Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman

Catherine Eddowes was a terrible, inexcusable mistake. It was no accident that she got clean away with her crimes, and the caution she exercised, along with the blind certainty of the police that the killer was a man, allowed her to escape each time. There is no police record of any person matching Lizzie Williams’s description being stopped or questioned by the many police patrols and detectives who searched the streets and alleyways of Whitechapel. As a woman, she was ‘invisible’.
    Our suspicions were aroused one day in 2005 by a short statement of just seven words, ‘You are the centre of my world’. This was an extract taken from a letter discovered by the author of Uncle Jack , Tony Williams. He believed the letter to have been written by his great-great-uncle, Dr John Williams, and sent by him to an old friend. The statement formed part of Tony Williams’s evidence that his distant relative was Jack the Ripper. What rang alarm bells with my father and me was that, from what we knew of Dr Williams, whose life my father had researched intensively, it was completely out of character for him to have made such a statement.
    Strangely, no signature appeared at the foot of the letter attributed to Dr John Williams as reproduced in Uncle Jack , and this increased our suspicions that he had not written it. When we cast about for likely options, my father quickly reached the conclusion that there was only one other possible candidate: the author of the letter was Dr Williams’s wife, Lizzie.
    Since the letter included another short, enigmatic statement, “Thank you for the forgiveness and for keeping my secret”, which Tony Williams took as an admission by Dr Williams that he was the murderer, the finger of suspicion now pointed directly at his wife.
    It was a startling revelation, but, though we were sceptical at first, the notion immediately rang true. For one thing, it explained why the murderer of five women in London’s Whitechapel had never been caught. The police were hunting for a man . Other than that, we had no idea of what might have turned Lizzie Williams into a brutal serial killer, and we set out to conduct our own investigation into the murders, to see how far it would take us.
    What we discovered amazed us. We had confidently expected our hypothesis to fall at the first hurdle: it didn’t. Instead, it jumped over it with ease, and it kept on jumping other hurdles. Once we accepted the proposition that Jack the Ripper might have been a woman, everything started to fall into place, with nothing having to be omitted or twisted to fit the facts. At no point in our investigation did we discover anything to prove that the murderer must have been a man; on the contrary, all the evidence pointed to a woman, and one in particular, Mary Elizabeth Ann Williams – Lizzie.
    At the outset, we listed a number of questions relating to the murders which had always puzzled and perplexed us; as our investigation progressed, those questions were answered one by one. The reasons why Polly Nichols’s throat was cut twice – after she was dead; why the pocket of Annie Chapman’s apron was almost torn off and her (remaining) personal effects arranged carefully at her feet; why Elizabeth Stride’s throat, and nothing more, was cut; why Catherine Eddowes’s face was mutilated and the inverted letter V was carved into each of her cheeks – and what the letter might have stood for; how Caroline Maxwell believed she had seen the final victim several hours after she was known to have been killed; why no sexual interest was shown in any of the victims, and the ultimate red herring, the cryptic words and the bloody part of the apron discovered in Goulston Street, and of course, the identity of the murderer, and the motive behind the dreadful crimes.
    But it was not just the answers that kept emerging which convinced us we were on the right track; it was the way all the pieces of the jigsaw kept dropping neatly into place. Why Polly Nichols was chosen as a victim; what caused the three scratches on Annie Chapman’s neck; how Elizabeth Stride knew what time Catherine Eddowes would be released from custody; even the discovery that Catherine Eddowes was not the worn-out, decrepit harridan we had expected to find.
    That Tony Williams’s great-great-uncle was ‘Jack the Ripper’ was inconceivable from the start. That Dr John Williams would need to seek out prostitutes in Whitechapel to murder them for their uteri was