Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman

Williams made several deliberate cuts to her victim’s face, each with its own purpose. All the injuries were recorded in F.W. Foster’s mortuary sketch, and clearly illustrate the extensive nature of the wounds inflicted upon Catherine Eddowes’s body and face. Her eyelids were slashed, her nose severed, ear, mouth and cheeks all deeply scored; in fact, every facial feature that gave her a feminine appearance were obliterated; it was the face that Lizzie Williams thought her husband had been attracted by, and she, who was plain, had destroyed it. Of particular interest to us now, though, were the four mysterious nicks on Eddowes’s cheeks, two on either side of her nose, each 1½ inches long, which appeared to form the shape of an inverted letter V, or triangle.
    Pushing his Masonic connection to the limit, Stephen Knight’s explanation is that the two ‘triangles’ were a sacred sign; they adorn the top of the altar used in the Holy Royal Arch, a side order in Freemasonry. While it is correct that the triangles are symbolically used by Masons, they represent the square and compasses and the two arms are at right angles to each other; the two instruments oppose each other and are linked by the arms which cross so that they appear to be in perfect symmetry. When the six points are joined, they form a symbol identical with the Star of David. They are not entirely separate, as Knight suggests, and they do not resemble the marks on Catherine Eddowes’s cheeks.
    Another suggestion from elsewhere which we considered is that the inverted Vs or triangles were arrows, pointing towards the victim’s hazel eyes, although the reason why the murderer should have wished to draw attention to the eyes was impossible for us to fathom.
    Patricia Cornwell hardly addressed the matter of the victim’s facial injuries, other than to mention briefly that facial injuries “can be revealing”. But revealing of what exactly, she failed to say. She also quoted the comment of a senior Scotland Yard detective, Chief Inspector Donald Sutherland Swanson (Abberline’s superior officer from 1 September until 6 October 1888) who was said to read every piece of paper concerning the murder investigation: “Eddowes’s face had been disfigured ‘almost beyond identity’.” But therein lay the clue. Catherine Eddowes’s face had been disfigured deliberately, to take away her femininity.
    As for the inverted letter V, a far more likely explanation is that the oblique gashes represented something symbolic, though less inventive than Stephen Knight’s suggestion, and far more downto-earth. Why might Lizzie Williams go to the trouble – and time – of carving two peculiar symbols into her victim’s face unless it meant something significant to her? We thought that the bloody shapes must have a special meaning.
    Lizzie Williams was a strongly religious woman. She attended church regularly and knew her Bible well; whether or not she felt that her faith had deserted her in recent years by denying her the child she desired was quite another matter, but we think the letters might have referred to a short but appropriate sentence from Romans 12:19. Lizzie Williams had taken her revenge and left her message? Because that short sentence – beginning with the letter V – reads, “Vengeance is mine: I will repay, saith the Lord”.
    There is another possibility. It is an idea we had tried to ignore as seeming to be too far-fetched, yet we were constantly drawn back to the extraordinary notion that, once again, it was something important that had been hidden in plain sight.
    Lizzie Williams had thought she was dealing with Mary Kelly, her husband’s mistress. She had murdered the woman and inflicted all the injuries she intended at the outset. She had taken her uterus, thereby neutering her as a woman, and ripped out her left kidney (believing it to be her victim’s heart) and she had destroyed the face that, she believed, had so attracted her husband. Her objective, as far as she was concerned, was now fulfilled.
    Is it possible that, in the same way an artist signs his name on a canvas to signify his work has come to an end, that Lizzie Williams had added a sign that her work was also concluded?
    In the early days of his career as an artist, the Dutch painter Rembrandt (1606-69) signed his paintings with the single initial ‘R’, only later adding the additional letter ‘H’ for ‘Rembrandt; son of Harmen’. If an artist of