Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman

connected with the crimes – both before 1903 and in the years that followed. But there was no direct evidence of involvement in the murders by any of the suspects whom they named, nor did any of them appear to possess a plausible motive.
    Perhaps the truth as to who the murderer might have been was confined to just those who needed to know, and those few who did were sworn to secrecy. That way, there was less likelihood of the secret leaking out – ever. Few police officers possessed the depth of knowledge about the murders, and enjoyed such well-established connections with the Home Office, as James Monroe, and none had such intimate familiarity with the cases as Frederick Abberline. Author of Autumn of Terror, Tom Cullen, said that James Monroe was “possibly the only man at Scotland Yard who was capable of tracking down the killer”. Perhaps he had. Monroe had written some private memoirs for his family which contained nothing about the Ripper murders, but supposedly some for his eldest son, Charles, which did; however, it is assumed that any such papers were unaccountably destroyed because they have never surfaced. Charles, who had presumably read his father’s notes, allegedly told his younger brother, Douglas, that his father’s theory was “a very hot potato”, while his grandson, Christopher, remembers him saying that “Jack the Ripper should have been caught”. This suggests that Monroe knew or, at the very least, suspected who the Ripper was. When Sir John and Lady Williams so hurriedly left London for Wales, those suspicions may very well have crystallised. If James Monroe believed that either the eminent Sir John Williams, a peer of the realm, or his wife, Lady Williams, might have been the murderer, this would indeed have been a very hot potato.
    If it was the case that there had been a high-level governmental cover-up over the suspected identity of the murderer, it would not have been for the first time, so there was already a precedent. In 1889, the year following the murders, Inspector Abberline was involved in the Cleveland Street scandal, when a homosexual brothel in the West End of London was raided by the police. This was at a time when homosexual activity was illegal. Prince Albert Victor, Queen Victoria’s grandson (later proposed, but dismissed, as a Ripper suspect) was said to have been involved, but a government cloak of secrecy kept his name out of the newspapers. Whatever the reason, within a relatively short time of Sir John
    Williams sending his most extraordinary letter to Margot Asquith, the wife of the future Prime Minister, he suddenly and unexpectedly gave up his successful private practice. Ruth Evans says that the months of dissolving his Brook Street practice were ‘strenuous’, which would not be expected in a planned retirement – rather, the pressure felt by a man in a hurry to leave.
    On 29 January 1903, Sir John Williams left London, and took a twenty-one-year lease on a magnificent Georgian mansion, Plas Llanstephan in Carmarthenshire, overlooking the beautiful Towy estuary, towards Ferryside on the opposite bank. Lady Williams, at fifty-two, was cared for by her stepmother, Mary Hughes, who continued to look after her, following the death of her husband, Lizzie’s father, Richard Hughes, who died in that same year. All three lived there in relative isolation until 1908 before finally moving to Aberystwyth where they spent the rest of their days, so that Sir John Williams could be near the library he founded and loved so much. If neither a child nor medicine was to be his legacy, then the National Library of Wales, to which he devoted the remainder of his life and perhaps as atonement for his part in the murders, would be. At just sixty-two years of age, and while at the peak of his career, Sir John Williams had left London and the medical profession forever; his life in medicine was over.
     
    The story we have uncovered is incredible, but that does not mean that it did not happen. Everything about the Ripper murders is extraordinary; nothing more so than the fact that Jack the Ripper was a woman, that she was the wife of a prominent London doctor, a gynaecologist and physician to royalty who became a baronet and she Lady Williams, makes it all the more astounding. Yet all the evidence we have uncovered, though much of it circumstantial, points to it being true.
    Every murder Lizzie Williams committed was planned with meticulous care, even though that of