Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman (2 page)

Four years later, Mary Kelly was killed in her tiny rented room during the early hours of a cold November morning on the day of the Lord Mayor’s Show. She was more horrendously disfigured than any of the previous victims, and her death posed the most important question of all.

After that murder, Mrs. Caroline Maxwell, a housewife, gave a written statement to the police, and later also swore on oath at Kelly’s inquest, that she had both seen the victim and carried on a conversation with her at the entrance to Miller’s Court where Mary Kelly had lived. But this had happened, Mrs Maxwell insisted, several hours after it has been conclusively established that Kelly was dead. How was this possible?

A more general question was why the murderer appeared to have no sexual interest in any of the victims? None of them had been raped, or sexually interfered with, or had their undergarments removed – save for the purpose of cutting up their bodies. And all of them, with the exception of Mary Kelly, appeared to have
voluntarily
lain down, as though they were expected to perform the sexual act.

Was it significant that the first four murders took place within the relatively short time-frame of thirty days, while the fifth and last killing took place more than five weeks after the fourth murder? Was there some reason for this delay, and, if so, what might it have been?

What was the catalyst for the murders? What momentous event or series of events could have turned someone into a brutal, serial killer – carrying out horrific murders, almost beyond
comprehension
, even by the standards of Ed Gein, on whose character Alfred Hitchcock’s Norman Bates and Tom Harris’s Buffalo Bill were both based? Edward Theodore Gein, born in 1906, a serial killer from Plainfield, Wisconsin, whose gruesome death toll is unknown, adopted the practice of murdering his victims, then fashioning household items from their skin, bones and body parts. Convicted of murder in the first degree, Gein was found legally insane and committed to a mental hospital, where he remained until his death in 1984.

Why did the murders end with the inconceivably savage
disfigurement
of Mary Kelly? Had the murderer finally achieved his purpose, and if so, what was that purpose?  

And finally, the most elusive question of all: why was the murderer never caught?  

None of these questions has ever been answered satisfactorily.  

Philip Sugden’s
The Complete History of Jack the Ripper
(2002), a meticulously researched almanac, provides information on almost everything that anyone could wish to know about the Whitechapel murders – except the answers to the questions who and why? But while Sugden did not actually provide the answers I was looking for, at least he succeeded unwittingly in pointing me in the right direction.  

I had expected Patricia Cornwell’s book
Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper Case Closed
(2002) to provide the conclusive evidence for which I was searching. But, regrettably, this book also failed to live up to expectations. Despite the thorough and deep research that Cornwell had undertaken, I was disappointed that her proposed suspect, Walter Richard Sickert (1860-1942), the German-born English impressionist painter, was supported by so little, if any, concrete evidence. Her ‘proof’ seemed to consist of several of Sickert’s drawings, pictures, canvases and a number of anonymous and denigrating letters sent to the police which Sickert may or may not have written. The ‘Dear Boss’ letter, delivered to Scotland Yard almost three weeks after the murder of the second victim, Annie Chapman, which Cornwell claimed Sickert had written, was an important pillar of the writer’s case and it was that letter which gave birth to the infamous sobriquet Jack the Ripper. Sir Robert Anderson, Assistant Commissioner of the Criminal Investigation Department, Scotland Yard, declared in
Criminals and Crime
(1907) that “the letters were the work of an enterprising journalist”, but was unable to provide the evidence needed to substantiate his claim. It was not until well over one hundred years later that his theory was confirmed, by Dr Andrew Cook, in
Jack the Ripper: Case Closed
(2009), who established that the letter was indeed written by a journalist. Walter Sickert did not write that letter.

Patricia Cornwell also claimed that Sickert suffered from a misshapen penis and was incapable of consummating the sexual act. This, she suggested, caused in him such a hatred of women that he was compelled to murder them, dissect their bodies, and remove their reproductive organs. But at no stage did she explain why the murders began and, just as importantly, why they ended so abruptly. There is no mention in Cornwell’s book of the
extraordinary
and compelling evidence given by Mrs Caroline Maxwell – which is central to the Kelly murder.

Disappointingly, none of the answers I hoped to find were provided in Patricia Cornwell’s book and there was little or no other persuasive evidence to suggest that Walter Sickert was anything other than an oddity or a misfit – traits that are not
sufficient
to merit him being called a serial killer.

In 2004, my father, an active and perceptive amateur historian, then aged ninety-two, began to research his latest subject, Sir John Williams, born in 1840, the third of four brothers on a small farm in Gwynfe, a village near Carmarthen in west Wales. John Williams had struggled to rise above his humble origins, and went on to become a physician to royalty and Professor of Obstetric Medicine at University College Hospital in London. In June 1905, after his early and unexpected retirement two years earlier, the deputation he headed won the sixteen-month fight to establish the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth.

Sometime after the result of my father’s research into the life of Sir John Williams was published in the
South Wales Evening Post
, the book
Uncle Jack
(2005) appeared. Within its pages, the author Tony Williams identified his great-great-uncle, Sir John Williams, as “Britain’s most notorious murderer”.

My father refused to believe that Williams, a gifted, brilliant and philanthropic doctor, could possibly be Jack the Ripper. Reading
Uncle Jack
did nothing to change that view. If anything, it reinforced my father’s opinion that, while Williams may have shared the same weaknesses as many of his fellow men as far as women were concerned, this did not make him a murderer. In any event, what motive could he possibly have had? Sadly, like all books written on the subject to date,
Uncle Jack
was also a huge
disappointment
to me. The many questions and explanations I was seeking remained unanswered.

As my father and I worked our way through the long list of suspects, we listed the essential attributes the murderer would have to have in order to accomplish, and get away with, the terrible crimes: a knowledge of anatomy, some surgical skill, access to specialist knives, the baffling ability to disappear into thin air, and a motive, at the very least, to commit murder. Then my father’s eyes suddenly lit up and he told me whom he thought the murderer could have been….

That
was my first eureka moment.

The realisation had come about as he recalled a short extract, just seven words, from a passage in one of the many scores of books we had read. It supported its author’s contention as to the identity of his suspect perfectly, but it didn’t ring true for us. It was only when we turned the passage about, that its true meaning, and the possible identity of the murderer, became clear, and the motive behind one of the murders, at least, was now patently obvious.

But simple conjecture, however plausible, is never enough, and so we began our own line of research. As our investigation progressed and the evidence mounted, the person my father
identified
as the Whitechapel murderer became increasingly probable. Like pieces in a jigsaw, one important fact after another slotted neatly and effortlessly into place. Just as a thick London fog might lift to reveal a clear blue sky, the picture of what really happened all those decades ago gradually began to emerge. Not only were we able to confirm the murderer’s identity, we also unearthed the catalyst for the killings – why they started, why they ended, the motive for all the murders and an explanation for the injuries inflicted on each of the murdered women.

After an intensive investigation lasting almost three years, I finally had the answers to my questions:
Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman
is the result of that research.

Friday, 31 August
Mary Ann Nichols, known as Polly, was 43. Her body was
discovered
at 3.40 a.m. in a gateway in Buck’s Row, Whitechapel. Her throat had been cut twice, her abdomen ripped open.

Saturday, 8 September
Annie Chapman, known as Dark Annie, was 47. Her body was discovered at 6.00 a.m. in a backyard in Hanbury Street, Whitechapel. Her throat had been cut, her abdomen ripped open. Her uterus had been excised from her body and removed from the scene.

Sunday, 30 September
Elizabeth Stride, known as Long Liz, was 45. Her body was
discovered
at 1.00 a.m. inside an open gateway to Dutfield’s Yard in Berner Street, Whitechapel. Her throat had been cut. She was the first of two victims to be murdered that night in what came to be known as the ‘double event’.

Catherine Eddowes, the second victim to be murdered that night, was 46. Her body was discovered at 1.44 a.m. in Mitre Square, Whitechapel. Her throat had been cut, her face mutilated, her abdomen ripped open, and her uterus and left kidney both excised and removed from the scene.

Friday, 9 November
Mary Jane Kelly at 25 was by far the youngest victim. Her body was discovered at 11.00 a.m. in a rented room at 13 Miller’s Court, Whitechapel. Her throat had been severed, her body hacked to pieces and almost all her internal organs removed. They were recovered later, except for her heart. No trace of it was ever found.

In the autumn of 1888, the bodies of these five women, all of them prostitutes, were discovered in Whitechapel within a one-mile radius of each other. The murders were investigated by the finest senior detectives from Scotland Yard, recognised then as the best and most efficient police force in the world. Despite the most intensive hunt for a killer ever carried out in Britain up to that time, no one was caught, nor was the reason why such terrible crimes had been carried out ever discovered. In the many decades that followed, innumerable theories have been put forward as to the identity of the killer, none of them conclusive. Up to now, the identity of the murderer and the motive behind the murders have remained insoluble mysteries.

9 November 1888

I
t surpassed Dante’s vision of hell. Not in his wildest imagination could the supreme medieval poet have dreamed up a scene of such horror. There was blood everywhere: on the bed, on the floor, on the walls and even on the ceiling. Pieces of skin, flayed from the victim’s abdomen, and flesh from her thighs lay on a small bedside table; more skin and lumps of flesh, hacked from her arms and legs, were left on a larger table. Several feet of intestines and the young woman’s spleen were strewn across the bed, where blood had soaked through the thin mattress and dripped silently into a
widening
, crimson pool on the floor. Her uterus, kidneys and one severed breast had been pushed under her head. The other breast lay beside her right foot. Her liver nestled between her feet on a coverlet caked in yet more blood. The stench of blood and gore was overwhelming – enough to make a person retch. The small room at number 13 Miller’s Court was truly hell on earth.

Mary Kelly was an attractive young woman and the final victim of the Whitechapel murderer, more popularly known as Jack the Ripper. Her stiffening corpse lay on its back near to the left-hand side of the bed. Her face, drained of colour, was turned away from the wall, her sightless pale blue eyes having lost their shine, stared from behind a thin grey film towards the middle of the room. She was almost naked, save for a sheer linen undergarment which had been slashed away at the front. Her right carotid artery had been savagely cut, and her throat severed to the spine, which was deeply scored by the blade of a knife; a torrent of blood from the gaping wound had matted almost all her long, light-coloured hair. Her nose had been hacked off and lay on one side, while her cheeks, eyebrows and ears were partially removed. Several cuts ran obliquely from her lips to her chin and her face was covered in so much blood that she was barely recognisable. Her knees were bent and her legs had been forced unnaturally wide apart. Mary Kelly’s torso was torn open from her ribs to her private parts, her insides viciously ripped out. Her right arm was placed in such a way that her hand was pushed inside the now empty cavity of her belly. With her entire body hideously disfigured, she resembled a slaughtered beast hanging on a butcher’s hook rather than a human being, and certainly not a young, attractive woman.

At that time of year, November, and during the colder winter months, damp mists rising from the Essex marshes would drift towards London driven by light, easterly winds. There, they combined with the toxic black smoke spewed from a hundred thousand chimneys to create a permanent miasma: the filthy, poisonous, sulphurous mist of a London pea soup fog.

At 8.30 a.m. several hours after the murder on that same cold grey morning, a woman emerged from Miller’s Court. She walked briskly up the narrow stone passageway to the corner of the lane, and then turned right into Dorset Street. Mrs Caroline Maxwell, a housewife who lived in a lodging house opposite the arched entrance to the court, saw her, though her vision would have been somewhat impaired by the thick foul mists swirling around the streets.