Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman

by kindels

  What happened between the time that Lizzie Williams entered Mary Kelly’s room, and the moment before she attacked her, we do not know; we do not even know if any conversation took place. If it did, it was almost certainly brief. All we can say for certain is that Lizzie Williams’s abhorrence for Kelly manifested itself clearly by both the manner in which she killed her, and the extent of the violence she inflicted on her body afterwards. We know that Kelly pulled up the bed sheet to cover her face at the very moment she was attacked, because the two witnesses who heard her scream said that the cry sounded ‘muffled’. A cut in the bloodied sheet coincided exactly with the brutal knife stroke that killed her. It was delivered with such force that her throat was severed down to the spinal column, causing it to be deeply scored. A small cut on Kelly’s right thumb and an abrasion to the back of her left hand and forearm suggest that she made a brief, but ultimately futile, attempt to defend herself.

  Mary Kelly may not have felt the sting of the sharp surgical blade as it cut deep into her throat at this point, nor even feared the prospect of her own death. Terror would have caused her body to release endorphins (hormones), raising her pain threshold and affecting her frame of mind. The blood supply and the oxygen which it carried to the cerebral cortex – that part of the brain which controls emotion and thought – stopped as soon as the carotid arteries were severed. The brain stem survived for just a little longer, allowing blood circulation to continue. Her heart beat faster to pump more blood to the open wound. Mary Kelly would have felt her consciousness quickly slipping away and, within just a few seconds, like a candle burning out, she was dead.

  The murder of Mary Kelly should have been enough to satisfy Lizzie Williams’s thirst for revenge; even the taking of her uterus, a sufficient act of vengeance. But after years of pent-up frustration, her emotions were running high and simply murdering Kelly was not enough. Everything about the woman that could remind Lizzie Williams’s husband that she was the woman he had wanted, who could give him the child he desired, had to be annihilated. But before she set to work on her victim’s corpse, she removed her black velvet cape and placed it on a chair, thereby covering the clothes that Kelly had taken off earlier. Then she removed her hat, and placed it on top of her cape. Such evidence as there is shows that she must have acted in his way, because Kelly’s own undergarments were later discovered on one of the two chairs in the room, free of blood.

  Lizzie Williams was a woman possessed. Driven by raging anger and bitter resentment, she pulled Kelly’s body towards her so that she could more easily launch her terrifying assault. Everything had been planned in minute detail. She slashed the eyelids up and down. She hacked away her victim’s nose, so it ended up lying on one side on her cheek. She chopped at her ears, and severed her lips. She destroyed every feature of the face her husband had found so much more engaging than her own, in the same manner that she had destroyed Catherine Eddowes’s face six weeks before.

  The autopsy notes of Dr Bond dated 10 November 1888 (which report went missing for almost a century, before surfacing unexpectedly in 1987) read in part:

  The face was gashed in all directions, the nose, cheeks, eyebrows and ears being partly removed. The lips were blanched and cut by several incisions running obliquely down to the chin. There were also numerous cuts extending irregularly across all the features.

  The oblique incisions suggest that Lizzie Williams may have signed her ‘work’ again by carving the initial ‘M’ into Mary Kelly’s face; but this is uncertain. Neither Inspector Abberline nor Dr Bond saw anything beyond the victim’s terrible wounds. Bond merely recorded the injuries that he had observed, but failed to record their precise descriptions without realising the great evidential value they might have presented as to the identity of the murderer.

  After she had finished carving Kelly’s face, Lizzie Williams might have stepped back to inspect her handiwork. The young woman had been pretty once, which was why her husband had been attracted to her, but this was no longer the case. Any beauty she might have possessed was gone forever. We wondered: if Kelly’s murderer had been a man, what possible reason could he have had to desecrate a woman’s face, because there had to be one. In over 120 years, none, or no plausible reason, has ever been put forward. But if the murderer was a woman whose husband was having an affair with the victim, and the victim’s face was so much more pleasing than the murderer’s own face, then jealousy might very well provide that reason.

  But it was still not enough. Lizzie Williams had needed to satisfy herself that her husband would never desire this woman again. We think that she hacked off her victim’s breasts, not only because she believed her husband frequently revelled in fondling them, but because those breasts might one day have suckled his baby.

  Lizzie Williams pushed Kelly’s left breast under the dead woman’s head. The right breast she placed at the feet of the corpse. Kelly’s arms were gouged and slashed to shreds. Her legs that had, perhaps only days earlier, gripped him in passion were cut to ribbons, the skin and flesh strewn about the room. Kelly’s intestines, liver and spleen, which had once given life to such a sensual body, were ripped out, and her uterus, the organ that made her the woman that Lizzie Williams could never be, was excised with a single sweep of her knife. But the heart that he had wanted – metaphorically – she cut out and kept for herself.

  As she finished her bloody business, there was something more Lizzie Williams had to do. She drew Kelly’s legs away from each other, bending them slightly at the knees. When the body was discovered, it appeared that they had been forced unusually wide apart. In fact, they had been left in the position Kelly might have adopted herself for sexual intercourse to have taken place. It was as if she was leaving a bizarre message of some kind: ‘If this is the way you behave with my husband, this is what you get!’ Though, and as we freely admit, we have no way of knowing if this is the correct interpretation – except for another strange, and perhaps final, act performed by Kelly’s murderer which suggests that it might be. When Kelly’s body was found, one of her arms had been pushed into the now-empty cavity of her belly. It seemed like a last sarcastic gesture – to protect the child she would never have.

  It had been an orgy of death – the reason for which only a woman unable to have children of her own, a woman who had lost her fortune and was now faced with losing her husband too, a woman on the edge of insanity, could fully understand. But the butchery had taken much longer than she had realised. It was now almost an hour and a half past sunrise and people would be up and about.

  Lizzie Williams must have looked down at her hands and skirt which were now covered in blood. The hat and cape she had left on the chair were also soaked with blood. She could not have foreseen that her clothes would have been ruined in such a manner. She could not go out on the streets like that in daylight, even if she was disguised as a midwife, and the evidence could not be concealed.

  Kelly’s room offered the murderer no possibilities for cleaning herself. There was a water pump on the end wall of the courtyard outside, but it was overlooked by a small row of terraced houses on the opposite side of the court. Lizzie Williams could not risk using the pump and meeting one of the neighbours, and then having to explain what she was doing there.

  The answer would have come to her quickly, even if that too had not been part of her plan. Kelly’s clothes, which she had removed the night before as she prepared herself for bed, or for the male visitor whom Hutchinson had observed, were neatly laid across a chair. They were underneath Lizzie Williams’s own ruined hat and cape, but Kelly’s clothes were not stained with blood.

  Mary Kelly and Lizzie Williams were about the same size, judging by Lizzie Williams’s photographs which are all we have to go by, and the description of Kelly provided by Philip Sugden’s The Complete History of Jack the Ripper, although, if anything, Lizzie might have been a little smaller of the two. Lizzie Williams removed her skirt, wiped the blood from her hands on the cotton twill material and then pus
hed it into the fireplace. She took the soiled cape and hat, and placed those on the fire too where they were consumed by the flames. Whether or not the fire was still alight when the clothes were shoved into the grate, we do not know – perhaps it had gone out and that was one of the reasons why the murderer remained in Kelly’s room for so long: to make sure that the fire was properly alight so that her clothes – the only evidence linking her directly to the murder – were completely destroyed: which in the event, they were not.

  Then Lizzie Williams dressed herself in Mary Kelly’s clothes, putting on her brown linsey skirt, her green bodice and red knitted crossover shawl. As she prepared to leave the room, she may have taken one last satisfied look around, surveying the carnage she had caused and the bloody remains of her victim. Lizzie Williams was a woman scorned and her fury had created a vision of hell which would surely haunt her forever.

  But as she emerged from the passageway that led from Miller’s Court, Lizzie Williams was seen by Caroline Maxwell on the other side of Dorset Street, and they spoke briefly through the fog before the rain started. From the little Maxwell could see of the woman she believed to be Mary Kelly, it is clear that her appearance was somewhat different to normal, because Maxwell said she ‘looked ill’. Whether Lizzie Williams was covering her face with her hand feigning illness, or there was something else that might explain Caroline Maxwell’s comment is unknown, but somehow Lizzie Williams managed to persuade Maxwell that she was Kelly. The deception might not have been so difficult to achieve; after all, she had been an actress when she was younger. To the end of her life, Caroline Maxwell continued to swear that it was Kelly whom she had both seen and spoken with, according to the memoirs of Detective Inspector Walter Dew. This was the only time, following all five murders, that Lizzie Williams was seen leaving the scene of her crime: but, in an ironic twist of fate, she was recognised not as the murderer but as the victim.

  Lizzie Williams would have been unconcerned about Caroline Maxwell. She had laid her plans carefully, including her escapes and, up to now, they had served her well enough. She knew that, as long as everyone thought that the Whitechapel murderer was a man, no one would believe Maxwell’s story, and no one would suspect that ‘Jack the Ripper’ was a woman.

  With the killing and dismemberment of Mary Kelly, Lizzie Williams’s mission of death was finally accomplished and the Whitechapel murders came to an end. We believe that, following her departure from Miller’s Court and brief exchange of words with Caroline Maxwell, Lizzie Williams returned to Queen Anne Street, disposing of Kelly’s heart along the way. Once she reached the relative safety of her own home, she cleaned herself up, changed her clothing and burned Mary Kelly’s clothes; she washed the murder weapon – the small, amputating knife – and replaced it among her husband’s other surgical knives and medical equipment. Then she awaited the return of her estranged husband and, with her rival now dead, perhaps she expected to regain his love.

  We believe that it was then that this intelligent, resourceful and religious, but deeply troubled, woman from Wales, came to realise the horror of the terrible things she had done, and the enormous pressure gradually overwhelmed her. But her reign of terror as Jack the Ripper, in the autumn of 1888, was over.

  CHAPTER 18

  In the months immediately following the murders, when he was just forty-seven years old, Dr John Williams began to wind down his extensive hospital work. He gave up his teaching role and many of his official positions. He ceased attending the numerous committee meetings he had once enjoyed. He no longer sought the companionship of his friends and colleagues at private members clubs – The Cymmrodorion Society, for Welsh professionals in London seeking to promote the Welsh language and culture, and the Savile Club in Piccadilly.

  The following year in 1890, he applied to cease performing the abdominal operations which had made his name within the medical profession, while the year after that he resigned his position as Dean of the Medical Committee at University College Hospital. Thereafter, he took no further part in managing the hospital. In 1893, five years after the murders at the age of fifty-three, Williams retired from the active staff of the hospital, although he continued to practice privately for another ten years.

  Writing Sir John Williams’s obituary in University College Hospital’s in-house magazine The Lancet in 1926, Dr Herbert Spencer explained his friend’s early retirement from the hospital as “in part to considerations of health”. Ruth Evans repeated the same ‘official’ line and Tony Williams leapt to the obvious conclusion that the statement meant that it was Dr John Williams who had become ill, while all the evidence suggests that he had not. This argument is strengthened further by the fact that Dr John Williams lived for a further thirty-three – very active – years after his retirement from the hospital, while his wife, though ten years younger, lived for just another twenty-two years.

  In fact, the statement is ambiguous; perhaps deliberately so, and may have been designed to mislead rather than illuminate. While it was generally taken to mean that it was Dr John Williams’s health that had suffered, it may equally have referred to the ill-health of his wife.

  Tony Williams suggested that it was guilt which explained Dr Williams’s sudden loss of interest in medicine and the ambition that once had been his life’s driving force: his search to find a cure for infertility. But it did not seem to my father and me that it was his conscience that was troubling him, causing him to retire so early from the profession he loved. More likely it was the horrific discovery that his wife was a murderer – and the appalling realisation that he was indirectly to blame.

  We believe that it was Lizzie Williams who had become unwell. Perhaps soon after the murders ended, and before the end of that calendar year, overcome by the strain, fear and enormity of what she had done, she suffered a delayed nervous or mental breakdown. In the circumstances, and coupled with her other traumas, such an illness would not have been surprising. Then she may have confessed her sins to her husband through endless floods of tears, while begging his forgiveness; this would explain the contents of the letter Tony Williams found among his great-great-uncle’s personal effects in the National Library of Wales. She may even have given him the shoe-maker’s knife, ‘well-ground down’, she had used in the Stride murder, as proof of her crimes, which he placed with his personal possessions, where it would remain undisturbed until its discovery by Tony Williams several decades later.

  It is possible that, up to this point, Lizzie Williams had appeared to everyone – her husband, family, friends, and neighbours if she knew them – as perfectly normal, likeable even. She may have been quiet and reserved, or amiable and charming. But no one would have guessed at the burning turmoil which lay beneath her outer veneer of solid Victorian respectability, though it is clear that Dr Williams suspected that something was wrong with her – which was why he had kept a diary – and later removed its many telling pages.

  Shocked by her admission, upset, confused and not knowing what he should do – except that he could not allow Lizzie to remain in London – Dr Williams made the arrangements he thought best and sent her back to her family in Wales, far away from Whitechapel and the police who were frantically searching for the murderer, known by the pseudonym Jack the Ripper. There, he knew she would be properly, and lovingly, cared for – and kept out of harm’s way – at least until the panic was over, and she was able to recover from her illness.

  Just over two years later, on 31 March 1890, while his wife was recuperating in Wales, Dr John Williams moved again, this time to 63 Brook Street, also in London’s West End. It was an old house, somewhat dilapidated and, judging by the building tradesmen’s quotes that appear in his private papers, it needed substantial renovation. It seemed to us that his intention was to leave behind the ghosts of Queen Anne Street, with all the bad memories that the house held, and start afresh elsewhere – it would be a new start for Lizzie also when she was well enough to return. At this time, Dr Williams was highly regarded
in his profession, numbering royalty and the top echelons of society among his patients. He must have envisaged a private practice lasting for many years into the future, which was why he sanctioned the expensive repairs to his new home, from where he also ran his surgery.

  In 1894, and in gratitude for the years of service that Dr John Williams had devoted to the Royal family, he was elevated to the ranks of the nobility when he was awarded a baronetcy by Queen Victoria so that he became a Sir, and Lizzie took the courtesy title of Lady Williams. She was now entitled perhaps to enjoy the privilege of being hanged with a silk rope.

  My father and I believe that by the early 1890s Lizzie Williams had recovered sufficiently from her breakdown to return to London from time to time, and during these visits Dr Williams made every effort to integrate her back into their everyday life, renew old friendships and meet with acquaintances. It appears that their lives may have returned to what they might have regarded as normal – at least for a while.

  But early in 1903, Sir John Williams, as he now was, suddenly abandoned his lucrative private practice, and left London for rural Wales, never to practice medicine again. His life thereafter took an entirely different course. It provokes the question: why, and what was it that happened which caused him to change his plans so radically?

  The answer might be found in a strange letter discovered by Tony Williams. It had been written by Sir John Williams just twenty-six months earlier, and sent to one of his patients, Mrs Margot Asquith. She was the wife of the future Liberal Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, whose term of office ran from 1908 to 1916. He had served as Home Secretary from 1892 to 1895, and was – in November 1900 – an opposition M.P.

  The letter concerned Lizzie – Lady Williams – and was, apparently, viciously critical of her. Tony Williams took it as further evidence of the poor state of the marriage, but when my father and I read the letter, we felt it held far deeper significance than that. We also were unable to locate the letter that Margot Asquith had initially sent to Sir John Williams, which was odd, bearing in mind the pains he took to retain his personal correspondence – just like the pages removed from his 1888 diary, so the letter received by Sir John, which might have thrown so much more light on the matter, had disappeared. Nevertheless, we felt that much might be deduced from the content and tenor of Sir John’s letter.