Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman

whom Maxwell had seen.
    The day of the murder was chosen specifically because that was the day of the Lord Mayor’s Show. It meant that Lizzie Williams could give both the servants the day off to attend the parade without arousing any suspicions if she were found to be absent from the house. Dr John Williams may have been at his work, which so often took him through the night. The house, therefore, would be empty, and she could enter unobserved on her return from Whitechapel; clean herself of blood, and replace the weapon from where she had taken it.
    We know that the time she chose to attack her victim was at 4 o’clock in the morning, because that was when two independent witnesses heard a single scream from somewhere in the court which was, almost certainly, Kelly’s last pitiable cry for help. It was a good time to choose because the cry went unanswered. Lizzie Williams knew that any cries at that hour would likely be ignored because people were deep in sleep, and any who were awoken or awake would be reluctant to leave their beds to investigate, which, in the event, proved to be the case.
    According to George Hutchinson’s statement, Kelly returned to her apartment soon after 2.00 a.m. with a man whom he later described to Inspector Abberline in great, if not impossible, detail. Mary Kelly had gained access to her room by reaching through a broken window at the side of the house (it had been broken during an earlier quarrel with Hutchinson) and pulling back the latch on the inside of her door. That night, the court was bitter cold and deathly quiet. It had rained until 11.00 p.m. and the temperature had dropped to just a few degrees above freezing. Soon the filthy, thick fog would descend.
    At a time approaching 4.00 a.m., Lizzie Williams’s fingers found and pulled back the latch, opening the door to Kelly’s room which she then entered. A small candle on top of a broken wine glass placed on a table next to the bed, provided the only light. Mary Kelly, wearing nothing but a thin cotton nightdress, was in her bed. She may have been shocked at first to discover that someone had found their way into her room uninvited. Perhaps she sat bolt upright in surprise, asking her who she was and what she wanted; but she would have been alarmed and on her guard.
    It is almost certain that Lizzie Williams had visualised this moment, thinking what she would say to Mary Kelly when the moment arrived. My father and I had little doubt that she had prepared a few well-chosen words for the occasion, rehearsing them over and over in her troubled mind. Every word was designed to strike home, intended to hurt. But we wondered if any words were actually delivered when Lizzie Williams found herself face to face with Kelly, or did she perhaps think that the words were no longer important, an irrelevance. It is clear from what followed that no words could adequately convey the murderer’s true feelings of the hatred she felt for the woman her husband desired and who perhaps could bear him the child he wanted so badly.
    Lizzie Williams would have seen, even by the dim candlelight, that Mary Kelly was young, voluptuous, and why, perhaps, she appealed sexually to her husband. Contemporary accounts of her appearance record that she was comely with pale-blue eyes, waist-length fair hair, figure buxom and well-rounded.
    What happened between the time that Lizzie Williams entered Mary Kelly’s room, and the moment before she attacked her, we do not know; we do not even know if any conversation took place. If it did, it was almost certainly brief. All we can say for certain is that Lizzie Williams’s abhorrence for Kelly manifested itself clearly by both the manner in which she killed her, and the extent of the violence she inflicted on her body afterwards. We know that Kelly pulled up the bed sheet to cover her face at the very moment she was attacked, because the two witnesses who heard her scream said that the cry sounded ‘muffled’. A cut in the bloodied sheet coincided exactly with the brutal knife stroke that killed her. It was delivered with such force that her throat was severed down to the spinal column, causing it to be deeply scored. A small cut on Kelly’s right thumb and an abrasion to the back of her left hand and forearm suggest that she made a brief, but ultimately futile, attempt to defend herself.
    Mary Kelly may not have felt the sting of the sharp surgical blade as it cut deep into her throat at this point, nor