Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman (24 page)

Perhaps for the price of yet another sovereign, Catherine Eddowes would have been persuaded to lie down on the ground in the corner, even though it was still wet from the rain the previous evening had brought. There, like Nichols and Chapman before her, she lay on her back unsuspectingly as she prepared to satisfy her ‘lesbian’ client.

Lizzie Williams was a woman incensed beyond reason, and believed that the woman who now lay on the ground before her might, if she were allowed to live, wreck what was left of her marriage, steal her husband and provide him with the child he craved, which she could never do. She had spent many painful years agonizing over her failure as a woman, and the way in which her body had let her down. Now she would vent all the anger and bitterness she felt, where, she wrongly believed, it was so richly and justly deserved.

It would have taken only a moment for Lizzie Williams to drop to her knees or crouch beside her victim, draw her knife and cut Eddowes’s throat across, taking her victim completely by surprise. Thus, mortally wounded, she was already dying before she knew what had happened.

While there is no forensic evidence to confirm the order of events we think Catherine Eddowes’s apron was cut in half immediately after her throat was cut, and before the injuries to her face and body were inflicted. It is certain that Lizzie Williams laid her victim’s uterus and left kidney on the severed part of the apron, which she then used to carry them away, because it was later found in a Goulston Street doorway covered in blood and gore. The murderer pushed up the women’s skirts to her breasts, then opened her abdomen with a single stroke of a knife. She made another cut inside the body, removed a section of the victim’s intestines, and pushed them away from her so that they fell on the far side of the body. Then she cut away the uterus, and placed it on the torn part of the apron.

But this time, perhaps more confident of her increasing skills with the knife, her fears of failure temporarily forgotten, Lizzie Williams had an afterthought – or perhaps it was all part of her plan. She inserted her hand once more into the cavity of the dead body. Feeling around under the breastbone of the corpse, her fingers touched a large, round rubbery shape. Satisfied that she had located her victim’s heart, she cut out the organ and placed that on the apron too.

At some point during the attack, three small black buttons from a woman’s boots were lost, that Sergeant Jones later found in clotted blood by the victim’s neck. We know for certain that they were not from the victim’s boots because at the time of her death Eddowes was wearing men’s laced boots. Could they perhaps have been torn from the boots that Lizzie Williams was wearing? And the fourth tin button, and the thimble: did they belong to the victim – or her murderer?

Lizzie Williams would almost certainly have known that a police constable passed through the square on his beat every 15 minutes, because her victim might well have told her, or Williams could have asked her, just to make sure. Working as quickly as the poor light allowed, Williams made several deliberate cuts to her victim’s face, each with its own purpose. All the injuries were recorded in F.W. Foster’s mortuary sketch, and clearly illustrate the extensive nature of the wounds inflicted upon Catherine Eddowes’s body and face. Her eyelids were slashed, her nose severed, ear, mouth and cheeks all deeply scored; in fact, every facial feature that gave her a feminine appearance were obliterated; it was the face that Lizzie Williams thought her husband had been attracted by, and she, who was plain, had destroyed it. Of particular interest to us now, though, were the four mysterious nicks on Eddowes’s cheeks, two on either side of her nose, each 1½ inches long, which appeared to form the shape of an inverted letter V, or triangle.

Pushing his Masonic connection to the limit, Stephen Knight’s explanation is that the two ‘triangles’ were a sacred sign; they adorn the top of the altar used in the Holy Royal Arch, a side order in Freemasonry. While it is correct that the triangles are symbolically used by Masons, they represent the square and compasses and the two arms are at right angles to each other; the two instruments oppose each other and are linked by the arms which cross so that they appear to be in perfect symmetry. When the six points are joined, they form a symbol identical with the Star of David. They are not entirely separate, as Knight suggests, and they do not resemble the marks on Catherine Eddowes’s cheeks.

Another suggestion from elsewhere which we considered is that the inverted Vs or triangles were arrows, pointing towards the victim’s hazel eyes, although the reason why the murderer should have wished to draw attention to the eyes was impossible for us to fathom.

Patricia Cornwell hardly addressed the matter of the victim’s facial injuries, other than to mention briefly that facial injuries “can be revealing”. But revealing of what exactly, she failed to say. She also quoted the comment of a senior Scotland Yard detective, Chief Inspector Donald Sutherland Swanson (Abberline’s superior officer from 1 September until 6 October 1888) who was said to read every piece of paper concerning the murder investigation: “Eddowes’s face had been disfigured ‘almost beyond identity’.” But therein lay the clue. Catherine Eddowes’s face had been
disfigured
deliberately, to take away her femininity.

As for the inverted letter V, a far more likely explanation is that the oblique gashes represented something symbolic, though less inventive than Stephen Knight’s suggestion, and far more downto-earth. Why might Lizzie Williams go to the trouble – and time – of carving two peculiar symbols into her victim’s face unless it meant something significant
to her?
We thought that the bloody shapes must have a special meaning.

Lizzie Williams was a strongly religious woman. She attended church regularly and knew her Bible well; whether or not she felt that her faith had deserted her in recent years by denying her the child she desired was quite another matter, but we think the letters
might
have referred to a short but appropriate sentence from Romans 12:19. Lizzie Williams had taken her revenge and left her message? Because that short sentence – beginning with the letter V – reads, “Vengeance
is
mine: I will repay, saith the Lord”.

There is another possibility. It is an idea we had tried to ignore as seeming to be too far-fetched, yet we were constantly drawn back to the extraordinary notion that, once again, it was something important that had been hidden in plain sight.

Lizzie Williams had
thought
she was dealing with Mary Kelly, her husband’s mistress. She had murdered the woman and inflicted
all
the injuries she intended at the outset. She had taken her uterus, thereby neutering her as a woman, and ripped out her left kidney (believing it to be her victim’s heart) and she had destroyed the face that, she believed, had so attracted her husband. Her objective, as far as she was concerned, was now fulfilled.

Is it
possible
that, in the same way an artist signs his name on a canvas to signify his work has come to an end, that Lizzie Williams had added a sign that her work was also concluded?

In the early days of his career as an artist, the Dutch painter Rembrandt (1606-69) signed his paintings with the single initial ‘R’, only later adding the additional letter ‘H’ for ‘Rembrandt; son of Harmen’. If an artist of Rembrandt’s calibre could sign his artworks with a single letter, Lizzie Williams could also have done so.

But again, we asked ourselves, what did the letter V stand for and why was it inverted? Was it because of the position Lizzie Williams found herself in when she made the four oblique incisions? We did not think so. There is no medical, or indeed any evidence, to suggest that she caused the wounds from any position other than one she had adopted for the murder – at her victim’s side. So what exactly was the unusual shape, the inverted V, which does not resemble any of the letters in our own Roman alphabet?

The Greek alphabet however (which commences Alpha, Beta, Gamma), which has been in continual use since the eighth century BC, consists of twenty-four letters. The eleventh letter, in
uppercase
of this ancient alphabet, is known as ‘Lambda’, and is identical to an inverted V and it represents the letter ‘L’.

Had Lizzie Williams left her mark in blood by signing the initial letter of her pet-name Lizzie on Catherine Eddowes’s face using the Greek symbol Lambda – ^. While it is indeed possible, and almost certain that she would have been familiar with the Greek alphabet, it seemed to us too remote a possibility. In any case, we were unable to come up with a plausible reason as to why she would have carved the same letter twice. Yet we felt we were on to something and thought that the marks must have some secret, or hidden, meaning.

As we pondered the matter further and stared hard at the two shapes recorded in Foster’s mortuary sketch, something
unexpectedly
revealed itself. It seemed to us that Lizzie
might
have signed her work, but in a manner which was not immediately obvious, and that would not have emerged in the decades that followed unless searched for, and was quite incomprehensible to the detectives involved in the murder investigation.

Viewed separately, perhaps an inch and a half apart on either side of Eddowes’s nose and in almost exact alignment, the two shapes cut into Catherine Eddowes’s cheeks have no obvious meaning. They merely formed part of her terrible facial injuries:

 

But we wondered, if they were not in fact two separate shapes, but component parts of the same character. So we brought them together, and when we did a familiar and clearly recognizable letter or
initial
quickly emerged:

 

A closer inspection of Foster’s sketch, though roughly drawn, shows that the shape on the left cheek, and perhaps the second one to have been carved, is actually rounded at the top, so the letter appears more like an M than ever:

 

Had the elusive killer, who confounded Scotland Yard’s best detectives, and who was famed for leaving no clues at the scenes of any of the murders,
actually
left an obscure clue behind, by carving the initial letter of her first (baptismal) name, ‘Mary,’ into the cheeks of the woman she believed was her final victim? Had she signed her ‘canvas’ in the manner of an artist, to signify that she was now satisfied that her work was finished? While we cannot be absolutely certain that we are correct in this hypotheses, the answer may well be ‘yes’.

As the murderer prepared to leave the scene of the crime, the dim yellow light from a lamp, such as a police constable might hold, was directed into the misty darkness from Church Passage at the far end of the square. But its beam was weak and quite unable to reach the corner where Lizzie Williams was hidden in the shadows with her victim. A moment later, it disappeared as its owner, P.C. James Harvey, walked on. Even if Harvey had seen her, it is possible that he dismissed her from his mind, because when the crime was later detected, the hunt was on for a man. Harvey, of course, was the officer who was later dismissed from the police force for reasons that are unknown.