Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman

speculation is the fate of Annie Chapman’s uterus, ripped from her corpse just three weeks before. Had she taken them home with her to Queen Anne Street, to dispose of in her fireplace, or, to throw them at her husband in a gesture full of contempt? We thought this was unlikely because the part of Catherine Eddowes’s apron in which she carried off the organs was found a five-minute walk away in Goulston Street, along with the chalked message. It is not feasible that she would have gone home – a distance of almost 4 miles from Mitre Square, even as the crow flies – left the organs there and returned to Goulston Street, a slightly greater distance, in the hour and a quarter available to her. She would, of course, have been carrying the soiled apron with her – incontrovertible evidence of her guilt – back into the heart of the East End well before dawn, when two frantic police searches were already underway for the murderer. At that time of the morning, it would have been difficult to avoid the attention of the patrols – even as a woman – so for that reason alone we considered the proposition implausible.
    Had she perhaps gone somewhere in Whitechapel after the second of that night’s murders? Maybe she went to the dispensary in Leman Street where her husband sometimes worked, providing ‘essential services’ to the women who walked the darkened streets seeking the price of a doss for the night; perhaps she had stolen the key from him so that she could enter the premises in the middle of the night, and there, using such instruments as might be needed, dissected and examined the uterus to see if it contained a foetus? She was probably capable of conducting such an examination, so this was at least possible.
    But Leman Street runs south from the junction of Whitechapel Road and Commercial Road, which would have taken Lizzie Williams back towards Berner Street where the first of that night’s murders had taken place, so we thought that that explanation was also unlikely. And, of course, if she had been disturbed, it would have been impossible to explain her presence in the dispensary on her own at any time, much less during the early hours of the morning when two full-scale murder investigations were underway. Even if a foetus were to be discovered growing within the uterus, it would prove that Kelly was pregnant, but by whom? Lizzie Williams could never know.
    Because the soiled part of the severed apron, used to transport the organs from the scene of the crime, was found in nearby Goulston Street, although there was no sign of the uterus or kidney, we do not think that Lizzie Williams kept the organs for long or took them very far – or that she kept the bloody apron in which she had carried them away. It was clear to my father and me that she had disposed of the organs soon after committing her crimes, and somewhere close at hand.
    In the end, and as gruesome as the prospect might seem, we thought it more likely that the starving cats and dogs which roamed the streets of Whitechapel held the answer: she fed what she had ripped from her victims’ bodies to them. The murderer might have thought it to be a fitting and just end for the organs that she believed she had taken from her rival – although, and as we readily concede, the truth, as to what became of them, may well lie elsewhere.
    The severed part of the apron, wet with blood, was folded in two, so the bloody mess was on the inside. Then it was discarded somewhere; perhaps on a rubbish pile or just dropped in the street. Afterwards, Lizzie Williams would have returned home, confident that she had murdered Mary Kelly, but would she reveal her secret to her husband? We thought it unlikely that she would have done so. If she had, it is certain that Dr John Williams would have prevented her from continuing with her murderous campaign.
    Two days later, on the evening of Tuesday, 2 October, a labourer, John Kelly, turned up at Bishopsgate Police Station. He had read the description of the Mitre Square victim in The Star newspaper which he had picked up in Cooney’s lodging house. The reference in the text to the initials T.C., which had been found tattooed on the left forearm of the corpse, shocked him. After Kelly identified the body at the mortuary, he told the police that the deceased had been in her mid-forties and that her name was Catherine Eddowes. He and the deceased, whom he called Kate, had lived together as husband and wife since