Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman

before attacking the abdomen, sheer force of feminine habit compelled Lizzie Williams to tidy up the remaining personal effects of her victim, which she set neatly to one side, and out of her way by the feet of the corpse.
    We are fairly sure that this was the order of events, because neither the small-toothed comb, the larger comb in a paper case, nor the small piece of coarse muslin were reported as being blood-stained – and they would have been if Lizzie Williams had picked them up after she had ripped out Annie Chapman’s uterus.
    She pushed her victim’s skirts up to her breasts, and confidently opened the abdomen. She only knew from her observations how a hysterectomy should be performed; she had never before practised the operation, or indeed any surgery, herself.
    The intestines were in the way of the uterus and she severed them at one end, scooped them up and placed them on the corpse’s upper body, out of the way. It seems logical to deduce that they were put there because that was the most convenient place for them, and not for any other reason, Masonic or otherwise.
    Then she made her incisions, low into the vagina and then higher through the bladder, so that no injury was caused to the uterus located between them, “the organ the murderer was determined to possess”, as the coroner, Wynne Baxter, remarked, during Annie Chapman’s inquest.
    The murderer’s hands were now covered in blood. She could not leave the backyard and walk through the streets of Whitechapel in such a state. There was a pan of clean water in the yard. Lizzie Williams may have intended to use the water to wash her hands, knowing from years of experience of being married to a doctor that it was cold, and not hot, water, which was most effective when it came to removing blood. But perhaps a noise from within the house alerted her to the danger of delaying her escape. So, instead of plunging her hands into the water, and in order to save precious seconds, we think that she may instead have dipped into the water some of the bunched material of her petticoat, soaking it well. Then, by using the damp fabric to wipe the blood from her hands as she hurried back along the long corridor, they were clean enough by the time she reached the front door. By dropping her skirts to their normal position, all evidence of the blood on her undergarments beneath would have been hidden from view.
    Certain now that she could both kill Mary Kelly and perform the surgery necessary to remove the uterus from her dead body, Lizzie Williams left the scene of her crime, taking her ghastly, but well-wrapped, package with her. There were already many people about at that early hour, of whom John Richardson, on his way to work an hour earlier, and Mrs Long, less than a half hour before, were just two. There would have been others also, both male and female of all ages, on their way to market, or perhaps going home from their night shifts, and Lizzie Williams knew that, as a woman, she would not be noticed leaving a house where several families lived. The moment she stepped out into the street, she became just one in the crowd, and, again, vanished quickly from sight.

CHAPTER 16
     
     
    T o kill a person, a woman, had not proved to be so difficult after all, and the surgical extraction of the uterus from a corpse was indeed possible. What Lizzie Williams had learned at her husband’s elbow she had remembered, and what she remembered she had performed well; even in her hurry, and in the potential death-trap of an enclosed backyard in Hanbury Street.
    During the late evening of Saturday, 29 September, Lizzie Williams returned to Whitechapel for which she must have expected to be the last time. It would have taken less than a month, from the night of Polly Nichols’s death on the last day of August to what should be the final killing; that of Mary Kelly, which she intended to commit as soon as the opportunity presented itself, during the early hours of the following morning.
    It was after midnight and the streets of Whitechapel were quieter than usual, owing in large part to the adverse publicity the newspapers had given to the murders that autumn, though hansom cabs, broughams, carriages and tradesmen’s carts still passed to and fro. Police patrols were frequent and detectives kept their vigilant watch on any man prepared to brave the faceless terror lurking in the shadows of the dimly lit streets.
    Lizzie Williams was confident that she was capable of