Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman (10 page)

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.

T
hursday, 30 August 1888 marked the night of the London Docklands fires and the eve of the first of the Ripper murders. At about nine o’clock in the evening, the warehouse of an
engineering
company in the Shadwell dry dock turned into an inferno when an oil lamp fell on to the bone-dry straw of a damaged packing case, setting it alight. A second unconnected fire broke out in a bonded warehouse nearby, in the South Quay of the Pool of London. Thunderous black storm-clouds, hanging low over London Bridge, turned a vivid blood-red as they reflected the furious leaping flames, and East Enders, ignoring the driving rain, turned out in their thousands to observe the grand spectacle.

Standing in the throng of sightseers was a small, dirty, emaciated woman. At fifty years of age, Ellen Holland was a penniless, convicted drunk. Soon after midnight, when the rain finally stopped, she turned away from the raging fires and headed back to Thrawl Street in Whitechapel and her paid bed for the night.

When Holland neared the junction of Osborne Street and the Whitechapel Road, the bell of St Mary’s church chimed half past two. It was then that she met an old friend, Polly, who was drunk, reeking of gin, and barely able to keep her balance as she staggered about on the pavement.

At forty-three years of age, Polly was a small, unattractive, poorly dressed woman with dark brown hair turning a premature grey. The few teeth she had left were crooked and stained dark brown by nicotine and neglect. Her dirty clothes and voluminous skirts marked her out as a vagrant.

A bed in Thrawl Street’s White House, a common lodging house, had to be paid for in advance. Anyone loitering in the house at nightfall with insufficient money for a doss, a bed for the night, would be turned out into the street. To have no bed on a cold, early autumn night was bad enough at the best of times, but the prospect of a sadistic murderer stalking the dark streets and alleyways of Whitechapel must have made it all the more terrifying. Ellen Holland, who had already paid for her bed, offered to share it with her friend. The offer was refused. “I’ve ’ad me doss money three times already,” Polly said, “an’ it’s all gone. But it won’t be long before I’m back.” The implication seemed to be that she intended to find one more client for sex before using the money she would earn to pay for her bed. Her hand lightly touched the brim of a black straw bonnet that someone had given to her. And then she made her parting remark, “See what a jolly bonnet I’ve got now.” She turned and staggered away eastwards along the almost deserted Whitechapel Road, lit only by a few gas street lamps and the bright crimson glow from the distant Docklands fires. Ellen Holland, who watched her until she disappeared into the
impenetrable
darkness, was the last person known to have seen Polly alive.

At 3.40 a.m., just over an hour later, Charles Cross, a labourer, was walking from his home in Doveton Street to Pickford’s in Broad Street where he worked. It was the same route he always took and it brought him through Buck’s Row, a narrow cobbled street that ran from Brady Street in the east to Baker’s Row in the west, where it widened to twice its width just past the Board School. It was one street away from, and ran parallel to, the Whitechapel Road, close to the London Hospital. A row of small terraced cottages housing eight families stood on the south side; warehouses and factories lined the north side of the row. Usually deserted after dark, there was just a single gas-lamp at one end, so it was almost pitch-black and, past midnight, always deathly quiet.

The evidence that Cross gave, both to the police and at the inquest which began the following afternoon, was that, as he drew level with Brown’s stable yard, next to the last cottage in the row, he saw by the poor light what he thought was a tarpaulin pushed up against the closed stable gates. Thinking he could use it, he crossed the road to take a better look. He was halfway across the road when he realised that the dark shape was the body of a woman. She was lying still, dressed in dirty rags, and her skirts were pushed up almost to her waist.

Cross summoned a second man, Robert Paul, walking not far behind him and also on his way to work, and together they examined the body. Cross took the woman’s hand, found it to be cold and concluded that she was dead. Paul touched her face, which he noted was cold, and then he put his ear to the woman’s chest to see if he could detect any sign of life. He thought she might have been breathing, but very little if she was, and both men agreed that she was probably dead.

Neither Cross nor Paul had time to wait for help, because they had to go to work, so they pulled the woman’s skirts down to her knees to give her some decency, then continued on their way, hoping to find a constable to whom they could report their find. At the corner of Hanbury Street and Baker’s Row, they met P.C. Jonas Mizen and told him that they had found a woman whom they believed was dead.

However, no sooner had Cross and Paul left Buck’s Row when the victim was discovered again, this time by P.C. John Neil at 3.45 a.m. as he was walking his beat. He had last passed through the street thirty minutes earlier but had seen no one. By the dim light of his hand-held oil lamp, Neil could see that the woman’s throat had been cut. He looked about for assistance and when he saw the light of another lamp at the far end of Buck’s Row, he waved his lamp to attract attention. P.C. Thain, who had been walking his beat, joined P.C. Neil by the body, and he (Neil) instructed him to fetch Dr Rees Ralph Llewellyn, the police surgeon, who lived in the Whitechapel Road. When P.C. Jonas Mizen arrived, P.C. Neil instructed him to fetch an ‘ambulance’, a heavy wooden hand-cart used to convey the dead, wounded and injured, which took two men to pull, and also reinforcements from Bethnal Green Police Station.

Dr Llewellyn arrived at the murder scene at about 4.00 a.m. and briefly examined the body by the woefully inadequate light of P.C. Neil’s lamp. After noting the dreadful gaping wound to the woman’s throat, Llewellyn pronounced her dead and ordered that her corpse be taken to the Whitechapel Mortuary. This was little more than a rickety, windowless shed attached to the workhouse. Because Cross and Paul had pulled down the woman’s skirts before they left, the doctor did not realise that she had sustained severe abdominal injuries also.

As Neil and Thain lifted the corpse on to the hand-cart, Thain noticed that the clothing on the dead woman’s back was soaked with blood. A hand-sized clot of blood had congealed on the pavement and more blood had flowed into the gutter, though, as P.C. Neil reported later, “There was not as much blood as he expected to find, not more than a half-pint or so.”

After the body arrived at the makeshift mortuary, Inspector John Spratling from Bethnal Green Police Station turned up to make a note of her injuries. During the course of examining the corpse so that he could make his report, he lifted the victim’s skirts and made a horrifying discovery. Her abdomen had been torn open and her bowels were protruding through the open wounds. Dr Llewellyn was summoned for a second time that night, and this time he carried out a more thorough examination of the body by the slightly better light of an overhead gas-lamp.

The victim was lying on her back on an old wooden butcher’s block which was used as a mortuary table. She was fully clothed. Her tongue, protruding past her teeth, had turned a livid dark blue. On the right side of her face was a light blue bruise the size of a thumb. This corresponded with another bruise on the left side of her face. It appeared to indicate the manner in which the murderer had gripped the victim’s face as she was attacked.