Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman

and that somehow she had made a ghastly mistake, she was forced to make new plans to find and murder her true intended victim. Those plans took her a little less than six weeks to devise – from the Wednesday morning after the newspapers published the victim, Catherine Eddowes’s true identity, to the day of the Lord Mayor’s Show.
    During the early hours of Friday, 9 November, after George Hutchinson had abandoned his watch on Kelly’s door, Kelly’s visitor also left, though at what time exactly we are unable to say. Then at some time afterwards, but before 4.00 a.m., Lizzie Williams entered the small room at 13 Miller’s Court. There, by the light of a solitary candle, she took her appalling revenge on the unfortunate young woman within.
    We think that the injuries inflicted on Mary Kelly’s body were not just in retribution for the anguish and pain the murderer had suffered, knowing that the man at the centre of her world physically desired someone else. It was jealousy, because Kelly was youthful, good-looking and – most important of all – fertile, everything Lizzie Williams was not. And it was in fury for the babies that this woman – and all women like her – could conceive, but did not want.
    How had Lizzie Williams found Mary Kelly this time, when previously she had had to ask around for her? We think in the very same way; she had made her plans long before she ever picked up a knife with intent to commit murder, and they included how she would find Kelly. Perhaps Dr John Williams revealed more information about Kelly than he had intended – that she had been brought up in Wales, for instance; even that she spoke with a Welsh accent. We think it doubtful that his wife would have deviated far from her plans. We believe it is more probable that within days of the newspapers publishing Catherine Eddowes’s true name, Lizzie Williams returned to Whitechapel to seek out Mary Kelly. One woman asking questions about another would arouse few, if any, suspicions; perhaps she told the people whom she asked that she was a long-lost relative from Wales. It is not such an unlikely proposition ; after all, they both had a common background, she from Swansea, Kelly, though Irish-born, from Cwmparc in the Rhondda Valley, and of course, they both spoke with a Welsh accent – or Lizzie Williams could when she needed to.
    Once Lizzie Williams discovered where Kelly lived, she was able to take her time; not only so the people she questioned about Kelly would forget that they had ever been asked about her, but to plan how she would carry out the murder. Lizzie Williams almost certainly used the weeks leading up to the murder to discover everything she could about her victim: watching her movements, establishing her routine, when she left home, when she returned, even the method by which she gained access to her room. They may even have talked together when Lizzie would have noted Kelly’s Welsh accent. Lizzie, who was ten years younger than her husband, would have found that Kelly, at twenty-five years old, was even younger; she may have also discovered that Kelly shared her small room with a child. These discoveries possibly would have incensed her all the more.
    My father and I had wondered if, on the morning of the murder, when Mrs Caroline Maxwell alleged that Mary Kelly had addressed her by her nickname, ‘Carrie’, Lizzie had in fact called her ‘Cariad’, meaning ‘dear’ or ‘love’ in Welsh, and Maxwell had somehow misheard. But we think it more likely that she could have chanced upon Caroline Maxwell as she was stalking Kelly, and might even have spoken with her or, at the very least, listened in on her conversations, and perhaps that was how she discovered Maxwell’s nickname.
    Later, on the day of the murder, Maxwell said that she had seen Kelly a second time, but it was at a distance of twenty-five yards when the woman was in the Queen’s Head public house talking to a man. Again, fog would have impeded her vision and perhaps what she actually saw was the distinctive red knitted crossover shawl that she had seen Lizzie Williams wearing earlier that morning. She then assumed wrongly, a second time, that the person wearing the shawl was Kelly. We think that Lizzie Williams realised that the bright red shawl drew attention to herself, and so she gave it away or discarded it somewhere as she made her escape, so that it was taken or picked up by someone else, and it was another woman altogether