Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman (16 page)

The motive for Catherine Eddowes’s murder was equally obscure and gave rise to the question: how, having disposed of Elizabeth Stride, had Lizzie Williams met up with and murdered her next victim so quickly and, for that matter also, so quietly? All the evidence surrounding Stride’s murder showed that Lizzie Williams had left the scene of her first crime that night by close to 1.00 a.m. at the latest, though, it could have been a few minutes earlier; perhaps between 12.46 and 12.56, which was the time Dr Blackwell thought the victim, Elizabeth Stride, had died. Whichever it was, we contend that within the hour Lizzie Williams had murdered Catherine Eddowes in Mitre Square, before making good her escape.

Whitechapel was already swarming with police, the alarm having been raised after the first of that night’s murders: all neighbouring streets, alleys and passageways were combed inch by inch; houses, lodgings and tenements were entered and their occupants searched. Over 2,000 lodgers and their landlords were interviewed in the investigation which followed. Any man unable to answer questions satisfactorily was brought in for further questioning and every man who even looked over the age of fourteen years, whether in the company of a woman or not, was stopped, searched, questioned and inspected for traces of blood. Even Inspector Abberline, when his shifts ended, frequently took to the streets of Whitechapel until 4 or 5 o’clock in the morning, committed as he was to finding his man. He would often give the “wretched, homeless women he found there, four-pence or six-pence” so they could get themselves off the streets and “out of harm’s way”.

But on 23 October, just over three weeks after the murders, the Criminal Investigation Department of Scotland Yard admitted that it had not discovered “the slightest clue of any kind”. Neither could any trace of the killer be found. It was hardly surprising: the police were searching for a man.

T
he murder of young, attractive Mary Jane Kelly, which occurred during the early hours of Friday, 9 November 1888, was by far the most savage and brutal of the five killings that autumn. It took place, as near as can be established, at about 4 o’clock in the morning, within the confines of the small dismal room she rented at 13 Miller’s Court off Dorset Street, on the day of the Lord Mayor’s Show.

The editorial published in
The Star
that same day, matched every bit in sensationalism the shock headline publicised to the crowds by the two young boys who had joined the parade with their news-boards: “Details in respect of the mutilation of the body reveal a more horrible state of things than anything which has yet been recorded in this series of crimes. The thick flesh has been literally stripped from the thighs of the victim, and placed upon a table in the room. The woman’s breasts have also been roughly sliced off. The fleshy parts of the cheeks have also been hacked away, and the corpse presents a spectacle more hideous than anything which has presented itself to even the oldest and most experienced of the police officers who are engaged in the case. Everyone’s feelings are revolted, and it is absolute truth to say that the horrors revealed by the case are simply inexpressible.”

Mary Kelly had married at sixteen but was widowed at nineteen, when her husband was killed in a mining accident. She had one son who was now aged seven or eight. He shared his mother’s room, but was occasionally packed off to friends nearby when she wanted privacy. She needed it that night because she had to earn her rent, and earlier during the evening he had been sent out, though what the boy’s name was, who might have cared for him and where he might have slept, we were unable to discover.

Kelly’s room was partitioned from the rest of the house so that her front door opened directly into Miller’s Court. The other tenants used the front door which led into Dorset Street, so that, while they lived in the same house, their addresses were different.

Mrs Elizabeth Prater, a prostitute, rented a first-floor room at 26 Dorset Street, which was located immediately above Mary Kelly’s room (and destined to become the scene of another murder some ten years later). At about 1.30 a.m., Mrs Prater went to her bed, having consumed some alcohol, and fell into a deep sleep. She was awoken by her kitten, which climbed onto her bed, and almost immediately heard a cry for help. In her statement to the police, she claimed that she heard two or three cries of ‘Murder!’ in a female voice. She said that the cries seemed to emanate from somewhere close at hand, though they sounded ‘muted’. Since the lodging house light was out, she thought it was probably past four o’clock. As to why Mrs Prater did not do something: she explained that such screams were so common that she took no notice of them, and went back to sleep.

Another witness, Mrs Sarah Lewis, a laundress, who lived with her husband at 24 Great Pearl Street in Spitalfields, arrived at Miller’s Court between 2.00 and 3.00 in the morning. She came to stay with her friends, the Keyler’s, who lived at 2 Miller’s Court, after a quarrel with her husband. Lewis was given the use of an armchair where she slept poorly until 3.30 when she awoke. She then dozed. Just moments before 4.00, she too heard a cry for help. It was just a single shriek of ‘Murder!’ Mrs Lewis told the inquest that it sounded like the scream of a woman nearby, and she thought it came from the direction of Kelly’s room, but, once again, such cries were so frequent in the neighbourhood that she did not trouble herself to investigate further.

Sarah Lewis’s evidence accorded well with the sworn testimony of Elizabeth Prater, who, by the time of the inquest on 12 November at the Shoreditch Town Hall, decided that she had, after all, heard only one cry of ‘Murder!’

The medical evidence of Dr Thomas Bond and Dr George Phillips was of scant help in determining the time of death, but that was understandable. They were using the traditionally established methods: the rate of the victim’s body heat loss, the time it takes for rigor mortis to set in, the drop in rectal temperature and ambient temperature, but these pointers had almost no application in the present case; the variables were just too great. Mary Jane Kelly was virtually naked; at 36.2 degrees Fahrenheit, it had been a wet and bitterly cold night, and the early hours of the following morning were only slightly warmer at 38.9F, but still less than 7 degrees above freezing; there had been a brief but intensely hot fire, and a window pane in the tiny room was missing. Given the conflicting elements, it must have proved extremely difficult to even attempt to estimate the time of death, though when the two doctors did, the extraneous evidence indicates that they were wildly out. So the best evidence available – that of the two witnesses who heard what was probably Mary Kelly’s last, desperate cry for help – suggests that her death occurred at around 4.00 a.m.

Another witness, George Hutchinson, turned up at Commercial Street Police Station on 12 November to give a statement, but it was at six o’clock in the evening after the one-day inquest had ended. Hutchinson, a casual labourer, was a rogue. Six months previously he had appeared in the Thames Magistrates Court on a theft charge, so his evidence should be treated with caution. But Detective Inspector Abberline, who interviewed him, was impressed by the consistent nature of his testimony, and was
satisfied
that he was telling the truth – on this occasion at least.

Hutchinson’s statement was that he was walking up Commercial Street at 2 a.m. on the morning of the murder, and as he was passing Thrawl Street he met Mary Kelly. He did not think she was drunk, but he described her as ‘spreeish’ (slightly intoxicated). She asked him for the loan of sixpence, but he told her that he had no money because he had spent it in Romford earlier. She bade him good-bye, saying she must go and find some cash, and continued on her way. A man coming towards her tapped her lightly on the shoulder, and said something to her that Hutchinson was unable to hear. She and the man then laughed. At the corner of Fashion Street and Commercial Street, Hutchinson waited by a street lamp outside the Queen’s Head public house and watched the couple as they walked past him. The man lowered his head and avoided Hutchinson’s stare. Then he and Mary Kelly turned into Dorset Street and continued walking in the direction of the entrance to the narrow passageway that led to Miller’s Court.

The impressive description Hutchinson gave of the man he said he saw was: aged about thirty-four or thirty-five, 5 ft 6 inches tall, pale complexion, dark eyes and eyelashes, a slight moustache curled up at the ends, and dark hair. He was wearing a long dark coat, collar and cuffs trimmed in astrakhan, a dark jacket, light waistcoat, dark trousers, dark felt hat turned down in the middle, boots with white buttons, a very thick gold chain, black tie with horseshoe pin, and was of a respectable, Jewish appearance.

The description was considerably enhanced by the time the story got into the clutches of the newspapers, and Hutchinson’s suspect had now acquired a pair of brown kid gloves, a watch chain with a big seal and a red stone hanging from it. He had also grown a pair of bushy eyebrows.

Hutchinson watched the couple until they halted at the entrance to Miller’s Court where they talked for some three minutes. Then they entered the passageway, and disappeared from his view. Hutchinson walked after them and followed them down the passageway, but by the time he reached the court, they had gone into Kelly’s room, closing the door behind them. He stayed watching Kelly’s door for approximately forty-five minutes, but since neither of them emerged within that time, he gave up and left.

Why Hutchinson should have paid such close attention to the man he claims he saw with Kelly is unknown; there was no apparent reason why he should have scrutinised him so closely when no crime was anticipated. The amazingly detailed description he gave of a man, whom he glimpsed only briefly by the dim light of a gas street lamp, was particularly surprising; why he should have been watching Kelly’s door in Miller’s Court at that time of night is a mystery that has never been explained. On the two nights that followed, Inspector Abberline sent Hutchinson, in the presence of two detectives, to scour the streets and alleyways of Whitechapel to see if he could find the suspect. But whoever Kelly’s visitor was, he had gone to ground, so all attempts to find him frustratingly failed and that part of the investigation, at least, came to a halt.

The time of Hutchinson’s departure from his vantage-point opposite Kelly’s door was around 2.45 a.m., according to his police statement, but he later told newspaper reporters that as he left Miller’s Court, he heard the bell of the Spitalfields clock in Commercial Street strike three. Whichever time was correct, Hutchinson had certainly departed Miller’s Court by 3.00 a.m. at the latest, and there were no further witnesses to say when Kelly’s male visitor had left – if indeed there ever had been a male visitor.

Tony Williams mentioned that Dr John Williams’s friend and assistant Herbert R. Spencer described his employer in the late 1880s as “of middle height, robust build, that he usually wore a frock coat, silk hat, stand-up collar and a dark silk tie held by a pin set with a red stone”. The implication seemed to be that the man Hutchinson saw entering Mary Kelly’s room was Dr John Williams.

Clearly it was not the man whom Hutchinson described. The photograph of Dr John Williams which appears in
Uncle Jack
does not resemble Hutchinson’s description of the man whom he said accompanied Mary Kelly to her room. This man was in his
mid-thirties
, had dark eyes, dark eyelashes, a moustache and dark hair; Dr Williams, by contrast, was forty-eight, had pale, light-blue eyes, light hair and no moustache. His dress was normal for that era. As for the red stone Hutchinson and Spencer mention, the former said that it was hanging from his watch chain along with a seal, whereas the latter stated that it was set in a pin used to secure his tie, so the stone would have been much smaller. While Dr Williams would almost certainly have been described as ‘respectable’, he did not look Jewish. Whomever Hutchinson had seen entering Mary Kelly’s room on that fateful morning, it was not Dr Williams.

Since Kelly’s screams were heard an hour after Hutchinson had left Miller’s Court, it is likely that at some time after 3.00 on that cold November morning the man Hutchinson had seen going with Kelly into her room had left, and the murderer entered. She wore a felt hat, a brown twill skirt and a black velvet cape; she spoke with a Welsh accent and carried with her a strong knife, very sharp, pointed at the top, about an inch in width and at least six inches long … a surgeon’s knife. And she was determined to exact her bloody revenge.

I
t was time to collect all the evidence, to see if it was possible to make any sense of it. My father and I planned to go through the papers from start to finish; from Mary Ann Nichols, the first murder victim, to Mary Jane Kelly, the fifth and final victim. We were sure the answers we wanted were there somewhere. We intended to review the essential points of each case briefly to see if a pattern, or even anything unusual, emerged. If it did, we would explore our findings further, but if not, we would move on to the next case.  

We started with the first of the Ripper’s victims, Mary Ann Nichols, aka Polly, age forty-three, whose body was discovered in Buck’s Row at 3.40 in the morning on Friday, 31 August, the night of the London Docklands fires. The mother of five children and a common prostitute, she was drunk, throttled to death, her throat cut twice from left to right, her abdomen ripped open from top to bottom, her intestines made visible. There were no signs that the victim had struggled with her attacker or tried to fight back. Afterwards, the murderer had escaped, leaving no trace or clue behind.  

No one had been heard or seen leaving the scene of the crime; the only people whom P.C. Neil noticed were a number of women walking in the Whitechapel Road. None were traced, none were identified.  

There had been no rape or sexual assault, and detectives investigating the case thought it was strange that the murderer had shown no sexual interest in the victim during what appeared, at least on the face of it, to be a sexually motivated attack. Emma Smith and Martha Tabram, the two prostitutes murdered in Whitechapel earlier that year, had both been sexually assaulted before their deaths, while Smith had been raped.