Head Scratchers

New Claim: Jack The Ripper Was Woman Because Items Laid Out In “Typically Feminine Manner”

Not that it really matters now, but Jack the Ripper, the unidentified Whitechapel, London serial killer of the late 1800s, might not have been a “Jack” after all, as a new book by legal consultant John Morris attests there’s evidence that the murderer could have been the barren wife of a physician.

Dozens of people have been named possible suspects over the years, and Morris says that Welsh-born Lizzie Williams, the spouse of Dr. John Williams, carried out the killings because she could not have children. For the uninitiated, Jack the Ripper took the lives of several prostitutes in a very violent manner — slitting their throats and in some cases taking out their wombs, so Morris essentially claims that Lizzie was so bitter about being unable to reproduce that she sought revenge on women, many of whom happened to be sex workers. Morris also points out that various sources state that none of the women were sexually assaulted by Ripper, and this must mean the psycho life snatcher was a woman, as any man would have sexually assaulted a woman he was going to kill or had already killed… right?

Morris adds that Lizzie didn’t lead all that rewarding a life, as her husband was having an affair and she lost her family fortune. What’s weirder is that Mary Kelly, one of the victims, was having an affair with John, so while Lizzie was on a killing spree, she decided to punish the Other Woman through means of death.

Another piece of evidence in Morris’s case states that the personal items of one victim, Annie Chapman, were laid out at her feet “in a feminine manner.” Do I even want to dare guessing what that means? Were these woman’s belongings carefully set down or organized in a uniform way? Because men can be neat freaks, too.

Most of the suspects for Jack the Ripper have been male, but this is not the first time someone has questioned whether Jack was actually a Jacqueline. In 2006, an Australian scientist used swabs from letters that Ripper had allegedly written and found that the killer (or author of the letters, at least) could have been a woman. Given the gruesome condition of the victims, who had been mutilated and sliced open, historians everywhere have speculated that the killer had some medical knowledge, which fits with the profile of Lizzie and her husband John, a major suspect himself.

We’re so far away from Jack the Ripper’s era that we cannot know for sure who the mysterious creep was, but if Lizzie was indeed responsible for all those deaths, there needs to be evidence other than “the killer was very precise and girly in her placing of objects” for the case before I can believe it.

[Daily Mail]

TAGS: Jack the Ripper | jack the ripper a woman

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