Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman

Eddowes had separated from her former lover, Thomas Conway, in 1881, and it was Conway who had tattooed his initials on her arm. A full report of the murder, together with the victim’s name, was published in the following days’ newspapers.
    How Lizzie Williams must have felt at the revelation that she had murdered the wrong woman cannot be imagined. Elizabeth Stride had identified the dead woman as Mary Kelly. She had described what Kelly was wearing, when and where she might be found; the woman herself may have told her that her name was Mary Kelly and that she lived in Spitalfields, but however the mistake had come about, the woman was not the Mary Kelly for whom Lizzie Williams was searching. The real Mary Kelly, Dr John Williams’s Mary Kelly, was still alive.

CHAPTER 17
     
     
    L izzie Williams’s principal objective all along was to murder Mary Kelly. She was the woman who threatened her marriage, her future, and perhaps even her pride. Kelly had already proven fertile and might give Dr Williams the child he craved, but Lizzie Williams neither could nor would allow that to happen. It was clear that she had not wished to encounter Kelly, no matter how much she loathed the woman and wished her dead, without knowing that she was capable of killing her and taking her womanhood.
    At the outset, truth perhaps being stranger than fiction, Lizzie Williams decided that she would perfect her skills elsewhere first, and only then, when she was confident that she could achieve her purpose, would she seek out Kelly and exact her revenge.
    Mary Ann Nichols, her first unfortunate victim, was chosen deliberately because she was small, very drunk and unlikely to put up much resistance. She was also a prostitute, and therefore, in Lizzie Williams’s eyes, the lowest of the low. The police had already demonstrated a reluctance to commit their meagre resources to full-scale investigations into the murders of prostitutes, vis-à-vis Emma Smith and Martha Tabram. Both enquiries had ground to a premature halt; the former within two months, the latter within just a month. Lizzie Williams might have considered that there was little prospect of full and proper investigations being carried out into the murders of two more prostitutes. She was aware, therefore, that if she planned her crimes with care, she would be likely to get away with them.
    Polly Nichols should have been her only other victim, but her plans to remove the victim’s uterus were thwarted by poor light, or perhaps it was the sound of Charles Cross’s approaching footsteps which stopped her from continuing with her attack. A second victim was therefore required because Lizzie Williams needed to know that she could remove the uterus from a dead body; after the murder of Annie Chapman in Hanbury Street, she knew that she could. That was when she began her search for Mary Kelly.
    Somehow, somewhere in Whitechapel, Lizzie Williams met Elizabeth Stride and it was she who identified a woman to her whom she knew as Mary Kelly, though she was in fact Catherine Eddowes. Stride told Lizzie where ‘Kelly’ would be, at what time she would be there and provided her with a physical description of the woman. But Stride could have given Lizzie away to the police, who were already searching for the Buck’s Row and Hanbury Street murderer, so she had to be silenced. Thus it was that Stride, too, found herself a victim of Lizzie Williams’s knife.
    Lizzie met Eddowes soon after her release from custody at Bishopsgate Police Station – where exactly, we do not know – and she murdered her in the mistaken belief that she was Mary Kelly. The anger and hatred she felt towards her victim was illustrated by the dreadful catalogue of injuries she caused to her dead body. Every wound was inflicted with precision and purpose. Catherine Eddowes’s throat was severed so deeply that her head was almost cut from her shoulders – to make sure she was dead. Every feature of the woman’s face, a face that was so much more fetching than the murderer’s, was destroyed; Eddowes’s uterus was torn from her body and her left kidney ripped out in the mistaken belief that the murderer had found her heart. In a final act of triumph over her opponent, and as a sign that her deadly mission was over, she may even have signed the initial letter of her first name, Mary, into her victim’s cheeks.
    When Lizzie Williams discovered that the woman she had murdered in Mitre Square was not Mary Kelly,