Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman

by kindels

  That the problem lay with Lizzie Williams, and that it was she who was infertile, was never in any doubt, although it is equally likely that it may have been Dr John Williams who was unable to father a child.

  While my father and I were unable to locate any medical records or even diary entries that might throw some light on Lizzie Williams’s emotional state at this time, her condition was one affecting so many women of childbearing age, both then and today, that it is possible to speculate about the effects that her infertility might have caused in the marriage.

  It is now well recognised that reactions differ from one individual to another, that they are subject to cultural and social factors, even the importance placed on having a child by the parties to the marriage. Both Dr John and Lizzie Williams wanted a child; he, it seems – encouraged by his mother – more than she. A baby was the cement that might have held their marriage together, and if that were not possible, the very future of their relationship was in doubt. She likely felt a seething anger at what she may have thought was a serious failing on her part, and bitter resentment towards her mother-in-law, Eleanor, other mothers and all pregnant women. Perhaps she felt a sense of guilt, and thought that her infertility was a punishment for some long-forgotten transgression; she may been uncomfortable around friends who had children of their own, so that her frustration and mood swings pushed them away from her, leaving her feeling even more isolated. She may have harboured emotions of hatred, or even disgust, towards her own body, feeling that it had let her down. It is within the uterus that gestation – life – begins, and it is this organ, above all others, that identifies a human being as a woman. Lizzie’s uterus, this most significant of all female organs, was useless to her, perhaps leading to feelings of inadequacy and that she was in some way less than a woman and sexually unattractive.

  There is no doubt that Lizzie Williams’s infertility placed a great strain on the marriage. She may have felt that she was under constant threat of abandonment – however unlikely that was – and perhaps Dr John Williams, himself disappointed, angry and resentful, displayed his wrath towards her and showed his feelings, thereby increasing her fears, and the schism between them.

  Their sex life may have disappeared and, with it, the love and closeness normally experienced by fertile married couples. Or they may have timed the sexual act to coincide with ovulation, but it would, by that stage, have been performed as an attempt to procreate, rather than for enjoyment.

  Dr John Williams’s mother would have added to the heavy burden that Lizzie Williams already felt. It is certain that Eleanor Williams, anxious that her only married son should provide her with a grandchild, would have pressed the issue both before and frequently during the marriage. This too would have placed the couple’s relationship under further, enormous strain.

  For such a woman as Lizzie Williams, accustomed from childhood to having everything she wanted, it must have seemed almost incomprehensible to her that she was being denied a baby by her own body: her feelings of despair were exacerbated by the steady stream of women patients who found their way to Dr John Williams’s consulting rooms, wards and clinics, many seeking abortions, to rid themselves of their unwanted babies.

  Above all, she would have seen it as grossly unjust that the worthless, middle-aged, disease-ridden hags, the gin-soaked alcoholics who clamoured for Dr John Williams’s services to perform an abortion, as he did on Mary Ann Nichols in the Whitechapel Workhouse Infirmary, were fertile and produced babies by the score. She, even though of child-bearing age, who read her Bible, attended chapel, and performed so many charitable works, was infertile – and she would have resented them for it.

  This brings us rather neatly to the point: exactly what were the services that Dr John Williams, gynaecologist, provided to his destitute female patients at the Whitechapel Workhouse Infirmary and Leman Street’s Eastern Clinic, also in Whitechapel, the poorest district of London? The Medical Directory of 1900 makes no mention of Dr John Williams working in either establishment, yet a thorough investigation by author Tony Williams confirmed that he worked in both places, although at the same time stating that it was illegal for him to do so. He suggested that it was for the purposes of his research and for philanthropic reasons, but my father and I believe that his sole motivation to work in the poverty-stricken East End was for a reason far more fundamental than that.

  Before the Abortion Act of 1967, abortion was illegal, except where the doctor was acting to save the life of the mother, or if continuing the pregnancy would result in physical or mental harm. Consequently, pregnant women who wished to abort a child, and whose lives were not in danger, might resort to back-street abortionists or to other self-induced methods to terminate their pregnancies. This frequently led to injury, infection, infertility and sometimes even death. According to figures supplied by the Metropolitan Police, more than 8,000 prostitutes walked the streets of London plying their trade, more than 1,200 of them in Whitechapel alone. However, newspapers at the time estimated their numbers to be ten times that figure. Whichever is correct, the services of these women could be bought for the same price as a glass of cheap gin or a bed for the night in a lodging house, though clean sheets, if required, cost a halfpenny more.

  Pregnancy, for these desperately poor and unfortunate women, was an inconvenient occupational hazard, and termination of the pregnancy, an unpleasant – but necessary – solution. No doubt cheap abortions were available, but those would involve great risk. It would have been considered that it was far better to play it safe, pay a little more and employ the services of an experienced, willing and discreet gynaecologist, if one could be found at a reasonable price.

  There was one reason, and one alone, why Dr John Williams worked in London’s East End and that was to make money. His hospital salary would not have taken him very far with the Harley Street lifestyle he was obliged to maintain, and we believed that Lizzie Williams would have been what today might be described as ‘high maintenance’. We assume that even the generosity of Richard Hughes had its limits.

  It is simply inconceivable that the women who lived in the slums and overcrowded lodging houses, so many of them selling their bodies as a means of survival, would have required Dr Williams’s services for any reason other than to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. Whether it was needed on medical grounds – that the life or health of the mother was at stake – was quite another matter. No one would dare to question the word of an eminent doctor on such an issue.

  What toll might the sight of countless small bundles – the aborted foetuses – have taken on Lizzie Williams’s already devastated emotions? Unable to bear a child herself, but watching or even just knowing that her husband was performing his grisly task in the course of his work, not just once, but time and time and time again.

  How must she have felt when her husband returned home from Windsor Castle on that great day, late in 1886, when he attended the difficult birth of Queen Victoria’s grandson, Prince Alexander, born on 23 November? A pathetic, but irreconcilable mixture of pride, envy, resentment and anger, because her husband, who could do so much for so many women, could do nothing at all for her.

  Dr John Williams’s research into the causes of infertility in women, and the search for a cure, had become a desperate, personal crusade. Any feelings that he may have felt would have been set aside for his work. Lizzie Williams would have had no such welcome diversion. But despite all his efforts at University College Hospital, he was getting nowhere, and, according to his great-great-nephew, Tony Williams, the marriage had gone sour. So what were the couple to do? The only option available to Lizzie Williams was to carry on with her life as best she could, and learn to live with her emotional nightmares. She still had what remained of her marriage, she had a fine home, she was heir to a fortune, and her father’s money was always readily available.

  But it is highly probable that Lizzie’s husband decided to look elsewhere for sexual gratification; it would not have been the first time Dr
John Williams had strayed outside the marriage. London offered many temptations, especially for a professional man with money and a roving eye. If, as Tony Williams has suggested, he happened to meet a woman he had known previously, an eye-catching woman much younger than himself, even younger than Lizzie – who was rather plain, and the young woman made herself available to him, it is possible that he would have seen her as an opportunity to father his child. This would have fulfilled his desire, and his mother’s wish. Or perhaps such a woman just satisfied the doctor’s sexual appetites.

  If Lizzie had discovered about his affair, she would have been incensed. Already pushed to the edge of insanity as a consequence of her infertility, it is almost possible to imagine the scene that would have followed: the tears, the arguments, the recriminations, the insults thrown from both sides. John Williams might have displayed his customary indifference and arrogance, while his wife would have been furious, but frustrated by her sheer helplessness.

  The discovery would have been Lizzie Williams’s worst nightmare, the culmination of her secret fears. Being unable to bear her husband a child, when that was what they so desperately wanted, was bad enough; it was the one element missing from their lives that might have saved their relationship. But the thought that he might be physically involved with another woman, one who was capable of bearing his child while Lizzie could not, and who might destroy what was left of their marriage, would have been almost unbearable. So what could she do?

  Probably nothing at all.

  There was little that a sad and lonely Victorian housewife could do in such a situation. While the love might have disappeared from their marriage, it was most unlikely that her husband would leave her. Even if he did, she was not entirely dependent on him. Thanks to her wealthy father, Lizzie Williams was financially secure in her own right. There was nothing she could do about her childlessness, the stresses it brought, or her loveless marriage; she just had to bear the pain and make the best of things.

  Then the unexpected happened and it came like a bolt from the blue. Something from the past caught up with the Hughes family and brought with it terrifying consequences that turned Lizzie Williams’s world upside down, changing everything.

  In the spring of 1888, the Landore Tinplate Works, of which Lizzie’s father was now managing partner, ran into financial difficulties. The company had enjoyed a good run but was too successful an enterprise to go unchallenged indefinitely. The secret methods of production which Daniel Edwards had learnt, and taken from Richard Hughes, enabled him to set up his own company in competition with Hughes’s company. The Dyffryn Works Ltd, established in 1874, was a huge operation, with three mills driven by steam. Located in the lower Swansea Valley, and also on the banks of the river Tawe, it was considered to be a model tinplate works, and Edwards employed an even greater number of workers than the Landore Tinplate Works.

  The death knell sounded for Hughes when Edwards’s lower production costs won over Hughes’s customers. In the course of just a few months, Hughes lost his investment and a third of his workforce. By 17 December 1888, everything he owned was charged to the Glamorgan Banking Company Ltd. The Voters Roll 1888-1889, show that Hughes was forced to move into the much smaller ‘Rock House’ in Church Street, Morriston, only a few hundred yards away from the public house where his career had begun. It was all the more humiliating because he now lived – literally – within the shadow of Dunbar House, a vast rambling mansion on the same street, though on the upper slope, built by Daniel Edwards for his family, which still stands (it is now a grade II listed building, although much dilapidated). Edwards, his wife Ann and their eight children never moved in to it, perhaps because Ann Edwards was more sympathetic to Hughes’s wounded feelings than her husband.

  In July 1891, the United States introduced the McKinley tariff and a levy was imposed on all tinplate imported into the country. The effect of this was to increase the price by up to 10 per cent, which devastated the Welsh tinplate industry and accelerated Richard Hughes’s financial decline. On 22 December 1892, Judge Gwilym Williams in the Swansea County Court declared Hughes bankrupt. He was a ruined man. Daniel Edwards’s revenge was complete.

  By mid-1888, her family fortune gone, Lizzie no longer had the financial security she had relied on all her life. The money her father had provided for her up until now, and which she expected one day to inherit, was nothing but a distant memory. Even the beautiful family mansion in Ynystawe, in which she had lived until the day she married, had been sold. From this time on, she would have to rely for her financial support on a man who no longer cherished her because she was incapable of giving him the child he wanted. But he was in a relationship with a woman who could bear him an heir – a captivating, fertile, Irish girl who spoke with a Welsh accent and lived in Whitechapel: Mary Kelly.

  My father and I had little doubt that, up to this point, Lizzie Williams would have tolerated her husband’s sexual flings, albeit reluctantly. But in her distressed emotional state, her fears – however ill-founded – that her husband might father a child by another woman, and finally, the unexpected and shattering loss of her inheritance was the final straw, and this, we believe, was the catalyst that drove Lizzie Williams to commit murder.

  If there was to be any hope of saving her marriage and keeping her husband, Mary Kelly had to be removed from Dr Williams’s life, both as the woman he desired, and as the potential mother of his child: and it was in the autumn of that same year that the Ripper murders began.

  Lizzie Williams’s motive for murdering Mary Kelly we could understand, if not at that point the reason for the extent of the horrendous injuries she had inflicted on her victim’s dead body. We were sure that our research would enable us to discover why she had acted as she did, but now we had to find out why she had previously murdered four other women. If we were right in our assumption, there had to be a motive for each of the murders, and my father and I were determined to find out what they were.

  We were convinced that the answers to at least some of our questions were hidden in the mountain of books, documents and papers that we had accumulated in the course of our research. There were copies of witness statements, maps and plans with crosses marked on them; copies of medical reports, some with marginal notes; transcripts of inquests; copies of police reports and records; reference books; newspaper articles and cuttings. Altogether, we had acquired many hundreds of documents, all now to be read, re-read, analysed, discussed, compared and cross referenced; contents memorised and anomalies noted, and, where necessary, further thorough research to be undertaken. It was hard to know where to start. With Mary Ann Nichols seemed to be the obvious answer, but we already knew that she was not the first prostitute to have been murdered in Whitechapel that year.

  On Easter Monday, 3 April, Emma Smith, a forty-five-year-old widow who supported herself by prostitution, was attacked by three or four men in Osborn Street, just off the Whitechapel Road. She was raped, beaten, and had a blunt object, perhaps a stick, pushed into her private parts. She managed to get herself back to her lodgings at 18 George Street, and the assistant manageress, Mary Russell, and a lodger, Annie Lee, took her to the London Hospital on the Whitechapel Road. There, she described her attackers to George Haslip, the house surgeon who attended upon her, before slipping into a coma from which she never recovered. She died four days later. Following an intensive but brief murder investigation, during which her murderers were never found, the hunt was called off.

  On Bank Holiday Monday, 7 August, the body of another prostitute, Martha Tabram, thirty-nine years old, was discovered lying in a pool of blood in George Yard buildings, in Wentworth Street, just north of Whitechapel High Street, close to where Emma Smith had been attacked. Her arms and hands were close by her sides, her fingers tightly clenched, and her legs were open in a manner that suggested that sexual intercourse had taken place. Martha Tabram had sustained multiple stab wounds. According to Dr Timothy Killeen, who examined her, she had no less than 39 injuries �
�� one wound for every year of her life. Whether this was deliberate or a macabre coincidence has never been established. Following two unsuccessful identity parades, the murder investigation ground to a halt within a month; her murderer was never found.

  What these two cases unequivocally demonstrated was that, to a certain upper-middle-class, middle-aged woman, with more than just a passing interest in crime, it might have appeared that during the latter years of the nineteenth century, neither Scotland Yard, nor the London Metropolitan Police Force were capable of detecting a murderer who did not wish to be caught. It was the dawn of forensic science, and there was so much to learn about so many aspects of criminal investigation. Dr Frederick Gordon Brown, the police surgeon who examined the bloodied part of the apron found in the doorway of the Wentworth model apartments in Goulston Street on the night of the murders of Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes, could not even say if the blood found on the apron was human blood.

  By 1885 the population of London stood at 5,255,069. Officers in the Metropolitan Police numbered 13,319, but only 1,383 walked a beat during the day. Unless a criminal admitted to his crime, or an accomplice informed on him, or he was caught red-handed in the commission of the offence, it might be a simple enough matter for a cautious and determined criminal to get away with murder.