Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman (18 page)

The letter, in an envelope apparently postmarked ‘early 1889’ (no specific day or month was given), the year following the murders, contained the potentially incriminating sentence, “Thank you for the forgiveness and for keeping my secret”. But while Tony Williams included most of the text in his book, he omitted the signature of the letter’s author, either by accident or design, though he included the valediction, ‘See you,’ and there it ended. It seemed to us a strange omission to make, because, according to our research, Dr Williams routinely signed his letters; we thought that perhaps he was not really sure if the author was Dr John Williams.

In a letter written by Dr Williams in reply to one sent to him by Queen Victoria, both of which are reproduced in Ruth Evans’s book
John Williams 1840-1926
, Williams’s letter is dated, ‘November 2, 1887’, and his full signature is included, ‘John Williams’. Again, a letter which he wrote to Dr Morgan Davies, Assistant Medical Officer in the Whitechapel Workhouse Infirmary, explaining why he is unable to meet with him on 8 September 1888, is also reproduced in full, including the date, ‘23 August 1888’, and the signature, ‘John’. So why Tony Williams had chosen to omit the signature this time seems very odd and, perhaps, blatant ‘cherry picking’.

It was not just the missing signature that made us wonder if Dr Williams had written the letter, but the quality of the handwriting. Tony Williams said the writing was ‘poor,’ and did not, apparently, reflect the doctor’s usual neat handwriting. In other words, it looked different. If Dr Williams wrote the letter and sent it to someone else, what was it doing amongst his personal belongings? Why had the recipient of the letter given it back to him?

But it was not these questions that concerned us; it was a single sentence in the body of the text which read, “You are the centre of my world.” These seven words immediately rang alarm bells with us because they simply sounded out of character for Dr Williams.

For one thing, Annie Roberts, a childhood friend of the young John Williams, who had lived on a neighbouring farm, was now a respectable married woman. We did not think it likely that Dr Williams would commit such sentiments to paper, even if he thought them, no matter how close their early friendship as children might have been. For another, what was it that Annie Roberts had forgiven him for? It would hardly be for the brutal murders and hideous disfigurement of five London East End prostitutes, an offence that carried the death penalty. Such a secret he would be unlikely to confide to anyone, least of all a woman who was married to somebody else.

More importantly, from what we knew about Dr Williams, no one – with the possible exception of his mother, Eleanor Williams, who died in 1895 – was at the centre of his world. He had been brought up to think highly of himself and it was even mentioned by his biographer, Ruth Evans, that he was arrogant and vain. Whoever had written that letter early in 1889, it was certainly not Dr Williams. Since the letter was now in his archive, we thought it more likely that
he
was its recipient, and the sentence, included in the letter, referred to him. This also explained why he was in possession of the letter.

So who, we wondered, might have regarded Dr John Williams as being at the centre of their world? There was only one possible person: his wife, Lizzie Williams.

She, we concluded, had written the letter and sent it to her husband.
She
was not at the centre of his world, but
he
was at the centre of hers. Looked at from this new point of view, it all made perfect sense:
she
was the one thanking him for his forgiveness, and for keeping
her
secret.

Perhaps the ‘forgiveness’ and ‘secret’ referred to something quite innocent and had nothing to do with the terrible events that had taken place in Whitechapel. Equally, she could have been alluding to the five murders she had committed the previous autumn, and sent the letter to him early the following year. Whichever explanation was correct, it was my father’s sudden realisation that it was not Dr John Williams who had a motive to commit murder, but his wife, so the finger of suspicion pointed directly at her.

But why would Mrs Lizzie Williams have written to her husband when she was surely living with him in their home in Queen Anne Street; unless she was not living with him at that time? The result of the census taken during 1891 in Swansea, two years after the letter was written, discloses that a number of people lived at 188 Ynystawe Road, Morriston: they were Richard Hughes, aged seventy-four, described as a tinplate manufacturer, married; Mary Hughes, his wife aged fifty-seven, no occupation given; and Mary E.A. Williams (Lizzie), daughter, aged forty-one. Under the ‘occupation’ rubric, she has given that of her husband, whom she describes as ‘General Practitioner, Surg. MRCS’. There were also three domestic servants living with the household, all female.

There was just one other odd entry: Edward R. Morgan, who is described as a nephew, also aged forty-one; but under ‘occupation’, he is described as a ‘Registered Surg’.

Could it be that soon, perhaps just days, after the murder of Mary Kelly, Lizzie Williams had suffered a nervous or mental breakdown? Then, she revealed to her husband the dreadful crimes she had committed, begging for his forgiveness and, of course, his silence. Shocked, upset and almost unable to believe what he was hearing, until, perhaps, she showed him a knife she had used in a murder – still possibly blood-stained, had he then done what he thought was best, and sent her far from London and out of harm’s way? Lizzie could remain with her family in Wales, there to recover from her illness, and wait until the hue and cry in London had died down. We believe that this
could
have been the case.

Just a few weeks later, early in the New Year, perhaps Dr Williams came to accept that he was partly responsible for his wife’s criminal actions, that his conduct had been far from exemplary, and so he had ‘forgiven’ her.

Who was the nephew, Edward R. Morgan, registered on the census form as living in the Hughes household, described as a ‘Registered Surg?’ Was he a doctor or a medical practitioner of some sort whom Dr John Williams was paying to keep an eye on his wife? We thought that he might have been. Certainly, the family fortunes appeared to have improved since Lizzie had gone home to live with them, so soon after the murders. They were no longer living in Church Street. The present property was larger and there were now three live-in servants. This was after Richard Hughes had lost his fortune, and his tinplate company was in terminal decline. Perhaps a bigger house was needed now that Lizzie was living there too, and Dr Williams was doubtless paying towards the upkeep.

A few pages later on in
Uncle Jack
, Tony Williams was to say that he had mistaken the identity of the letter’s recipient, and it had really been sent to someone else; the wife of the Reverend Owen, Sophia Owen, a childhood friend of Dr Williams, with whom he also enjoyed a close relationship. But it made no difference, because it still seemed to us that it must have been written by Lizzie, which was why we had looked at her so closely in the first place.

Tony Williams discovered something else that was strange. It was in a catalogue, also kept at the National Library of Wales, which listed the personal effects formerly owned by his great-great-uncle. Item number 329, within the volume’s pages, read: “Diary of Sir John Williams for 1888. Most of the pages are missing; those that remain are blank.”

The diary, a faded red cloth-covered volume, has become a
cause célèbre
now and is kept in its own protective box. But it is shabby and the dull covers have separated from the spine. Each of the pages, representing a single day, is separated by a piece of pink blotting paper. But many of the pages have been removed; either cut away or torn out, so that very few remain. Those that are left are empty. The blotting paper, however, has not been removed and it is clear from the ink that had soaked into them that the diary had been extensively used during the greater part of the calendar year 1888. Nevertheless, it was impossible to tell from them what had been recorded on the pages that had been removed.

It was certainly very peculiar and seemed to indicate something; but what? While Tony Williams asserted that the diary supported his contention that Dr John Williams had recorded aspects of his life that he later preferred the world not to know – that he was the murderer and had destroyed the records that would have proved this – it seems equally likely, if not more so, that he had recorded his wife Lizzie’s increasingly erratic and worrying behaviour, leading to her breakdown. When she finally confessed her crimes to him, he then understood why she had behaved in the way she had, and he removed the pages to cover all trace of his wife’s medical history and previously inexplicable conduct both leading up to, and during, the ten weeks of the murders.

There was no diary listed for the following year, which was disappointing since it might have thrown some light on the events of the previous year, nor, for that matter, the year after that. The next entry, number 330, listed the diary of Sir John Williams for the year 1891, along with the description ‘Entries are full’. But this diary too was odd and contained nothing of the year indicated by its cover, because every one of the dates had been altered so that they reconciled with the
following
year. Thursday 8 January 1891 was crossed out and now read Thursday 7 January 1892: Friday 6 February 1891 was now amended to Friday 5 February 1892, and so on. It recorded nothing of interest or significance except for a number of payments made to various tradesmen. This meant that there were no diary records from the start of 1888 to the end of 1891 – which included the two-year period following the murders when we believe that Lizzie Williams was recovering from her breakdown, and staying with her family in Wales.

Sending Lizzie home to Wales to recuperate, immediately after her breakdown and possible confession to her husband of the murders, was a shrewd move on his part because her highly charged emotional state meant that she might otherwise be in danger of letting something ‘slip’. It also removed her from their circle of acquaintances at a time when they may have realised that she was unwell, so her two-year absence from Queen Anne Street at this time would have surprised no one.

In the event, the ploy failed, because when Lizzie returned to her home in London, by now 63 Brook Street, of which Dr Williams had taken the lease on 31 March 1890, it seems that Lizzie did indeed say or do something that forced him – quite unexpectedly – to change his plans dramatically, and set a new course for the future. What that might have been we shall explore later.

Another unusual item Tony Williams discovered in his
great-great-
uncle’s box of personal belongings was a sharp-bladed knife with a dark wooden handle, the blade tarnished by age. The tip, he asserted, had broken off, but it matched in every other respect the description of the knife that Dr Thomas Bond, who had been involved in the Kelly murder investigation, considered had been used to inflict the injuries on Nichols, Chapman, Eddowes and Kelly which, he said, were “all of the same character”. He described the weapon used as “a strong knife, very sharp, pointed at the top, about an inch in width and at least six inches long … it may have been … a surgeon’s knife … a straight knife.” In the Nichols murder, Dr Rees Ralph Llewellyn described the murder weapon as “a strong-bladed knife, moderately sharp….” In Annie Chapman’s death, Dr George Bagster Phillips gave his opinion that the murder weapon was “a very sharp weapon, probably with a thin, narrow blade at least six to eight inches long, perhaps a small amputating knife.” Catherine Eddowes’s murderer, according to Dr Frederick Gordon Brown, “had performed the mutilations to the face and abdomen with a sharp, pointed knife … with a blade at least six inches long.”

The knife was the ‘smoking gun’ that Tony Williams required to help establish his case. There was no question in his mind that this was not the surgical knife that his ancestor, Dr John Williams, had used to commit four out of the five murders. It was a natural and understandable assumption to make, given everything he had discovered so far, and, of course, it fitted perfectly with his hypothesis. He thought that DNA analysis of the knife at some future time might provide the hard evidence that would prove beyond reasonable doubt that Dr John Williams was Jack the Ripper.

But Dr Williams was not the murderer and we had strong
reservations
about the knife Tony Williams had discovered which, he was sure, was the murder weapon. My father and I found it hard to believe that so cautious and careful a murderer as Lizzie Williams, who had, thus far, left no clue or trace of any kind behind her, would have disposed of the murder weapon so carelessly that it had been found by someone else, even her husband, unless she had deliberately provided it to him for some reason. We believe that after committing each of the murders – where a surgical knife had been used – she cleaned and replaced the weapon in her husband’s medical bag, where it would lie unnoticed amongst all his other surgical knives and medical equipment. She may have considered that it was, in some ways, poetic justice; that the knife he had used to save lives had been used by her to destroy them.

So what exactly, we asked ourselves, was the knife that Tony Williams had found?

Also now kept in its own special closed box, sandwiched between two sheets of safety glass so that it can be viewed from either side but not touched, the knife with the broken tip that Tony Williams believes is the murder weapon also attracts a great deal of interest in the reading room of the National Library of Wales.

But as soon as my father and I saw the knife, we recognised it for what it was. However plausible and attractive the prospect might have seemed to Tony Williams, we knew at once that it was not, and could not have been, the murder weapon as described by Dr Bond.

A cursory inspection showed that the tip had not broken off; the knife had been designed and manufactured in that style
deliberately
, for where the blade now ended, it was both straight and machine-bevelled into a small but sharp edge. A second sharp edge ran along the lower part of the blade from the tang (handle) to the tip, where the two edges met at a point angled at almost 90 degrees. Northamptonshire, where I grew up, was, for many years, the world centre of the boot-and-shoe-making industry. A close friend of mine owned a shoe factory in the town and I was well acquainted with the tools of his trade. The knife so proudly displayed in the small glass case is not a broken surgical knife, though claimed; it is nothing more sinister than a shoemaker’s lasting knife.