Portrait Of A Killer: Jack The Ripper - Case Closed

Chapter Ten. Medicine Of The Courts

Dr. Llewellyn testified at the Mary Ann Nichols inquest that she had a slight laceration of the tongue and a bruise on the lower right jaw from the blow of a fist or the "pressure of a thumb." She had a circular bruise on the left side of her face that may have been from the pressure of a finger.

Her neck had been cut in two places. One incision was four inches long, beginning an inch below the left jaw, just below the left ear. A second incision also began on the left side, but about an inch lower than the first incision and a little forward of the ear. The second incision was "circular," Dr. Llewellyn stated. I don't know what he meant by "circular" unless he was trying to say that the incision was curved instead of straight - or simply that it encircled her neck. It was eight inches long, severed all blood vessels, muscle tissue, and cartilage, and nicked the vertebrae before terminating three inches below her right jaw.

Dr. Llewellyn's recital of the injuries to Mary Ann's abdomen was as unspecific as his other determinations. On the left side were one jagged incision "just about at the lower part of the abdomen" and "three or four" similar cuts that ran in a downward direction on the right side of the abdomen. In addition, there were "several" cuts running across the abdomen and small stabs to her "private parts." In his conclusion, Dr. Llewellyn said that the abdominal wounds were sufficient to cause death, and he believed they had been inflicted before her throat was cut. He based his conclusion on the lack of blood around her neck at the scene, but he failed to tell the coroner or the jurors that he had neglected to turn over the body. It is possible that he still didn't know that he had overlooked - or failed to see - a large quantity of blood and a six-inch clot.

All injuries were from left to right, Dr. Llewellyn testified, and this led him to the conclusion that the killer was "left handed." The weapon - and there was only one this time, he stated - was a long-bladed, "moderately" sharp knife used with "great violence." The bruises on her jaw and face, he said, were also consistent with a left-handed assailant, and he theorized that the killer placed his right hand over Mary Ann's mouth to stop her from screaming as he used his left hand to repeatedly slash her abdomen. In the scenario Dr. Llewellyn describes, the killer was facing Mary Ann when he suddenly attacked her. Either they were standing or the killer already had her on the ground, and he somehow managed to keep her from shrieking and thrashing about as he shoved up her clothes and started cutting through skin, fat, right down to her bowels.

It makes no sense for a calculating, logical, and intelligent killer like Jack the Ripper to slash open a victim's abdomen first, leaving her ample opportunity to put up a ferocious struggle as she suffered unimaginable terror, panic, and pain. Had the coroner carefully questioned Dr. Llewellyn about the relevant medical details, a very different reconstruction of Mary Ann Nichols's murder might have emerged. Maybe the killer did not approach her from the front. Maybe he never said a word to her. Maybe she never saw him.

A prevailing theory is that Jack the Ripper approached his victims and talked to them before they walked off together to an isolated, dark area where he suddenly and swiftly killed them. For quite some time, I assumed that this was the Ripper's modus operandi (MO) in all cases. As countless other people have done, I envisioned the Ripper using the ruse of wanting to solicit sex to get the woman to go with him. Since sex with prostitutes was often performed while the woman's back was turned to her client, this seemed like the perfect opportunity for the Ripper to cut her throat before she had any idea what was happening.

I don't discount the possibility that this MO might have been the Ripper's - at least in some of the murders. It really never occurred to me that it might be incorrect in any of them until I had a moment of enlightenment during the Christmas holiday of 2001 when I was in Aspen with my family. I was spending an evening alone in a condo at the base of Ajax Mountain, and as usual, I had several suitcases of research materials with me. I happened to be going through a Sickert art book for what must have been the twentieth time and stopped flipping pages when I got to his celebrated painting Ennui. What a strange thing, I thought, that this particular work of his was considered so extraordinary that Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother bought one of its five versions and hung it in Clarence House. Other versions are privately owned or hang in various prestigious museums, such as the Tate.

In all five versions of Ennui, a bored older man sits at a table, his cigar lit, a tall glass of what I assume to be beer in front of him. He stares off, deep in thought and completely uninterested in the woman behind him, leaning against a dresser, her head resting on her hand as she gazes unhappily at stuffed doves inside a glass dome. Central to the picture is a painting of a woman, a diva, on the wall behind the bored couple's heads. Having seen several versions of Ennui, I was aware that the diva in each has a slightly different appearance.

In three of them, she has what appears to be a thick feather boa thrown around her naked shoulders. But in the late Queen Mother's version and the one in the Tate there is no feather boa, just some indistinguishable reddish-brown shape that envelopes her left shoulder and extends across her upper arm and left breast. It wasn't until I was feeling ennui myself as I sat in the Aspen condo that I noticed a vertical crescent, rather fleshy-white, above the diva's left shoulder. The fleshy-white shape has what appears to be a slight bump on the left side that looks very much like an ear.

Upon closer inspection, the shape becomes a man's face half in the shadows. He is coming up behind the woman. She is barely turning her face as if she senses his approach. Under the low magnification of a lens, the half-shadowed face of the man is more apparent, and the woman's face begins to look like a skull. But at a higher magnification, the painting dissolves into the individual touches of Sickert's brushes. I went to London and looked at the original painting at the Tate, and I did not change my mind. I sent a transparency of the painting to the Virginia Institute of Forensic Science and Medicine to see if we could get a sharper look through technology.

Computerized image enhancement detects hundreds of gray shades that the human eye can't see and makes it possible for a fuzzy photograph or erased writing to become visible or discernible. While forensic image enhancement might work with bank videotapes or bad photographs, it does not work on paintings. All our efforts accomplished with Ennui was to separate Sickert's brush strokes until we ended up with the reverse of what he was doing when he put the strokes together. I was reminded, as I would be repeatedly in the Ripper case, that forensic science does not and will not ever take the place of human detection, deduction, experience, and common sense - and very hard work.

Sickert's Ennui was mentioned in the Ripper investigation long before I gave the matter a thought, but in a very different way from what I have just described. In one version of the painting, the feather-boa-enveloped diva has a white blob on her left shoulder that is slightly reminiscent of one of the stuffed doves under the glass dome on top of the dresser. Some Ripper enthusiasts insist that the "bird" is a "sea gull" and that Sickert cleverly introduced the "gull" into his painting to drop the clue that Jack the Ripper was Sir William Gull, who was Queen Victoria's surgeon. The advocates of this interpretation usually subscribe to the so-called royal conspiracy that implicates Dr. Gull and the Duke of Clarence in five Ripper murders.

The theory was advanced in the 1970s. Although my intention in this work is not to focus on who the Ripper was not, I will state categorically that he was not Dr. Gull or the Duke of Clarence. In 1888, Dr. Gull was seventy-one years old and had already suffered a stroke. The Duke of Clarence no more used a sharp blade than he was one. Eddy, as he was called, was born two months prematurely after his mother went out to watch her husband play ice hockey and apparently spent too much time being "whirled" about in a sledge. Not feeling well, she was taken back to Frogmore, where there was only a local practitioner to oversee Eddy's unexpected birth.

His developmental difficulties probably had less to do with his premature birth than they did with the small royal gene pool that spawned him. Eddy was sweet but obtuse. He was sensitive and gentle but a dismal student. He could barely ride a horse, was unimpressive during his military training, and was far too fond of clothes. The only cure his frustrated father, the Prince of Wales, and his grandmother the Queen could come up with was from time to time to launch Eddy on long voyages to distant lands.

Rumors about his sexual preferences and indiscretions continue to this day. It may be that he engaged in homosexual activity, as some books claim, but he was also involved with women. Perhaps Eddy was sexually immature and experimented with both sexes. He would not have been the first member of a royal family to play both sides of the net. Eddy's emotional attachments were to women, especially to his beautiful, doting mother, who did not seem unduly concerned that he cared more about clothes than the crown.

On July 12, 1884, Eddy's frustrated father, the Prince of Wales and future king, wrote to Eddy's German tutor, "It is with sincere regret that we learn from you that our son dawdles so dreadfully in the morning--

He will have to make up the lost time by additional study." In this unhappy seven-page missive the father wrote from Marlborough House, he is emphatic - if not desperate - that the son, who was in direct line to the throne, "must put his shoulder to the wheel."

Eddy had neither the energy nor the interest to go about preying on prostitutes, and to suggest otherwise is farcical. On the nights of at least three of the murders, he allegedly was not in London or even close by (not that he needs an alibi), and the murders continued after his untimely death on January 14,1892. Even if the royal family's surgeon, Dr. Gull, had not been elderly and infirm, he was far too consumed by fussing over the health of Queen Victoria and that of the rather frail Eddy to have had interest or time to run about Whitechapel in a royal carriage at all hours of the night, hacking up prostitutes who were blackmailing Eddy because of his scandalous "secret marriage" to one of them. Or something like that.

It is true, however, that Eddy had been blackmailed before, as evidenced by two letters he wrote to George Lewis, the formidable barrister who would later represent Whistler in a lawsuit involving Walter Sickert. Eddy wrote to Lewis in 1890 and 1891 because he had gotten himself into a compromising situation with two ladies of low standing, one of them a Miss Richardson. He was trying to disengage himself by paying for the return of letters he imprudently had written to her and another lady friend.

"I am very pleased to hear you are able to settle with Miss Richardson," Eddy wrote Lewis in November of 1890, "although?200 is rather expensive for letters." He goes on to say he heard from Miss Richardson "the other day" and that she was demanding yet another?100. Eddy promises he will "do all I can to get back" the letters he wrote to the "other lady," as well.

Two months later, Eddy writes, in "November" [crossed out] "December," 1891 from his "Cavelry [sic] Barracks" and sends Lewis a gift "in acknowledgement for the kindness you showed me the other day in getting me out of that trouble I was foolish enough to get into." But apparently "the other lady" wasn't so easily appeased because Eddy tells Lewis he had to send a friend to see her "and ask her to give up the two or three letters I had written to her… you may be certain that I shall be careful in the future not to get into any more trouble of the sort."

Whatever was in the letters the Duke of Clarence wrote to Miss Richardson and "the other lady" isn't known, but one might infer that he acted in a manner bound to cause the royal family trouble. He was well aware that news of his involvement with the sorts of women who would blackmail him would not have been well received by the public and certainly not by his grandmother. What this attempted extortion does show is that Eddy's inclination in such situations was not to have the offending parties murdered and mutilated, but to pay them off.

Sickert's works of art may contain "clues," but they are about himself and what he felt and did. His art is about what he saw, and it was filtered through an imagination that was sometimes childlike and at other times savage. The point of view in most of his works indicates that he watched people from behind. He could see them, but they could not see him. He could see his victims, but they could not see him. He would have watched Mary Ann Nichols for a while before he struck. He would have determined her degree of drunkenness and worked out his best approach.

He may have drifted up to her in the dark and showed her a coin and given her a line before going around behind her. Or he may have come out of the damp dark and suddenly was on her. Her injuries, if they were accurately described, are consistent with her killer yoking her and jerking her head back as he slashed his knife across her exposed throat. She may have bitten her tongue, explaining the abrasion Dr. Llewellyn found. If she tried to twist away, that could explain why the first incision was incomplete and basically a failed attempt. The bruising of her jaw and face may have come about as her killer tightened his restraint of her and cut her throat a second time, this incision so violent that in one stroke he almost decapitated her.

His position behind her would have prevented him from being splashed by the arterial blood that would have spurted out of her severed left carotid artery. Few murderers would choose to have blood spattering their faces, especially the blood of a victim who probably had diseases - at the very least, sexually transmitted ones. When Mary Ann was on her back, her killer moved to the lower part of her body and shoved up her clothes. She could not scream. She may have made no sound except the wet choking rushes and gurgles of air and blood sucking in and out of her severed windpipe. She may have aspirated her own blood and drowned in it as virtually all of her blood bled out from her body. All of this takes minutes.

Coroners' reports, including Dr. Llewellyn's, tend to assure us that the person "died instantly." There is no such thing. One might be disabled instantly by a gunshot wound to the head, but it takes minutes for someone to bleed to death, suffocate, drown, or cease all bodily functions due to a stroke or cardiac arrest. It is possible that Mary Ann was still conscious and aware of what was happening when her murderer began cutting up her abdomen. She may have been barely alive when he left her body in the courtyard.

Robert Mann was the Whitechapel Workhouse inmate in charge of the mortuary the morning her body was brought in. During the inquest inquiry of September 17th, Mann testified that at some point after 4:00 A.M., the police arrived at the workhouse and ordered him out of bed. They said there was a body parked outside the mortuary and to hurry along, so he accompanied them to the ambulance parked in the yard. They carried the body inside the mortuary, and Inspector Spratling and Dr. Llewellyn appeared briefly to take a look. Then the police left, and Mann recalled that it must have been around 5:00 A.M. when he locked the mortuary door and went to breakfast.

An hour or so later, Mann and another inmate named James Hatfield returned to the mortuary and began to undress the body without police or anyone else present. Mann swore to Coroner Baxter that no one had instructed him not to touch the body, and he was sure the police weren't present. You're absolutely certain of that? He was, well, maybe not. He could be mistaken. He couldn't remember. If the police said they were there, then maybe they were. Mann got increasingly confused during his testimony, and "was subject to fits… his statements hardly reliable," The Times reported.

Wynne Baxter was a solicitor and an experienced coroner who would preside over the inquest of Joseph Merrick two years later. Baxter would not tolerate lying in his courtroom or the abuse of proper protocol in a case. He was more than a little irked that inmates had removed Mary Ann Nichols's clothing. He rigorously questioned the confused, fitful Mann, who steadfastly maintained that the clothing was neither torn nor cut when the body arrived. All he and Hatfield had done was strip the dead woman naked and wash her before the doctor showed up so he wouldn't have to waste his time doing it.

They cut and tore clothing to speed things along and make their chore a bit easier. She was wearing a lot of layers, some of them stiff with dried blood, and it is very difficult to pull clothing over the arms and legs of a body that is as rigid as a statue. When Hatfield took the stand, he agreed with everything Mann had said. The two inmates unlocked the mortuary after breakfast. They were by themselves when they cut and tore off the dead woman's clothing.

They washed her, they were alone with her body, and they had no reason to think there was anything inappropriate about that. Transcripts of their testimonies at the inquest give the impression that the men were frightened and bewildered because they didn't think they had done anything wrong. They really didn't understand what the fuss was about. The workhouse mortuary wasn't supposed to handle police cases, anyway. It was just a whistle-stop for dead inmates on their way to a pauper's grave.

In Latin, forensic means "forum," or a public place where Roman lawyers and orators presented their cases before judges. Forensic or legal medicine is the medicine of the courts, and in 1888, it hardly existed in practice. The sad truth is, there wasn't much physical evidence that could have been either utilized or ruined in Mary Ann Nichols's murder. But not knowing with certainty whether Mary Ann's clothing was already cut or torn when her body arrived at the mortuary is a significant loss. Whatever the killer did would reveal more about him and his emotions at the time of the murder.

Based on the descriptions of Mary Ann's body at the scene, I suspect her clothing was disarrayed but not cut or torn off, and it was on the early morning of August 31st when the Ripper advanced to his next level of violence. He shoved up her ulster, woolen petticoats, flannel underclothing, and skirts. He made one jagged, then "three or four" quick slashes downward, and "several" across, almost in the pattern of a grid. A few small stabs to the genitals and he was gone, vanished in the dark.

Without reviewing autopsy diagrams or photographs, it is very difficult to reconstruct injuries and re-create what a killer did and what he might have been feeling. Wounds can be fierce or they can be tentative. They can show hesitation or rage. Three or four shallow incisions on a wrist in addition to the deep one that severed veins tell a different story about a person's suicide than one decisive cut does.

Psychiatrists interpret mental states and emotional needs through a patient's demeanor and confessions of feelings and behavior. The physicians of the dead have to make those same interpretations through the braille of injuries old and new and debris on the body and the way the person was dressed and where he or she died. Listening to the dead speak is a unique gift and demands highly specialized training. The language of silence is hard to read, but the dead do not lie. They may be difficult to understand, and we might misinterpret them or fail to find them before their communications have begun to fade. But if they still have something to say, their veracity is unimpeachable. Sometimes they continue to talk long after they have been reduced to bone.

If people have a great deal to drink and get into their cars or into fights, their dead bodies admit it through alcohol levels. If a man was a heroin and cocaine addict, his dead body displays the needle tracks, and the metabolites morphine and benzoylecgonine show up in urine, the vitreous fluid of the eye, and the blood. If one frequently engaged in anal sex or was into genital tattoos and body piercing, or if a woman shaved off her pubic hair because her lover's fantasy was to have sex with a child - these people speak openly after they are dead. If a teenage boy tried for a more intense orgasm by masturbating while dressed in leather and partially compressing the blood vessels in his neck with a noose - but he didn't mean to slip off the chair he was standing on and hang himself - he'll confess. Shame and lies are for those left behind.

It is startling what the dead have to say. I never cease to be amazed and pained. One young man was so determined to end his life that when he shot himself in the chest with his crossbow and didn't die, he pulled out the arrow and shot himself again. Anger. Desperation. Hopelessness. No turning back. I want to die, but I'll go ahead and make family vacation plans and write down the details of my funeral so I don't inconvenience my family. I want to die, but I want to look nice, so I'll put on makeup and fix my hair and shoot myself in the heart because I don't want to ruin my face, the wife decides after her husband has run off with a younger woman.

I'll shoot you in the mouth, bitch, because I'm tired of hearing you nag. I'll throw your body in the tub and dump acid all over it, you cunt. That's what you get for screwing around on me. I'll stab you in the eyes because I'm tired of you staring at me. I'll drain your blood and drink it because aliens are taking all of mine. I'll dismember you and boil you piece by piece so I can flush you down the toilet and no one will ever know. Hop on the back of my Harley, you slut, and I'll take you to a motel and cut you hundreds of times with a razor and scissors and watch you slowly die, because that's the initiation I gotta do before I can be a member of the gang.

Mary Ann Nichols's wounds tell us that the Ripper did not want her to struggle or scream, and he was ready for the next step of taking his knife below her throat and destroying her naked body. But he wasn't a master of this move yet and could go only so far. He did not remove her bowels or organs. His cuts were only so deep. He took no body part with him as a trophy or a talisman that might bring him sexual fantasy and wonder when he was alone in one of his secret rooms. For the first time, I believe, the Ripper had ripped, and he needed to think about that for a while and feel what it was like and if he wanted more.

"I like the work some more blood," the Ripper wrote October 5th.

"I must have some more," the Ripper wrote November 2nd.

It was scarcely a week later when Jack the Ripper would publicly call himself by that infernal name. Perhaps it makes sense. Before his murder of Mary Ann Nichols, he had not "ripped" yet. Sickert came up with the stage name "Mr. Nemo" for a reason, and it wasn't one driven by modesty. Sickert would have picked the name "Jack the Ripper" for a good reason, too. We can only guess what it was.

"Jack" was street slang for sailor or man, and "Ripper" is someone who "rips." But Walter Sickert was never obvious. I scanned through a dozen dictionaries and encyclopedias dating from 1755 to 1906, checking definitions. Sickert could have come up with the name "Jack the Ripper" by reading Shakespeare. As Helena Sickert said in her memoirs, when she and her brothers were growing up, they were all "Shakespeare mad," and Sickert was known to quote long passages of Shakespeare as an actor. Throughout his life he loved to stand up at dinner parties and deliver Shakespearean soliloquies. The word "Jack" is found in Coriolanus, The Merchant of Venice, and Cymbeline. Shakespeare doesn't use the word "ripper," but there are variations of it in King John and Macbeth.

Definitions of "Jack" include: boots; a diminutive of John used contemptuously to mean a saucy fellow; a footboy who pulls off his master's boots; a scream; a male; American slang for a stranger; American slang for a jackass; a cunning fellow who can do anything - such as a "Jack of all trades." Definitions of "Ripper" include: one who rips; one who tears; one who cuts; a fine fellow who dresses well; a good fast horse; a good play or part.

Jack the Ripper was the stranger, the cunning fellow who could do anything. He "hath his belly-full of fighting." He was a "cock that nobody can match." He ripped "up the womb of your dear mother England." Sickert, in the deep crevices of his psyche, might have felt that from his own mother's womb he had been "ripp'd." What happened inside his mother's womb was unjust and not his fault. He would repay.