Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman

Metropolitan Police, but he resigned from the force two years later, having achieved 84 commendations and awards. He worked as a private detective for a further twelve years before moving to Bournemouth on his retirement. He died in 1929 at the age of eighty-six – the very same age that Dr John Williams and Richard Hughes had been when they died.
     
    Detective Sergeant George Godley, who was appointed to assist Abberline in the murder investigation, remained in the police force for another twenty years. By the time he retired, he had attained the rank of Inspector. In 1903 he arrested George Chapman, one of the Ripper suspects, for the alleged murder of his wife by poisoning. Godley died in 1941, aged eighty-five.
     
    Inspector Walter Dew, one of the first officers in the murder investigation to enter 13 Miller’s Court, regarded the sight of Mary Kelly’s remains as “the most gruesome memory of the whole of my police career” ( I Caught Crippen, 1938). He gained fame for himself when he arrested ‘Dr’ Hawley Harvey Crippen in Quebec, Canada, who poisoned his wife in 1910. The case was notable because Crippen was the first criminal to be captured with the aid of wireless communications. Walter Dew died in 1947.
     
    Wynne Edwin Baxter, coroner for the South-Eastern District of Middlesex, held many thousands of inquests during his professional lifetime, including, notably, that of Joseph Meyrick, the Elephant Man. Two years after the Whitechapel murders, in 1890, he was appointed Life Governor of the London Hospital. Like John Williams, he was an avid book collector but with a specific interest in the works of John Milton. Baxter was also a popular and very successful solicitor, politician and businessman whose legal practice in Worthing survives to this day under the name Mayo Wynne Baxter LLP. Baxter died in 1920, aged seventy-six.
     
    Thomas Power O’Connor, founder and editor of The Star newspaper, was almost certainly the originator of the name Jack the Ripper, though it has since been proved beyond reasonable doubt that the infamous ‘Dear Boss’ letter, including its notorious signature, was penned and signed by his employee, journalist Frederick Best. As an astute marketing ploy, it must rank as one of the best in history as a means of selling newspapers, because it catapulted sales of the newly launched paper far beyond competitors of the day. O’Connor, a shrewd Irishman and Member of Parliament (1880-1929), founded several other newspapers, including The Weekly Sun (1891) and The Sun (1893). It was as much because of his sensationalised style of journalism, that morbid curiosity, panic and terror increased among the general public, as the brutality of the murders and mystery surrounding the identity of the murderer. A marble bust of O’Connor gazes down Fleet Street to this day to commemorate his better-known achievements in the newspaper industry, though none are as well-known as the sobriquet he almost certainly coined so surreptitiously, which is still used as an instantly recognisable pseudonym to categorise brutal serial killers the world over. He died in London in 1929 at the age of eighty-six.
     
    The summer of 2008 marked the 120th anniversary of the Whitechapel murders, and my father’s death. His funeral was held at the very same Welsh chapel, in Morriston, where Lizzie Williams had laid the foundation stone in 1870. Also a quiet and methodical watchmaker, Byron Morris developed a passion for historical research during the latter years of his life, and ferreted out the answers to several mysteries long past. Though he became almost blind and very deaf, his memory was clear, his mind sharp and intuitive. He was, it was said, a hard act to follow. It was he, rather than me, whose spark of realisation as to whom the murderer could have been led us – eventually – to discover the truth. But at the age of ninety-six, and with so much more to give, his time had also come.

APPENDIX I
     
     
    A fter I delivered the ‘final’ draft manuscript to my forgiving publisher for a third time, I made a startling and unexpected discovery. It occurred as I looked up a small detail about the Savile Club in Piccadilly to which Sir John Williams belonged. A familiar, and famous, name in the list of members caught my eye: Rudyard Kipling, author of ‘The Female of the Species’, an extract from which I had included in the text earlier, was also a member of the club.
    Founded in 1868 for the