Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman

victim.
    The evidence of Dr Llewellyn, the police surgeon who examined the body, shows that Lizzie Williams placed her hand over her victim’s mouth, and pressed down hard, the cradle between her thumb and forefinger blocking her victim’s nose and cutting off her air supply. At this point she was fully committed and it was too late to change her mind. But at no time did she have any intention of stopping because the future of her marriage was at stake.
    If Nichols had been even half-sober, she might have fought off her murderer, but the copious amount of gin she had taken earlier meant that she was unable to put up any serious form of resistance. In any event, she was small and easily restrained. It would not have taken long for Lizzie Williams to have throttled Polly Nichols to death. Less than a minute might have been sufficient. We were reminded of what Dr Llewellyn had said at the inquest: “it would not have needed a strong man to kill her”.
    We know there was little noise as Nichols died, because neither the residents living in the small cottages that lined one side of Buck’s Row nor the watchmen from the factories and warehouses on the other side heard a sound or any cry for help.
    It was very dark in the street, though the sky was still glowing from the distant Docklands fires. Lizzie Williams had planned to cut Mary Kelly’s throat and now she would discover if she was capable of doing such a thing. She had selected a surgical knife from amongst those she might have found in her husband’s medical bag – a small amputating knife, knowing it was the most suitable instrument for her purpose, “a strong-bladed knife, moderately sharp”.
    Lizzie Williams had to know that she was capable of performing such a gruesome act. She drew out the knife, pressed it against her victim’s neck, pressed down hard and quickly drew back the blade, making a short incision perhaps the length of a finger. When she found that she could do it, she knew she could kill Mary Kelly in the same way, and she cut her victim’s throat a second time, just to be sure that she could do it. This time, the incision was more than twice as long, and almost encircled her victim’s throat.
    But Lizzie Williams also wanted to know if she was capable of performing the operation that would allow her to remove her victim’s uterus, so that she could, when the time came, take Kelly’s. She pushed up her victim’s skirts to her breasts, exposing the abdomen. The woman wore stays – corsets with laces which could be tightened to improve the figure – but they were loose and easily pushed up out of the way. The murderer knew where she needed to make the incisions because, we assume, she had watched her husband perform this very same operation a dozen times before. Then, she made several deliberate cuts, opening her victim’s naked abdomen.
    At the inquest, Dr Llewellyn testified that the murderer “must have had some rough knowledge of anatomy, for he seemed to have attacked all the vital parts.” Once again, this description fitted the extent of Lizzie’s Williams’s knowledge and skill, or lack of it; it most certainly did not fit the description of her husband, Dr John Williams, a highly qualified and expert surgeon.
    But it may have been too dark for Lizzie Williams to see properly, and she might not have been confident that she could find the uterus in the dark. Or perhaps it was the sound of Charles Cross’s approaching footsteps, the labourer walking to his work, which caused her to abandon her victim. Whichever it was, she left the body where it was found soon afterwards, and stole quietly away. In the Whitechapel Road, she fell in with a number of female workers whom P.C. Neil saw, but he immediately discounted them as suspects of importance, because they were just “women… going home”. There was not a man to be seen.

CHAPTER 15
     
     
    M ary Ann Nichols was to have been Lizzie Williams’s only other victim before she was ready to confront and murder Mary Kelly. But while she had managed to kill the unfortunate drunken woman and cut her throat, either poor light, shortness of time, or perhaps both, had prevented her from completing her task.
    Eight days later, early on Saturday, 8 September, Lizzie Williams returned to Whitechapel. It was still dark on this cold but dry morning, though dawn was not far off. This was to be her final rehearsal, and now she was determined to kill a woman, and tear her uterus from