Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman (20 page)

We conjectured why the murderer wanted those particular organs; what possible use could anyone have for either of them? They would have been useless for any practical purposes, including medical research. After much deliberation, we realised that the murderer had not intended to take Catherine Eddowes’s left kidney at all – it had been a mistake. When the murderer cut out Mary Kelly’s heart, that was what she intended to take from Catherine Eddowes and not her kidney. Dr George Sequeira’s comment, as the first doctor to arrive at the crime scene, certainly supported this contention; “perhaps the murderer had come across the victim’s left kidney by accident and cut it out without knowing what it was”.

We agreed and thought it would have been a simple error to make. Working quickly in the near darkness and with the
ever-present
danger of discovery, fumbling about inside Catherine Eddowes’s chest cavity, her fingers slippery with blood, the murderer found what she believed was her victim’s heart. It was on the left side of her chest, covered only by a membrane and held in place, and protected by, a layer of fat – so her left kidney would have been in the
approximate
position that her heart would have occupied, and
that
organ was removed instead.

We were certain this could be the only rational explanation why the murderer had cut out and taken Catherine Eddowes’s left kidney. The normal surgical method of extracting the kidney was from the side, not the front – which merely reinforced our belief that the murderer had not intended to take the kidney. But if this provided the answer to one question, it raised another question equally obscure: for what purpose did the murderer require Catherine Eddowes’s uterus and heart? We could only speculate.

My father and I wondered who might have passed the fatal information to Lizzie Williams which enabled her to find and murder the person she believed to be Mary Kelly. Would it be possible to identify whomever it was? Our first thoughts were that it could have been almost anyone in Whitechapel.

During the mid-1880s, London was a magnet for immigrants from many parts of the world. Whitechapel, in particular, was teeming with Jews escaping from the Tsarist-Russian pogroms, who formed their own close-knit communities. Thousands of Russians, Poles, Irish, Italians, Hungarians and many other
nationalities
crowded into slums that equalled the most squalid ghettoes to be found anywhere in eastern Europe. So where, we asked ourselves, in this pitiful, seething mass of humanity, were we going to find the person who had identified Catherine Eddowes to Lizzie Williams as Mary Kelly? It seemed an impossible task.

On further reflection, it occurred to us that Lizzie Williams had placed herself in a very dangerous position by asking where she might find Mary Kelly. When Catherine Eddowes’s dead body was discovered, her informant might come forward, and Lizzie Williams, if found, would become a suspect, with the unthinkable consequences that her detection and arrest would bring. Lizzie Williams would have realised this awful truth and must have striven to find a way out of her difficulty. We believe she reached the rapid conclusion that the only course of action open to her was to eliminate her informant. It was not part of her master plan, but it was essential if she was to avoid the gallows, and get away with her dreadful crimes.

But, still, who was Lizzie Williams’s informant?

The answer soon presented itself to us when we remembered that there were two victims murdered on the early morning of Sunday, 30 September. Catherine Eddowes was the second victim; the first was Elizabeth Stride!

It seemed both feasible and likely to us that Lizzie Williams had murdered Elizabeth Stride to ensure her silence. But how could we be sure we were right? There was only one way: we needed to find hard evidence and to see if it supported our theory. If Lizzie Williams just wanted to kill Elizabeth Stride to save her own neck, she would have no reason to mutilate her body. So we reviewed the report Dr Phillips presented on 3 October 1888 at Elizabeth Stride’s inquest:

The report was clear. Elizabeth Stride’s throat had been cut and that was all; there were no mutilations to her body.

N
ow we were pretty certain why Lizzie Williams had murdered three of her victims: Mary Kelly because she feared the woman would destroy her marriage, and might bear her husband the child for which he craved; Catherine Eddowes, in the mistaken belief that
she
was Mary Kelly; and Elizabeth Stride, merely to silence her and to prevent her from giving Lizzie Williams away to the police. We were left with the murders of Mary Ann Nichols and Annie Chapman to explain, and of course the dozen or more questions with which we had started out.

We were minded of the words of advice delivered by Harper Lee’s Atticus Finch to his young daughter, Scout, in the 1960 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel,
To Kill a Mockingbird:
“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view … until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.” We had to look at the situation from the murderer’s point of view, to understand why she had acted in the ways she had. It meant ‘taking a subjective view’.

And it is the subjective view that is of importance here, because in all criminal cases, except those where ‘strict liability’ is imposed – for road traffic offences and the like, two elements are required to be present at the same moment for a crime to be committed. In criminal law they are known as an
actus reas
(a wrongful act) and
mens rea
(a guilty mind). Should either element be absent, no crime will have been committed. In all criminal cases, except for murder where the jury is asked to decide upon the question of guilt, its members are required to look at the events from the point of view of the average man. The example most often cited in days gone by, and even now, is ‘the man on the Clapham omnibus’, and to ask themselves what
he
might have thought. This is known as the objective view. In the case of murder, however, the jury is asked to look at the crime from the point of view of the accused; in other words, what
he
or
she
might have thought. This is the subjective view.

We decided to climb into Lizzie Williams’s skin, metaphorically, and walk around in it for a while, looking at things the way she might have done, to see if we could find the answers for which we were searching. When we did we began to understand why she had committed murder.

In 1867 Dr John Williams returned from London and set up his surgery in Swansea. He was then twenty-seven years old. It was a moderately successful practice because we know from his
biographer
, Ruth Evans, that one of the first things he did when he got on his feet was to repay his mother all the money she had loaned him while he was working in London. It was also the time when he began his life-long hobby of collecting Welsh language books and manuscripts.

But Dr John Williams must have been frustrated. He was a brilliant and gifted doctor, with ambition and drive, but he lacked the money he needed to propel his career to the great heights to which he aspired. This was when Mary Elizabeth Ann Hughes entered the picture. It is doubtful that they were a well-matched couple. She was from an extremely wealthy family and had been brought up as a lady; he was from humble farming stock and had struggled to become a doctor. But there was an age difference to consider too. At the date of their marriage in April 1872, he was thirty-one and had already spent a year in Glasgow and six years in London where he undoubtedly had gained some experience of life; she, at almost ten years his junior, was twenty-two and might never have been out of Wales.

How long Dr Williams and Lizzie Hughes were courting before they got married we do not know, though it appears to have been a whirlwind romance. Ruth Evans says the couple became engaged in 1872 (and married in April) while “important negotiations were going on”. This was at the time when Dr Williams was appointed to the position of assistant obstetric physician at University College Hospital in London, which enabled him to give up his Swansea practice and move back to London. It is difficult to avoid the suspicion that he married Lizzie Hughes for her money – and for the child he expected her to provide. It was certainly not for her looks because, in truth, Lizzie Hughes was quite plain. When a child was not forthcoming, that left only
money
as the primary reason for their relationship. Lizzie Williams, being the astute woman she was, would have realised this, and the discovery would have devastated her and added to her fears.

By 1888, Dr John Williams and his wife had been married for sixteen years. There is no doubt that he was hugely disappointed to discover that Lizzie was infertile. We know he devoted much of his life to a search for the cure for infertility, and this quest now became personal as well as professional. As Ruth Evans writes, “the one great sadness of his life is that he was unable to father a child”. This bald statement was undoubtedly the tip of a very large emotional iceberg for the couple.

Even from what we learned in the first few pages of Tony Williams’s
Uncle Jack
, where the author mentions talk within the family of an affair with “a girl he shouldn’t have” (called Mary – Tony Williams’s suggestion is that she was the Mary Kelly of Miller’s Court), it is clear that this was an unhappy marriage.

In September 1885, Dr John Williams established the ‘Eleanor Williams Exhibition’, a scholarship which he named after his mother. It was an award intended to help deserving boys in the parishes surrounding the area where he had lived in Carmarthenshire to continue their education at a higher grade school. This instance gives but a small insight into how the marriage had deteriorated: Dr Williams named the scholarship after his mother,
not
his wife. Another indication was the large portrait of Dr Williams’s mother which hung over the mantelpiece in his study, as a permanent reminder of where his real affections lay.

What took place behind the closed doors of the Williams household during those sixteen years between 1872 and 1888 is difficult to know, though Lizzie’s infertility, and the enormous emotional upset it inevitably brought into their lives, must have played upon the minds of them both. It was a vitally important factor which contributed greatly to the difficulties in the marriage.

For a man, age is no obstacle when it comes to the physical side of fathering a child. Charlie Chaplin, the comedian, famously fathered two children when in his seventies. But in 1888, Lizzie Williams knew that it would soon be too late for her to conceive, if it was not already well past the time when giving birth would be unsafe for her and her baby’s health. Time was running out for her. Dr Williams, on the other hand, was only two years short of fifty. He had long since lost interest in his infertile wife and was finding his physical pleasures elsewhere. Tony Williams says he chanced upon Mary Kelly and embarked on a relationship with her which could only have been essentially sexual.

It is Tony Williams’s proposition that when Mary Kelly was aged sixteen, she married a miner named Jonathan Davies, who was killed in a colliery accident. Kelly, who was nineteen at the time of his death, became ill and spent eight or nine months recovering in Cardiff Infirmary, later to become Cardiff Hospital. Dr Andrew Davies, a friend and work colleague of Dr John Williams, lived close to the Infirmary, and it was he who may have introduced Williams to the pretty Mary Kelly. Alternatively, Dr Williams may have met Kelly when she was working as a prostitute in Cardiff, after she had left the Infirmary and moved in to live with a female cousin. When, in 1884, Kelly moved up to London, she took a room in Cleveland Street, located midway between Dr Williams’s home in Queen Anne Street, and University College Hospital where he worked. (There were therefore, at least three possible separate occasions when Dr John Williams could have come across Mary Kelly.) They became lovers and he took her to Paris for a fortnight, though when, and for what reason is unclear. Mary Kelly is said not too have liked it in the French capital, but nevertheless she assumed the name Marie Jeannette, perhaps to protect their adulterous relationship. After they returned to England, Mary Kelly left Cleveland Street and, for reasons that are also obscure, she moved to Whitechapel, taking a room at 13 Miller’s Court, possibly resuming her old profession as a prostitute – but even this is not certain.

Tony Williams suggested that in order for Dr John Williams to cure his wife’s infertility, and make a ‘name’ for himself within the medical profession, he embarked upon a radical course of action. On the basis that the end would justify the means, Dr Williams sought out prostitutes whom he had known, and murdered them to plunder their body parts for use in the course of his research. In this argument, Mary Kelly, his former mistress, discovered that he was the murderer and tried to blackmail him, and Dr Williams murdered Kelly purely to prevent her from exposing him.

A womb or uterus transplant – if that was what Tony Williams was suggesting – would have been a radical, if not highly unlikely, medical procedure for those days, and one that would not be attempted (or repeated?) for more than a century. It was not until 2009 that a Saudi Arabian woman affected by Mayer Rokitansky Kuster Hauser syndrome (born without a uterus) became the first known recipient of another woman’s womb. Even then, complications developed and the womb was removed after 99 days. Dr Mats Brannstrom, a current pioneer of womb transplant surgery, described the operation: “Technically, it is a lot more difficult than transplanting a kidney, liver or heart. The difficulty with it is avoiding haemorrhage and making sure you have long enough blood vessels to connect the womb. You are also working deep down in the pelvis area and it is like working in a funnel.”