Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman

with her hand feigning illness, or there was something else that might explain Caroline Maxwell’s comment is unknown, but somehow Lizzie Williams managed to persuade Maxwell that she was Kelly. The deception might not have been so difficult to achieve; after all, she had been an actress when she was younger. To the end of her life, Caroline Maxwell continued to swear that it was Kelly whom she had both seen and spoken with, according to the memoirs of Detective Inspector Walter Dew. This was the only time, following all five murders, that Lizzie Williams was seen leaving the scene of her crime: but, in an ironic twist of fate, she was recognised not as the murderer but as the victim.
    Lizzie Williams would have been unconcerned about Caroline Maxwell. She had laid her plans carefully, including her escapes and, up to now, they had served her well enough. She knew that, as long as everyone thought that the Whitechapel murderer was a man, no one would believe Maxwell’s story, and no one would suspect that ‘Jack the Ripper’ was a woman.
    With the killing and dismemberment of Mary Kelly, Lizzie Williams’s mission of death was finally accomplished and the Whitechapel murders came to an end. We believe that, following her departure from Miller’s Court and brief exchange of words with Caroline Maxwell, Lizzie Williams returned to Queen Anne Street, disposing of Kelly’s heart along the way. Once she reached the relative safety of her own home, she cleaned herself up, changed her clothing and burned Mary Kelly’s clothes; she washed the murder weapon – the small, amputating knife – and replaced it among her husband’s other surgical knives and medical equipment. Then she awaited the return of her estranged husband and, with her rival now dead, perhaps she expected to regain his love.
    We believe that it was then that this intelligent, resourceful and religious, but deeply troubled, woman from Wales, came to realise the horror of the terrible things she had done, and the enormous pressure gradually overwhelmed her. But her reign of terror as Jack the Ripper, in the autumn of 1888, was over.

CHAPTER 18
     
     
    I n the months immediately following the murders, when he was just forty-seven years old, Dr John Williams began to wind down his extensive hospital work. He gave up his teaching role and many of his official positions. He ceased attending the numerous committee meetings he had once enjoyed. He no longer sought the companionship of his friends and colleagues at private members clubs – The Cymmrodorion Society, for Welsh professionals in London seeking to promote the Welsh language and culture, and the Savile Club in Piccadilly.
    The following year in 1890, he applied to cease performing the abdominal operations which had made his name within the medical profession, while the year after that he resigned his position as Dean of the Medical Committee at University College Hospital. Thereafter, he took no further part in managing the hospital. In 1893, five years after the murders at the age of fifty-three, Williams retired from the active staff of the hospital, although he continued to practice privately for another ten years.
    Writing Sir John Williams’s obituary in University College Hospital’s in-house magazine The Lancet in 1926, Dr Herbert Spencer explained his friend’s early retirement from the hospital as “in part to considerations of health”. Ruth Evans repeated the same ‘official’ line and Tony Williams leapt to the obvious conclusion that the statement meant that it was Dr John Williams who had become ill, while all the evidence suggests that he had not. This argument is strengthened further by the fact that Dr John Williams lived for a further thirty-three – very active – years after his retirement from the hospital, while his wife, though ten years younger, lived for just another twenty-two years.
    In fact, the statement is ambiguous; perhaps deliberately so, and may have been designed to mislead rather than illuminate. While it was generally taken to mean that it was Dr John Williams’s health that had suffered, it may equally have referred to the ill-health of his wife.
    Tony Williams suggested that it was guilt which explained Dr Williams’s sudden loss of interest in medicine and the ambition that once had been his life’s driving force: his search to find a cure for infertility. But it did not seem to my father and me that it was his conscience that was troubling