Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman

even feared the prospect of her own death. Terror would have caused her body to release endorphins (hormones), raising her pain threshold and affecting her frame of mind. The blood supply and the oxygen which it carried to the cerebral cortex – that part of the brain which controls emotion and thought – stopped as soon as the carotid arteries were severed. The brain stem survived for just a little longer, allowing blood circulation to continue. Her heart beat faster to pump more blood to the open wound. Mary Kelly would have felt her consciousness quickly slipping away and, within just a few seconds, like a candle burning out, she was dead.
    The murder of Mary Kelly should have been enough to satisfy Lizzie Williams’s thirst for revenge; even the taking of her uterus, a sufficient act of vengeance. But after years of pent-up frustration, her emotions were running high and simply murdering Kelly was not enough. Everything about the woman that could remind Lizzie Williams’s husband that she was the woman he had wanted, who could give him the child he desired, had to be annihilated. But before she set to work on her victim’s corpse, she removed her black velvet cape and placed it on a chair, thereby covering the clothes that Kelly had taken off earlier. Then she removed her hat, and placed it on top of her cape. Such evidence as there is shows that she must have acted in his way, because Kelly’s own undergarments were later discovered on one of the two chairs in the room, free of blood.
    Lizzie Williams was a woman possessed. Driven by raging anger and bitter resentment, she pulled Kelly’s body towards her so that she could more easily launch her terrifying assault. Everything had been planned in minute detail. She slashed the eyelids up and down. She hacked away her victim’s nose, so it ended up lying on one side on her cheek. She chopped at her ears, and severed her lips. She destroyed every feature of the face her husband had found so much more engaging than her own, in the same manner that she had destroyed Catherine Eddowes’s face six weeks before.
    The autopsy notes of Dr Bond dated 10 November 1888 (which report went missing for almost a century, before surfacing unexpectedly in 1987) read in part:
    The face was gashed in all directions, the nose, cheeks, eyebrows and ears being partly removed. The lips were blanched and cut by several incisions running obliquely down to the chin. There were also numerous cuts extending irregularly across all the features.
     
    The oblique incisions suggest that Lizzie Williams may have signed her ‘work’ again by carving the initial ‘M’ into Mary Kelly’s face; but this is uncertain. Neither Inspector Abberline nor Dr Bond saw anything beyond the victim’s terrible wounds. Bond merely recorded the injuries that he had observed, but failed to record their precise descriptions without realising the great evidential value they might have presented as to the identity of the murderer.
    After she had finished carving Kelly’s face, Lizzie Williams might have stepped back to inspect her handiwork. The young woman had been pretty once, which was why her husband had been attracted to her, but this was no longer the case. Any beauty she might have possessed was gone forever. We wondered: if Kelly’s murderer had been a man, what possible reason could he have had to desecrate a woman’s face, because there had to be one. In over 120 years, none, or no plausible reason, has ever been put forward. But if the murderer was a woman whose husband was having an affair with the victim, and the victim’s face was so much more pleasing than the murderer’s own face, then jealousy might very well provide that reason.
    But it was still not enough. Lizzie Williams had needed to satisfy herself that her husband would never desire this woman again. We think that she hacked off her victim’s breasts, not only because she believed her husband frequently revelled in fondling them, but because those breasts might one day have suckled his baby.
    Lizzie Williams pushed Kelly’s left breast under the dead woman’s head. The right breast she placed at the feet of the corpse. Kelly’s arms were gouged and slashed to shreds. Her legs that had, perhaps only days earlier, gripped him in passion were cut to ribbons, the skin and flesh strewn about the room. Kelly’s intestines , liver and spleen, which had once given life to such a sensual body, were ripped out, and her uterus,