Tony Williams: Uncle Jack

It is now nearly 120 years since London was terrorised by the brutal and apparently random slaughter of five destitute women. The killer, known to the world as Jack the Ripper, was never brought to justice but his identity has remained a source of fascination over the years. Indeed, the revulsion generated by his crimes has mellowed with the passing of time, and the terror he generated has softened to a morbid curiosity.

The identity of the Ripper has been the subject of much scholarly and literary debate, and has developed into an industry of its own. Ripper walks, books and websites abound. Most recently the novelist Patricia Cornwell earned herself the nickname Pat the Ripper when she spent more than $10 million in a quest to identify the Victorian painter Walter Sickert as the Ripper. In her efforts to prove her theory she enraged the art world by slashing up several of Sickert's works in a futile search for DNA evidence.

The line-up of Ripper suspects has changed demographically over the years. At the time of the murders, the police suspected local identities such as Kosminski, a Polish Jew "deranged by his indulgence in solitary vices". However, from the beginning there were veiled suggestions of a killer of a better class than the usual Whitechapel denizen — a medical man, perhaps. Several of the women had various parts of their reproductive organs removed after death. Recently, attention has focused on better connected and far more interesting suspects. These range from Queen Victoria's son, the Duke of Clarence, and her personal physician Sir William Gull, through a conspiracy of Freemasons and down to celebrated Victorian murderers, psychopaths and perverts.

Many of the theories make fascinating reading, as much for the descriptions of life in Victorian London as for any genuine hope that the case may have been solved. New suspects emerge regularly, and since Cornwell's outing of Sickert was more than four years ago, the time has become ripe for another suspect to emerge.

Through the pen of Tony Williams, he has. Predictably, perhaps, the new face is that of a respected public figure; less predictably, he has been "grassed up" by a member of his own family.

Sir John Williams was from Welsh farming stock. He became an obstetrician who attended many royal births, who founded the National Library of Wales, and who, according to his great-great-nephew, had a penchant for carrying out forcible hysterectomies in the back streets of Whitechapel on very recently deceased prostitutes.

Sir John Williams is something of enigma. A disciple of Jenner, he was an early proponent of hygienic surgical procedures. Intelligent, ambitious and hard working, he earned the respect of his colleagues, but clearly not their affection. However, he retired from surgery and gave up his hospital consultancies within a short time of the last of the murders, that of Mary Kelly, and at a time when he ought to have been at the height of his professional achievements.

His descendant, who began his inquiries about his ancestor out of curiosity, has been persuaded by a number of circumstances that his retirement is not merely coincidence, but was a direct consequence of Sir John having been the killer.

The evidence is slim. A note found in some private materials suggests that Sir John was in Whitechapel at the time of one of the killings. An entry in a book of accounts hints that he had a hitherto unknown practice in the Whitechapel Infirmary. And a knife, preserved among the knight's personal effects, may match that used by the killer.

Sir John has not previously featured in the Ripper line-up. This is probably because he was such an eminently dull and charmless character that he drew no attention. A large part of the book is devoted to the man himself, and it suffers from its author's inability to invest him with any trace of personality and humanity. The tension and pathos which gave the Ripper murders their lasting fascination are also missing from the narrative. This is no ripping yarn.

But for those familiar with the murders, it is always exciting to consider new suspects. Williams, with the able research assistance of Humphrey Price, has uncovered fresh material which is interesting but far from conclusive. A book in which the most used word is "perhaps" and the most common punctuation is the question mark will never be accepted as the final answer to the riddle that is the Ripper.

* Ross Burns is a Crown prosecutor who previously reviewed Patricia Cornwell's Portrait of a Killer for the Herald.
* Humphrey Price Orion, $35