be ignored. Sooner or later the ‘problem’ had to be dealt with, but they always knew whom they could go to for an abortion, at a price – no questions asked.
    There has been much speculation as to how the murder victims all came to be lying on their backs when they were discovered. It was as though they expected to ‘service’ their client, even though in no case had any of them been sexually assaulted. Why was it that none of them, with the exception of Mary Kelly, appeared to have put up a struggle – as if they had willingly accepted their fate? Of equal importance is why the women agreed to go with Lizzie Williams in the first place.
    Without suggesting for one moment that Lizzie Williams was anything other than heterosexual (although the alternative might well have contributed to the poor state of her marriage) we believe that she could have portrayed herself to her victims as a lesbian seeking their sexual services for payment, in order to lure them to their deaths.
    We considered whether she would have needed to draw upon her acting abilities to convince the women that she was a lesbian. Commenting at the premiere of the tv series Tipping the Velvet (1998), which was based on a lesbian-themed novel set in Victorian England by Sarah Waters, Rachel Stirling who acted in the lead role, Nan Astley, said, “From the outside, one thinks there’s some great big secret that you must discover in order to play a lesbian: the fact is, there isn’t.”
    While gross indecency between males was made illegal by the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, later repealed, there was no such equivalent law for females. Popular legend has it that Queen Victoria naively believed that lesbianism did not exist, therefore she refused to sign a bill that would make it unlawful.
    None of the frequent patrols that policed Whitechapel would have given two women walking together a second glance. They would barely register on the subconscious.
    Buck’s Row, a narrow cobbled street lit by just a single gas-lamp at one end, was almost pitch black at night. Every prostitute working the streets of London knew the movements of each constable patrolling his beat, and Mary Ann Nichols would have been no exception, drunk or not. She, in turn, would almost certainly have told Lizzie Williams, and they timed their trip to give the police a wide berth, and so avoid discovery.
    The two women would have walked as quietly as they could along the street to the place where the prostitute brought her clients for the privacy they needed: the slight recess made by a pair of closed wooden gates to a stable yard. They were a little farther along, just past the last cottage in the row, well away from the factories and warehouses, and in a spot where they could not be seen by any householder or night watchmen.
    We think that Mary Ann Nichols acceded to Lizzie Williams’s request for her to perform the sexual act, and she lay down on the ground for her client, a woman whom she believed was a lesbian, in the manner she might have adopted for a man. Perhaps immediately after Nichols’ death her legs were arranged in such a manner that indicated sexual intercourse had taken place, so as to throw the police off track and lead them to believe the killer was a man. There is some support for this notion because sexual intercourse had definitely not taken place, and there was no evidence that any sexual interest had been shown in the