Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman

hand-operated water pump. However, no one who was covered in blood could have used the pump in daylight without the risk of being seen from any one of the tenement houses opposite; though perhaps unbeknown to the murderer, three of them were currently unoccupied. Sunrise on that day was at 7.07, but by the time the murderer was making good an escape, that time was already long past.
    But if the clothes that had been burned in the fire – a woman’s felt hat, a dark brown skirt and a black velvet cape – were not Mary Kelly’s clothes, and Kelly was not known to own a hat, they could have been the blood-stained clothes of the murderer. If the murderer then dressed in Kelly’s clean outer clothes in order to escape, this might explain how Caroline Maxwell believed that she had encountered Mary Kelly.
    What all this means is that over 120 years of traditional thinking has to be set aside. The persistent, single-minded belief that the Whitechapel murders were committed by a man must now be replaced by the possibility that the murderer known as Jack the Ripper could actually have been a woman.

CHAPTER 2
     
     
    T here are several, generally held misconceptions about the Whitechapel murders. One is that the victims were all hacked to death with a knife. They weren’t. The first victim, Mary Ann Nichols, ‘Polly’, was throttled to death before her throat was cut. Another is that the bodies of the five victims were ripped to pieces. Again, they weren’t. The third victim, Elizabeth Stride, was found with her throat cut, but no further mutilations were inflicted on her body. Yet another supposition is that all the victims were murdered under cover of darkness. Wrong again. The estimated time of death of the second victim, Annie Chapman, was 5.30 a.m., more than forty minutes after dawn and five minutes after sunrise. The most important misconception of all, however, is that Jack the Ripper must have been a man.
    The hypothesis that the Whitechapel murderer may have been a woman is not new. Detective Inspector Frederick Abberline had briefly discussed the prospect with a colleague, Dr Thomas Dutton, after the murder of Mary Kelly, and it was Abberline himself who suggested that the killer might indeed have been a woman. Dutton considered the notion unlikely, but suggested that if it were a woman, the only kind of person capable of committing such horrendous crimes would have to be a midwife, and a mad midwife at that.
    The idea had some merit. A midwife would possess the anatomical knowledge necessary to locate the uterus and other organs in the female body; she would have easy access to surgical knives, and the very nature of her profession would enable her to explain away any blood on her clothing and to account for the late hours when she was out and about on the streets. An element of madness thrown in for good measure would provide a valid reason why she had been driven to murder and maim in the first place.
    But it seemed to my father and me that madness was too convenient an excuse. When an explanation cannot be found for some form of irrational behaviour, then describing it as an act of madness provides a neat answer – the easy way out, because no further explanation or answer is required to be given. The assumption was that madness explained everything. Or at least it might have done were it not for the fact that the Whitechapel murders raised so many questions that not even the charge of madness could explain. Abberline must have thought so too, because he doesn’t appear to have pursued his Mad Midwife theory any further.
    The only woman mentioned as a possible suspect for the Whitechapel murders, though some two years later, was a Mary Pearcey from Kentish Town in north London.
    Mary Pearcey, born in 1866, was the daughter of Thomas Wheeler, a convicted murderer, who was hanged on 29 November 1880. She was said, in contemporary newspaper reports, to have been an attractive woman with “lovely russet-coloured hair and pale blue eyes”. After a relationship with a carpenter – John Pearcey – from whom she took her surname, broke down, she moved in with a furniture remover, Frank Hogg, who was already involved in a relationship with a Phoebe Styles. Styles became pregnant by Hogg, and Mary Pearcey persuaded Hogg to marry Styles. Mary Pearcey and Phoebe Hogg became the best of friends, and Pearcey doted on Hogg’s baby, also named Phoebe.
    On 24 October 1890, Phoebe Hogg went to Pearcey’s home