Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman

by kindels

  Stride might have laughed when Lizzie Williams asked her where she could find Mary Kelly because, the evening before, ‘Kelly’ had been found drunk in Aldgate High Street. She was arrested and taken to Bishopsgate Police Station where she would remain until she sobered up. Further questioning would have elicited the likely time of her discharge from custody and what she was wearing: a black straw bonnet trimmed with black and green velvet, a black fur-edged jacket, a dark-green skirt and a white apron.

  One might well ask, even if Elizabeth Stride had known of Mary Kelly’s arrest and subsequent incarceration, how could she possibly know when she would be released?

  The answer was simple enough.

  Elizabeth Stride had appeared before the Thames Magistrates Court on numerous occasions for offences of drunk and disorderly behaviour under the name Anne Fitzgerald. She herself had been locked in the cells of Bishopsgate Police Station several times, and had experienced at first hand the policy of clearing the cells of their occupants, wherever possible, at the end of the evening shift. That always happened at one o’clock in the morning – the very same time that police constables at fixed-points, all over London, changed their shifts.

  So now Lizzie Williams knew what Mary Kelly looked like and where and when she could be found. Yet she was now in a dilemma. Stride knew that Lizzie Williams wanted to find Mary Kelly. When Kelly turned up dead, it would not take long for Elizabeth Stride to come forward and provide the police with a description of the woman who had been looking for her – especially if a reward was offered, and there was talk of a reward for information leading to the arrest of the murderer, though none had yet been officially sanctioned. Perhaps Stride became suspicious of Lizzie Williams’s motive for wanting to find Kelly, and asked for an extra sovereign to buy her silence; whatever happened, Lizzie Williams would have quickly realised that neither a sovereign, nor even a handful of sovereigns, would buy the woman’s silence for long. So there was only one possible option available to her if she was to murder Mary Kelly and avoid the hangman’s rope: Stride too would have to be silenced.

  Lizzie Williams must have justified the murder to herself; what was another dead prostitute in Whitechapel anyway? She had already murdered two women and got clean away with it. No one suspected her; no one even suspected that a woman was responsible for the murders; nor, she might have thought, would they ever. So, when the two women parted, we believe that Lizzie Williams followed Stride, waiting for an opportunity to murder her. Her moment came in Berner Street where, at the gateway to Dutfield’s Yard, she would have observed Stride being assaulted. Her attacker was a man with a fair complexion, dark hair, a short moustache, and wearing a peaked cap. She would have watched a second man walking towards the gates, suddenly turn and run away in the direction from which he had come, and she would have seen a third man who had been leaning against a lamppost, calmly lighting his pipe, suddenly start, and run after the second man.

  There are no eyewitness accounts to what happened next (a familiar and distinguishing feature of all the murders) but Stride’s dead body was discovered just a quarter of an hour later, so it is logical to assume that the man in the peaked cap killed her. We do not believe that he did, and wonder if he possessed an entirely different motive for his assault upon Stride.

  Israel Schwartz, the second man and a witness who chanced upon the attack, made no mention of seeing a knife in the possession of Stride’s attacker, and he was able to provide the police with a good description of him. While we do not know if the third man was an associate of the assailant or just an innocent bystander, there is at least a possibility that he was the latter. Stride’s attacker knew that he had been seen by one witness, possibly two, and could, consequently, be identified. We think it unlikely, therefore, that he would have risked the hangman’s noose for the murder of a prostitute that night.

  A far more likely possibility, we thought, was that the motive for the attack was robbery, and the man in the peaked cap stole from Stride any money she might have had when he threw her to the ground (because none was found on her corpse when the police noted the contents of her pockets). Afterwards, he had departed, leaving Elizabeth Stride where she lay in the yard, dazed, but otherwise unhurt, and the street was then both quiet and empty.

  Fate had placed Lizzie Williams’s next victim on her back, in the very same position she had persuaded her first two victims to adopt, so her task would be that much easier to perform. She went to Elizabeth Stride and knelt or crouched by her side; then perhaps she asked her if she was hurt and reassured her that she meant no harm. It is likely that the sound of approaching hooves may have sounded on the stone cobbles, though they were still some way off. Seconds were all Lizzie Williams needed. Stride, still shocked by the attack, might have expected Lizzie Williams to help her get to her feet, but instead Lizzie Williams pulled out her knife and pressed the blade against her throat where a silk scarf was tied about her neck. There was little time, but no need to move the scarf out of the way because the knife was strong and the blade, well ground, was sharp, and it sliced through silk, skin, flesh and tissue. Seconds were all that were needed, and by the time Louis Diemschutz with his pony and cart pulled to a halt in the gateway, the woman was dead, and of the murderer there was no trace.

  It was past 12.46 a.m. and if Mary Kelly was released at 1.00, as Stride had told her she would be, Lizzie Williams had less than a quarter of an hour to get from Berner Street to Bishopsgate Police Station, almost a mile away.

  If she had been lucky enough to catch a carriage immediately on reaching Commercial Road at the junction of Berner Street, she might have told the cab driver that she needed to get to Bishopsgate Police Station quickly. She had witnessed a fight, a woman wearing a red rose in her lapel had been injured, and she wished to report the crime. It would have been a plausible enough explanation, and it was, of course, based on truth.

  It must have been a rapid carriage ride, and at that time of night the journey could have been accomplished in ten minutes or less. So it was at least possible for Lizzie Williams to have arrived in Bishopsgate before, or very soon after, Kelly’s release. Time was indeed short, and if she had arrived later, Lizzie Williams might have missed Kelly and the fourth murder would never have happened. But the fact remains that her next victim was murdered, which means, we believe, that Lizzie Williams got there in time.

  The woman wearing the green and black bonnet was released from custody at around 1.00 a.m., and soon afterwards Lizzie Williams approached her. Once again, two women out walking together would barely have been noticed; they could have walked though the police cordons unhindered and past the numerous plain-clothes detectives, who were already combing the streets for the murderer of the Buck’s Row and Hanbury Street victims, and now for the murderer of the Berner Street victim too.

  The woman might have confirmed, if and when Lizzie Williams asked, that her name was Mary Kelly and that she lived in Spitalfields. Lizzie would then have been sure that she had found the right person. The distance from Bishopsgate Police Station to Mitre Square is four hundred yards, so the walk would have taken them no longer than five minutes, even walking at a slow pace – though speed was less critical than timing, as would soon become apparent.

  But the woman was not Mary Kelly and 6 Fashion Street was not her address, as she had told Sergeant Byfield upon her discharge from custody, though she did live in Spitalfields. Her real name was Catherine Eddowes and she lived in Crossingham’s, a common lodging house in Dorset Street. Catherine Eddowes, also known as Mary Kelly, may have been seen on the short journey by two witnesses: Joseph Lawende, a salesman, and Joseph Hyam Levy, a butcher. Their evidence was that at 1.33 or 1.34 they saw a man and woman talking together at the entrance to Church Passage, which led to Mitre Square. However, since neither witness could identify Eddowes, or provide the police with a description of her, their alleged sighting is inconclusive and it might not have been her. However, if it was Eddowes they saw, it would not have b
een surprising that Lizzie Williams was nowhere to be seen; just as in the case of Annie Chapman, who had walked on a little way alone in Hanbury Street to meet a man, so Catherine Eddowes may have acted in the same manner. Both women would have been known to many clients in the neighbourhood whom they would not wish to turn away.

  We believe that when the two eyewitnesses had gone, the man Eddowes had spoken to (if it was her) also left (intending to meet her later perhaps?), and it was Eddowes who led Lizzie Williams through one of the three entrances into Mitre Square; two were narrow foot passageways, the third was a slightly wider carriageway. The ill-lit square was darkest in the southern corner and it was here that Eddowes led her clients for sexual purposes. It was to that same corner that Catherine Eddowes brought Lizzie Williams.

  Perhaps for the price of yet another sovereign, Catherine Eddowes would have been persuaded to lie down on the ground in the corner, even though it was still wet from the rain the previous evening had brought. There, like Nichols and Chapman before her, she lay on her back unsuspectingly as she prepared to satisfy her ‘lesbian’ client.

  Lizzie Williams was a woman incensed beyond reason, and believed that the woman who now lay on the ground before her might, if she were allowed to live, wreck what was left of her marriage, steal her husband and provide him with the child he craved, which she could never do. She had spent many painful years agonizing over her failure as a woman, and the way in which her body had let her down. Now she would vent all the anger and bitterness she felt, where, she wrongly believed, it was so richly and justly deserved.

  It would have taken only a moment for Lizzie Williams to drop to her knees or crouch beside her victim, draw her knife and cut Eddowes’s throat across, taking her victim completely by surprise. Thus, mortally wounded, she was already dying before she knew what had happened.

  While there is no forensic evidence to confirm the order of events we think Catherine Eddowes’s apron was cut in half immediately after her throat was cut, and before the injuries to her face and body were inflicted. It is certain that Lizzie Williams laid her victim’s uterus and left kidney on the severed part of the apron, which she then used to carry them away, because it was later found in a Goulston Street doorway covered in blood and gore. The murderer pushed up the women’s skirts to her breasts, then opened her abdomen with a single stroke of a knife. She made another cut inside the body, removed a section of the victim’s intestines, and pushed them away from her so that they fell on the far side of the body. Then she cut away the uterus, and placed it on the torn part of the apron.

  But this time, perhaps more confident of her increasing skills with the knife, her fears of failure temporarily forgotten, Lizzie Williams had an afterthought – or perhaps it was all part of her plan. She inserted her hand once more into the cavity of the dead body. Feeling around under the breastbone of the corpse, her fingers touched a large, round rubbery shape. Satisfied that she had located her victim’s heart, she cut out the organ and placed that on the apron too.

  At some point during the attack, three small black buttons from a woman’s boots were lost, that Sergeant Jones later found in clotted blood by the victim’s neck. We know for certain that they were not from the victim’s boots because at the time of her death Eddowes was wearing men’s laced boots. Could they perhaps have been torn from the boots that Lizzie Williams was wearing? And the fourth tin button, and the thimble: did they belong to the victim – or her murderer?

  Lizzie Williams would almost certainly have known that a police constable passed through the square on his beat every 15 minutes, because her victim might well have told her, or Williams could have asked her, just to make sure. Working as quickly as the poor light allowed, Williams made several deliberate cuts to her victim’s face, each with its own purpose. All the injuries were recorded in F.W. Foster’s mortuary sketch, and clearly illustrate the extensive nature of the wounds inflicted upon Catherine Eddowes’s body and face. Her eyelids were slashed, her nose severed, ear, mouth and cheeks all deeply scored; in fact, every facial feature that gave her a feminine appearance were obliterated; it was the face that Lizzie Williams thought her husband had been attracted by, and she, who was plain, had destroyed it. Of particular interest to us now, though, were the four mysterious nicks on Eddowes’s cheeks, two on either side of her nose, each 1½ inches long, which appeared to form the shape of an inverted letter V, or triangle.

  Pushing his Masonic connection to the limit, Stephen Knight’s explanation is that the two ‘triangles’ were a sacred sign; they adorn the top of the altar used in the Holy Royal Arch, a side order in Freemasonry. While it is correct that the triangles are symbolically used by Masons, they represent the square and compasses and the two arms are at right angles to each other; the two instruments oppose each other and are linked by the arms which cross so that they appear to be in perfect symmetry. When the six points are joined, they form a symbol identical with the Star of David. They are not entirely separate, as Knight suggests, and they do not resemble the marks on Catherine Eddowes’s cheeks.

  Another suggestion from elsewhere which we considered is that the inverted Vs or triangles were arrows, pointing towards the victim’s hazel eyes, although the reason why the murderer should have wished to draw attention to the eyes was impossible for us to fathom.

  Patricia Cornwell hardly addressed the matter of the victim’s facial injuries, other than to mention briefly that facial injuries “can be revealing”. But revealing of what exactly, she failed to say. She also quoted the comment of a senior Scotland Yard detective, Chief Inspector Donald Sutherland Swanson (Abberline’s superior officer from 1 September until 6 October 1888) who was said to read every piece of paper concerning the murder investigation: “Eddowes’s face had been disfigured ‘almost beyond identity’.” But therein lay the clue. Catherine Eddowes’s face had been disfigured deliberately, to take away her femininity.

  As for the inverted letter V, a far more likely explanation is that the oblique gashes represented something symbolic, though less inventive than Stephen Knight’s suggestion, and far more downto-earth. Why might Lizzie Williams go to the trouble – and time – of carving two peculiar symbols into her victim’s face unless it meant something significant to her? We thought that the bloody shapes must have a special meaning.

  Lizzie Williams was a strongly religious woman. She attended church regularly and knew her Bible well; whether or not she felt that her faith had deserted her in recent years by denying her the child she desired was quite another matter, but we think the letters might have referred to a short but appropriate sentence from Romans 12:19. Lizzie Williams had taken her revenge and left her message? Because that short sentence – beginning with the letter V – reads, “Vengeance is mine: I will repay, saith the Lord”.

  There is another possibility. It is an idea we had tried to ignore as seeming to be too far-fetched, yet we were constantly drawn back to the extraordinary notion that, once again, it was something important that had been hidden in plain sight.

  Lizzie Williams had thought she was dealing with Mary Kelly, her husband’s mistress. She had murdered the woman and inflicted all the injuries she intended at the outset. She had taken her uterus, thereby neutering her as a woman, and ripped out her left kidney (believing it to be her victim’s heart) and she had destroyed the face that, she believed, had so attracted her husband. Her objective, as far as she was concerned, was now fulfilled.

  Is it possible that, in the same way an artist signs his name on a canvas to signify his work has come to an end, that Lizzie Williams had added a sign that her work was also concluded?

  In the early days of his career as an artist, the Dutch painter Rembrandt (1606-69) signed his paintings with the single initial ‘R’, only later adding the additional letter ‘H’ for ‘Rembrandt; son of Harmen’. If an artist of Rembrandt’s calibre could sign his artworks with a single letter, Lizzie Williams could also have done so.

  But again, we asked ourselves,
what did the letter V stand for and why was it inverted? Was it because of the position Lizzie Williams found herself in when she made the four oblique incisions? We did not think so. There is no medical, or indeed any evidence, to suggest that she caused the wounds from any position other than one she had adopted for the murder – at her victim’s side. So what exactly was the unusual shape, the inverted V, which does not resemble any of the letters in our own Roman alphabet?

  The Greek alphabet however (which commences Alpha, Beta, Gamma), which has been in continual use since the eighth century BC, consists of twenty-four letters. The eleventh letter, in uppercase of this ancient alphabet, is known as ‘Lambda’, and is identical to an inverted V and it represents the letter ‘L’.

  Had Lizzie Williams left her mark in blood by signing the initial letter of her pet-name Lizzie on Catherine Eddowes’s face using the Greek symbol Lambda – ^. While it is indeed possible, and almost certain that she would have been familiar with the Greek alphabet, it seemed to us too remote a possibility. In any case, we were unable to come up with a plausible reason as to why she would have carved the same letter twice. Yet we felt we were on to something and thought that the marks must have some secret, or hidden, meaning.

  As we pondered the matter further and stared hard at the two shapes recorded in Foster’s mortuary sketch, something unexpectedly revealed itself. It seemed to us that Lizzie might have signed her work, but in a manner which was not immediately obvious, and that would not have emerged in the decades that followed unless searched for, and was quite incomprehensible to the detectives involved in the murder investigation.