Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman

by kindels

  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.

  There is no doubt that from mid-October 1888 dirty grey fog enveloped the area in and around Miller’s Court. A brief contemporary account of the atmospheric conditions prevailing at the crime scene on the actual morning of Mary Kelly’s murder read: “About half way down this street on the right-hand side is Miller’s Court, the entrance to which is a narrow arched passage, and within a few yards of which, by the way, last night there loomed grimly through the murky air [my italics] a partly torn down bill….” (The Daily News, 10 November 1888).

  At the street entrance to the passage, foul noxious fog would have been thick enough to obscure Lizzie Williams’s facial features sufficiently so as to prevent Maxwell from seeing her clearly, even though she was only standing on the other side of Dorset Street, some twenty feet or so away. Maxwell said she looked ill, even though it is certain that she could not have seen her clearly, so perhaps her face looked ‘different’. Mary Kelly’s clothes would persuade Maxwell that she was talking with her. Lizzie Williams’s Welsh accent would have completed that illusion.

  There was something else that persuaded my father and me that we were right in our deduction. At the inquest into Mary Kelly’s death, Caroline Maxwell’s sworn testimony was that when she called across the street to the person she believed to be Mary Kelly, she addressed her by her first name. ‘What, Mary, brings you up so early?’ Lizzie Williams’s first name was also Mary – she had been christened Mary Elizabeth Ann, and that was why she had responded instinctively to Caroline Maxwell’
s call.

  After each of the murders, the killer would wish to avoid capture: to disappear by some means, blend into the passing crowds and walk unnoticed through tight police cordons. Inspector Frederick Abberline had issued specific orders to police patrolling Whitechapel that they should “observe every man carefully”, and “men and women out together were to be watched too, in case the woman might be protecting the man”. A woman on her own would have been ignored by the police hunting for the murderer. Perhaps Lizzie Williams had adopted the guise of a midwife. It would have been well within her acting abilities and, after each murder when the hue and cry was raised and the police were frantically searching for a man, the murderer would seem to have vanished into thin air, while remaining in plain sight all the time.

  Our proposition is this: Dr John Williams desperately wanted a child, but his wife was infertile and unable to conceive. Mary Kelly, on the other hand, was youthful, good-looking and, most importantly, fertile. Williams and Kelly were having an affair and his wife had somehow found out. She might have turned a blind eye to the relationship; after all, Tony Williams suggested that Dr Williams had enjoyed many affairs during the marriage. But Lizzie was becoming increasingly fragile emotionally, and deeply distressed by her infertility. She might have feared that her husband would father a child by Mary Kelly, and this her pride would not allow. So she plotted to murder her; it was an act of revenge committed out of that oldest of emotions, jealousy; the “green-ey’d monster” of Shakespeare’s Othello, and close cousin of envy, the sixth of the Seven Deadly Sins.

  All this was straightforward, except for the unanswered questions, such as what was the catalyst that compelled the jealous wife to kill Mary Kelly, and why had she inflicted such terrible wounds upon the unfortunate young woman? Why had she murdered and mutilated Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman and Catherine Eddowes, and why too had she murdered Elizabeth Stride? She might merely have resigned herself to her unhappy situation; after all, her family money would have given her all the comforts and security she needed.

  These were some of the more obvious questions; there were at least a dozen others, and we wanted to find the answers to them all. So we decided to re-examine the crimes, to see what evidence we might find to support our theory that the Whitechapel murders were committed not just by a woman, but by the wife of a world-renowned medical specialist, a professor and a physician to Royalty.

  First, we would have to look again into the backgrounds of John and Lizzie Williams, and this time even more thoroughly. Now, we conducted our research on the assumption that Lizzie Williams would one day be driven to commit murder. We wondered if perhaps we might find a clue somewhere in her past that would unlock the mystery, and provide us with an explanation as to why a respectable upper-middle-class, middle-aged Victorian housewife might have turned into a brutal serial killer.

  It was probably the winning combination of driving ambition, ruthless determination and exceptional good fortune that, by the mid-1850s, had made Richard Hughes, a maltster (beer-maker) from Llanbrynmair in the old Welsh county of Montgomeryshire (now part of Powys), one of the richest men in the country; by today’s standards he would have been a multi-millionaire. Hughes, one of eight children of farming stock, was born on 12 February 1817. At the height of his success he lived with his family and their four servants in a large imposing mansion, a few miles north of Swansea, just off the Brecon road near the small village of Ynystawe. Nothing now remains of this once grand house that overlooked the thriving industrial valley below, save for a pair of ornate gate-posts at the start of a long winding drive, and the circular stone base of what might once have been a statue standing on the front lawn. At a time when the average income per head of the population in Britain was less than £1 a week and the welfare state did not yet exist, poverty and starvation were commonplace. At this time, Morriston, a thriving industrial town, was the centre of British tinplate production, and many fortunes were made there. But for a labourer, the work was hard, the days were long and the pay abysmally poor; often as little as two shillings might be paid for an exhausting twelve-hour shift. In these hard times, women and children frequently had to beg or prostitute themselves in order to survive.

  By contrast, Richard Hughes had money to burn. He hadn’t been born into money; he had sought it out deliberately. Opportunity came his way in the shapely form of Anne Thomas, daughter to the owner of The Lan public house near Morriston. It stood at the corner of Clasemont Road and Vicarage Road, where Hughes worked brewing beer from 1839 to 1849. Anne, born in 1827, was ten years his junior. She was the sister of William Thomas of Lan Manor (1816-1909), affectionately known as Thomas O’Lan – Justice of the Peace, entrepreneur and twice Lord Mayor of Swansea (1877/78 and 1878/79). Despite what was a considerable disparity in their ages, Hughes married his employer’s daughter on 1 May 1845.

  Such a well-timed stroke of calculated good fortune brought Richard Hughes into the folds of the Thomas family business. He soon abandoned the beer trade to become a partner and director in the Landore Tinplate Works (established in 1851), situated between Swansea and Morriston in the Lower Swansea Valley. This huge enterprise on the banks of the river Tawe – which, at its peak employed over a thousand men, women and children – was the largest, and most innovative, tinplate works in the world, with the first mills ever to be driven by steam.

  Mary Elizabeth Ann, Lizzie, was born to Richard and Anne Hughes on 7 February 1850, almost five years after their marriage. She was the adorable child they had hoped for, with a perfectly round face, coal-black hair and dark brown eyes. She was named Mary after her father’s sister who had died, unmarried, on 11 February 1842 – almost exactly eight years before Lizzie was born, Elizabeth after her paternal grandmother who died in 1868, and Ann, either after her father’s youngest sister, Anne, born on 30 December 1829, or her own mother (we were unsure which), though the ‘e’ was dropped from her name. But, five years later, on 9 May 1855, Anne Hughes died after a long illness; she was only twenty-eight years old. In her obituary, she was described as “a most affectionate and kind-hearted woman, and is deeply lamented by a large circle of relatives and friends” (The Cambrian, 11 May 1855). A little over a year later, on 24 June 1856, Hughes married again. This time, his wife, Mary, was sixteen years his junior; only seventeen years older than his little daughter. There were no children by this second marriage.

  By all accounts, Hughes doted on his daughter, and she idolised him. There seems little doubt that she admired in her father the characteristics that had been so instrumental in shaping his forceful personality and, as a direct consequence, the fortune he had made from the tinplate works. Hughes lavished every conceivable expense on her; no request was refused. Perhaps he was trying to make up for the loss of her mother, or perhaps he just didn’t know what else to do with his enormous wealth. Whatever the motive, the result was that Lizzie grew up accustomed to having everything her father’s money could buy. Most importantly, though she would not have realised it at the time, it bought her the security she needed following the loss of her loving mother, and that was a situation she must have anticipated would never change.

  Lizzie, who from the age of five enjoyed the luxury of her live-in governess, was both intelligent and well educated. She studied the Bible, regularly attended chapel on Sundays with both her parents, and spoke the Queen’s English as flawlessly as her native Welsh language. At the age of fifteen she won a competition for singing and acting at the 1865 Eisteddfod, at which event she was given the Bardic name Morfydd Glantawe. She was a remarkably bright and confident young woman, with the blithe self-assurance exuded only by those who are born into money. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Lizzie Hughes was a woman who expected to get what she wanted out of life, and that life would never say ‘No!’.

  Lizzie, always close to Papa and Mama – the names she called her father and stepmother – enjoyed a close relationship with them both for the whole of her life. Her diaries show that, duri
ng the early years, it was her father who played a key role in her upbringing, guiding, supporting and financing her when she needed it, while in her declining years, after she became ill, it was her stepmother who provided the constant care Lizzie Williams required.

  In 1870 a curious incident upset the close-knit Hughes family. A little over a decade earlier, in 1859, Daniel Edwards, whom Hughes had employed in a business that he also controlled, the Upper Forest Tinplate Works, had involved himself in what today would be known as industrial espionage. Edwards, as ambitious as he was hard-working, had been busy recording the secret methods and ideas of Hughes’s tin-making processes, with the intention of setting up his own factory which would bring him into direct competition with his one-time employer. When the ‘intellectual property’ theft was discovered, Edwards was instantly dismissed. It was a degradation he would never forget or forgive.

  The matter might have passed off as just another of the disagreeable industrial problems that Richard Hughes was required to deal with in the day-to-day management of his business, except that this affair proved to be the genesis of something that would develop into a crisis of nightmarish proportions. In the meantime, however, it would manifest itself on young Lizzie in a most public and humiliating manner.

  When a new, larger chapel was proposed for the quickly growing population of Morriston, Richard Hughes provided the land for the building at a knock-down price. But the agreement was conditional on his daughter having the honour of laying the foundation stone – which, in accordance with recognised tradition, was to be inscribed with her name.

  Its benefactors intended the new Congregational chapel, Tabernacle, to be the most impressive building in Wales. John Humphreys, a chapel deacon known as ‘God’s Architect’, was appointed to create what would be the most outstanding classical design of the age. At the staggering cost of £18,000, it was a veritable cathedral amongst chapels, with a soaring octagonal clock tower and seating capacity for 1,450 people. “Tabernacle stands out as one great redeeming feature in the whole of that manufacturing district, an oasis in a desert, an object worthy of admiration in the midst of unsightly works and manufactories of every size and description … and all who have seen it speak of it in the highest terms” (The Cambrian, January 1873).