Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman (22 page)

Lizzie Williams had prepared herself carefully for this night. She knew exactly the type of woman she was looking for, what she would say to entice her victim to come with her, what she would do to her and, finally, how she would get away with her crime. She might have visited the East End often during the early days of her marriage because Dr Williams sometimes worked in the Whitechapel Workhouse Infirmary. She knew how the local women dressed, how they spoke and how they behaved. She could not go to Whitechapel dressed for the West End and, since she had to resemble most of the women who lived and worked there, her dress must allow her to blend in.

The police officers who patrolled their beats in Whitechapel had taken to nailing pieces of bicycle tyres to the soles of their boots, to reduce the noise made by the iron nails as they struck the stone cobbles. Lizzie Williams may have learned from this and worn shoes fixed with rubber soles which would enable her to walk the alleyways and passages in relative silence. In each case where the murdered body of a victim was discovered out of doors – Nichols, Chapman, Stride and Eddowes – not only was no one seen leaving the scene of a murder, but, significantly, no one was heard either.

We know that the Williams household possessed the knife that would have been needed to make such an alteration, because a shoemaker’s knife ‘well-used’ was later discovered among Dr Williams’s personal possessions – but we believe that the knife also once had a darker, and more deadly, purpose.

Lizzie Williams wanted to find a woman of low class, someone who would do what she was asked for money. But her requirements were specific; it had to be someone she could overpower easily, someone unlikely or unable to resist. There were few people about on the dimly lit streets of this poorest part of the city, and two haggard-looking women talking on a street corner may well have caught her attention. One of them, wearing a straw hat, was small, shabbily dressed, middle-aged and, importantly, very drunk. She was the ideal choice.

Three years before, in 1885, and quite unbeknown to Lizzie Williams, Dr John Williams had aborted the child that this woman was carrying. She was merely one of the many hundreds of nameless prostitutes walking the streets of Whitechapel, trying to earn enough for a glass of cheap gin, a doss for the night or just as a means to survive. Any pains they suffered or disease that they might contract they learned to live with, but a pregnancy could not be ignored. Sooner or later the ‘problem’ had to be dealt with, but they always knew whom they could go to for an abortion, at a price – no questions asked.

There has been much speculation as to how the murder victims all came to be lying on their backs when they were discovered. It was as though they expected to ‘service’ their client, even though in no case had
any
of them been sexually assaulted. Why was it that none of them, with the exception of Mary Kelly, appeared to have put up a struggle – as if they had willingly accepted their fate? Of equal importance is why the women agreed to go with Lizzie Williams in the first place.

Without suggesting for one moment that Lizzie Williams was anything other than heterosexual (although the alternative might well have contributed to the poor state of her marriage) we believe that she could have portrayed herself to her victims as a lesbian seeking their sexual services for payment, in order to lure them to their deaths.

We considered whether she would have needed to draw upon her acting abilities to convince the women that she was a lesbian. Commenting at the premiere of the tv series
Tipping the Velvet
(1998), which was based on a lesbian-themed novel set in Victorian England by Sarah Waters, Rachel Stirling who acted in the lead role, Nan Astley, said, “From the outside, one thinks there’s some great big secret that you must discover in order to play a lesbian: the fact is, there isn’t.”

While gross indecency between males was made illegal by the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, later repealed, there was no such equivalent law for females. Popular legend has it that Queen Victoria naively believed that lesbianism did not exist, therefore she refused to sign a bill that would make it unlawful.

None of the frequent patrols that policed Whitechapel would have given two women walking together a second glance. They would barely register on the subconscious.

Buck’s Row, a narrow cobbled street lit by just a single gas-lamp at one end, was almost pitch black at night. Every prostitute working the streets of London knew the movements of each constable patrolling his beat, and Mary Ann Nichols would have been no exception, drunk or not. She, in turn, would almost certainly have told Lizzie Williams, and they timed their trip to give the police a wide berth, and so avoid discovery.

The two women would have walked as quietly as they could along the street to the place where the prostitute brought her clients for the privacy they needed: the slight recess made by a pair of closed wooden gates to a stable yard. They were a little farther along, just past the last cottage in the row, well away from the factories and warehouses, and in a spot where they could not be seen by any householder or night watchmen.

We think that Mary Ann Nichols acceded to Lizzie Williams’s request for her to perform the sexual act, and she lay down on the ground for her client, a woman whom she believed was a lesbian, in the manner she might have adopted for a man. Perhaps immediately after Nichols’ death her legs were arranged in such a manner that indicated sexual intercourse had taken place, so as to throw the police off track and lead them to believe the killer was a man. There is some support for this notion because sexual intercourse had definitely not taken place, and there was no evidence that any sexual interest had been shown in the victim.

The evidence of Dr Llewellyn, the police surgeon who examined the body, shows that Lizzie Williams placed her hand over her victim’s mouth, and pressed down hard, the cradle between her thumb and forefinger blocking her victim’s nose and cutting off her air supply. At this point she was fully committed and it was too late to change her mind. But at no time did she have any intention of stopping because the future of her marriage was at stake.

If Nichols had been even half-sober, she might have fought off her murderer, but the copious amount of gin she had taken earlier meant that she was unable to put up any serious form of resistance. In any event, she was small and easily restrained. It would not have taken long for Lizzie Williams to have throttled Polly Nichols to death. Less than a minute might have been sufficient. We were reminded of what Dr Llewellyn had said at the inquest: “it would not have needed a strong man to kill her”.

We know there was little noise as Nichols died, because neither the residents living in the small cottages that lined one side of Buck’s Row nor the watchmen from the factories and warehouses on the other side heard a sound or any cry for help.

It was very dark in the street, though the sky was still glowing from the distant Docklands fires. Lizzie Williams had planned to cut Mary Kelly’s throat and now she would discover if she was capable of doing such a thing. She had selected a surgical knife from amongst those she might have found in her husband’s medical bag – a small amputating knife, knowing it was the most suitable instrument for her purpose, “a strong-bladed knife, moderately sharp”.

Lizzie Williams had to
know
that she was capable of performing such a gruesome act. She drew out the knife, pressed it against her victim’s neck, pressed down hard and quickly drew back the blade, making a short incision perhaps the length of a finger. When she found that she could do it, she knew she could kill Mary Kelly in the same way, and she cut her victim’s throat a second time, just to be sure that she could do it. This time, the incision was more than twice as long, and almost encircled her victim’s throat.

But Lizzie Williams also wanted to know if she was capable of performing the operation that would allow her to remove her victim’s uterus, so that she could, when the time came, take Kelly’s. She pushed up her victim’s skirts to her breasts, exposing the abdomen. The woman wore stays – corsets with laces which could be tightened to improve the figure – but they were loose and easily pushed up out of the way. The murderer knew where she needed to make the incisions because, we assume, she had watched her husband perform this very same operation a dozen times before. Then, she made several deliberate cuts, opening her victim’s naked abdomen.

At the inquest, Dr Llewellyn testified that the murderer “must have had some rough knowledge of anatomy, for he seemed to have attacked all the vital parts.” Once again, this description fitted the extent of Lizzie’s Williams’s knowledge and skill, or lack of it; it most certainly did not fit the description of her husband, Dr John Williams, a highly qualified and expert surgeon.

But it may have been too dark for Lizzie Williams to see properly, and she might not have been confident that she could find the uterus in the dark. Or perhaps it was the sound of Charles Cross’s approaching footsteps, the labourer walking to his work, which caused her to abandon her victim. Whichever it was, she left the body where it was found soon afterwards, and stole quietly away. In the Whitechapel Road, she fell in with a number of female workers whom P.C. Neil saw, but he immediately discounted them as suspects of importance, because they were just “women… going home”. There was not a man to be seen.

M
ary Ann Nichols was to have been Lizzie Williams’s only other victim before she was ready to confront and murder Mary Kelly. But while she had managed to kill the unfortunate drunken woman and cut her throat, either poor light, shortness of time, or perhaps both, had prevented her from completing her task.

Eight days later, early on Saturday, 8 September, Lizzie Williams returned to Whitechapel. It was still dark on this cold but dry morning, though dawn was not far off. This was to be her final rehearsal, and now she was determined to kill a woman, and tear her uterus from her dead body.

Annie Chapman was plump, shabbily dressed and merry with drink, though she was not as drunk as Mary Ann Nichols had been. Where Lizzie Williams met her in Whitechapel we do not know. All we can say for certain is that when they parted in the small backyard of a tenement building in Hanbury Street, Chapman was dead. We have no doubt that Lizzie Williams made her the same proposition that had worked so well with Nichols, and paid her to provide sexual services.

Once again, no one would have noticed two women walking together, even during the early hours of the morning when there were few people about; a man on his own of almost any age would have been a different matter, and even a man and woman together might be stopped and questioned by the frequent patrols that policed Whitechapel, but one, two or even more women together would not have drawn particular attention.

Annie Chapman brought Lizzie Williams to Hanbury Street. The evidence is that Chapman went on alone as they approached the run-down three-storey property at number 29, to speak with a man, presumably a regular client. The witness, Mrs Elizabeth Long, the cart-minder’s wife, says that a man and a woman were talking together, but she passed them by, so was unable to say what had happened afterwards. It is quite possible that she passed Lizzie Williams and saw her too, but if she did, her image failed to register.

It is unlikely that the latter would have wished to be seen in the close company of a woman she intended to murder, though walking along the streets together did not appear to present her with such concern. Where her victim found herself in the position that she had to speak to someone, perhaps a client, it is more likely that Lizzie would have hung back and hidden until she could rejoin her in comparative safety. It would not be the only time for Lizzie Williams to conceal herself while accompanying her victim. She would act in the same way with Catherine Eddowes three weeks later, who was seen talking to a man – whom we also believe to have been a client – shortly before her murder in Mitre Square.

But the man and woman had parted soon after Mrs Long walked past; perhaps the man was told to come back later: the few words that Mrs Long
did
hear, certainly supports this proposition: He said “Will you [meet me here later]?” and she replied “Yes [I’ll see you in twenty minutes or so]”. Then Annie Chapman and Lizzie Williams entered the house by the front left doorway, and walked as quietly as they could down the long corridor through the house that led to the door at the rear. By now, it was past five o’clock; dawn had been at 4.51, and it was daylight.

There, between the fence on one side of the yard, and the steps on the other, Annie Chapman lay down on the ground, spread her legs apart, and waited for her ‘lesbian’ client to lower herself onto her, and perform the sexual act.

Once again, and without warning because the investigating detectives found that there was no sign that a struggle had taken place, Lizzie Williams unexpectedly clamped her hand over Annie Chapman’s mouth to stifle her cries. She held her fast until she had rendered the woman insensible, the long nails of the three middle fingers of her right hand clawing deep into her victim’s neck – evidence of the forceful manner in which she had restrained her.

Taking out her knife, she pressed the sharp blade to Chapman’s throat, and pulled her hand back swiftly, cutting through skin, flesh and muscle. It would have taken just seconds for Annie Chapman’s life to drain away and any convulsions to cease. But there was more to be done, and this time it was light, and Lizzie Williams could see well enough.

It was her intention to take her victim’s uterus, but she needed something in which to carry the organ. A large pocket, tied with string under Annie Chapman’s clothing, was later found to have been partially torn away, and a number of her belongings had spilled out onto the ground. We assume that Williams had found the pocket, tried to wrench it away, and the contents fell out (because the pocket was empty when it was found). One of the items suited her purpose better than the material of the pocket itself – which we believe she had intended to use, but then left, partially torn away. What we think she found, to put the uterus in, was probably a large handkerchief or similar piece of material which she used to clean herself. Then, before attacking the abdomen, sheer force of feminine habit compelled Lizzie Williams to tidy up the remaining personal effects of her victim, which she set neatly to one side, and out of her way by the feet of the corpse.