Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman

carrying her objective through to the bitter end, although first she had to find her victim. The only way she could achieve this was to ask around. But where should she begin? Since Mary Kelly lived in Spitalfields, perhaps Spitalfields church on Dorset Street – which was where many prostitutes waited for their clients – would be as good a starting place as any, or perhaps the Queen’s Head public house on the corner of Fashion Street and Commercial Street where they also gathered. Wherever it was that Lizzie Williams went, she met a woman who said she knew Mary Kelly. That woman’s name, we contend, was Elizabeth Stride. She wore a long black fur-trimmed jacket with a single red rose on maidenhair fern in her buttonhole.
    Stride might have laughed when Lizzie Williams asked her where she could find Mary Kelly because, the evening before, ‘Kelly’ had been found drunk in Aldgate High Street. She was arrested and taken to Bishopsgate Police Station where she would remain until she sobered up. Further questioning would have elicited the likely time of her discharge from custody and what she was wearing: a black straw bonnet trimmed with black and green velvet, a black fur-edged jacket, a dark-green skirt and a white apron.
    One might well ask, even if Elizabeth Stride had known of Mary Kelly’s arrest and subsequent incarceration, how could she possibly know when she would be released?
    The answer was simple enough.
    Elizabeth Stride had appeared before the Thames Magistrates Court on numerous occasions for offences of drunk and disorderly behaviour under the name Anne Fitzgerald. She herself had been locked in the cells of Bishopsgate Police Station several times, and had experienced at first hand the policy of clearing the cells of their occupants, wherever possible, at the end of the evening shift. That always happened at one o’clock in the morning – the very same time that police constables at fixed-points, all over London, changed their shifts.
    So now Lizzie Williams knew what Mary Kelly looked like and where and when she could be found. Yet she was now in a dilemma. Stride knew that Lizzie Williams wanted to find Mary Kelly. When Kelly turned up dead, it would not take long for Elizabeth Stride to come forward and provide the police with a description of the woman who had been looking for her – especially if a reward was offered, and there was talk of a reward for information leading to the arrest of the murderer, though none had yet been officially sanctioned. Perhaps Stride became suspicious of Lizzie Williams’s motive for wanting to find Kelly, and asked for an extra sovereign to buy her silence; whatever happened, Lizzie Williams would have quickly realised that neither a sovereign, nor even a handful of sovereigns, would buy the woman’s silence for long. So there was only one possible option available to her if she was to murder Mary Kelly and avoid the hangman’s rope: Stride too would have to be silenced.
    Lizzie Williams must have justified the murder to herself; what was another dead prostitute in Whitechapel anyway? She had already murdered two women and got clean away with it. No one suspected her; no one even suspected that a woman was responsible for the murders; nor, she might have thought, would they ever. So, when the two women parted, we believe that Lizzie Williams followed Stride, waiting for an opportunity to murder her. Her moment came in Berner Street where, at the gateway to Dutfield’s Yard, she would have observed Stride being assaulted. Her attacker was a man with a fair complexion, dark hair, a short moustache, and wearing a peaked cap. She would have watched a second man walking towards the gates, suddenly turn and run away in the direction from which he had come, and she would have seen a third man who had been leaning against a lamppost, calmly lighting his pipe, suddenly start, and run after the second man.
    There are no eyewitness accounts to what happened next (a familiar and distinguishing feature of all the murders) but Stride’s dead body was discovered just a quarter of an hour later, so it is logical to assume that the man in the peaked cap killed her. We do not believe that he did, and wonder if he possessed an entirely different motive for his assault upon Stride.
    Israel Schwartz, the second man and a witness who chanced upon the attack, made no mention of seeing a knife in the possession of Stride’s attacker, and he was able to provide the police