by kindels
More importantly, from what we knew about Dr Williams, no one – with the possible exception of his mother, Eleanor Williams, who died in 1895 – was at the centre of his world. He had been brought up to think highly of himself and it was even mentioned by his biographer, Ruth Evans, that he was arrogant and vain. Whoever had written that letter early in 1889, it was certainly not Dr Williams. Since the letter was now in his archive, we thought it more likely that he was its recipient, and the sentence, included in the letter, referred to him. This also explained why he was in possession of the letter.
So who, we wondered, might have regarded Dr John Williams as being at the centre of their world? There was only one possible person: his wife, Lizzie Williams.
She, we concluded, had written the letter and sent it to her husband. She was not at the centre of his world, but he was at the centre of hers. Looked at from this new point of view, it all made perfect sense: she was the one thanking him for his forgiveness, and for keeping her secret.
Perhaps the ‘forgiveness’ and ‘secret’ referred to something quite innocent and had nothing to do with the terrible events that had taken place in Whitechapel. Equally, she could have been alluding to the five murders she had committed the previous autumn, and sent the letter to him early the following year. Whichever explanation was correct, it was my father’s sudden realisation that it was not Dr John Williams who had a motive to commit murder, but his wife, so the finger of suspicion pointed directly at her.
But why would Mrs Lizzie Williams have written to her husband when she was surely living with him in their home in Queen Anne Street; unless she was not living with him at that time? The result of the census taken during 1891 in Swansea, two years after the letter was written, discloses that a number of people lived at 188 Ynystawe Road, Morriston: they were Richard Hughes, aged seventy-four, described as a tinplate manufacturer, married; Mary Hughes, his wife aged fifty-seven, no occupation given; and Mary E.A. Williams (Lizzie), daughter, aged forty-one. Under the ‘occupation’ rubric, she has given that of her husband, whom she describes as ‘General Practitioner, Surg. MRCS’. There were also three domestic servants living with the household, all female.
There was just one other odd entry: Edward R. Morgan, who is described as a nephew, also aged forty-one; but under ‘occupation’, he is described as a ‘Registered Surg’.
Could it be that soon, perhaps just days, after the murder of Mary Kelly, Lizzie Williams had suffered a nervous or mental breakdown? Then, she revealed to her husband the dreadful crimes she had committed, begging for his forgiveness and, of course, his silence. Shocked, upset and almost unable to believe what he was hearing, until, perhaps, she showed him a knife she had used in a murder – still possibly blood-stained, had he then done what he thought was best, and sent her far from London and out of harm’s way? Lizzie could remain with her family in Wales, there to recover from her illness, and wait until the hue and cry in London had died down. We believe that this could have been the case.
Just a few weeks later, early in the New Year, perhaps Dr Williams came to accept that he was partly responsible for his wife’s criminal actions, that his conduct had been far from exemplary, and so he had ‘forgiven’ her.
Who was the nephew, Edward R. Morgan, registered on the census form as living in the Hughes household, described as a ‘Registered Surg?’ Was he a doctor or a medical practitioner of some sort whom Dr John Williams was paying to keep an eye on his wife? We thought that he might have been. Certainly, the family fortunes appeared to have improved since Lizzie had gone home to live with them, so soon after the murders. They were no longer living in Church Street. The present property was larger and there were now three live-in servants. This was after Richard Hughes had lost his fortune, and his tinplate company was in terminal decline. Perhaps a bigger house was needed now that Lizzie was living there too, and Dr Williams was doubtless paying towards the upkeep.
A few pages later on in Uncle Jack, Tony Williams was to say that he had mistaken the identity of the letter’s recipient, and it had really been sent to someone else; the wife of the Reverend Owen, Sophia Owen, a childhood friend of Dr Williams, with whom he also enjoyed a close relationship. But it made no difference, because it still seemed to us that it must have been written by Lizzie, which was why we had looked at her so closely in the first place.
Tony Williams discovered something else that was strange. It was in a catalogue, also kept at the National Library of Wales, which listed the personal effects formerly owned by his great-great-uncle. Item number 329, within the volume’s pages, read: “Diary of Sir John Williams for 1888. Most of the pages are missing; those that remain are blank.”
The diary, a faded red cloth-covered volume, has become a cause célèbre now and is kept in its own protective box. But it is shabby and the dull covers have separated from the spine. Each of the pages, representing a single day, is separated by a piece of pink blotting paper. But many of the pages have been removed; either cut away or torn out, so that very few remain. Those that are left are empty. The blotting paper, however, has not been removed and it is clear from the ink that had soaked into them that the diary had been extensively used during the greater part of the calendar year 1888. Nevertheless, it was impossible to tell from them what had been recorded on the pages that had been removed.
It was certainly very peculiar and seemed to indicate something; but what? While Tony Williams asserted that the diary supported his contention that Dr John Williams had recorded aspects of his life that he later preferred the world not to know – that he was the murderer and had destroyed the records that would have proved this – it seems equally likely, if not more so, that he had recorded his wife Lizzie’s increasingly erratic and worrying behaviour, leading to her breakdown. When she finally confessed her crimes to him, he then understood why she had behaved in the way she had, and he removed the pages to cover all trace of his wife’s medical history and previously inexplicable conduct both leading up to, and during, the ten weeks of the murders.
There was no diary listed for the following year, which was disappointing since it might have thrown some light on the events of the previous year, nor, for that matter, the year after that. The next entry, number 330, listed the diary of Sir John Williams for the year 1891, along with the description ‘Entries are full’. But this diary too was odd and contained nothing of the year indicated by its cover, because every one of the dates had been altered so that they reconciled with the following year. Thursday 8 January 1891 was crossed out and now read Thursday 7 January 1892: Friday 6 February 1891 was now amended to Friday 5 February 1892, and so on. It recorded nothing of interest or significance except for a number of payments made to various tradesmen. This meant that there were no diary records from the start of 1888 to the end of 1891 – which included the two-year period following the murders when we believe that Lizzie Williams was recovering from her breakdown, and staying with her family in Wales.
Sending Lizzie home to Wales to recuperate, immediately after her breakdown and possible confession to her husband of the murders, was a shrewd move on his part because her highly charged emotional state meant that she might otherwise be in danger of letting something ‘slip’. It also removed her from their circle of acquaintances at a time when they may have realised that she was unwell, so her two-year absence from Queen Anne Street at this time would have surprised no one.
In the event, the ploy failed, because when Lizzie returned to her home in London, by now 63 Brook Street, of which Dr Williams had taken the lease on 31 March 1890, it seems that Lizzie did indeed say or do something that forced him – quite unexpectedly – to change his plans dramatically, and set a new course for the future. What that might have been we shall explore later.
Another unusual item Tony Williams discovered in his great-great-uncle’s box of personal belongings was a sharp-bladed knife with a dark wooden handle, the blade tarnished by age. The tip, he asserted, had broken off, but it matched in e
very other respect the description of the knife that Dr Thomas Bond, who had been involved in the Kelly murder investigation, considered had been used to inflict the injuries on Nichols, Chapman, Eddowes and Kelly which, he said, were “all of the same character”. He described the weapon used as “a strong knife, very sharp, pointed at the top, about an inch in width and at least six inches long … it may have been … a surgeon’s knife … a straight knife.” In the Nichols murder, Dr Rees Ralph Llewellyn described the murder weapon as “a strong-bladed knife, moderately sharp….” In Annie Chapman’s death, Dr George Bagster Phillips gave his opinion that the murder weapon was “a very sharp weapon, probably with a thin, narrow blade at least six to eight inches long, perhaps a small amputating knife.” Catherine Eddowes’s murderer, according to Dr Frederick Gordon Brown, “had performed the mutilations to the face and abdomen with a sharp, pointed knife … with a blade at least six inches long.”
The knife was the ‘smoking gun’ that Tony Williams required to help establish his case. There was no question in his mind that this was not the surgical knife that his ancestor, Dr John Williams, had used to commit four out of the five murders. It was a natural and understandable assumption to make, given everything he had discovered so far, and, of course, it fitted perfectly with his hypothesis. He thought that DNA analysis of the knife at some future time might provide the hard evidence that would prove beyond reasonable doubt that Dr John Williams was Jack the Ripper.
But Dr Williams was not the murderer and we had strong reservations about the knife Tony Williams had discovered which, he was sure, was the murder weapon. My father and I found it hard to believe that so cautious and careful a murderer as Lizzie Williams, who had, thus far, left no clue or trace of any kind behind her, would have disposed of the murder weapon so carelessly that it had been found by someone else, even her husband, unless she had deliberately provided it to him for some reason. We believe that after committing each of the murders – where a surgical knife had been used – she cleaned and replaced the weapon in her husband’s medical bag, where it would lie unnoticed amongst all his other surgical knives and medical equipment. She may have considered that it was, in some ways, poetic justice; that the knife he had used to save lives had been used by her to destroy them.
So what exactly, we asked ourselves, was the knife that Tony Williams had found?
Also now kept in its own special closed box, sandwiched between two sheets of safety glass so that it can be viewed from either side but not touched, the knife with the broken tip that Tony Williams believes is the murder weapon also attracts a great deal of interest in the reading room of the National Library of Wales.
But as soon as my father and I saw the knife, we recognised it for what it was. However plausible and attractive the prospect might have seemed to Tony Williams, we knew at once that it was not, and could not have been, the murder weapon as described by Dr Bond.
A cursory inspection showed that the tip had not broken off; the knife had been designed and manufactured in that style deliberately, for where the blade now ended, it was both straight and machine-bevelled into a small but sharp edge. A second sharp edge ran along the lower part of the blade from the tang (handle) to the tip, where the two edges met at a point angled at almost 90 degrees. Northamptonshire, where I grew up, was, for many years, the world centre of the boot-and-shoe-making industry. A close friend of mine owned a shoe factory in the town and I was well acquainted with the tools of his trade. The knife so proudly displayed in the small glass case is not a broken surgical knife, though claimed; it is nothing more sinister than a shoemaker’s lasting knife.
Such knives are still readily available today and are identical to the knife that had once belonged to Dr John Williams. If further confirmation is needed, stamped into the metal of the blade – easily seen with the aid of a magnifying glass – is the letter ‘A’ and a clear outline of a small workman’s boot, each about ¼ inch high. Immediately underneath, the following words in tiny letters are also stamped into the blade: ‘George Barnsley’ and ‘Damascus Steel’.
George Barnsley of George Barnsley and Sons Ltd, Sheffield (founded 1836) was a master cutler who, by 1883, produced cutting tools for workers in the leather and shoe industries. By 1944 they had increased their range by adding “files and blades, shoe knives and leather workers’ tools”. No surgical knives were listed as being available from this company.
Yet the knife may not be discounted as a murder weapon quite so easily. Elizabeth Stride, the first of the murder victims on the night of the double event, had been killed, according to the medical report of Dr George Bagster Phillips, by a single cut to her throat, “a clean incision 6 inches in length, incision commencing two and a half inches in a straight line below the angle of the jaw”. It was performed in a manner similar to the two earlier murders, the cut having been made from left to right. The evidence of Dr Frederick William Blackwell given at the coroner’s inquest on 5 October, was that the murder weapon in that case was a “short knife, like a shoemaker’s well ground down”, which may have made the cut.
It was the oddest of ironies: author of Uncle Jack, Tony Williams, had found a knife with ‘a broken tip’ among his ancestor’s personal effects, which, with the exception of Elizabeth Stride, he believed was the murder weapon. Yet the diametrically opposite was true. The knife he had found was, incontrovertibly, a shoe-maker’s knife, and while it could not possibly have been used in the murders of Nichols, Chapman, Eddowes and Kelly, its description matched exactly that which Dr Blackwell had provided of the murder weapon which, he said, had been used to cut the throat of Elizabeth Stride.
We know that Dr John Williams retired from the hospital by 1893 and his lucrative private practice in 1903. He gave ill-health and strain brought on by overwork as the reason, but the simple facts do not support this explanation. Dr Williams’s workload increased considerably after his retirement. He became a Justice of the Peace, High Sheriff of the County of Carmarthenshire and accepted a government appointment to the Royal Commission on Welsh Disestablishment. Furthermore, he involved himself in the affairs of the village of Llanstephan where he lived from 1903 to 1909 with his wife, her stepmother, Mary, and their four female servants. There were, according to Ruth Evans, many more appointments too, not including the huge amount of work he took on to establish the National Library of Wales, the foundation stone of which was laid on 15 July 1911.
It seemed to my father and me that all the evidence suggested that it was not Dr John Williams who had become ill, but his wife Lizzie.
If Dr Williams had sent Lizzie to live with her family in Wales soon after the murders, so that they could care for her, especially Edward R. Morgan, it would explain why she wrote to her husband in London early in 1889. It would make perfect sense. It was he who was “at the centre of” her world, not she at the centre of his. It would explain the enigmatic line, “Thank you for the forgiveness and for keeping my secret”. He had perhaps forgiven her for the murders, in particular the murder of his mistress, Mary Kelly; he could hardly do otherwise because his affair was the direct cause of Kelly’s death, and indirectly the cause of the other deaths too. Similarly, he had no option but to keep his wife’s secret, and perhaps this was the reason why he had removed the pages from his diary; as her husband, he was duty bound to protect her and keep her confidences – no matter how serious they were. He could not, in any event, disclose her crimes to anyone without involving himself in the scandal, and the dire consequences, which inevitably would follow. It would be far better for both of them to keep their terrible secret to themselves.
CHAPTER 12
We thought it had to be more than coincidence that the last two victims of Jack the Ripper shared the same name, Mary Kelly. But if we thought this was an incredible discovery, we were even more astonished to find that little or no importance had been given to the anomaly by any previous author. Philip Sugden and Patricia Cornwell both stated flatly that Catherine Eddowes gave a false na
me and address at Bishopsgate Police Station before her discharge from custody, but failed to pursue the matter further; Tony Williams merely mentioned that the police believed the alias given by Catherine Eddowes was in fact her true name – and left it at that.
Stephen Knight, however, states that Catherine Eddowes used the alias Mary Ann Kelly, and suggested that she was murdered in the mistaken belief that she was Mary Jane Kelly – which was exactly the same conclusion we had reached, though, whereas we considered the discovery to be of the utmost importance, Knight seemed to consider the name similarity an unimportant side-issue, and did not even know how the error had come about.
We wondered what Sherlock Holmes would have made of it? Would he merely have accepted as a coincidence that the final two murder victims in his latest case just happened to use the same name? Or is it more likely that he would have pondered the matter carefully while playing his violin behind the locked door of his study at 221B Baker Street, before reaching the elementary conclusion that it was not just a simple quirk of fate, but the key that enabled him to unlock the mystery and solve the crime? We assumed the latter option unquestionably.
My father and I shared the same view on the matter: the possibility of two women, both prostitutes, both living in Spitalfields, both murdered, one after the other, and both using the same name, was extremely unlikely to be mere coincidence. The fact that Mary Jane Kelly was the last of the Ripper’s victims merely increased our doubts of such likelihood. The only reasonable conclusion to be drawn is that the death of one of the victims must have been a tragic case of mistaken identity.
Having reached this finding, we looked at the statements and medical records of all the murders again, and it wasn’t long before we were able to work out a likely chain of events.
Simple logic told us that Catherine Eddowes, aka Mary Ann Kelly, must have been murdered in the belief that she was Mary Jane Kelly.