Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman (23 page)

We are fairly sure that this was the order of events, because neither the small-toothed comb, the larger comb in a paper case, nor the small piece of coarse muslin were reported as being
blood-stained
– and they would have been if Lizzie Williams had picked them up after she had ripped out Annie Chapman’s uterus.

She pushed her victim’s skirts up to her breasts, and confidently opened the abdomen. She only knew from her observations
how
a hysterectomy should be performed; she had never before practised the operation, or indeed any surgery, herself.

The intestines were in the way of the uterus and she severed them at one end, scooped them up and placed them on the corpse’s upper body, out of the way. It seems logical to deduce that they were put there because that was the most convenient place for them, and not for any other reason, Masonic or otherwise.

Then she made her incisions, low into the vagina and then higher through the bladder, so that no injury was caused to the uterus located between them, “the organ the murderer was
determined
to possess”, as the coroner, Wynne Baxter, remarked, during Annie Chapman’s inquest.

The murderer’s hands were now covered in blood. She could not leave the backyard and walk through the streets of Whitechapel in such a state. There was a pan of clean water in the yard. Lizzie Williams may have intended to use the water to wash her hands, knowing from years of experience of being married to a doctor that it was cold, and not hot, water, which was most effective when it came to removing blood. But perhaps a noise from within the house alerted her to the danger of delaying her escape. So, instead of plunging her hands into the water, and in order to save precious seconds, we think that she may instead have dipped into the water some of the bunched material of her petticoat, soaking it well. Then, by using the damp fabric to wipe the blood from her hands as she hurried back along the long corridor, they were clean enough by the time she reached the front door. By dropping her skirts to their normal position, all evidence of the blood on her undergarments beneath would have been hidden from view.

Certain now that she could both kill Mary Kelly and perform the surgery necessary to remove the uterus from her dead body, Lizzie Williams left the scene of her crime, taking her ghastly, but
well-wrapped,
package with her. There were already many people about at that early hour, of whom John Richardson, on his way to work an hour earlier, and Mrs Long, less than a half hour before, were just two. There would have been others also, both male and female of all ages, on their way to market, or perhaps going home from their night shifts, and Lizzie Williams knew that, as a woman, she would not be noticed leaving a house where several families lived. The moment she stepped out into the street, she became just one in the crowd, and, again, vanished quickly from sight.

T
o kill a person, a woman, had not proved to be so difficult after all, and the surgical extraction of the uterus from a corpse was indeed possible. What Lizzie Williams had learned at her husband’s elbow she had remembered, and what she
remembered
she had performed well; even in her hurry, and in the potential death-trap of an enclosed backyard in Hanbury Street.

During the late evening of Saturday, 29 September, Lizzie Williams returned to Whitechapel for which she must have expected to be the last time. It would have taken less than a month, from the night of Polly Nichols’s death on the last day of August to what should be the final killing; that of Mary Kelly, which she intended to commit as soon as the opportunity presented itself, during the early hours of the following morning.

It was after midnight and the streets of Whitechapel were quieter than usual, owing in large part to the adverse publicity the
newspapers
had given to the murders that autumn, though hansom cabs, broughams, carriages and tradesmen’s carts still passed to and fro. Police patrols were frequent and detectives kept their vigilant watch on any man prepared to brave the faceless terror lurking in the shadows of the dimly lit streets.

Lizzie Williams was confident that she was capable of carrying her objective through to the bitter end, although first she had to find her victim. The only way she could achieve this was to ask around. But where should she begin? Since Mary Kelly lived in Spitalfields, perhaps Spitalfields church on Dorset Street – which was where many prostitutes waited for their clients – would be as good a starting place as any, or perhaps the Queen’s Head public house on the corner of Fashion Street and Commercial Street where they also gathered. Wherever it was that Lizzie Williams went, she met a woman who said she knew Mary Kelly. That woman’s name, we contend, was Elizabeth Stride. She wore a long black fur-trimmed jacket with a single red rose on maidenhair fern in her buttonhole.

Stride might have laughed when Lizzie Williams asked her where she could find Mary Kelly because, the evening before, ‘Kelly’ had been found drunk in Aldgate High Street. She was arrested and taken to Bishopsgate Police Station where she would remain until she sobered up. Further questioning would have elicited the likely time of her discharge from custody and what she was wearing: a black straw bonnet trimmed with black and green velvet, a black fur-edged jacket, a dark-green skirt and a white apron.

One might well ask, even if Elizabeth Stride had known of Mary Kelly’s arrest and subsequent incarceration, how could she possibly know when she would be released?

The answer was simple enough.

Elizabeth Stride had appeared before the Thames Magistrates Court on numerous occasions for offences of drunk and disorderly behaviour under the name Anne Fitzgerald. She herself had been locked in the cells of Bishopsgate Police Station several times, and had experienced at first hand the policy of clearing the cells of their occupants, wherever possible, at the end of the evening shift. That always happened at one o’clock in the morning – the very same time that police constables at fixed-points, all over London, changed their shifts.

So now Lizzie Williams knew what Mary Kelly looked like and where and when she could be found. Yet she was now in a dilemma. Stride knew that Lizzie Williams wanted to find Mary Kelly. When Kelly turned up dead, it would not take long for Elizabeth Stride to come forward and provide the police with a description of the woman who had been looking for her – especially if a reward was offered, and there was talk of a reward for information leading to the arrest of the murderer, though none had yet been officially sanctioned. Perhaps Stride became suspicious of Lizzie Williams’s motive for wanting to find Kelly, and asked for an extra sovereign to buy her silence; whatever happened, Lizzie Williams would have quickly realised that neither a sovereign, nor even a handful of sovereigns, would buy the woman’s silence for long. So there was only one possible option available to her if she was to murder Mary Kelly and avoid the hangman’s rope: Stride too would have to be silenced.

Lizzie Williams must have justified the murder to herself; what was another dead prostitute in Whitechapel anyway? She had already murdered two women and got clean away with it. No one suspected her; no one even suspected that a woman was responsible for the murders; nor, she might have thought, would they ever. So, when the two women parted, we believe that Lizzie Williams followed Stride, waiting for an opportunity to murder her. Her moment came in Berner Street where, at the gateway to Dutfield’s Yard, she would have observed Stride being assaulted. Her attacker was a man with a fair complexion, dark hair, a short moustache, and wearing a peaked cap. She would have watched a second man walking towards the gates, suddenly turn and run away in the direction from which he had come, and she would have seen a third man who had been leaning against a lamppost, calmly lighting his pipe, suddenly start, and run after the second man.

There are no eyewitness accounts to what happened next (a familiar and distinguishing feature of all the murders) but Stride’s dead body was discovered just a quarter of an hour later, so it is logical to assume that the man in the peaked cap killed her. We do not believe that he did, and wonder if he possessed an entirely different motive for his assault upon Stride.

Israel Schwartz, the second man and a witness who chanced upon the attack, made no mention of seeing a knife in the possession of Stride’s attacker,
and
he was able to provide the police with a good description of him. While we do not know if the third man was an associate of the assailant or just an innocent bystander, there is at least a possibility that he was the latter. Stride’s attacker knew that he had been seen by one witness, possibly two, and could, consequently, be identified. We think it unlikely, therefore, that he would have risked the hangman’s noose for the murder of a prostitute that night.

A far more likely possibility, we thought, was that the motive for the attack was robbery, and the man in the peaked cap stole from Stride any money she might have had when he threw her to the ground (because none was found on her corpse when the police noted the contents of her pockets). Afterwards, he had departed, leaving Elizabeth Stride where she lay in the yard, dazed, but
otherwise
unhurt, and the street was then both quiet and empty.

Fate had placed Lizzie Williams’s next victim on her back, in the very same position she had persuaded her first two victims to adopt, so her task would be that much easier to perform. She went to Elizabeth Stride and knelt or crouched by her side; then perhaps she asked her if she was hurt and reassured her that she meant no harm. It is likely that the sound of approaching hooves may have sounded on the stone cobbles, though they were still some way off. Seconds were all Lizzie Williams needed. Stride, still shocked by the attack, might have expected Lizzie Williams to help her get to her feet, but instead Lizzie Williams pulled out her knife and pressed the blade against her throat where a silk scarf was tied about her neck. There was little time, but no need to move the scarf out of the way because the knife was strong and the blade, well ground, was sharp, and it sliced through silk, skin, flesh and tissue. Seconds were all that were needed, and by the time Louis Diemschutz with his pony and cart pulled to a halt in the gateway, the woman was dead, and of the murderer there was no trace.

It was past 12.46 a.m. and if Mary Kelly was released at 1.00, as Stride had told her she would be, Lizzie Williams had less than a quarter of an hour to get from Berner Street to Bishopsgate Police Station, almost a mile away.

If she had been lucky enough to catch a carriage immediately on reaching Commercial Road at the junction of Berner Street, she might have told the cab driver that she needed to get to Bishopsgate Police Station quickly. She had witnessed a fight, a woman wearing a red rose in her lapel had been injured, and she wished to report the crime. It would have been a plausible enough explanation, and it was, of course, based on truth.

It must have been a rapid carriage ride, and at that time of night the journey could have been accomplished in ten minutes or less. So it was at least possible for Lizzie Williams to have arrived in Bishopsgate before, or very soon after, Kelly’s release. Time was indeed short, and if she had arrived later, Lizzie Williams might have missed Kelly and the fourth murder would never have happened. But the fact remains that her next victim
was
murdered, which means, we believe, that Lizzie Williams got there in time.

The woman wearing the green and black bonnet was released from custody at around 1.00 a.m., and soon afterwards Lizzie Williams approached her. Once again, two women out walking together would barely have been noticed; they could have walked though the police cordons unhindered and past the numerous plain-clothes detectives, who were already combing the streets for the murderer of the Buck’s Row and Hanbury Street victims, and now for the murderer of the Berner Street victim too.

The woman might have confirmed, if and when Lizzie Williams asked, that her name was Mary Kelly and that she lived in Spitalfields. Lizzie would then have been sure that she had found the right person. The distance from Bishopsgate Police Station to Mitre Square is four hundred yards, so the walk would have taken them no longer than five minutes, even walking at a slow pace – though speed was less critical than timing, as would soon become apparent.

But the woman was not Mary Kelly and 6 Fashion Street was not her address, as she had told Sergeant Byfield upon her discharge from custody, though she did live in Spitalfields. Her real name was Catherine Eddowes and she lived in Crossingham’s, a common lodging house in Dorset Street. Catherine Eddowes, also known as Mary Kelly, may have been seen on the short journey by two witnesses: Joseph Lawende, a salesman, and Joseph Hyam Levy, a butcher. Their evidence was that at 1.33 or 1.34 they saw a man and woman talking together at the entrance to Church Passage, which led to Mitre Square. However, since neither witness could identify Eddowes, or provide the police with a description of her, their alleged sighting is inconclusive and it might not have been her. However, if it was Eddowes they saw, it would not have been surprising that Lizzie Williams was nowhere to be seen; just as in the case of Annie Chapman, who had walked on a little way alone in Hanbury Street to meet a man, so Catherine Eddowes may have acted in the same manner. Both women would have been known to many clients in the neighbourhood whom they would not wish to turn away.

We believe that when the two eyewitnesses had gone, the man Eddowes had spoken to (if it was her) also left (intending to meet her later perhaps?), and it was Eddowes who led Lizzie Williams through one of the three entrances into Mitre Square; two were narrow foot passageways, the third was a slightly wider
carriageway
. The ill-lit square was darkest in the southern corner and it was here that Eddowes led her clients for sexual purposes. It was to that same corner that Catherine Eddowes brought Lizzie Williams.