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his contention that Sir William Gull and his co-conspirators, John Netley, who became Prince Albert Victor’s coach driver when travelling incognito, and the flamboyant artist Walter Sickert, whom Princess Alexandra had asked to act as mentor to Prince Albert, or Eddy as he was known to his family, her immature son and heir apparent to the throne, had enticed Nichols, Chapman and Eddowes – on different nights – into a carriage. There, Gull swiftly despatched them by cutting their throats, then mutilated their bodies. Netley, assisted by Sickert, had then dumped the bodies where they were found soon afterwards. Stride was murdered outside the coach, and then Netley had thrown her body into a yard through an open gateway in Berner Street as Sir Robert Anderson, Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, acted in the most unlikely guise of a look-out and fourth conspirator .
    Catherine Eddowes, the killer’s next victim within the hour, Knight claimed, had been murdered in the mistaken belief that she was Mary Kelly. Her body was deposited in Mitre Square, which, Knight maintained, held great significance for Freemasons. The mitre is an instrument used in architecture and consists of two straight pieces, usually made of wood, both bevelled at 45 degrees, where they are joined to form a right angle. It is also one of the two principal instruments of Freemasonry (the other being the compass) and is used in Masonic ceremonies.
    It was, Knight suggested, the murder of Catherine Eddowes in Mitre Square that gave the Ripper a reputation for having supernatural powers, and he referred to the suggestion of an ‘invisible man’, which he said had been made by earlier writers. In other words, Knight suggested, “the sort of person whose presence on the streets would not have been noticed; like a policeman.” He could as easily have added ‘or a woman’, since such an obvious possibility must surely have presented itself to him.
     
    In the annals of crime, the incidence of females using knives in attacks is highly unusual, and the number of females who are driven to murder and mutilate their victims is rarer still. But they are not unheard of and there are in fact, several modern parallels with the Whitechapel murders.
    In 2004 a gruesome news report rocked the United States and shocked the rest of the civilised world. The murdered body of a young woman had been discovered in her own home. She was identified as 28-year-old Bobbie Jo Stinnett from Kansas City, and she was eight months’ pregnant at the time of her death. She had been strangled, her stomach cut open and her unborn baby ripped out of her womb. The baby survived and was presented to family and friends as the murderer’s own child. What made the crime all the more appalling was that the convicted killer, 36-year-old Lisa Montgomery, was a woman.
    On 10 October 2011 another American, Annette Morales-Rodriguez from Wisconsin, was charged with the murder of a pregnant woman. Desperate to have a baby son with her new boyfriend, she invited heavily pregnant Martiza Ramirez-Cruz into her home. There Morales-Rodriguez battered her with a baseball bat before strangling her to death. She then used a knife to cut open her victim’s abdomen, and removed the foetus in an attempt to replicate a Caesarean operation she had seen on the Discovery Channel. At least five other similar cases of attacks on pregnant women in America have been reported.
    In March 2005, two sisters, Linda and Charlotte Mulhall, dubbed the ‘Scissor Sisters’, aged 30 and 32 years respectively, made headline news across Ireland when they demonstrated graphically that women murderers could be as vicious as their male counterparts. They had attacked and killed their mother, Kathleen’s, abusive lover, Farah Swaleh Noor, a Kenyan immigrant and known violent criminal, after he had made repeated sexual advances to Linda in her central Dublin terraced home. Mr Justice Carney, who presided at the