by kindels
The letter, dated 25 November 1900, reads in part, as follows:
Dear Mrs Asquith
I do not know, nor have I any wish to know, indeed I would rather not know, what my adversary told you of my wife, but I gather that it was something the reverse of complimentary. Fortunately I am almost, if not quite indifferent as to the opinions of most people about me and mine – and on this point I think that I am quite indifferent.
The tone of the paragraph is sharp, but its message is clear, and one can only wonder what, following her recuperation in Wales, Lizzie Williams had said or done to have caused such acerbic comment to be made about her. Whatever it was, Margot Asquith had considered that it was of such a serious and derogatory nature that she was compelled to write to Sir John Williams informing him about it. Clearly, it was both important, and highly critical of Lady Williams; something that Sir John appeared to brush aside and ignore, so as to nip the incident in the bud. But his blithe dismissal obscured a deep unease that was impossible for him to mask. Whatever the content of the letter, we felt that it supported our belief that it was Lizzie Williams who had suffered a breakdown and was now thought to have recovered, but clearly she was far from well.
Perhaps the next paragraph in Sir John Williams’s reply to Margot Asquith provides a clue as to the content of the letter he had received from her:
Oddly I have during the last fortnight been troubled beyond measure by the foolish and wicked talk of so-called friends respecting a friend of mine now dead. I have had to speak and write much with a view to try and stop the tongues of scandal which under the circumstances should have been absolutely silent.
To what ‘foolish and wicked talk’ might Sir John have been referring which had troubled him ‘beyond measure’, and who was the ‘friend’ who had died? It was clearly something deeply disturbing and of a distressing personal nature. And what was the ‘scandal’ that he had tried to quell amongst his friends. Perhaps Lizzie Williams had not quite recovered from her breakdown and had either said or done something to illustrate the fact; perhaps she had let slip some detail about the Whitechapel murders that caused someone in her circle of acquaintances to sit up and take notice. Had she, in her troubled state of mind, mentioned that Mary Kelly had been her husband’s friend, or that she had ‘taken care’ of Mary Kelly, or even that Sir John Williams might have been ‘responsible’ for the murders, and that was the scandal he was trying to quell?
If so, it might have been at this point that Sir John realised that he and his wife’s lives had changed forever; that Lizzie might never make a full recovery from her breakdown. Even if she did, she would likely continue to suffer the mood swings and depressions that her infertility had given rise to, and that would be something that would affect her all her life; though all the current medical evidence suggests that, with the passage of time, a feeling of profound sadness would replace more emotive thoughts. If she were allowed to remain in London, there would always be a risk that she would reveal something more about the murders, and next time the tongues of scandal might not be so easily silenced. In such an inconceivable event, the consequences that might follow would be far too dreadful to contemplate….
Alternatively, had Margot Asquith discussed the issue with her husband Herbert Asquith perhaps, who was, of course, connected with the highest levels of government? Is it possible that, the murders having ended more than twelve years before, someone, somewhere, perhaps the then Home Secretary, Charles Thompson Richie (term of office 1900-1902) decided that in order to avoid a scandal involving the many royals, and influential patients of Sir John Williams – of whom Asquith’s own wife was just one, the matter could be quietly, and better, disposed of if Sir John could just be persuaded to co-operate, and leave the medical profession, and London, of his own accord.
Perhaps it was ‘suggested’ to Sir John that unconfirmed rumours were circulating about Lady Williams – or possibly even about him – which might require Scotland Yard to redirect its investigation (which was officially closed on 14 February 1902) towards the source of the speculation and gossip. Rather than run the risk of their reputations being irrevocably tarnished by police involvement – whatever the outcome – or worse, it might be better for Sir John Williams and his disconsolate lady wife, to depart the scene gracefully, and while no stigma was attached.
In 1903, Inspector Abberline, having retired from the Metropolitan Police on 7 February of the previous year (which was, coincidentally, Lizzie Williams’s fifty-second birthday), told the Pall Mall Gazette in an interview, “You can state most emphatically that Scotland Yard is really no wiser on the subject [of the identity of Jack the Ripper] than it was fifteen years ago.” But this statement contrasts sharply with what he allegedly told Nigel Morland, novelist and crime-writer, some years later: “I’ve given my word to keep my mouth permanently closed about it … I know my superiors know certain facts … the Ripper wasn’t a butcher, Yid or foreign skipper … you’d have to look for him not at the bottom of London society but a long way up.”
When publishing his memoirs Lost London in 1934, ex-Detective Sergeant Benjamin Leeson, who joined the police force two years after the murders, wrote: “…amongst the police who were most concerned in the case there was a general feeling that a certain doctor … could have thrown quite a lot of light on the subject.” This opinion expressed a widespread belief, which was held by certain police officers, that a doctor was in some way involved in the murders.
So what was it that Inspector Abberline (and for that matter, Benjamin Leeson) had come to learn after 1903 – the year that Sir John Williams so unexpectedly gave up his private practice and moved back to Wales with Lady Williams – which was not known in the fifteen-year period that had elapsed since the murders? What was it that Abberline had promised to keep his mouth closed about, and to whom had the promise been made? Had one of his friends at Scotland Yard told him something? Perhaps only an examination of the files held at the Home Office for the years between 1900 and 1903 might provide the answer – rather than any that may have been retained by Scotland Yard.
It is likely that Abberline maintained many friendships within the police force after he retired. He worked for more than a decade as a private detective for the American Pinkerton Detective Agency, when he almost certainly made use of his connections forged with colleagues at Scotland Yard. He appeared to have enjoyed a close relationship with James Monroe, with whom detectives consulted during the period of the murders, and it was Monroe who held Abberline in such high regard that he had specifically requested his transfer to Scotland Yard in 1887. Monroe held a dual role as Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, and Head of the Detective Service. He succeeded Sir Charles Warren as Chief Commissioner on 3 December 1888, on the latter’s resignation after the death of Mary Kelly, and Monroe reported directly to the Home Office on matters of national security. It was said of him that if anyone knew anything about the murders, he would. But while James Monroe may well have possessed and imparted information of a sensitive and confidential nature about a possible suspect to Abberline, neither of them wrote their memoirs, and Monroe, a very private man, gave few interviews and any secrets to which they may have been party, remain untold.
In order to present a balanced picture, however, it must be said that there were as many theories as to the likely identity of the murderer among senior police officials, as there were officers who were either directly, or indirectly, connected with the crimes – both before 1903 and in the years that followed. But there was no direct evidence of involvement in the murders by any of the suspects whom they named, nor did any of them appear to possess a plausible motive.
Perhaps the truth as to who the murderer might have been was confined to just those who needed to know, and those few who did were sworn to secrecy. That way, there was less likelihood of the secret leaking out – ever. Few police officers possessed the depth of knowledge about the murders, and enjoyed such well-established connections with the
Home Office, as James Monroe, and none had such intimate familiarity with the cases as Frederick Abberline. Author of Autumn of Terror, Tom Cullen, said that James Monroe was “possibly the only man at Scotland Yard who was capable of tracking down the killer”. Perhaps he had. Monroe had written some private memoirs for his family which contained nothing about the Ripper murders, but supposedly some for his eldest son, Charles, which did; however, it is assumed that any such papers were unaccountably destroyed because they have never surfaced. Charles, who had presumably read his father’s notes, allegedly told his younger brother, Douglas, that his father’s theory was “a very hot potato”, while his grandson, Christopher, remembers him saying that “Jack the Ripper should have been caught”. This suggests that Monroe knew or, at the very least, suspected who the Ripper was. When Sir John and Lady Williams so hurriedly left London for Wales, those suspicions may very well have crystallised. If James Monroe believed that either the eminent Sir John Williams, a peer of the realm, or his wife, Lady Williams, might have been the murderer, this would indeed have been a very hot potato.
If it was the case that there had been a high-level governmental cover-up over the suspected identity of the murderer, it would not have been for the first time, so there was already a precedent. In 1889, the year following the murders, Inspector Abberline was involved in the Cleveland Street scandal, when a homosexual brothel in the West End of London was raided by the police. This was at a time when homosexual activity was illegal. Prince Albert Victor, Queen Victoria’s grandson (later proposed, but dismissed, as a Ripper suspect) was said to have been involved, but a government cloak of secrecy kept his name out of the newspapers. Whatever the reason, within a relatively short time of Sir John
Williams sending his most extraordinary letter to Margot Asquith, the wife of the future Prime Minister, he suddenly and unexpectedly gave up his successful private practice. Ruth Evans says that the months of dissolving his Brook Street practice were ‘strenuous’, which would not be expected in a planned retirement – rather, the pressure felt by a man in a hurry to leave.
On 29 January 1903, Sir John Williams left London, and took a twenty-one-year lease on a magnificent Georgian mansion, Plas Llanstephan in Carmarthenshire, overlooking the beautiful Towy estuary, towards Ferryside on the opposite bank. Lady Williams, at fifty-two, was cared for by her stepmother, Mary Hughes, who continued to look after her, following the death of her husband, Lizzie’s father, Richard Hughes, who died in that same year. All three lived there in relative isolation until 1908 before finally moving to Aberystwyth where they spent the rest of their days, so that Sir John Williams could be near the library he founded and loved so much. If neither a child nor medicine was to be his legacy, then the National Library of Wales, to which he devoted the remainder of his life and perhaps as atonement for his part in the murders, would be. At just sixty-two years of age, and while at the peak of his career, Sir John Williams had left London and the medical profession forever; his life in medicine was over.
The story we have uncovered is incredible, but that does not mean that it did not happen. Everything about the Ripper murders is extraordinary; nothing more so than the fact that Jack the Ripper was a woman, that she was the wife of a prominent London doctor, a gynaecologist and physician to royalty who became a baronet and she Lady Williams, makes it all the more astounding. Yet all the evidence we have uncovered, though much of it circumstantial, points to it being true.
Every murder Lizzie Williams committed was planned with meticulous care, even though that of Catherine Eddowes was a terrible, inexcusable mistake. It was no accident that she got clean away with her crimes, and the caution she exercised, along with the blind certainty of the police that the killer was a man, allowed her to escape each time. There is no police record of any person matching Lizzie Williams’s description being stopped or questioned by the many police patrols and detectives who searched the streets and alleyways of Whitechapel. As a woman, she was ‘invisible’.
Our suspicions were aroused one day in 2005 by a short statement of just seven words, ‘You are the centre of my world’. This was an extract taken from a letter discovered by the author of Uncle Jack, Tony Williams. He believed the letter to have been written by his great-great-uncle, Dr John Williams, and sent by him to an old friend. The statement formed part of Tony Williams’s evidence that his distant relative was Jack the Ripper. What rang alarm bells with my father and me was that, from what we knew of Dr Williams, whose life my father had researched intensively, it was completely out of character for him to have made such a statement.
Strangely, no signature appeared at the foot of the letter attributed to Dr John Williams as reproduced in Uncle Jack, and this increased our suspicions that he had not written it. When we cast about for likely options, my father quickly reached the conclusion that there was only one other possible candidate: the author of the letter was Dr Williams’s wife, Lizzie.
Since the letter included another short, enigmatic statement, “Thank you for the forgiveness and for keeping my secret”, which Tony Williams took as an admission by Dr Williams that he was the murderer, the finger of suspicion now pointed directly at his wife.
It was a startling revelation, but, though we were sceptical at first, the notion immediately rang true. For one thing, it explained why the murderer of five women in London’s Whitechapel had never been caught. The police were hunting for a man. Other than that, we had no idea of what might have turned Lizzie Williams into a brutal serial killer, and we set out to conduct our own investigation into the murders, to see how far it would take us.
What we discovered amazed us. We had confidently expected our hypothesis to fall at the first hurdle: it didn’t. Instead, it jumped over it with ease, and it kept on jumping other hurdles. Once we accepted the proposition that Jack the Ripper might have been a woman, everything started to fall into place, with nothing having to be omitted or twisted to fit the facts. At no point in our investigation did we discover anything to prove that the murderer must have been a man; on the contrary, all the evidence pointed to a woman, and one in particular, Mary Elizabeth Ann Williams – Lizzie.
At the outset, we listed a number of questions relating to the murders which had always puzzled and perplexed us; as our investigation progressed, those questions were answered one by one. The reasons why Polly Nichols’s throat was cut twice – after she was dead; why the pocket of Annie Chapman’s apron was almost torn off and her (remaining) personal effects arranged carefully at her feet; why Elizabeth Stride’s throat, and nothing more, was cut; why Catherine Eddowes’s face was mutilated and the inverted letter V was carved into each of her cheeks – and what the letter might have stood for; how Caroline Maxwell believed she had seen the final victim several hours after she was known to have been killed; why no sexual interest was shown in any of the victims, and the ultimate red herring, the cryptic words and the bloody part of the apron discovered in Goulston Street, and of course, the identity of the murderer, and the motive behind the dreadful crimes.
But it was not just the answers that kept emerging which convinced us we were on the right track; it was the way all the pieces of the jigsaw kept dropping neatly into place. Why Polly Nichols was chosen as a victim; what caused the three scratches on Annie Chapman’s neck; how Elizabeth Stride knew what time Catherine Eddowes would be released from custody; even the discovery that Catherine Eddowes was not the worn-out, decrepit harridan we had expected to find.
That Tony Williams’s great-great-uncle was ‘Jack the Ripper’ was inconceivable from the start. That Dr John Williams would need to seek out prostitutes in Whitechapel to murder them for their uteri was implausible. That these were required for the purpose of his research, when he had an almost inexhaustible supply of women patients at the hospitals where he worked, made this hypothesis impossible to believe.
From start to finish, all the evidence pointed directly to the suspect my father had identified. Not once were we dissuaded that we wer
e wrong. On the contrary, at every turn our suspicions were confirmed that we had identified the murderer and discovered the motive for her terrible crimes.
That Jack the Ripper, author of five Whitechapel murders in the autumn of 1888 was not a man but a woman, has now, we believe, been proven beyond reasonable doubt. That she was the outwardly respectable, upper-middle-class, middle-aged Victorian housewife whom we identified at the outset, is certain.
EPILOGUE
Mary Elizabeth Ann Williams, whom her husband called ‘Lizzie’, was the only daughter of a wealthy industrialist, Richard Hughes, who indulged her to excess. She was accustomed to having anything and everything her father’s money could buy. She married a brilliant, capable and ambitious doctor, a specialist in gynaecology, and it was her family’s money that provided the foundation of his very successful career. But, unfortunately, they could never have the child they wanted because, by a tragic twist of fate, Lizzie was infertile, and no amount of money could change that fact.
As time passed by, Lizzie Williams feared for her marriage. Not only was she afraid that she would lose her husband to another woman, she worried that she would forfeit her social standing too. When her father lost his fortune, Lizzie lost her security, and became dependent on a husband who no longer loved her as he once did. She thought that he might leave her, perhaps even father a child by Mary Kelly who had proved herself fertile. It was therefore the green-ey’d monster of jealousy, and fear for her very future that became the catalyst that drove her to commit murder.