Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman (19 page)

Such knives are still readily available today and are identical to the knife that had once belonged to Dr John Williams. If further confirmation is needed, stamped into the metal of the blade – easily seen with the aid of a magnifying glass – is the letter ‘A’ and a clear outline of a small workman’s boot, each about ¼ inch high. Immediately underneath, the following words in tiny letters are also stamped into the blade: ‘George Barnsley’ and ‘Damascus Steel’.

George Barnsley of George Barnsley and Sons Ltd, Sheffield (founded 1836) was a master cutler who, by 1883, produced cutting tools for workers in the leather and shoe industries. By 1944 they had increased their range by adding “files and blades, shoe knives and leather workers’ tools”. No surgical knives were listed as being available from this company.

Yet the knife may not be discounted as a murder weapon quite so easily. Elizabeth Stride, the first of the murder victims on the night of the double event, had been killed, according to the medical report of Dr George Bagster Phillips, by a single cut to her throat, “a clean incision 6 inches in length, incision commencing two and a half inches in a straight line below the angle of the jaw”. It was performed in a manner similar to the two earlier murders, the cut having been made from left to right. The evidence of Dr Frederick William Blackwell given at the coroner’s inquest on 5 October, was that the murder weapon in that case was a “short knife, like a shoemaker’s well ground down”, which may have made the cut.

It was the oddest of ironies: author of
Uncle Jack
, Tony Williams, had found a knife with ‘a broken tip’ among his ancestor’s personal effects, which, with the exception of Elizabeth Stride, he believed was the murder weapon. Yet the diametrically opposite was true. The knife he had found was, incontrovertibly, a shoe-maker’s knife, and while it could not possibly have been used in the murders of Nichols, Chapman, Eddowes and Kelly, its description matched exactly that which Dr Blackwell had provided of the murder weapon which, he said, had been used to cut the throat of Elizabeth Stride.

We know that Dr John Williams retired from the hospital by 1893 and his lucrative private practice in 1903. He gave ill-health and strain brought on by overwork as the reason, but the simple facts do not support this explanation. Dr Williams’s workload increased considerably after his retirement. He became a Justice of the Peace, High Sheriff of the County of Carmarthenshire and accepted a government appointment to the Royal Commission on Welsh Disestablishment. Furthermore, he involved himself in the affairs of the village of Llanstephan where he lived from 1903 to 1909 with his wife, her stepmother, Mary, and their four female servants. There were, according to Ruth Evans, many more appointments too, not including the huge amount of work he took on to establish the National Library of Wales, the foundation stone of which was laid on 15 July 1911.

It seemed to my father and me that all the evidence suggested that it was not Dr John Williams who had become ill, but his wife Lizzie.

If Dr Williams
had
sent Lizzie to live with her family in Wales soon after the murders, so that they could care for her, especially Edward R. Morgan, it would explain why she wrote to her husband in London early in 1889. It would make perfect sense. It was he who was “at the centre of” her world, not she at the centre of his. It would explain the enigmatic line, “Thank you for the forgiveness and for keeping my secret”. He had perhaps forgiven her for the murders, in particular the murder of his mistress, Mary Kelly; he could hardly do otherwise because his affair was the direct cause of Kelly’s death, and indirectly the cause of the other deaths too. Similarly, he had no option but to keep his wife’s secret, and perhaps this was the reason why he had removed the pages from his diary; as her husband, he was duty bound to protect her and keep her confidences – no matter how serious they were. He could not, in any event, disclose her crimes to anyone without involving himself in the scandal, and the dire consequences, which inevitably would follow. It would be far better for both of them to keep their terrible secret to themselves.

W
e thought it had to be more than coincidence that the last two victims of Jack the Ripper shared the same name, Mary Kelly. But if we thought this was an incredible discovery, we were even more astonished to find that little or no importance had been given to the anomaly by any previous author. Philip Sugden and Patricia Cornwell both stated flatly that Catherine Eddowes gave a false name and address at Bishopsgate Police Station before her discharge from custody, but failed to pursue the matter further; Tony Williams merely mentioned that the police believed the alias given by Catherine Eddowes was in fact her true name – and left it at that.

Stephen Knight, however, states that Catherine Eddowes used the alias Mary Ann Kelly, and suggested that she was murdered in the mistaken belief that she was Mary Jane Kelly – which was exactly the same conclusion we had reached, though, whereas we considered the discovery to be of the utmost importance, Knight seemed to consider the name similarity an unimportant side-issue, and did not even know how the error had come about.

We wondered what Sherlock Holmes would have made of it? Would he merely have accepted as a coincidence that the final two murder victims in his latest case just
happened
to use the same name? Or is it more likely that he would have pondered the matter carefully while playing his violin behind the locked door of his study at 221B Baker Street, before reaching the elementary conclusion that it was not just a simple quirk of fate, but the key that enabled him to unlock the mystery and solve the crime? We assumed the latter option unquestionably.

My father and I shared the same view on the matter: the possibility of two women, both prostitutes, both living in Spitalfields, both murdered, one after the other, and both using the same name, was extremely unlikely to be mere coincidence. The fact that Mary Jane Kelly was the last of the Ripper’s victims merely increased our doubts of such likelihood. The only reasonable conclusion to be drawn is that the death of one of the victims must have been a tragic case of mistaken identity.

Having reached this finding, we looked at the statements and medical records of all the murders again, and it wasn’t long before we were able to work out a likely chain of events.

Simple logic told us that Catherine Eddowes, aka Mary
Ann
Kelly, must have been murdered in the belief that she was Mary
Jane
Kelly.

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.