Shahdi Feroz chuckled. “You would be wrong, my dear, for a mad midwife did, in fact exist. Midwife Mary Pearcey was arrested and hanged for slashing to death the wife and child of her married lover in 1890. Even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle suggested the police might have been searching for a killer of the wrong gender. He wrote a story based on this idea.”
“That Sherlock Holmes should’ve been searching for Jill the Ripper, not Jack the Ripper?”
Shahdi Feroz laughed. “I agree with you, it isn’t very likely.”
“Not very! I mean, women killers don’t do that sort of thing. Chop up their victims and eat the parts? Do they?”
The Ripper scholar’s expression sobered. “Actually, a woman killer is quite capable of inflicting such mutilations. Criminologists have long interpreted such female-inflicted mutilations in a psychologically significant light. While lesbianism is a perfectly normal biological state for a fair percentage of the population and lesbians are no more or less likely than heterosexuals or gays to fit psychologically disturbed profiles, nonetheless there is a pattern which some lesbian killers do fit.”
“Lesbian killers?”
“Yes, criminologists have known for decades that one particular profile of disturbed woman killer, some of whom happen to be lesbians, kill their lovers in a fit of jealousy or anger. They often mutilate the face and breasts and sexual organs. Which the Ripper most certainly did. A few such murders have been solved only after police investigators stopped looking for a male psychotically deranged sexual killer and began searching, instead, for a female version of the psychotic sexual killer.”