Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman (21 page)

It seemed to my father and me that however gifted and brilliant a surgeon Dr John Williams was, he appears to have been more cautious than cavalier. In a magazine article entitled ‘Medicos under the Microscope’ which appeared in
The Gentlewoman
on 15 August 1891, the unknown author says of him: “…he has not
established
by any valuable book, new discovery of brilliant cure, a claim to be considered as the leading London obstetrician.” It is clear that Dr Williams was certainly not the man to attempt such innovative, world-shattering surgery.

Mary Kelly gave birth to a son during the course of her short, but ultimately tragic, marriage, and he lived with her in Miller’s Court, though at some time during the evening before her murder, he was sent to stay with a neighbour or friend for the night. Kelly had therefore proved herself fertile. We think that Lizzie Williams somehow discovered the affair, which we believe was continuing, but by this time the nature of Dr John and Lizzie Williams’s relationship had completely changed.

Though we do not know if Lizzie Williams was aware of her husband’s many sexual dalliances, and if so, whether she tolerated them or not, she would have found some comfort in her father’s money. But when she lost her inheritance in the spring of 1888, that security was swept away and it was then that her husband’s relationship with Mary Kelly became a source of great alarm because her marriage and entire future had been put at risk. My father and I believe that it was this tragic combination of fateful circumstances that would turn Lizzie Williams, an upper-
middle-class
, middle-aged woman, into a brutal serial killer.

Lizzie Williams and her husband had long been recipients of her father’s generosity. Richard Hughes bought them their first house in London’s Harley Street, which he also furnished for them. Although Dr Williams enjoyed a substantial income by Swansea standards, it would not have stretched as far as a home in famous Harley Street. We know that Hughes continued to finance his daughter and son-in-law while they lived in London, but relations between the couple became strained. Lizzie Williams was
financially
independent of her husband and perhaps she too often let him know it; maybe it was a source of great irritation to Dr Williams that his wife did not depend on him. With her money gone, the balance of power within the relationship shifted. Dr Williams might have made it clear to her that now she was dependent solely on him for her financial support; he could do what he liked – and if that included consorting with other women, then so be it. Perhaps he let it slip that there was another woman in his life, someone more desirable than Lizzie who could bear him a child. Somehow, Lizzie Williams found out that this woman lived in Spitalfields and that her name was Mary Kelly.

Lizzie Williams found herself in the invidious position of being married to a man who no longer loved her because she was infertile, and who was conducting a sexual relationship with another woman. She had already lost her inheritance; now she was in danger of losing her husband too. The future must have looked very bleak. He would never leave her, of course – custom and convention would not allow it in Victorian England – but perhaps she thought that he might, and it was what Lizzie thought, her subjective view, that was all-important to my father and me.

What any woman’s feelings might be towards another woman upon discovering that her husband is having an affair with her are intolerable enough, but the jealousy and anger of Lizzie Williams, compounded by her highly charged emotional state, can only be imagined; what she would have liked to do to her rival is beyond our comprehension, except that the level of violence that was inflicted upon Mary Kelly during those early hours on Friday, 9 November, reflected exactly what one might have expected Lizzie Williams to have wished upon her victim.

She decided that the only way to safeguard her marriage and her future was to kill Mary Kelly, and take from her the one organ that identified her as a woman – her uterus. It was then that she began to devise her murderous plan to do away with her husband’s mistress.

Those thoughts would have grown and festered within her. Lizzie Williams may have spent hours, perhaps even days, thinking of what she would do to Kelly if she could: kill her, rip her uterus from her body, and perhaps even throw it at her husband’s feet in a grand, triumphal gesture.

But could she do it? She did not know. Perhaps she knew how to kill, if, as seems likely, she had watched her husband decapitate the small white rats he experimented upon: pinning them down on their backs with his finger and thumb, then easing the head back to expose the neck which he severed quickly with one swift stroke of a razor-sharp knife.

Lizzie Williams’s thoughts of killing Mary Kelly, cutting her uterus out of her body, thus destroying her as a woman, would have continued to fester. They would have tormented her, and she would have planned every aspect of the murder: how she would first discover if she was even capable of killing someone; find a helpless victim; lure her away to a dark lonely place; throttle her; cut her throat; open her abdomen; cut out her uterus; finally, and most importantly, get away with her crime. Then, confident in the knowledge that she was capable of performing such a hideous task, find Mary Kelly and perhaps tell her what she thought of her deplorable behaviour, so the woman would understand why she was going to die.

But no matter how well she planned the murder, Lizzie Williams may never have believed that she would be able to carry it out. As she became more frustrated, so the injuries she wanted to inflict increased in their severity: cut the woman’s throat; destroy every feature of the face that her husband found so much more agreeable than her own; tear out her uterus; rip her body to pieces. And, as a final touch, leave a small, indelible reminder; a single character carved on each of Kelly’s cheeks: the inverted letter V. The reason for the choice of this particular letter we shall explore later.

At some point, Lizzie Williams realised that the murder she had considered so carefully was indeed possible; two prostitutes, Emma Smith and Martha Tabram, had been brutally killed in Whitechapel earlier that year, and the murderer or murderers had got clean away with their crimes. My father and I believe that that moment arrived on the night of the London Docklands fires in a manner worthy of the best efforts of Shakespeare. As the tragedy
Macbeth
opens to an accompaniment of thunder and lightning, so the first of the Ripper murders takes place following a raging storm, complete with blinding flashes of lightning and deafening crashes of thunder, while the sky above London Bridge turned a vivid blood-red from the furious raging flames. It was an angry, violent night, and it suited Lizzie Williams’s darkest emotions perfectly.

In the light of what we now know, it was clear to us that Mary Kelly was Lizzie Williams’s true and only objective all along. The murders of Nichols and Chapman were ancillary to her plan; they were unimportant to her, an irrelevance, merely the steps she needed to take on the journey to achieve her aim: the murder and annihilation of her husband’s mistress.

An interesting note appears at the end of Chapter 9 in Stephen Knight’s
Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution
, which almost seems to have been added as an afterthought. An elderly nun, interviewed by the BBC in 1973, claimed that in 1915, when she was a novice in Providence Row, Whitechapel, a sister nun who was there at the time of the Ripper murders, told her: “If it had not been for the Kelly woman, none of the murders would have happened”. It was a very short, simple sentence with no embellishing detail, unlike George Hutchinson’s description of the suspect who had been with Mary Kelly on the night of her murder which was filled with so much information that it became impossible to believe that it could all have been true.

The statement appears to support Knight’s incredible claim that Mary Kelly was the principal conspirator of a small group of prostitutes who were trying to blackmail the Crown; Nichols, Chapman, Stride and Eddowes were all murdered and she, Mary Kelly, it is alleged, was directly responsible for their deaths.

While we had also reached the same conclusion – that Kelly was the cause of the murders – it was for an entirely different reason, and the elderly nun’s claim fitted our own hypothesis just as well. Kelly’s affair with an influential London doctor had brought the wrath of his vengeful wife down on them all. She might have added the truism – if such were needed: Hell has no fury like a woman scorned.

What the evidence showed us was that Lizzie Williams wanted to be confident that when she met Mary Kelly, she could kill her, destroy her as a woman, and live out the fantasy of what she wanted to do to her. She would not, however, act so impulsively as to place her own life in danger. On the contrary, she made her plans carefully, to prevent any possibility of detection, and this she achieved far beyond her own lifetime.

We had little doubt that while Lizzie Williams knew what she wanted for Kelly, she did not know if she could murder her. Was it all just wishful thinking? But the consequences of allowing Kelly to live were unthinkable, and so she embarked on her murderous crusade.

She was not a violent woman, nor was she a murderer out of choice. The circumstances she found herself in forced that
unwelcome
decision upon her; nothing could have been further from the personality who had sung and acted at Eisteddfodau and played the organ in her local chapel. But neither was Lisa Montgomery, the American woman who cold-bloodedly tore the living uterus from a woman she had strangled to death, nor the Irish Scissor Sisters who slashed and battered their mother’s abusive lover to death and then dismembered his body with a bread knife, nor Mrs Mary Pearcey, who smashed her victim’s skull, then cut her head almost clean from her shoulders. None of them were born killers; it was just the circumstances they found themselves in which directed the course of action they were ultimately bound to follow.

In the civilised western world, a number of attacks upon women have been reported involving the theft of their uteri. All were cunningly planned, all were carried out by a lone assailant who then escaped from the crime scene undetected, and all, so far as we have been able to ascertain, were women. This does not appear to be the type of crime likely to have been committed by a man.

The first part of Lizzie Williams’s plan was to discover if she was capable of killing a woman. Would she have the physical strength to overpower her and, even if she did, could she then kill her? She had already decided how she would kill Kelly – by cutting her throat in the very same way that her husband killed the small white rats he used in his experiments. If she discovered that she could kill, then she would move on to the next stage of her plan: to rip out her victim’s uterus, to obliterate her as a woman. Only then, when she was sure that she could do all these things, would she be ready to face Mary Kelly, confident that she could wreak her terrible revenge.

T
he night of the London Docklands fires proved fortuitous for Lizzie Williams, if not for Polly Nichols. Most of central London was aware of the fires, which broke out at about 9 p.m., from the crimson glow in the sky over the river Thames by London Bridge. It was easily visible as far as Queen Anne Street, near Regent’s Park where the Williamses lived. Lizzie Williams knew the streets of Whitechapel would be deserted as huge crowds, and perhaps also her own servants, rushed to watch the soaring flames. There might never be a better time to find a suitable victim.

The murderers of Emma Smith were still at large almost five months after she had been attacked in April, and Martha Tabram’s murder of just three weeks earlier also remained unsolved. The police did not appear to be making strenuous efforts to apprehend the murderers and this would have strengthened Lizzie Williams’s determination.

What actually happened on those four fateful nights may never be known for certain, but my father and I thought it would be possible to re-enact the crimes from the information we had to hand. We knew the victims, their backgrounds and, from eyewitness accounts, even their movements during their last hours, sometimes just minutes, of their lives. We knew also the details of the discoveries of their bodies, the manner of their deaths and the subsequent murder investigations. We knew too, something of the strong-minded, resolute character of our suspect, Lizzie Williams; all we had to do now was to fit her to the crimes.

We believe that our account is the true, or most likely, account of what
really
happened on the nights of the Whitechapel murders, and just as importantly, why.

It might not have been difficult for Lizzie Williams to slip away from her home unnoticed; her husband was so tied up with his work that he was almost never at home; when he was, it is possible that they slept in separate bedrooms, though we do not know this for certain. There were just two servants in the Williams household: Annie Bartlett, who was almost thirty, their housekeeper who who doubled as a cook, and Mary Kempin, aged twenty-eight, who carried out whatever tasks were considered necessary about the house. Both were English and had been in service to the Williamses for several years, accompanying them from their previous home in Harley Street.

The servants were usually given bank holidays and special days off, and on Sundays they went to church. Late on the evening of that fateful night, after their work had ended, they may have asked Lizzie for permission to go to watch the Docklands fires. Their absence from the house on that night presented Lizzie with the perfect opportunity to visit Whitechapel herself, to undertake her macabre mission.

By 2.00 a.m., a raging storm that had started the previous day had passed, although the roads and pavements were still damp. It was at this time that Lizzie Williams found herself in Whitechapel, walking the streets to familiarise herself with her surroundings and to seek out a likely victim. A radiant stain, streaking the night sky over the Docklands, still flickered and glowed as the fires continued to rage, and it would not be until later that morning that they were brought fully under control.