Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman (28 page)

In order to present a balanced picture, however, it must be said that there were as many theories as to the likely identity of the murderer among senior police officials, as there were officers who were either directly, or indirectly, connected with the crimes – both before 1903 and in the years that followed. But there was no direct evidence of involvement in the murders by any of the suspects whom they named, nor did any of them appear to possess a plausible motive.

Perhaps the truth as to who the murderer might have been was confined to just those who needed to know, and those few who did were sworn to secrecy. That way, there was less likelihood of the secret leaking out – ever. Few police officers possessed the depth of knowledge about the murders, and enjoyed such well-established connections with the Home Office, as James Monroe, and none had such intimate familiarity with the cases as Frederick Abberline. Author of
Autumn of Terror,
Tom Cullen, said that James Monroe was “possibly the only man at Scotland Yard who was capable of tracking down the killer”. Perhaps he had. Monroe had written some private memoirs for his family which contained nothing about the Ripper murders, but supposedly some for his eldest son, Charles, which did; however, it is assumed that any such papers were unaccountably destroyed because they have never surfaced. Charles, who had presumably read his father’s notes, allegedly told his younger brother, Douglas, that his father’s theory was “a very hot potato”, while his grandson, Christopher, remembers him saying that “Jack the Ripper should have been caught”. This suggests that Monroe knew or, at the very least, suspected who the Ripper was. When Sir John and Lady Williams so hurriedly left London for Wales, those suspicions may very well have crystallised. If James Monroe believed that either the eminent Sir John Williams, a peer of the realm, or his wife, Lady Williams, might have been the murderer, this would indeed have been a very hot potato.

If it was the case that there had been a high-level governmental cover-up over the suspected identity of the murderer, it would not have been for the first time, so there was already a precedent. In 1889, the year following the murders, Inspector Abberline was involved in the Cleveland Street scandal, when a homosexual brothel in the West End of London was raided by the police. This was at a time when homosexual activity was illegal. Prince Albert Victor, Queen Victoria’s grandson (later proposed, but dismissed, as a Ripper suspect) was said to have been involved, but a government cloak of secrecy kept his name out of the newspapers. Whatever the reason, within a relatively short time of Sir John

Williams sending his most extraordinary letter to Margot Asquith, the wife of the future Prime Minister, he suddenly and unexpectedly gave up his successful private practice. Ruth Evans says that the months of dissolving his Brook Street practice were ‘strenuous’, which would not be expected in a planned retirement – rather, the pressure felt by a man in a hurry to leave.

On 29 January 1903, Sir John Williams left London, and took a twenty-one-year lease on a magnificent Georgian mansion, Plas Llanstephan in Carmarthenshire, overlooking the beautiful Towy estuary, towards Ferryside on the opposite bank. Lady Williams, at fifty-two, was cared for by her stepmother, Mary Hughes, who continued to look after her, following the death of her husband, Lizzie’s father, Richard Hughes, who died in that same year. All three lived there in relative isolation until 1908 before finally moving to Aberystwyth where they spent the rest of their days, so that Sir John Williams could be near the library he founded and loved so much. If neither a child nor medicine was to be his legacy, then the National Library of Wales, to which he devoted the remainder of his life and perhaps as atonement for his part in the murders, would be. At just sixty-two years of age, and while at the peak of his career, Sir John Williams had left London and the medical profession forever; his life in medicine was over.

The story we have uncovered is incredible, but that does not mean that it did not happen. Everything about the Ripper murders is extraordinary; nothing more so than the fact that Jack the Ripper was a woman, that she was the wife of a prominent London doctor, a gynaecologist and physician to royalty who became a baronet and she Lady Williams, makes it all the more astounding. Yet all the evidence we have uncovered, though much of it circumstantial, points to it being true.

Every murder Lizzie Williams committed was planned with meticulous care, even though that of Catherine Eddowes was a terrible, inexcusable mistake. It was no accident that she got clean away with her crimes, and the caution she exercised, along with the blind certainty of the police that the killer was a man, allowed her to escape each time. There is no police record of any person matching Lizzie Williams’s description being stopped or questioned by the many police patrols and detectives who searched the streets and alleyways of Whitechapel. As a woman, she was ‘invisible’.

Our suspicions were aroused one day in 2005 by a short statement of just seven words, ‘You are the centre of my world’. This was an extract taken from a letter discovered by the author of
Uncle
Jack
, Tony Williams. He believed the letter to have been written by his great-great-uncle, Dr John Williams, and sent by him to an old friend. The statement formed part of Tony Williams’s evidence that his distant relative was Jack the Ripper. What rang alarm bells with my father and me was that, from what we knew of Dr Williams, whose life my father had researched intensively, it was completely out of character for him to have made such a statement.

Strangely, no signature appeared at the foot of the letter attributed to Dr John Williams as reproduced in
Uncle Jack
, and this increased our suspicions that he had not written it. When we cast about for likely options, my father quickly reached the conclusion that there was only one other possible candidate: the author of the letter was Dr Williams’s wife, Lizzie.

Since the letter included another short, enigmatic statement, “Thank you for the forgiveness and for keeping my secret”, which Tony Williams took as an admission by Dr Williams that he was the murderer, the finger of suspicion now pointed directly at his wife.

It was a startling revelation, but, though we were sceptical at first, the notion immediately rang true. For one thing, it explained why the murderer of five women in London’s Whitechapel had never been caught. The police were hunting for a
man
. Other than that, we had no idea of what might have turned Lizzie Williams into a brutal serial killer, and we set out to conduct our own investigation into the murders, to see how far it would take us.

What we discovered amazed us. We had confidently expected our hypothesis to fall at the first hurdle: it didn’t. Instead, it jumped over it with ease, and it kept on jumping other hurdles. Once we accepted the proposition that Jack the Ripper
might
have been a woman, everything started to fall into place, with nothing having to be omitted or twisted to fit the facts. At no point in our investigation did we discover anything to prove that the murderer
must
have been a man; on the contrary, all the evidence pointed to a woman, and one in particular, Mary Elizabeth Ann Williams – Lizzie.

At the outset, we listed a number of questions relating to the murders which had always puzzled and perplexed us; as our investigation progressed, those questions were answered one by one. The reasons why Polly Nichols’s throat was cut twice – after she was dead; why the pocket of Annie Chapman’s apron was almost torn off and her (remaining) personal effects arranged carefully at her feet; why Elizabeth Stride’s throat, and nothing more, was cut; why Catherine Eddowes’s face was mutilated and the inverted letter V was carved into each of her cheeks – and what the letter might have stood for; how Caroline Maxwell believed she had seen the final victim several hours after she was known to have been killed; why no sexual interest was shown in any of the victims, and the ultimate red herring, the cryptic words and the bloody part of the apron discovered in Goulston Street, and of course, the identity of the murderer, and the motive behind the dreadful crimes.

But it was not just the answers that kept emerging which convinced us we were on the right track; it was the way all the pieces of the jigsaw kept dropping neatly into place. Why Polly Nichols was chosen as a victim; what caused the three scratches on Annie Chapman’s neck; how Elizabeth Stride knew what time Catherine Eddowes would be released from custody; even the discovery that Catherine Eddowes was not the worn-out, decrepit harridan we had expected to find.

That Tony Williams’s great-great-uncle was ‘Jack the Ripper’ was inconceivable from the start. That Dr John Williams would need to seek out prostitutes in Whitechapel to murder them for their uteri was implausible. That these were required for the purpose of his research, when he had an almost inexhaustible supply of women patients at the hospitals where he worked, made this hypothesis impossible to believe.

From start to finish, all the evidence pointed directly to the suspect my father had identified. Not once were we dissuaded that we were wrong. On the contrary, at every turn our suspicions were confirmed that we had identified the murderer and discovered the motive for her terrible crimes.

That Jack the Ripper, author of five Whitechapel murders in the autumn of 1888 was not a man but a woman, has now, we believe, been proven beyond reasonable doubt. That she was the outwardly respectable, upper-middle-class, middle-aged Victorian housewife whom we identified at the outset, is certain.

M
ary Elizabeth Ann Williams, whom her husband called ‘Lizzie’, was the only daughter of a wealthy industrialist, Richard Hughes, who indulged her to excess. She was accustomed to having anything and everything her father’s money could buy. She married a brilliant, capable and ambitious doctor, a specialist in gynaecology, and it was her family’s money that provided the foundation of his very successful career. But, unfortunately, they could never have the child they wanted because, by a tragic twist of fate, Lizzie was infertile, and no amount of money could change that fact.

As time passed by, Lizzie Williams feared for her marriage. Not only was she afraid that she would lose her husband to another woman, she worried that she would forfeit her social standing too. When her father lost his fortune, Lizzie lost her security, and became dependent on a husband who no longer loved her as he once did. She thought that he might leave her, perhaps even father a child by Mary Kelly who had proved herself fertile. It was
therefore
the green-ey’d monster of jealousy, and fear for her very future that became the catalyst that drove her to commit murder.

Of the many people who have been considered as suspects down through the years, Lizzie Williams alone had all the attributes that the Whitechapel murderer required in order to accomplish, and get away with, the terrible crimes. She was intelligent, confident and determined, yet cautious and careful too. She possessed a sufficient knowledge of anatomy and the requisite theoretical surgical skills both to kill her victims and, when necessary, to extract the organ she wanted to possess – the uterus. The coroner in the Annie Chapman inquest, Wynne Baxter, noted: “The organ had been taken by one who knew where to find it.”

Lizzie Williams had access to surgical knives. The Divisional Police Surgeon, Dr George Bagster Phillips, an expert witness in the inquest, gave his opinion that the weapon used in four out of the five murders was “very sharp… probably with a thin, narrow blade at least six to eight inches long; perhaps a small amputating knife.” The Williams household also owned a shoemaker’s knife “well ground down”, which expert opinion considered had been used in the Stride murder, because such a knife was discovered among the personal possessions of Dr Williams held by the National Library of Wales.

Of great significance was the possibility that Dr John Williams had a direct connection with at least three of the murder victims, Nichols (perhaps), Eddowes and, crucially, Kelly, and so, by indirect association, did his wife.

And she was a woman. Since everyone – the police, the press and the public – were looking for a man, Lizzie Williams was ‘invisible’. She was able to come and go at will; she walked along alleyways and passages, roads and high-streets, through police cordons, past constables and detectives wherever and whenever she wished, always unnoticed.

But, most significantly of all, she had the
motive
to commit murder.

As a child, Lizzie was gifted at both acting and music. At the age of fifteen, she won a competition at an Eisteddfod for which she was given the Bardic name of
Morfydd Glantawe.
At the age of twenty, she was given the honour of awarding prizes at the 1870 Eisteddfod. She was an accomplished organist and accompanied the choir in her local chapel, Libanus. While Lizzie Williams is now largely forgotten, Morfydd Street and Glantawe Street still exist in Morriston, the town of her birth. However, no more than a handful of people living there now know that these street names honour the gifted daughter of a leading industrialist, whose husband was a doctor to royalty, and when in 1894, her husband was made a baronet, she became Lady John Williams.

Soon after the murders ended, and almost certainly before the end of the year 1888, Lizzie Williams returned alone to live with her family in Wales. Also living with her was Edward R. Morgan, whom we believe was a qualified medical practitioner whose job it was to keep her under constant supervision. She remained with her family, visiting her husband in London from time to time, until Dr John Williams moved back to Wales on his retirement in 1903. When Lizzie moved to her husband’s new home in Llanstephan, she was accompanied by her stepmother, who lived with them, and it was she, Mary Hughes, who now provided the constant care that Lizzie needed for the few remaining years of her life. Lizzie Williams died of cancer in 1915 at the age of sixty-five.