Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman

by kindels

  In the annals of crime, the incidence of females using knives in attacks is highly unusual, and the number of females who are driven to murder and mutilate their victims is rarer still. But they are not unheard of and there are in fact, several modern parallels with the Whitechapel murders.

  In 2004 a gruesome news report rocked the United States and shocked the rest of the civilised world. The murdered body of a young woman had been discovered in her own home. She was identified as 28-year-old Bobbie Jo Stinnett from Kansas City, and she was eight months’ pregnant at the time of her death. She had been strangled, her stomach cut open and her unborn baby ripped out of her womb. The baby survived and was presented to family and friends as the murderer’s own child. What made the crime all the more appalling was that the convicted killer, 36-year-old Lisa Montgomery, was a woman.

  On 10 October 2011 another American, Annette Morales-Rodriguez from Wisconsin, was charged with the murder of a pregnant woman. Desperate to have a baby son with her new boyfriend, she invited heavily pregnant Martiza Ramirez-Cruz into her home. There Morales-Rodriguez battered her with a baseball bat before strangling her to death. She then used a knife to cut open her victim’s abdomen, and removed the foetus in an attempt to replicate a Caesarean operation she had seen on the Discovery Channel. At least five other similar cases of attacks on pregnant women in America have been reported.

  In March 2005, two sisters, Linda and Charlotte Mulhall, dubbed the ‘Scissor Sisters’, aged 30 and 32 years respectively, made headline news across Ireland when they demonstrated graphically that women murderers could be as vicious as their male counterparts. They had attacked and killed their mother, Kathleen’s, abusive lover, Farah Swaleh Noor, a Kenyan immigrant and known violent criminal, after he had made repeated sexual advances to Linda in her central Dublin terraced home. Mr Justice Carney, who presided at the sisters’ subsequent trial, made a chilling remark during sentencing when he said: “It was the most grotesque killing that has occurred in my professional lifetime.”

  In the evidence, it was revealed that, encouraged by their mother, Charlotte Mulhall had slit Noor’s throat with a Stanley knife – significantly she cut it twice – while her sister delivered several blows to his skull with a hammer. He was then stabbed repeatedly. But it was what the sisters did to Noor’s corpse that earned them notoriety. In order to dispose of their victim, they dragged Noor’s lifeless body to the bathroom where they dismembered it using a bread knife and a hammer. Over a period of several hours, the victim’s head, limbs and penis were severed; a towel was used to soak up the blood. The sisters then put the body parts into plastic bags. Some were dumped in Dublin’s Royal Canal, where a leg still wearing a sock surfaced ten days later. The bag containing the head was buried in a local park; then, at a later date, it was recovered and taken to a field where Linda Mulhall smashed the head to pieces with a hammer and allegedly buried the remains. Neither the murdered man’s head nor penis have been found.

  Charlotte Mulhall received a mandatory life sentence for murder. Linda Mulhall was given a fifteen-year sentence for manslaughter. Kathleen Mulhall, who initially fled to England, was later captured and brought back to Ireland. She received a five-year sentence for helping to clean the scene of the crime. Her daughters refused to testify against her in court.

  In what he saw as an established fact or truth of nature, Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) demonstrated in his poem, ‘The Female of the Species’, penned in 1911, that it is the female, rather than the male, who has the greater propensity to commit violence. Two verses in particular convey this point most effectively:

  When the Himalayan peasant meets the he-bear in his pride,

  He shouts to scare the monster, who will often turn aside.

  But the she-bear thus accosted rends the peasant tooth and nail.

  For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.

  When the early Jesuit fathers preached to Hurons and Choctaws,

  They prayed to be delivered from the vengeance of the squaws.

  ’Twas the women, not the warriors, turned those stark enthusiasts pale.

  For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.

  Having established that women are capable of committing the most terrible acts of murder and maiming, even though they may have never previously committed an act of violence, then using cleverness and cunning to try to avoid detection, my father and I thought it was at least possible that a woman could have been responsible for the Whitechapel murders. The remnants of women’s clothing found in the ashes of Mary Kelly’s fireplace, and the firm, consistent testimony given by Mrs Caroline Maxwell, both to the police in her written statement, and to Dr Roderick McDonald J.P., the coroner who presided over the inquest into Kelly’s death, merely confirmed to us that her murderer must have been a woman.

  Mrs Caroline Maxwell was a respectable married woman, the wife of an assistant lodging-house keeper in Dorset Street, Whitechapel. Despite the caution issued to her by the coroner during the inquest at the Shoreditch Town Hall, “You must be careful about your evidence, because it is different to other people’s,” Maxwell steadfastly maintained that she had told the truth. Walter Dew described her in his memoirs half a century later as “a sane and sensible woman”, adding that “her reputation was excellent”. But Caroline Maxwell’s evidence was not the starting point of our research.

  The list of Ripper suspects is not endless, but it is long. We found ourselves wading through the minutiae of a motley collection of rogues. One of the more popular contemporary suspects was Montague Druitt, the barrister who drowned himself three weeks after the last murder, thereby drawing suspicion to himself as a suspect; Abberline later dismissed him as such. Another suspect was George Chapman – no relation to Annie Chapman – who poisoned three of his wives; however, he was never known to have used a knife (although he had once threatened his wife with one). Then there was Francis Tumblety, a quack ‘doctor’ who collected uteri and kept them in specimen jars; Mary Kelly’s uterus, though cut out of her body, was not removed from the crime scene. Dr Thomas Neill Cream, another poisoner who secretly performed unlawful abortions but was supposedly in prison in the United States on the dates when the crimes were committed, was also an official suspect, and there are perhaps a dozen others, all of whom were, in our opinion, equally unlikely to have committed the murders.

  More recent theories have identified a similar number of candidates, including Sir William Gull, the suspect named by Stephen Knight, but much of Knight’s work was later discredited when Walter Sickert’s son, Joseph, who was then an old man himself, retracted his story which formed the basis of Knight’s tale, and admitted that it was a hoax. Patricia Cornwell also accused the twisted but unlikely artist Walter Sickert. Other popular suspects are Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence, ‘Eddy,’ a grandson of Queen Victoria, who had an alibi for each of the nights when the murders were committed, and Sir John Williams, the sacrificial lamb offered by his great-great-nephew, author Tony Williams.

  However, the one important element missing in every case was that none of the suspects had a motive for committing the murders. We could find nothing in their backgrounds that would drive any of them to carry out such terrible, vicious crimes. None of the suspects had even the slightest connection with any of the victims – except one.

  But after all the research my father had undertaken into this most distinguished of Welshmen, we thought – no, we knew – that Sir John Williams could not possibly have been involved in any of the murders.

  John Williams was born on 6 November 1840, the son of a farmer and part-time Methodist minister who died of typhoid fever when John was just two years old. His mother recognised her son’s potential and intellect at an early age and struggled to provide him with a good education. Young John attended school in Swansea, before going on to Glasgow University aged sixteen, where he studied mathematics for a year. His natural aptitude for the sciences took him to University College Ho
spital in London where he studied medicine for six years, working at both the Brompton Hospital for Consumption (tuberculosis) and the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children. He was, by all accounts, a brilliant student, studying under William Jenner for one, who was credited with the invention of the smallpox vaccine.

  He completed his medical course (M.R.C.S, and M.B., London) in 1866, and in 1867 he qualified as a doctor (M.D., London). At University College Hospital, he made several friends among his student colleagues, one of whom, Markus Beck, was the nephew of Joseph Lister, pioneer of antiseptic which he used to prevent death from infected wounds and injuries. By early recognition and adoption of Lister’s discovery, this later helped Dr Williams to become an outstanding surgeon. His work was unpaid at this time, so lack of money, rather than ability, forced him to return to Swansea, where he practised for five years as a local GP.

  During the time he worked in Swansea, Williams had the good fortune to meet Mary Elizabeth Ann Hughes, who was then quite young. She was the daughter of Richard Hughes, a wealthy businessman and tinplate factory owner. On 3 April 1872, the couple married in Libanus Chapel in the industrial town of Morriston, three miles to the north-east of Swansea. Following the wedding, they enjoyed a short working honeymoon abroad, which allowed Dr Williams to visit a number of hospitals and make acquaintances within the European medical profession. Markus Beck, incidentally, was to have been Williams’s best man at the wedding, but he missed the ceremony when he overslept on the train, although he arrived at the family mansion in the small village of Ynystawe, just north of Morriston, in time for the reception. On 23 July in that same year, and with his father-in-law’s generous financial assistance, the couple moved to London, where Williams pursued an extremely successful career in medicine.

  Not only did Dr Williams work at University College Hospital, but at the Westminster General Lying-in Hospital in Lambeth, London, where Joseph Lister was both President and consulting surgeon. In 1880, Dr John Williams was appointed Physician Accoucheur, along with Dr Francis Champneys, and they were the first to practice antiseptic midwifery in Britain. He also worked at the Royal Waterloo Hospital for Women and Children near Waterloo Station in London, and the Whitechapel Workhouse Infirmary in London’s East End.

  Williams became as well known for his skill as a surgeon as for the care he took of his patients, whether rich or poor, whom he is said to have treated alike. He was once described by a fellow practitioner from France as “un opérateur sûr de sa main”. The literal translation of which is: a surgeon who knows his job.

  Tony Williams produced records to show that Dr John Williams had attended two of the subsequent murder victims in the Whitechapel Workhouse Infirmary where he practiced on an irregular and voluntary basis. He had performed an abortion on a Mary Ann Nichols, the first murder victim, in 1885, and he had treated Catherine Eddowes, the fourth victim, for Bright’s Disease, a chronic inflammation of the kidneys in 1887. Therefore his connection with at least two of the Ripper victims was, according to Tony Williams, well established. He might also have known a third, Mary Kelly, the fifth and final victim.

  Rumour within the Williams family had it that Sir John was something of a ladies’ man, and had indulged in numerous affairs during the course of his marriage. One of these relationships involved a girl called Mary. It is Tony Williams’s suggestion that in 1881 Dr Williams met the youthful, pretty Irish girl, Mary Kelly, when he had visited the Cardiff Infirmary where she was receiving treatment as an in-patient. She was the mother of a young child and had recently become widowed when her husband Jonathan Davies (or Davis) was killed in a mining accident, Williams maintained. He allegedly died in an explosion at Cwmparc Colliery, near Treorchy in the Rhondda Valley, which also claimed the lives of three other miners. Williams met Mary Kelly again when she moved up to London in 1884; they became lovers, conducted a torrid affair and even went to France together.

  A report appearing in the Daily News of 10 November 1888, the day after the murder, stated that an unnamed girl, who had known Mary Kelly for two years before her murder said, “Kelly was a Welsh woman, and could speak Welsh fluently”. But though Mary Kelly had lived in Wales, and all the available evidence suggests that she had lived in South Wales, she was in fact originally from Limerick in Ireland.

  While Tony Williams unwillingly attributed Mary Kelly’s brutal murder, and all four earlier murders, to his illustrious ancestor, he was vague as to the reasons why Dr John Williams should have stalked the lanes and alleyways of Whitechapel seeking out prostitutes to murder and butcher. He suggested obliquely that the collection of prostitutes’ body parts was for the purposes of his research into the causes of infertility. This, he explained, was why the murderer had excised and taken away uteri from Annie Chapman and Catherine Eddowes. But the suggestion that it was for research was, like the madness thesis, a glib explanation, and Tony Williams gave no credible reason as to why his great-great-uncle should have cut out Catherine Eddowes’s left kidney and taken it away. Even if it were so, research could in no way explain the extent of the ferociousness shown in his mistress, Mary Kelly’s, murder, or the reason why he had not removed her uterus from the scene of the crime. It had been cut out of her body, but had then been pushed under her head, where it was found by the doctors who examined her corpse.

  It seemed unlikely to my father and me that a medical professor, a specialist in gynaecology at the pinnacle of his career in one of the most famous teaching hospitals in the world, would have needed to murder prostitutes for their uteri. That such body parts were required for the purposes of Williams’s research is difficult, if not impossible, to comprehend when he would have been provided with an almost inexhaustible supply by the hospital where he worked. If uteri were needed for his research or to implant in his infertile wife as some sort of ground-breaking experiment, it is hard to believe that he would have chosen two middle-aged prostitutes as donors in preference to the young Mary Kelly, whose uterus had been removed from her body, but not taken away from the scene of the crime. His motive for the particularly vicious murder and horrendous mutilation of Kelly has, regrettably, never been properly explained. Tony Williams suggested that Kelly discovered that Dr John Williams was the Ripper, and tried to blackmail him, and so he killed her, but this explanation, when measured against the appalling litany of injuries the young woman sustained, stretched credulity beyond acceptable limits, and was, we thought, implausible.

  We were unable to find any obvious motive that might have turned Dr John Williams into a vicious serial killer. And why murder Mary Kelly at all? There was no apparent reason that would make Dr Williams want to murder his vivacious, fertile young mistress; to sever her throat to the spine, slash her face beyond recognition, hack her body to ribbons, cut off both her breasts, tear out her viscera, remove her reproductive organs and take away her heart. But as we pondered the mystery, we realised that there was someone who might have had every reason to murder the unfortunate young woman and rip her body to pieces: the doctor’s wife, Lizzie Williams.

  CHAPTER 3

  It was clear to us that Dr John Williams’s wife, Mary Elizabeth Ann, whom he called ‘Lizzie’, could have murdered Mary Kelly. She was the woman whose felt hat, cotton twill skirt and velvet cape were found burned in the ashes of the fireplace in Mary Kelly’s room; she was the woman whom Caroline Maxwell had seen in the mist dressed in Kelly’s clothes; and she was the woman who turned to face Maxwell at her call, ‘Mary’, and replied to her in a Welsh accent as she was fleeing from the scene of her crime in Miller’s Court.

  Of all the suspects there have been down through the years, only Lizzie Williams possessed all the attributes the murderer would have needed, including, crucially, a motive, to commit murder. And the reason why she was never caught was because she was intelligent and confident, careful and determined, and – even to this day – few have suspected that the murderer was a woman.

  But did Lizzie Williams really murder Mary Kelly? At alm
ost forty years of age and having led a privileged and protected life, was she capable of murder? Would she know how to kill, even supposing that she wanted to? And it was not just the question of who had killed Mary Kelly that my father and I had to consider; four other murders had been committed that autumn, and the world’s best detectives and doctors considered that they had all been murdered by the same hand.

  In 1889, a year after the murders, Sir Melville Macnaghten, Assistant Chief Constable in the Criminal Investigation Department at Scotland Yard, identified Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Kelly as victims of Jack the Ripper. It was, and perhaps still is, widely agreed by experts that these five women were the Ripper’s only victims and they became known as the ‘canonical five’. So, as impossible as it seemed, if Lizzie Williams murdered Mary Kelly, then she must have murdered all five women.

  But was it likely? We were eager to find out. We already knew a great deal about Sir John Williams, as he became when Queen Victoria conferred a baronetcy on him in 1894, from intensive research my father had carried out. He had also conducted an investigation into the life of Lizzie Williams (née Hughes) several years earlier which culminated in an article appearing in the South Wales Evening Post (14 May 2001). From information he had gathered, we knew that the marriage of John and Lizzie Williams was not happy. Dr John Williams desperately wanted a child, but his wife was infertile and unable to conceive.