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sisters’ subsequent trial, made a chilling remark during sentencing when he said: “It was the most grotesque killing that has occurred in my professional lifetime.”
    In the evidence, it was revealed that, encouraged by their mother, Charlotte Mulhall had slit Noor’s throat with a Stanley knife – significantly she cut it twice – while her sister delivered several blows to his skull with a hammer. He was then stabbed repeatedly. But it was what the sisters did to Noor’s corpse that earned them notoriety. In order to dispose of their victim, they dragged Noor’s lifeless body to the bathroom where they dismembered it using a bread knife and a hammer. Over a period of several hours, the victim’s head, limbs and penis were severed; a towel was used to soak up the blood. The sisters then put the body parts into plastic bags. Some were dumped in Dublin’s Royal Canal, where a leg still wearing a sock surfaced ten days later. The bag containing the head was buried in a local park; then, at a later date, it was recovered and taken to a field where Linda Mulhall smashed the head to pieces with a hammer and allegedly buried the remains. Neither the murdered man’s head nor penis have been found.
    Charlotte Mulhall received a mandatory life sentence for murder. Linda Mulhall was given a fifteen-year sentence for manslaughter . Kathleen Mulhall, who initially fled to England, was later captured and brought back to Ireland. She received a five-year sentence for helping to clean the scene of the crime. Her daughters refused to testify against her in court.
     
    In what he saw as an established fact or truth of nature, Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) demonstrated in his poem, ‘The Female of the Species’, penned in 1911, that it is the female , rather than the male, who has the greater propensity to commit violence. Two verses in particular convey this point most effectively:
    When the Himalayan peasant meets the he-bear in his pride,
He shouts to scare the monster, who will often turn aside.
But the she-bear thus accosted rends the peasant tooth and nail.
For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.
     
    When the early Jesuit fathers preached to Hurons and Choctaws,
They prayed to be delivered from the vengeance of the squaws.
’Twas the women, not the warriors, turned those stark enthusiasts pale.
For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.
     
    Having established that women are capable of committing the most terrible acts of murder and maiming, even though they may have never previously committed an act of violence, then using cleverness and cunning to try to avoid detection, my father and I thought it was at least possible that a woman could have been responsible for the Whitechapel murders. The remnants of women’s clothing found in the ashes of Mary Kelly’s fireplace, and the firm, consistent testimony given by Mrs Caroline Maxwell, both to the police in her written statement, and to Dr Roderick McDonald J.P., the coroner who presided over the inquest into Kelly’s death, merely confirmed to us that her murderer must have been a woman.
    Mrs Caroline Maxwell was a respectable married woman, the wife of an assistant lodging-house keeper in Dorset Street, Whitechapel. Despite the caution issued to her by the coroner during the inquest at the Shoreditch Town Hall, “You must be careful about your evidence, because it is different to other people’s,” Maxwell steadfastly maintained that she had told the truth. Walter Dew described her in his memoirs half a century later as “a sane and sensible woman”, adding that “her reputation was excellent”. But Caroline Maxwell’s evidence was not the starting point of our research.
    The list of Ripper suspects is not endless, but it is long. We found ourselves wading through the minutiae of a motley collection of rogues. One of the more popular contemporary suspects was Montague Druitt, the barrister who drowned himself three weeks after