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By Root 149 0

from the asylum several times during 1888, it was proven that no occasions match the dates of the murders. Dr William Thomas of Anglesey was the Ripper according to continued local oral tradition. He practised about three-quarters of a mile from Buck’s Row, and supposedly returned home to Aberffraw unexpectedly after each murder. He suffered a breakdown and poisoned himself in 1889. Dr William Westcott was outed as a suspect in 1992 mainly because he was a founder of the Order of the Golden Dawn and the authors detected ritualism in the murders. Dr Rosalyn D’Onston (real name Robert Onston Stephenson) started out as a Ripper-hunter, tracking his suspect, one Dr Morgan Davies, but then turned hunted when he was reported to the police by his assistant and, much later, fingered by Melvin Harris in The True Face of Jack the Ripper (1994) and later still by Ivor Edwards in Jack the Ripper’s Black Magic Rituals (2003).The most recent doctor to come under scrutiny is:

Dr John Williams (1840–1926)

Fingered by Tony Williams with Humphrey Price in Uncle Jack (2005)

Or ‘The John Williams?’ as someone asks the author at one point in his narrative. By this they mean another one of several doctors to the royal family and the driving force behind the National Library of Wales. Just in case you thought they were talking about the composer of the music for Jaws, which would be outlandish even by Ripper-theory standards.

This John Williams was an obstetrician. His outspokenness and his arrogance did little to endear him to colleagues or to slow his career’s progress at University College Hospital. His unlikable character led to rumours of nepotism, although these may have been engendered partly by jealousy over his financial success. He rose through the medical ranks to be eventually appointed surgeon accoucher to Princess Beatrice. He was the doctor who delivered ‘The Lost Prince’. The mention that he became a Freemason is a blind as far as Ripper theories go.

The author, having uncovered the truth in a dismayingly large font size, seems a little uncomfortable at pointing the finger at such a distinguished ancestor (Uncle Jack was in fact his grandmother’s great-great-uncle, but that many ‘greats’ on a book-jacket may invite disrespectful comparison with the material inside).This perhaps explains his focus on the medical research aspect of the doctor’s crimes.While not exactly downplaying the murders themselves, the book is one of a handful that does not carry the depressingly-familiar mortuary photographs of the victims.

At the National Library of Wales, Williams the author stumbled across a cache of his ancestor’s papers. A notebook provides Williams the doctor’s records of his patients. Among them is an entry about performing an abortion on ‘Mary Anne Nichols’ in 1885. Passing over that ‘e’, the author begins to wonder… According to his theory, Williams the doctor was trapped in a loveless marriage with a barren wife. At some point he took a mistress. Called ‘Mary’ according to family tradition, the author suspects it was Mary Kelly, who certainly lived in Wales for a time. When the doctor moved to London, he installed her in a flat near Cleveland Street. Later, he had a change of heart and returned his attentions to his wife, leaving Kelly to fend for herself.

The murders are said to have been committed in the doctor’s quest for greater understanding of the workings of the female reproductive organs which he believed would help him to solve the problem of female infertility. This, in turn, would make his name and help his wife to bear children. Williams sought out victims. These he found among the prostitutes he’d treated at a workhouse infirmary in Whitechapel where he did charitable work (the author makes several leaps to explain the lack of records recording the doctor’s attendance there, despite existing attendance records for the period showing otherwise). Needless to say, Kelly’s death is again the conclusion of his crimes. Into this butchery the author inserts his theory’s only Masonic reading, tying in two passages from