Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman

by kindels

  What was also clear to us was that, even though Lizzie Williams knew that her husband was enjoying an intimate relationship with a woman called Mary Kelly, she possessed no description of her, though she might have guessed that the young woman would be comely, if not beautiful. Perhaps all she knew about her was her name, and that she lived in Whitechapel’s district of Spitalfields. In order to murder Mary Kelly, Lizzie Williams first had to find her. How would she do this? She would have to go to Spitalfields and ask around until she found someone who knew her.

  She may have offered money, perhaps a sovereign, to anyone who could help. She might have asked a dozen people, or perhaps only one. What is certain is that, somehow, she chanced upon someone who said that she knew Mary Kelly, though, unbeknownst to them both, this acquaintance was in fact Catherine Eddowes.

  And then I remembered. It was Mary Ann Nichols’s alias that rang the small bell in my head earlier and which now provided another piece of the puzzle. In the same way that Ellen Holland knew the first murder victim only as Polly, whoever identified Catherine Eddowes to Lizzie Williams knew her only by her alias, Mary Kelly. If that person also confirmed that ‘Kelly’ lived in Spitalfields, then Lizzie Williams would have been confident that she had found the right woman.

  For another coin, Lizzie Williams’s informant might have told her what ‘Kelly’ was wearing: a black straw bonnet trimmed with black and green velvet; a red silk handkerchief about her neck; a black fur-trimmed jacket; a brown linsey bodice with a black velvet collar, and a white apron over a dark-green chintz, flower-patterned skirt. If her informant knew that ‘Kelly’ had been arrested for drunkenness in Aldgate High Street on Saturday, 29 September, it is possible that the likely time of her release from custody would also be known.

  This would explain how Lizzie Williams managed meet up with Catherine Eddowes so quickly after the murder of her last victim in Berner Street. She knew exactly where Eddowes was, what she was wearing and when she would be released – perhaps even the location of the street door by which she would leave the police station. And there she met the woman with whom she believed her husband was involved, who would, if allowed to live, destroy her marriage.

  And this, we thought for the first time, was where our theory was about to founder.

  From the outset, we decided that we would never twist the facts to suit the circumstances. We intended to present all the evidence we found honestly and objectively. To do otherwise would undermine the value of any findings we might make. So far, the pieces of the jigsaw had all fitted neatly into place, with nothing needing to be altered in any way or forced to fit, so we were confident we were on the right track. But now we found ourselves faced with a situation where Lizzie Williams was going to meet, and murder, the woman she believed to be her husband’s mistress. But the woman was not bewitching Mary Kelly who had lured Dr Williams away from her; she was middle-aged Catherine Eddowes; and from what we thought we knew, the two women could hardly be more different.

  Eddowes was only four years short of fifty at the time of her death, whereas Kelly was just in her mid-twenties. So how, we wondered, could we possibly explain Lizzie Williams’s mistaken belief that Eddowes was her husband’s mistress, if indeed we could explain it at all?

  While the fog, which hung like a dirty net curtain over London’s East End at that time of year, would not provide the reason why Lizzie Williams had been unable to make out her victim’s features, we thought that the darkness might. The effectiveness of the gas street lighting in Bishopsgate, where the police station was located, was reduced considerably by the fog that enveloped the area; in Houndsditch – leading to Mitre Square – it was worse, and in Mitre Square, apart from one light at the entrance to the passageway, it was effectively non-existent.

  But if poor light might have provided the reason why Lizzie Williams had been unable to see her victim properly, we were unhappy with this explanation, and wondered if our theory had reached its nemesis and it was time to call it a day; but then, on an impulse, we decided to take a closer look at Kelly and particularly Eddowes again, to see if they could provide us with an explanation.

  What we discovered surprised us. Mary Kelly was just twenty-five years old and said to be pretty. She was 5’ 7’’ in height, of stout build, had pale blue eyes and light-coloured hair which reached nearly to her waist. Elizabeth Prater, who lived in a room immediately above Kelly’s room, described her as “tall and pretty, and as fair as a lily”, while Walter Dew, one of the detectives assigned to investigate her murder and who had known Mary Kelly by sight, described her as ‘attractive’. She was more or less as we expected her to be.

  But when we looked at Catherine Eddowes, we found that she was not the worn-out, decrepit-looking female we anticipated. She was said to look much younger than her forty-six years. Approximately five feet tall, she was slim, with dark auburn hair and hazel eyes. A contemporary police report describes her as being around forty. From a photograph taken after her death, she might have been a winsome woman, though the clothes she wore were old, raggedy and dirty.

  If Lizzie Williams did not know how old Mary Kelly was, and all she knew about her was her name and that she lived in Spitalfields, she might well have believed that the ‘Mary Kelly’ she met outside Bishopsgate Police Station was the woman with whom her husband was consorting. After all, Dr Williams himself was approaching fifty, and could easily have been drawn to a good-looking woman who was said to appear to be in her late thirties or early forties. Catherine Eddowes’s sister, Mrs Eliza Gold, described her as a “jolly sort”, and Frederick Wilkinson, a deputy (assistant manager) at a lodging house where Eddowes stayed from time to time, remembered her as a “jolly woman, always singing”. An attractive woman who was always happy might have presented the type of personality that Lizzie Williams could have thought her husband found appealing.

  Our contention is that when Lizzie Williams murdered Catherine Eddowes, she believed her to be Mary Kelly, her husband’s mistress. She dispatched her with such terrifying ferocity that her throat was cut to the spine and her head almost severed from her shoulders. The murderer was possessed with burning anger and destroyed every feature of Eddowes’s face which gave her a feminine appearance: her eyelids, nose, an ear, her cheeks and mouth. Lizzie Williams had a plain, unattractive face, and that was why she ruined Eddowes’s good looks. It was jealousy, pure and simple.

  She cut open Eddowes’s abdomen, from her privates to her ribs, taking pains to guide her knife around the navel, so as to avoid damaging the uterus. She cut away the intestines and placed them on her victim’s upper body and right shoulder. They were not placed there for any Masonic purpose as Stephen Knight has suggested; they were put there because that was the most convenient place for them, and out of her way, as she continued with her gruesome task.

  At some time during the attack, the murderer took the apron from around her victim’s waist and held it taut; a large square of dirty white cloth secured in place by string. She sliced off one half with a single stroke of her knife, and placed it on the ground to one side. Turning her attention back to the body, she cut out Eddowes’s uterus and laid it on the severed part of the apron. Next, she inserted the knife deep into her victim’s corpse once more. This time she directed the blade to the upper body and into the chest cavity. There she excised the left kidney and set that on the cloth also. Then she collected her bundle and silently made good her escape.

  We conjectured why the murderer wanted those particular organs; what possible use could anyone have for either of them? They would have been useless for any practical purposes, including medical research. After much deliberation, we realised that the murderer had not intended to take Catherine Eddowes’s left kidney at all – it had been a mistake. When the murderer cut out Mary Kelly’s heart, that was what she intended to take from Catherine Eddowes and not her kidney. Dr George Sequeira’s comment, as the first doctor to arrive at the crime scene, certainly supported this contention; “perhaps
the murderer had come across the victim’s left kidney by accident and cut it out without knowing what it was”.

  We agreed and thought it would have been a simple error to make. Working quickly in the near darkness and with the ever-present danger of discovery, fumbling about inside Catherine Eddowes’s chest cavity, her fingers slippery with blood, the murderer found what she believed was her victim’s heart. It was on the left side of her chest, covered only by a membrane and held in place, and protected by, a layer of fat – so her left kidney would have been in the approximate position that her heart would have occupied, and that organ was removed instead.

  We were certain this could be the only rational explanation why the murderer had cut out and taken Catherine Eddowes’s left kidney. The normal surgical method of extracting the kidney was from the side, not the front – which merely reinforced our belief that the murderer had not intended to take the kidney. But if this provided the answer to one question, it raised another question equally obscure: for what purpose did the murderer require Catherine Eddowes’s uterus and heart? We could only speculate.

  My father and I wondered who might have passed the fatal information to Lizzie Williams which enabled her to find and murder the person she believed to be Mary Kelly. Would it be possible to identify whomever it was? Our first thoughts were that it could have been almost anyone in Whitechapel.

  During the mid-1880s, London was a magnet for immigrants from many parts of the world. Whitechapel, in particular, was teeming with Jews escaping from the Tsarist-Russian pogroms, who formed their own close-knit communities. Thousands of Russians, Poles, Irish, Italians, Hungarians and many other nationalities crowded into slums that equalled the most squalid ghettoes to be found anywhere in eastern Europe. So where, we asked ourselves, in this pitiful, seething mass of humanity, were we going to find the person who had identified Catherine Eddowes to Lizzie Williams as Mary Kelly? It seemed an impossible task.

  On further reflection, it occurred to us that Lizzie Williams had placed herself in a very dangerous position by asking where she might find Mary Kelly. When Catherine Eddowes’s dead body was discovered, her informant might come forward, and Lizzie Williams, if found, would become a suspect, with the unthinkable consequences that her detection and arrest would bring. Lizzie Williams would have realised this awful truth and must have striven to find a way out of her difficulty. We believe she reached the rapid conclusion that the only course of action open to her was to eliminate her informant. It was not part of her master plan, but it was essential if she was to avoid the gallows, and get away with her dreadful crimes.

  But, still, who was Lizzie Williams’s informant?

  The answer soon presented itself to us when we remembered that there were two victims murdered on the early morning of Sunday, 30 September. Catherine Eddowes was the second victim; the first was Elizabeth Stride!

  It seemed both feasible and likely to us that Lizzie Williams had murdered Elizabeth Stride to ensure her silence. But how could we be sure we were right? There was only one way: we needed to find hard evidence and to see if it supported our theory. If Lizzie Williams just wanted to kill Elizabeth Stride to save her own neck, she would have no reason to mutilate her body. So we reviewed the report Dr Phillips presented on 3 October 1888 at Elizabeth Stride’s inquest:

  The body was lying on its left side, face turned towards the wall, head towards the yard, feet towards the street, left arm extended from elbow, which held a packet of cachous in her hand. Similar ones were in the gutter. I took them from her hand, and handed them to Dr Blackwell. The right arm was lying over the body, and the back of the hand and wrist had on them clotted blood. The legs were drawn up, the feet close to the wall, the body still warm, the face warm, the hands cold, the legs quite warm, a silk handkerchief around the throat, slightly torn but I since find it is cut. This corresponded to the right angle of the jaw; the throat was deeply gashed, and an abrasion of the skin about an inch and a quarter diameter, apparently slightly stained with blood, was under the right clavicle.

  The report was clear. Elizabeth Stride’s throat had been cut and that was all; there were no mutilations to her body.

  CHAPTER 13

  Now we were pretty certain why Lizzie Williams had murdered three of her victims: Mary Kelly because she feared the woman would destroy her marriage, and might bear her husband the child for which he craved; Catherine Eddowes, in the mistaken belief that she was Mary Kelly; and Elizabeth Stride, merely to silence her and to prevent her from giving Lizzie Williams away to the police. We were left with the murders of Mary Ann Nichols and Annie Chapman to explain, and of course the dozen or more questions with which we had started out.

  We were minded of the words of advice delivered by Harper Lee’s Atticus Finch to his young daughter, Scout, in the 1960 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, To Kill a Mockingbird: “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view … until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.” We had to look at the situation from the murderer’s point of view, to understand why she had acted in the ways she had. It meant ‘taking a subjective view’.

  And it is the subjective view that is of importance here, because in all criminal cases, except those where ‘strict liability’ is imposed – for road traffic offences and the like, two elements are required to be present at the same moment for a crime to be committed. In criminal law they are known as an actus reas (a wrongful act) and mens rea (a guilty mind). Should either element be absent, no crime will have been committed. In all criminal cases, except for murder where the jury is asked to decide upon the question of guilt, its members are required to look at the events from the point of view of the average man. The example most often cited in days gone by, and even now, is ‘the man on the Clapham omnibus’, and to ask themselves what he might have thought. This is known as the objective view. In the case of murder, however, the jury is asked to look at the crime from the point of view of the accused; in other words, what he or she might have thought. This is the subjective view.

  We decided to climb into Lizzie Williams’s skin, metaphorically, and walk around in it for a while, looking at things the way she might have done, to see if we could find the answers for which we were searching. When we did we began to understand why she had committed murder.

  In 1867 Dr John Williams returned from London and set up his surgery in Swansea. He was then twenty-seven years old. It was a moderately successful practice because we know from his biographer, Ruth Evans, that one of the first things he did when he got on his feet was to repay his mother all the money she had loaned him while he was working in London. It was also the time when he began his life-long hobby of collecting Welsh language books and manuscripts.

  But Dr John Williams must have been frustrated. He was a brilliant and gifted doctor, with ambition and drive, but he lacked the money he needed to propel his career to the great heights to which he aspired. This was when Mary Elizabeth Ann Hughes entered the picture. It is doubtful that they were a well-matched couple. She was from an extremely wealthy family and had been brought up as a lady; he was from humble farming stock and had struggled to become a doctor. But there was an age difference to consider too. At the date of their marriage in April 1872, he was thirty-one and had already spent a year in Glasgow and six years in London where he undoubtedly had gained some experience of life; she, at almost ten years his junior, was twenty-two and might never have been out of Wales.

  How long Dr Williams and Lizzie Hughes were courting before they got married we do not know, though it appears to have been a whirlwind romance. Ruth Evans says the couple became engaged in 1872 (and married in April) while “important negotiations were going on”. This was at the time when Dr Williams was appointed to the position of assistant obstetric physician at University College Hospital in London, which enabled him to give up his Swansea practice and move back to London. It is difficult to avoid the suspicion that he married Lizzie Hughes for her money – and for
the child he expected her to provide. It was certainly not for her looks because, in truth, Lizzie Hughes was quite plain. When a child was not forthcoming, that left only money as the primary reason for their relationship. Lizzie Williams, being the astute woman she was, would have realised this, and the discovery would have devastated her and added to her fears.

  By 1888, Dr John Williams and his wife had been married for sixteen years. There is no doubt that he was hugely disappointed to discover that Lizzie was infertile. We know he devoted much of his life to a search for the cure for infertility, and this quest now became personal as well as professional. As Ruth Evans writes, “the one great sadness of his life is that he was unable to father a child”. This bald statement was undoubtedly the tip of a very large emotional iceberg for the couple.

  Even from what we learned in the first few pages of Tony Williams’s Uncle Jack, where the author mentions talk within the family of an affair with “a girl he shouldn’t have” (called Mary – Tony Williams’s suggestion is that she was the Mary Kelly of Miller’s Court), it is clear that this was an unhappy marriage.

  In September 1885, Dr John Williams established the ‘Eleanor Williams Exhibition’, a scholarship which he named after his mother. It was an award intended to help deserving boys in the parishes surrounding the area where he had lived in Carmarthenshire to continue their education at a higher grade school. This instance gives but a small insight into how the marriage had deteriorated: Dr Williams named the scholarship after his mother, not his wife. Another indication was the large portrait of Dr Williams’s mother which hung over the mantelpiece in his study, as a permanent reminder of where his real affections lay.

  What took place behind the closed doors of the Williams household during those sixteen years between 1872 and 1888 is difficult to know, though Lizzie’s infertility, and the enormous emotional upset it inevitably brought into their lives, must have played upon the minds of them both. It was a vitally important factor which contributed greatly to the difficulties in the marriage.