Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman

in Jack the Ripper: Case Closed (2009), who established that the letter was indeed written by a journalist. Walter Sickert did not write that letter.
    Patricia Cornwell also claimed that Sickert suffered from a misshapen penis and was incapable of consummating the sexual act. This, she suggested, caused in him such a hatred of women that he was compelled to murder them, dissect their bodies, and remove their reproductive organs. But at no stage did she explain why the murders began and, just as importantly, why they ended so abruptly. There is no mention in Cornwell’s book of the extraordinary and compelling evidence given by Mrs Caroline Maxwell – which is central to the Kelly murder.
    Disappointingly, none of the answers I hoped to find were provided in Patricia Cornwell’s book and there was little or no other persuasive evidence to suggest that Walter Sickert was anything other than an oddity or a misfit – traits that are not sufficient to merit him being called a serial killer.
    In 2004, my father, an active and perceptive amateur historian, then aged ninety-two, began to research his latest subject, Sir John Williams, born in 1840, the third of four brothers on a small farm in Gwynfe, a village near Carmarthen in west Wales. John Williams had struggled to rise above his humble origins, and went on to become a physician to royalty and Professor of Obstetric Medicine at University College Hospital in London. In June 1905, after his early and unexpected retirement two years earlier, the deputation he headed won the sixteen-month fight to establish the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth.
    Sometime after the result of my father’s research into the life of Sir John Williams was published in the South Wales Evening Post , the book Uncle Jack (2005) appeared. Within its pages, the author Tony Williams identified his great-great-uncle, Sir John Williams, as “Britain’s most notorious murderer”.
    My father refused to believe that Williams, a gifted, brilliant and philanthropic doctor, could possibly be Jack the Ripper. Reading Uncle Jack did nothing to change that view. If anything, it reinforced my father’s opinion that, while Williams may have shared the same weaknesses as many of his fellow men as far as women were concerned, this did not make him a murderer. In any event, what motive could he possibly have had? Sadly, like all books written on the subject to date, Uncle Jack was also a huge disappointment to me. The many questions and explanations I was seeking remained unanswered.
    As my father and I worked our way through the long list of suspects, we listed the essential attributes the murderer would have to have in order to accomplish, and get away with, the terrible crimes: a knowledge of anatomy, some surgical skill, access to specialist knives, the baffling ability to disappear into thin air, and a motive, at the very least, to commit murder. Then my father’s eyes suddenly lit up and he told me whom he thought the murderer could have been….
    That was my first eureka moment.
    The realisation had come about as he recalled a short extract, just seven words, from a passage in one of the many scores of books we had read. It supported its author’s contention as to the identity of his suspect perfectly, but it didn’t ring true for us. It was only when we turned the passage about, that its true meaning, and the possible identity of the murderer, became clear, and the motive behind one of the murders, at least, was now patently obvious.
    But simple conjecture, however plausible, is never enough, and so we began our own line of research. As our investigation progressed and the evidence mounted, the person my father identified as the Whitechapel murderer became increasingly probable. Like pieces in a jigsaw, one important fact after another slotted neatly and effortlessly into place. Just as a thick London fog might lift to reveal a clear blue sky, the picture of what really happened all those decades ago gradually began to emerge. Not only were we able to confirm the murderer’s identity, we also unearthed the catalyst for the killings – why they started, why they ended, the motive for all the murders and an explanation for the injuries inflicted on each of the murdered women.
    After an intensive investigation lasting almost three years, I finally had the answers to my questions: Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman is the result of that research.

CHRONOLOGY OF THE