Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman

the organ that made her the woman that Lizzie Williams could never be, was excised with a single sweep of her knife. But the heart that he had wanted – metaphorically – she cut out and kept for herself.
    As she finished her bloody business, there was something more Lizzie Williams had to do. She drew Kelly’s legs away from each other, bending them slightly at the knees. When the body was discovered, it appeared that they had been forced unusually wide apart. In fact, they had been left in the position Kelly might have adopted herself for sexual intercourse to have taken place. It was as if she was leaving a bizarre message of some kind: ‘If this is the way you behave with my husband, this is what you get!’ Though, and as we freely admit, we have no way of knowing if this is the correct interpretation – except for another strange, and perhaps final, act performed by Kelly’s murderer which suggests that it might be. When Kelly’s body was found, one of her arms had been pushed into the now-empty cavity of her belly. It seemed like a last sarcastic gesture – to protect the child she would never have.
    It had been an orgy of death – the reason for which only a woman unable to have children of her own, a woman who had lost her fortune and was now faced with losing her husband too, a woman on the edge of insanity, could fully understand. But the butchery had taken much longer than she had realised. It was now almost an hour and a half past sunrise and people would be up and about.
    Lizzie Williams must have looked down at her hands and skirt which were now covered in blood. The hat and cape she had left on the chair were also soaked with blood. She could not have foreseen that her clothes would have been ruined in such a manner. She could not go out on the streets like that in daylight, even if she was disguised as a midwife, and the evidence could not be concealed.
    Kelly’s room offered the murderer no possibilities for cleaning herself. There was a water pump on the end wall of the courtyard outside, but it was overlooked by a small row of terraced houses on the opposite side of the court. Lizzie Williams could not risk using the pump and meeting one of the neighbours, and then having to explain what she was doing there.
    The answer would have come to her quickly, even if that too had not been part of her plan. Kelly’s clothes, which she had removed the night before as she prepared herself for bed, or for the male visitor whom Hutchinson had observed, were neatly laid across a chair. They were underneath Lizzie Williams’s own ruined hat and cape, but Kelly’s clothes were not stained with blood.
    Mary Kelly and Lizzie Williams were about the same size, judging by Lizzie Williams’s photographs which are all we have to go by, and the description of Kelly provided by Philip Sugden’s The Complete History of Jack the Ripper , although, if anything, Lizzie might have been a little smaller of the two. Lizzie Williams removed her skirt, wiped the blood from her hands on the cotton twill material and then pushed it into the fireplace. She took the soiled cape and hat, and placed those on the fire too where they were consumed by the flames. Whether or not the fire was still alight when the clothes were shoved into the grate, we do not know – perhaps it had gone out and that was one of the reasons why the murderer remained in Kelly’s room for so long: to make sure that the fire was properly alight so that her clothes – the only evidence linking her directly to the murder – were completely destroyed: which in the event, they were not.
    Then Lizzie Williams dressed herself in Mary Kelly’s clothes, putting on her brown linsey skirt, her green bodice and red knitted crossover shawl. As she prepared to leave the room, she may have taken one last satisfied look around, surveying the carnage she had caused and the bloody remains of her victim. Lizzie Williams was a woman scorned and her fury had created a vision of hell which would surely haunt her forever.
    But as she emerged from the passageway that led from Miller’s Court, Lizzie Williams was seen by Caroline Maxwell on the other side of Dorset Street, and they spoke briefly through the fog before the rain started. From the little Maxwell could see of the woman she believed to be Mary Kelly, it is clear that her appearance was somewhat different to normal, because Maxwell said she ‘looked ill’. Whether Lizzie Williams was covering her face