Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman (6 page)

Williams became as well known for his skill as a surgeon as for the care he took of his patients, whether rich or poor, whom he is said to have treated alike. He was once described by a fellow practitioner from France as “un opérateur sûr de sa main”. The literal translation of which is: a surgeon who knows his job.

Tony Williams produced records to show that Dr John Williams had attended two of the subsequent murder victims in the Whitechapel Workhouse Infirmary where he practiced on an irregular and voluntary basis. He had performed an abortion on a Mary Ann Nichols, the first murder victim, in 1885, and he had treated Catherine Eddowes, the fourth victim, for Bright’s Disease, a chronic inflammation of the kidneys in 1887. Therefore his connection with at least two of the Ripper victims was, according to Tony Williams, well established. He might also have known a third, Mary Kelly, the fifth and final victim.

Rumour within the Williams family had it that Sir John was something of a ladies’ man, and had indulged in numerous affairs during the course of his marriage. One of these relationships involved a girl called Mary. It is Tony Williams’s suggestion that in 1881 Dr Williams met the youthful, pretty Irish girl, Mary Kelly, when he had visited the Cardiff Infirmary where she was receiving treatment as an in-patient. She was the mother of a young child and had recently become widowed when her husband Jonathan Davies (or Davis) was killed in a mining accident, Williams maintained. He allegedly died in an explosion at Cwmparc Colliery, near Treorchy in the Rhondda Valley, which also claimed the lives of three other miners. Williams met Mary Kelly again when she moved up to London in 1884; they became lovers, conducted a torrid affair and even went to France together.

A report appearing in the
Daily News
of 10 November 1888, the day after the murder, stated that an unnamed girl, who had known Mary Kelly for two years before her murder said, “Kelly was a Welsh woman, and could speak Welsh fluently”. But though Mary Kelly had lived in Wales, and all the available evidence suggests that she had lived in South Wales, she was in fact originally from Limerick in Ireland.

While Tony Williams unwillingly attributed Mary Kelly’s brutal murder, and all four earlier murders, to his illustrious ancestor, he was vague as to the reasons why Dr John Williams should have stalked the lanes and alleyways of Whitechapel seeking out
prostitutes
to murder and butcher. He suggested obliquely that the collection of prostitutes’ body parts was for the purposes of his research into the causes of infertility. This, he explained, was why the murderer had excised and taken away uteri from Annie Chapman and Catherine Eddowes. But the suggestion that it was for
research
was, like the
madness
thesis, a glib explanation, and Tony Williams gave no credible reason as to why his great-
great-uncle
should have cut out Catherine Eddowes’s left kidney and taken it away. Even if it were so, research could in no way explain the extent of the ferociousness shown in his mistress, Mary Kelly’s, murder, or the reason why he had
not
removed her uterus from the scene of the crime. It had been cut out of her body, but had then been pushed under her head, where it was found by the doctors who examined her corpse.

It seemed unlikely to my father and me that a medical professor, a specialist in gynaecology at the pinnacle of his career in one of the most famous teaching hospitals in the world, would have needed to murder prostitutes for their uteri. That such body parts were required for the purposes of Williams’s research is difficult, if not impossible, to comprehend when he would have been provided with an almost inexhaustible supply by the hospital where he worked. If uteri were needed for his research or to implant in his infertile wife as some sort of ground-breaking experiment, it is hard to believe that he would have chosen two middle-aged
prostitutes
as donors in preference to the young Mary Kelly, whose uterus had been removed from her body, but not taken away from the scene of the crime. His motive for the particularly vicious murder and horrendous mutilation of Kelly has, regrettably, never been properly explained. Tony Williams suggested that Kelly discovered that Dr John Williams was the Ripper, and tried to blackmail him, and so he killed her, but this explanation, when measured against the appalling litany of injuries the young woman sustained, stretched credulity beyond acceptable limits, and was, we thought, implausible.

We were unable to find any obvious motive that might have turned Dr John Williams into a vicious serial killer. And why murder Mary Kelly at all? There was no apparent reason that would make Dr Williams want to murder his vivacious, fertile young mistress; to sever her throat to the spine, slash her face beyond recognition, hack her body to ribbons, cut off both her breasts, tear out her viscera, remove her reproductive organs and take away her heart. But as we pondered the mystery, we realised that there was someone who might have had
every
reason to murder the unfortunate young woman and rip her body to pieces: the doctor’s wife, Lizzie Williams. 

I
t was clear to us that Dr John Williams’s wife, Mary Elizabeth Ann, whom he called ‘Lizzie’,
could
have murdered Mary Kelly.
She
was the woman whose felt hat, cotton twill skirt and velvet cape were found burned in the ashes of the fireplace in Mary Kelly’s room;
she
was the woman whom Caroline Maxwell had seen in the mist dressed in Kelly’s clothes; and
she
was the woman who turned to face Maxwell at her call, ‘Mary’, and replied to her in a Welsh accent as she was fleeing from the scene of her crime in Miller’s Court.

Of all the suspects there have been down through the years, only Lizzie Williams possessed all the attributes the murderer would have needed, including, crucially, a motive, to commit murder. And the reason why she was never caught was because she was
intelligent
and confident, careful and determined, and – even to this day – few have suspected that the murderer was a woman.

But did Lizzie Williams really murder Mary Kelly? At almost forty years of age and having led a privileged and protected life, was she capable of murder? Would she know how to kill, even supposing that she wanted to? And it was not just the question of who had killed Mary Kelly that my father and I had to consider; four other murders had been committed that autumn, and the world’s best detectives and doctors considered that they had all been murdered by the same hand.

In 1889, a year after the murders, Sir Melville Macnaghten, Assistant Chief Constable in the Criminal Investigation Department at Scotland Yard, identified Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Kelly as victims of Jack the Ripper. It was, and perhaps still is, widely agreed by experts that these five women were the Ripper’s
only
victims and they became known as the ‘canonical five’. So, as impossible as it seemed, if Lizzie Williams murdered Mary Kelly, then
she
must have murdered all five women.

But was it likely? We were eager to find out. We already knew a great deal about Sir John Williams, as he became when Queen Victoria conferred a baronetcy on him in 1894, from intensive research my father had carried out. He had also conducted an investigation into the life of Lizzie Williams (née Hughes) several years earlier which culminated in an article appearing in the
South Wales Evening Post
(14 May 2001). From information he had gathered, we knew that the marriage of John and Lizzie Williams was not happy. Dr John Williams desperately wanted a child, but his wife was infertile and unable to conceive.

It was not until well into the twentieth century, shortly after the end of the second world war in fact, that the notion of infertility affecting men became accepted. Until this time it was generally believed that if a couple were unable to produce a child, the woman was to blame; those who were educated or had careers even more so, as it was considered that they had brought their misfortune on themselves. James Marion Syms (1813-1883) considered to be the father of American gynecology, stated that “probably the
gynecologist
of today is consulted more often with regards to the sterile condition of women, than for any other disease”. The ‘driving force’ behind Sir John Williams’s professional career involved his search for a cure for infertility in women. He therefore followed the traditional path in holding his wife accountable for
her
failure to produce an heir. We also believe that his arrogance and vanity would not have allowed for the possibility of an alternative
explanation
. We therefore pursued our investigation on the basis of the parties’ apparent belief; that it was Lizzie Williams who was
infertile
, and not her husband.

While we had dismissed out of hand the possibility that Sir John Williams might have been the murderer, we found the additional family information provided by Tony Williams in his book
Uncle Jack
particularly helpful. If Dr Williams was the womaniser that his great-great-nephew says he was and had enjoyed an intimate and sustained relationship with Mary Kelly, as Tony Williams also claimed, a vitally important piece of the puzzle had fallen into place.

We now knew that Dr John Williams had a direct connection with three of the Ripper’s victims: Mary Ann Nichols perhaps, and Catherine Eddowes, who were his patients, and Mary Kelly, who was his mistress. Attacks on three of the victims, Chapman, Eddowes and Kelly involved the removal of uteri – a hysterectomy – and it was this very operation that Dr Williams performed on a frequent basis in his work as the leading gynaecologist at University College Hospital. In the circumstances, it was difficult to avoid the same conclusion that Tony Williams had reached: that Dr Williams was in some way, either directly or indirectly, connected with the murders. However, while he struggled to ascribe a plausible motive for the murders to Dr Williams, he failed to take the further small, but obvious, step that would have led him to the realisation that it was not Dr John Williams who had the motive to kill Mary Kelly, but his wife.

The consistent testimony of Mrs Caroline Maxwell, her written statement to the police and sworn evidence given during the inquest at Shoreditch Town Hall, identified a woman she believed to be Mary Kelly leaving Miller’s Court on the morning of the murder. But it was several hours
after
Mary Kelly was conclusively proved to be dead. This evidence, coupled with the remnants of a woman’s clothing found in the ashes in the fireplace of Kelly’s room; a felt hat, a dark brown cotton twill skirt and black velvet cape – clothes that no one had ever seen Kelly wearing – confirmed to us that her murderer must have been a woman. Lizzie Williams was an obvious suspect because of the intimate relationship that the victim, Mary Kelly, had formed with her husband.

Lizzie Williams had not expected to encounter someone like Caroline Maxwell as she left Miller’s Court following the murder, but she was well prepared for such an eventuality. A Welsh accent was essential to convince Caroline Maxwell that she was speaking with Kelly, because though Kelly was Irish-born, she had spent her formative years in Wales and it is virtually certain that she spoke with a Welsh accent. Lizzie, who spoke with an English ‘twang’, could also speak with a Welsh accent if she required. She needed to be confident enough, both in speech and demeanour, to convince Caroline Maxwell that
she
was Mary Kelly.

Lizzie Williams was both an accomplished musician
and an actress
. The information we were able to gather about her, some of it gleaned from the stack of postcards she received from her friends over many years, now kept by the National Library of Wales, demonstrates that she was intelligent and refined, talented and religious, even kindly. After the death of her mother, she had been brought up by a governess, Mary Bevan, and, as the only child of a wealthy, indulgent father, had almost certainly learned to think highly of herself, even though a photograph taken of her as a girl when she was about fifteen, shows that she was not a good-looking child. During her teenage years she performed at Eisteddfodau (Welsh festivals of music and drama). There is little doubt that whatever painful blows married life may have dealt her, Lizzie Williams was an intelligent and confident woman.

Fog, much like the poverty which plagued London’s East End, was a major problem in the capital during the last decades of the nineteenth century, and did not improve until well into the
following
century when the Clean Air Act of 1956 came into force. A report in
The Times
on 5 December 1837, referring to the huge difficulties caused in London by thick fog the previous morning, read, “Not only was the darkness so great that the shops were all lighted up, but also every object in the streets, however near, was totally obscured from the view of the persons walking along.”

As the nineteenth century progressed, the problem became worse owing to the growth of heavy industry which relied on coal for power, and an ever-increasing population which needed coal for cooking and heating. Almost thirty years later, an article published in
The Times
on 24 January 1865 made it clear that the problem was just as great for those indoors: “Even those who remained at home found a large clear fire but a poor mitigation of the unpleasant atmosphere that filled their comfortable rooms.”

R. Russell, in his book
London Fogs
(1880), wrote: “A London fog is brown, reddish-yellow, or greenish, darkens more than a white fog, has a smoky, or sulphurous, smell, is often somewhat dryer than a country fog, and produces, when thick, a choking sensation. Instead of diminishing while the sun rises higher, it often increases in density, and some of the most lowering London fogs occur about midday or late in the afternoon. Sometimes the brown masses rise and interpose a thick curtain at a considerable elevation between earth and sky. A white cloth spread out on the ground rapidly turns dirty, and particles of soot attach themselves to every exposed object.” It was said that in the theatre, actors’ voices could be heard but their faces could not be seen. Even in hospitals, it sometimes proved impossible to perform surgical operations, owing to the choking sulphurous haze that seeped into operating theatres. Shops, offices and even homes throughout London were similarly affected. During the cooler months, certainly from the autumn of 1888 onwards until June or even July the following summer when it became warmer, fog was an everyday, inescapable fact of life.