Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman

by kindels

  Viewed separately, perhaps an inch and a half apart on either side of Eddowes’s nose and in almost exact alignment, the two shapes cut into Catherine Eddowes’s cheeks have no obvious meaning. They merely formed part of her terrible facial injuries:

  But we wondered, if they were not in fact two separate shapes, but component parts of the same character. So we brought them together, and when we did a familiar and clearly recognizable letter or initial quickly emerged:

  A closer inspection of Foster’s sketch, though roughly drawn, shows that the shape on the left cheek, and perhaps the second one to have been carved, is actually rounded at the top, so the letter appears more like an M than ever:

  Had the elusive killer, who confounded Scotland Yard’s best detectives, and who was famed for leaving no clues at the scenes of any of the murders, actually left an obscure clue behind, by carving the initial letter of her first (baptismal) name, ‘Mary,’ into the cheeks of the woman she believed was her final victim? Had she signed her ‘canvas’ in the manner of an artist, to signify that she was now satisfied that her work was finished? While we cannot be absolutely certain that we are correct in this hypotheses, the answer may well be ‘yes’.

  As the murderer prepared to leave the scene of the crime, the dim yellow light from a lamp, such as a police constable might hold, was directed into the misty darkness from Church Passage at the far end of the square. But its beam was weak and quite unable to reach the corner where Lizzie Williams was hidden in the shadows with her victim. A moment later, it disappeared as its owner, P.C. James Harvey, walked on. Even if Harvey had seen her, it is possible that he dismissed her from his mind, because when the crime was later detected, the hunt was on for a man. Harvey, of course, was the officer who was later dismissed from the police force for reasons that are unknown.

  Lizzie Williams then gathered up her grotesque bundle, and silently stole away. The most likely route for her escape was via Church Passage because the constable with the lamp had gone, and it was the most direct route to safety. This would allow her to reach Duke Street quickly, and from there it was merely a stone’s throw to Aldgate where there were people with whom she could mingle, and swiftly disappear.

  What Lizzie Williams might have done with the organs she was carrying – the uterus and left kidney of the woman she believed to be her husband’s mistress – is open to conjecture. Also subject to speculation is the fate of Annie Chapman’s uterus, ripped from her corpse just three weeks before. Had she taken them home with her to Queen Anne Street, to dispose of in her fireplace, or, to throw them at her husband in a gesture full of contempt? We thought this was unlikely because the part of Catherine Eddowes’s apron in which she carried off the organs was found a five-minute walk away in Goulston Street, along with the chalked message. It is not feasible that she would have gone home – a distance of almost 4 miles from Mitre Square, even as the crow flies – left the organs there and returned to Goulston Street, a slightly greater distance, in the hour and a quarter available to her. She would, of course, have been carrying the soiled apron with her – incontrovertible evidence of her guilt – back into the heart of the East End well before dawn, when two frantic police searches were already underway for the murderer. At that time of the morning, it would have been difficult to avoid the attention of the patrols – even as a woman – so for that reason alone we considered the proposition implausible.

  Had she perhaps gone somewhere in Whitechapel after the second of that night’s murders? Maybe she went to the dispensary in Leman Street where her husband sometimes worked, providing ‘essential services’ to the women who walked the darkened streets seeking the price of a doss for the night; perhaps she had stolen the key from him so that she could enter the premises in the middle of the night, and there, using such instruments as might be needed, dissected and examined the uterus to see if it contained a foetus? She was probably capable of conducting such an examination, so this was at least possible.

  But Leman Street runs south from the junction of Whitechapel Road and Commercial Road, which would have taken Lizzie Williams back towards Berner Street where the first of that night’s murders had taken place, so we thought that that explanation was also unlikely. And, of course, if she had been disturbed, it would have been impossible to explain her presence in the dispensary on her own at any time, much less during the early hours of the morning when two full-scale murder investigations were underway. Even if a foetus were to be discovered growing within the uterus, it would prove that Kelly was pregnant, but by whom? Lizzie Williams could never know.

  Because the soiled part of the severed apron, used to transport the organs from the scene of the crime, was found in nearby Goulston Street, although there was no sign of the uterus or kidney, we do not think that Lizzie Williams kept the organs for long or took them very far – or that she kept the bloody apron in which she had carried them away. It was clear to my father and me that she had disposed of the organs soon after committing her crimes, and somewhere close at hand.

  In the end, and as gruesome as the prospect might seem, we thought it more likely that the starving cats and dogs which roamed the streets of Whitechapel held the answer: she fed what she had ripped from her victims’ bodies to them. The murderer might have thought it to be a fitting and just end for the organs that she believed she had taken from her rival – although, and as we readily concede, the truth, as to what became of them, may well lie elsewhere.

  The severed part of the apron, wet with blood, was folded in two, so the bloody mess was on the inside. Then it was discarded somewhere; perhaps on a rubbish pile or just dropped in the street. Afterwards, Lizzie Williams would have returned home, confident that she had murdered Mary Kelly, but would she reveal her secret to her husband? We thought it unlikely that she would have done so. If she had, it is certain that Dr John Williams would have prevented her from continuing with her murderous campaign.

  Two days later, on the evening of Tuesday, 2 October, a labourer, John Kelly, turned up at Bishopsgate Police Station. He had read the description of the Mitre Square victim in The Star newspaper which he had picked up in Cooney’s lodging house. The reference in the text to the initials T.C., which had been found tattooed on the left forearm of the corpse, shocked him. After Kelly identified the body at the mortuary, he told the police that the deceased had been in her mid-forties and that her name was Catherine Eddowes. He and the deceased, whom he called Kate, had lived together as husband and wife since Eddowes had separated from her former lover, Thomas Conway, in 1881, and it was Conway who had tattooed his initials on her arm. A full report of the murder, together with the victim’s name, was published in the following days’ newspapers.

  How Lizzie Williams must have felt at the revelation that she had murdered the wrong woman cannot be imagined. Elizabeth Stride had identified the dead woman as Mary Kelly. She had described what Kelly was wearing, when and where she might be found; the woman herself may have told her that her name was Mary Kelly and that she lived in Spitalfields, but however the mistake had come about, the woman was not the Mary Kelly for whom Lizzie Williams was searching. The real Mary Kelly, Dr John Williams’s Mary Kelly, was still alive.

  CHAPTER 17

  Lizzie Williams’s principal objective all along was to murder Mary Kelly. She was the woman who threatened her marriage, her future, and perhaps even her pride. Kelly had already proven fertile and might give Dr Williams the child he craved, but Lizzie Williams neither could nor would allow that to happen. It was clear that she had not wished to encounter Kelly, no matter how much she loathed the woman and wished her dead, without knowing that she was capable of killing her and taking her womanhood.

  At the outset, truth perhaps being stranger than fiction, Lizzie Williams decided that she would perfect her skills elsewhere first, and only then, when she was confident that she could achieve her purpose, would she seek out Kelly and exact her revenge.

  Mary Ann Nichols, her first unfortunate victim, was c
hosen deliberately because she was small, very drunk and unlikely to put up much resistance. She was also a prostitute, and therefore, in Lizzie Williams’s eyes, the lowest of the low. The police had already demonstrated a reluctance to commit their meagre resources to full-scale investigations into the murders of prostitutes, vis-à-vis Emma Smith and Martha Tabram. Both enquiries had ground to a premature halt; the former within two months, the latter within just a month. Lizzie Williams might have considered that there was little prospect of full and proper investigations being carried out into the murders of two more prostitutes. She was aware, therefore, that if she planned her crimes with care, she would be likely to get away with them.

  Polly Nichols should have been her only other victim, but her plans to remove the victim’s uterus were thwarted by poor light, or perhaps it was the sound of Charles Cross’s approaching footsteps which stopped her from continuing with her attack. A second victim was therefore required because Lizzie Williams needed to know that she could remove the uterus from a dead body; after the murder of Annie Chapman in Hanbury Street, she knew that she could. That was when she began her search for Mary Kelly.

  Somehow, somewhere in Whitechapel, Lizzie Williams met Elizabeth Stride and it was she who identified a woman to her whom she knew as Mary Kelly, though she was in fact Catherine Eddowes. Stride told Lizzie where ‘Kelly’ would be, at what time she would be there and provided her with a physical description of the woman. But Stride could have given Lizzie away to the police, who were already searching for the Buck’s Row and Hanbury Street murderer, so she had to be silenced. Thus it was that Stride, too, found herself a victim of Lizzie Williams’s knife.

  Lizzie met Eddowes soon after her release from custody at Bishopsgate Police Station – where exactly, we do not know – and she murdered her in the mistaken belief that she was Mary Kelly. The anger and hatred she felt towards her victim was illustrated by the dreadful catalogue of injuries she caused to her dead body. Every wound was inflicted with precision and purpose. Catherine Eddowes’s throat was severed so deeply that her head was almost cut from her shoulders – to make sure she was dead. Every feature of the woman’s face, a face that was so much more fetching than the murderer’s, was destroyed; Eddowes’s uterus was torn from her body and her left kidney ripped out in the mistaken belief that the murderer had found her heart. In a final act of triumph over her opponent, and as a sign that her deadly mission was over, she may even have signed the initial letter of her first name, Mary, into her victim’s cheeks.

  When Lizzie Williams discovered that the woman she had murdered in Mitre Square was not Mary Kelly, and that somehow she had made a ghastly mistake, she was forced to make new plans to find and murder her true intended victim. Those plans took her a little less than six weeks to devise – from the Wednesday morning after the newspapers published the victim, Catherine Eddowes’s true identity, to the day of the Lord Mayor’s Show.

  During the early hours of Friday, 9 November, after George Hutchinson had abandoned his watch on Kelly’s door, Kelly’s visitor also left, though at what time exactly we are unable to say. Then at some time afterwards, but before 4.00 a.m., Lizzie Williams entered the small room at 13 Miller’s Court. There, by the light of a solitary candle, she took her appalling revenge on the unfortunate young woman within.

  We think that the injuries inflicted on Mary Kelly’s body were not just in retribution for the anguish and pain the murderer had suffered, knowing that the man at the centre of her world physically desired someone else. It was jealousy, because Kelly was youthful, good-looking and – most important of all – fertile, everything Lizzie Williams was not. And it was in fury for the babies that this woman – and all women like her – could conceive, but did not want.

  How had Lizzie Williams found Mary Kelly this time, when previously she had had to ask around for her? We think in the very same way; she had made her plans long before she ever picked up a knife with intent to commit murder, and they included how she would find Kelly. Perhaps Dr John Williams revealed more information about Kelly than he had intended – that she had been brought up in Wales, for instance; even that she spoke with a Welsh accent. We think it doubtful that his wife would have deviated far from her plans. We believe it is more probable that within days of the newspapers publishing Catherine Eddowes’s true name, Lizzie Williams returned to Whitechapel to seek out Mary Kelly. One woman asking questions about another would arouse few, if any, suspicions; perhaps she told the people whom she asked that she was a long-lost relative from Wales. It is not such an unlikely proposition; after all, they both had a common background, she from Swansea, Kelly, though Irish-born, from Cwmparc in the Rhondda Valley, and of course, they both spoke with a Welsh accent – or Lizzie Williams could when she needed to.

  Once Lizzie Williams discovered where Kelly lived, she was able to take her time; not only so the people she questioned about Kelly would forget that they had ever been asked about her, but to plan how she would carry out the murder. Lizzie Williams almost certainly used the weeks leading up to the murder to discover everything she could about her victim: watching her movements, establishing her routine, when she left home, when she returned, even the method by which she gained access to her room. They may even have talked together when Lizzie would have noted Kelly’s Welsh accent. Lizzie, who was ten years younger than her husband, would have found that Kelly, at twenty-five years old, was even younger; she may have also discovered that Kelly shared her small room with a child. These discoveries possibly would have incensed her all the more.

  My father and I had wondered if, on the morning of the murder, when Mrs Caroline Maxwell alleged that Mary Kelly had addressed her by her nickname, ‘Carrie’, Lizzie had in fact called her ‘Cariad’, meaning ‘dear’ or ‘love’ in Welsh, and Maxwell had somehow misheard. But we think it more likely that she could have chanced upon Caroline Maxwell as she was stalking Kelly, and might even have spoken with her or, at the very least, listened in on her conversations, and perhaps that was how she discovered Maxwell’s nickname.

  Later, on the day of the murder, Maxwell said that she had seen Kelly a second time, but it was at a distance of twenty-five yards when the woman was in the Queen’s Head public house talking to a man. Again, fog would have impeded her vision and perhaps what she actually saw was the distinctive red knitted crossover shawl that she had seen Lizzie Williams wearing earlier that morning. She then assumed wrongly, a second time, that the person wearing the shawl was Kelly. We think that Lizzie Williams realised that the bright red shawl drew attention to herself, and so she gave it away or discarded it somewhere as she made her escape, so that it was taken or picked up by someone else, and it was another woman altogether whom Maxwell had seen.

  The day of the murder was chosen specifically because that was the day of the Lord Mayor’s Show. It meant that Lizzie Williams could give both the servants the day off to attend the parade without arousing any suspicions if she were found to be absent from the house. Dr John Williams may have been at his work, which so often took him through the night. The house, therefore, would be empty, and she could enter unobserved on her return from Whitechapel; clean herself of blood, and replace the weapon from where she had taken it.

  We know that the time she chose to attack her victim was at 4 o’clock in the morning, because that was when two independent witnesses heard a single scream from somewhere in the court which was, almost certainly, Kelly’s last pitiable cry for help. It was a good time to choose because the cry went unanswered. Lizzie Williams knew that any cries at that hour would likely be ignored because people were deep in sleep, and any who were awoken or awake would be reluctant to leave their beds to investigate, which, in the event, proved to be the case.

  According to George Hutchinson’s statement, Kelly returned to her apartment soon after 2.00 a.m. with a man whom he later described to Inspector Abberline in great, if not impossible, detail. Mary Kelly had gained access to her room by reaching through a broken windo
w at the side of the house (it had been broken during an earlier quarrel with Hutchinson) and pulling back the latch on the inside of her door. That night, the court was bitter cold and deathly quiet. It had rained until 11.00 p.m. and the temperature had dropped to just a few degrees above freezing. Soon the filthy, thick fog would descend.

  At a time approaching 4.00 a.m., Lizzie Williams’s fingers found and pulled back the latch, opening the door to Kelly’s room which she then entered. A small candle on top of a broken wine glass placed on a table next to the bed, provided the only light. Mary Kelly, wearing nothing but a thin cotton nightdress, was in her bed. She may have been shocked at first to discover that someone had found their way into her room uninvited. Perhaps she sat bolt upright in surprise, asking her who she was and what she wanted; but she would have been alarmed and on her guard.

  It is almost certain that Lizzie Williams had visualised this moment, thinking what she would say to Mary Kelly when the moment arrived. My father and I had little doubt that she had prepared a few well-chosen words for the occasion, rehearsing them over and over in her troubled mind. Every word was designed to strike home, intended to hurt. But we wondered if any words were actually delivered when Lizzie Williams found herself face to face with Kelly, or did she perhaps think that the words were no longer important, an irrelevance. It is clear from what followed that no words could adequately convey the murderer’s true feelings of the hatred she felt for the woman her husband desired and who perhaps could bear him the child he wanted so badly.

  Lizzie Williams would have seen, even by the dim candlelight, that Mary Kelly was young, voluptuous, and why, perhaps, she appealed sexually to her husband. Contemporary accounts of her appearance record that she was comely with pale-blue eyes, waist-length fair hair, figure buxom and well-rounded.