Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman (5 page)

Writing in
The Independent
, on 18 May 2006, under the headline ‘Was Jack the Ripper a woman?’, Kathy Marks in Sydney, Australia reported that an Australian scientist, Ian Findlay, a professor of molecular and forensic diagnostics, had “developed a profiling technique enabling him to extract DNA from a single cell or strand of hair up to 160 years old”. He had taken swabs from the gum used to seal some of the envelopes that had contained the
anonymous
letters sent to Scotland Yard, and what were believed to be samples of blood spattered on the ‘Dear Boss’ letter, and had subjected them to his analysis. While the results were inconclusive, Findlay managed to construct a partial profile and concluded that “It’s possible the Ripper could be female” – in fact, all he had managed to achieve was the discovery that whoever had sealed the envelopes might have been a woman, and the blood
might
have been a woman’s blood.

Stephen Knight ignored the possibility that the murderer might have been a woman in
Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution
, almost certainly because it would have undermined his conspiracy theory. It was his contention that Sir William Gull and his co-conspirators, John Netley, who became Prince Albert Victor’s coach driver when travelling incognito, and the flamboyant artist Walter Sickert, whom Princess Alexandra had asked to act as mentor to Prince Albert, or Eddy as he was known to his family, her immature son and heir apparent to the throne, had enticed Nichols, Chapman and Eddowes – on different nights – into a carriage. There, Gull swiftly despatched them by cutting their throats, then mutilated their bodies. Netley, assisted by Sickert, had then dumped the bodies where they were found soon afterwards. Stride was murdered outside the coach, and then Netley had thrown her body into a yard through an open gateway in Berner Street as Sir Robert Anderson, Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, acted in the most unlikely guise of a look-out and fourth
conspirator
.

Catherine Eddowes, the killer’s next victim within the hour, Knight claimed, had been murdered in the mistaken belief that she was Mary Kelly. Her body was deposited in Mitre Square, which, Knight maintained, held great significance for Freemasons. The mitre is an instrument used in architecture and consists of two straight pieces, usually made of wood, both bevelled at 45 degrees, where they are joined to form a right angle. It is also one of the two principal instruments of Freemasonry (the other being the compass) and is used in Masonic ceremonies.

It was, Knight suggested, the murder of Catherine Eddowes in Mitre Square that gave the Ripper a reputation for having
supernatural
powers, and he referred to the suggestion of an ‘invisible man’, which he said had been made by earlier writers. In other words, Knight suggested, “the sort of person whose presence on the streets would not have been noticed; like a policeman.” He could as easily have added ‘or a woman’, since such an obvious possibility must surely have presented itself to him.

In the annals of crime, the incidence of females using knives in attacks is highly unusual, and the number of females who are driven to murder and mutilate their victims is rarer still. But they are not unheard of and there are in fact, several modern parallels with the Whitechapel murders.

In 2004 a gruesome news report rocked the United States and shocked the rest of the civilised world. The murdered body of a young woman had been discovered in her own home. She was identified as 28-year-old Bobbie Jo Stinnett from Kansas City, and she was eight months’ pregnant at the time of her death. She had been strangled, her stomach cut open and her unborn baby ripped out of her womb. The baby survived and was presented to family and friends as the murderer’s own child. What made the crime all the more appalling was that the convicted killer, 36-year-old Lisa Montgomery, was a woman.

On 10 October 2011 another American, Annette
Morales-Rodriguez
from Wisconsin, was charged with the murder of a pregnant woman. Desperate to have a baby son with her new boyfriend, she invited heavily pregnant Martiza Ramirez-Cruz into her home. There Morales-Rodriguez battered her with a baseball bat before strangling her to death. She then used a knife to cut open her victim’s abdomen, and removed the foetus in an attempt to replicate a Caesarean operation she had seen on the Discovery Channel. At least five other similar cases of attacks on pregnant women in America have been reported.

In March 2005, two sisters, Linda and Charlotte Mulhall, dubbed the ‘Scissor Sisters’, aged 30 and 32 years respectively, made headline news across Ireland when they demonstrated graphically that women murderers could be as vicious as their male counterparts. They had attacked and killed their mother, Kathleen’s, abusive lover, Farah Swaleh Noor, a Kenyan immigrant and known violent criminal, after he had made repeated sexual advances to Linda in her central Dublin terraced home. Mr Justice Carney, who presided at the sisters’ subsequent trial, made a
chilling
remark during sentencing when he said: “It was the most grotesque killing that has occurred in my professional lifetime.”

In the evidence, it was revealed that, encouraged by their mother, Charlotte Mulhall had slit Noor’s throat with a Stanley knife – significantly she cut it
twice
– while her sister delivered several blows to his skull with a hammer. He was then stabbed repeatedly. But it was what the sisters did to Noor’s corpse that earned them notoriety. In order to dispose of their victim, they dragged Noor’s lifeless body to the bathroom where they
dismembered
it using a bread knife and a hammer. Over a period of several hours, the victim’s head, limbs and penis were severed; a towel was used to soak up the blood. The sisters then put the body parts into plastic bags. Some were dumped in Dublin’s Royal Canal, where a leg still wearing a sock surfaced ten days later. The bag containing the head was buried in a local park; then, at a later date, it was recovered and taken to a field where Linda Mulhall smashed the head to pieces with a hammer and allegedly buried the remains. Neither the murdered man’s head nor penis have been found.

Charlotte Mulhall received a mandatory life sentence for murder. Linda Mulhall was given a fifteen-year sentence for
manslaughter
. Kathleen Mulhall, who initially fled to England, was later captured and brought back to Ireland. She received a five-year sentence for helping to clean the scene of the crime. Her daughters refused to testify against her in court.

In what he saw as an established fact or truth of nature, Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) demonstrated in his poem, ‘The Female of the Species’, penned in 1911, that it is the
female
, rather than the male, who has the greater propensity to commit violence. Two verses in particular convey this point most effectively:

Having established that women are capable of committing the most terrible acts of murder and maiming, even though they may have never previously committed an act of violence, then using cleverness and cunning to try to avoid detection, my father and I thought it was at least possible that a woman could have been responsible for the Whitechapel murders. The remnants of women’s clothing found in the ashes of Mary Kelly’s fireplace, and the firm, consistent testimony given by Mrs Caroline Maxwell, both to the police in her written statement, and to Dr Roderick McDonald J.P., the coroner who presided over the inquest into Kelly’s death, merely confirmed to us that her murderer
must
have been a woman.

Mrs Caroline Maxwell was a respectable married woman, the wife of an assistant lodging-house keeper in Dorset Street, Whitechapel. Despite the caution issued to her by the coroner during the inquest at the Shoreditch Town Hall, “You must be careful about your evidence, because it is different to other people’s,” Maxwell steadfastly maintained that she had told the truth. Walter Dew described her in his memoirs half a century later as “a sane and sensible woman”, adding that “her reputation was excellent”. But Caroline Maxwell’s evidence was not the starting point of our research.

The list of Ripper suspects is not endless, but it is long. We found ourselves wading through the minutiae of a motley
collection
of rogues. One of the more popular contemporary suspects was Montague Druitt, the barrister who drowned himself three weeks after the last murder, thereby drawing suspicion to himself as a suspect; Abberline later dismissed him as such. Another suspect was George Chapman – no relation to Annie Chapman – who poisoned three of his wives; however, he was never known to have used a knife (although he had once threatened his wife with one). Then there was Francis Tumblety, a quack ‘doctor’ who collected uteri and kept them in specimen jars; Mary Kelly’s uterus, though cut out of her body, was not removed from the crime scene. Dr Thomas Neill Cream, another poisoner who secretly performed unlawful abortions but was supposedly in prison in the United States on the dates when the crimes were committed, was also an official suspect, and there are perhaps a dozen others, all of whom were, in our opinion, equally unlikely to have committed the murders.

More recent theories have identified a similar number of
candidates
, including Sir William Gull, the suspect named by Stephen Knight, but much of Knight’s work was later discredited when Walter Sickert’s son, Joseph, who was then an old man himself, retracted his story which formed the basis of Knight’s tale, and admitted that it was a hoax. Patricia Cornwell also accused the twisted but unlikely artist Walter Sickert. Other popular suspects are Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence, ‘Eddy,’ a grandson of Queen Victoria, who had an alibi for each of the nights when the murders were committed, and Sir John Williams, the sacrificial lamb offered by his great-great-nephew, author Tony Williams.

However, the one important element missing in every case was that none of the suspects had a
motive
for committing the murders. We could find nothing in their backgrounds that would drive any of them to carry out such terrible, vicious crimes. None of the suspects had even the slightest connection with any of the victims – except one.

But after all the research my father had undertaken into this most distinguished of Welshmen, we thought – no, we
knew
– that Sir John Williams could not possibly have been involved in any of the murders.

John Williams was born on 6 November 1840, the son of a farmer and part-time Methodist minister who died of typhoid fever when John was just two years old. His mother recognised her son’s
potential
and intellect at an early age and struggled to provide him with a good education. Young John attended school in Swansea, before going on to Glasgow University aged sixteen, where he studied mathematics for a year. His natural aptitude for the sciences took him to University College Hospital in London where he studied medicine for six years, working at both the Brompton Hospital for Consumption (tuberculosis) and the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children. He was, by all accounts, a brilliant student, studying under William Jenner for one, who was credited with the invention of the smallpox vaccine.

He completed his medical course (M.R.C.S, and M.B., London) in 1866, and in 1867 he qualified as a doctor (M.D., London). At University College Hospital, he made several friends among his student colleagues, one of whom, Markus Beck, was the nephew of Joseph Lister, pioneer of antiseptic which he used to prevent death from infected wounds and injuries. By early
recognition
and adoption of Lister’s discovery, this later helped Dr Williams to become an outstanding surgeon. His work was unpaid at this time, so lack of money, rather than ability, forced him to return to Swansea, where he practised for five years as a local GP.

During the time he worked in Swansea, Williams had the good fortune to meet Mary Elizabeth Ann Hughes, who was then quite young. She was the daughter of Richard Hughes, a wealthy businessman and tinplate factory owner. On 3 April 1872, the couple married in Libanus Chapel in the industrial town of Morriston, three miles to the north-east of Swansea. Following the wedding, they enjoyed a short working honeymoon abroad, which allowed Dr Williams to visit a number of hospitals and make acquaintances within the European medical profession. Markus Beck, incidentally, was to have been Williams’s best man at the wedding, but he missed the ceremony when he overslept on the train, although he arrived at the family mansion in the small village of Ynystawe, just north of Morriston, in time for the reception. On 23 July in that same year, and with his father-in-law’s generous financial assistance, the couple moved to London, where Williams pursued an extremely successful career in medicine.

Not only did Dr Williams work at University College Hospital, but at the Westminster General Lying-in Hospital in Lambeth, London, where Joseph Lister was both President and consulting surgeon. In 1880, Dr John Williams was appointed Physician Accoucheur, along with Dr Francis Champneys, and they were the first to practice antiseptic midwifery in Britain. He also worked at the Royal Waterloo Hospital for Women and Children near Waterloo Station in London, and the Whitechapel Workhouse Infirmary in London’s East End.