Portrait Of A Killer: Jack The Ripper - Case Closed

Chapter Fourteen. Crochet Work And Flowers

Mary Ann Nichols's body remained at the mortuary in Whitechapel until Thursday, September 6, when her decomposing flesh was finally allowed privacy and rest.

She was enclosed in a "solid-looking" wooden coffin and loaded into a horse-drawn hearse that carried her seven miles to Ilford Cemetery, where she was buried. The sun shone only five minutes that day, and it was misty and rainy.

The next day, Friday, the British Association's fifty-eighth annual meeting took up important topics such as the necessity of lightning rods being properly installed and inspected, and the vagaries of lightning and the great damage it and wild geese could do to telegraph wires. The hygienic qualities of electric lighting were presented, and a physicist and an engineer debated whether electricity was a form of matter or energy. It was announced that poverty and misery could be eliminated if "you could prevent weakness and sickness and laziness and stupidity." One bit of good news was that Thomas Edison had just started a factory that would begin producing 18,000 phonographs a year for?20 or?25 each.

The weather had been worse this day than yesterday, with no sunshine reported at all, and squalls roared in from the north. Heavy rain and sleet smacked down, and Londoners moved about in a cold mist, going to and from work and later to the theaters. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was still drawing large audiences at the Lyceum, and a parody of it called Hide and Seekyll had opened at the Royalty Theater. The play She was reviewed in that day's paper as "a formidable experiment of dramatizing," offering a murder and cannibals at the Gaiety. At the Alhambra, one of Walter Sickert's favorite music halls, the doors opened at 10:30 P.M. with a cast of dancing women and Captain Clives and his "marvelous dog."

Annie Chapman was sleeping off her last glass of spirits while London's early night life was going on. The week had been a bad one, worse than usual. Annie was forty-seven years old and missing her two front teeth. She was five feet tall, overweight, with blue eyes and short, dark-brown, wavy hair. As the police later put it, "she had seen her better day." On the street she was known as "Dark Annie." In some accounts her estranged husband was said to be a veterinary surgeon, but in most of them he was described as a coachman employed by a gentleman who lived in the Royal Borough of Windsor.

Annie and her husband had no contact with each other after they separated, and she made no inquiries into his life until her weekly allowance of ten shillings suddenly stopped in late 1886. One day, a wretched-looking woman, having the appearance of a tramp, appeared at the Merry Wives of Windsor public house and inquired about Chapman. She said she had walked twenty miles from London, staying in a lodging house along the way, and wanted to know if her husband was ill or using that as an excuse not to send money. The woman at the door of the Merry Wives of Windsor informed the tramp that Mr. Chapman had died on Christmas Day. He left Annie nothing but two children who wanted nothing to do with her: a boy who was an inmate of the Cripples' Home, and a well-educated daughter living in France.

Annie moved in with a sieve maker for a while, and when he left her, she borrowed small sums from her brother, who finally cut her off. She had no further contact with any members of her family, and when her health allowed, she made pennies by selling crochet work and flowers. Acquaintances described her as "clever" and industrious by nature, but the more her addiction to alcohol tightened its grip on her life, the less she cared what she did to earn her keep.

During the four months before her death, Annie had been in and out of the infirmary. She was spending her nights in Spitalfields doss-houses, the most recent one located at 35 Dorset Street, which joined Commercial Street and Crispin Street like a short rung on a ladder. There were an estimated 5,000 lodging-house beds in the hellish dens of Spitalfields, and The Times later observed that at Annie's inquest the "glimpse of life… was sufficient to make [jurors] feel there was much in the 19th century civilization of which they had small reason to be proud." In Annie Chapman's world, the poor were "herded like cattle," and were "near starvation." Violence smoldered day and night, fueled by misery, alcohol, and rage.

Four nights before her death, Annie got into an altercation with another lodger named Eliza Cooper, who confronted her in the lodging-house kitchen, demanding the return of a scrap of soap Annie had borrowed. Annie angrily threw a halfpenny on the table and told her to go buy it herself. The two women began to quarrel and carried their disagreement to the nearby Ringer public house, where Annie slapped Eliza across the face and Eliza punched Annie in the left eye and chest.

Annie's bruises were still noticeable the early Saturday morning of September 8th, when John Donovan, the deputy of the lodging house on Dorset Street, demanded payment of eight pennies for a bed if she planned to stay. She replied, "I have not got it. I am weak and ill and have been in the infirmary." Donovan reminded her that she knew the rules. She replied that she would go out and get the money and please not to let her bed to someone else. Donovan would later tell police that she "was under the influence of drink" when the night watchman escorted her off the property.

Annie took the first right on Little Paternoster Row, and when the night watchman saw her last she was on Brushfield Street, which ran east to west between what was then called Bishopsgate Without Norton Folgate and Commercial Street. Had she headed but a few blocks north on Commercial Street, she would have reached Shoreditch, where there were several music halls (the Shoreditch Olympia, Harwood's, and Griffin's). A little farther north was Hoxton - or the very route Walter Sickert sometimes took when he walked home to 54 Broadhurst Gardens after evenings at various music halls, theaters, or wherever it was he went on his obsessive wanderings late at night and in the early morning hours.

At 2:00 A.M., when Annie emerged onto London's East End streets, it was fifty degrees and sodden out. She was dressed in a black skirt, a long black jacket hooked at the neck, an apron, wool stockings, and boots. Around her neck was a piece of a black woollen scarf tied in front with a knot, and under it she wore a handkerchief that she recently had bought from another lodger. On the wedding ring finger of her left hand she wore three base metal or "flash" rings. In a pocket on the inside of her skirt was a small comb case, a piece of coarse muslin, and a torn bit of envelope that she had been seen to pick off the lodging-house floor and use to tuck away two pills she had gotten from the infirmary. The torn envelope had a red postmark on it.

If anyone saw Annie alive over the next three and a half hours, no witness ever came forward. At quarter to five, thirty-seven-year-old John Richardson, a porter at the Spitalfields Market, headed toward 29 Han-bury Street, a rooming house for the poor that, like so many other dilapidated dwellings in Spitalfields, had once been a barnlike workplace for weavers to toil on hand looms until steam power had put them out of business. Richardson's mother rented the house and sublet half of its rooms to seventeen people. He, being the dutiful son, had dropped by, just as he always did when he was up early, to check the security of the cellar. Two months ago someone had broken into it and had stolen two saws and two hammers. His mother also ran a packing-case business, and stolen tools were no small matter.

Satisfied that the cellar was safely locked, Richardson went through a passage that led into the backyard and sat on the steps to cut a bothersome piece of leather off his boot. His knife was "an old table knife," he later testified at the inquest, "about five inches long," and he had used it earlier to cut "a bit of carrot," then absently tucked the knife into a pocket. He estimated he was sitting out on the steps no longer than several minutes, his feet resting on flagstone that was just inches from where Annie Chapman's mutilated body would be found. He neither heard nor saw anyone. Richardson laced up his mended boot and headed to the market just as the sun began to rise.

Albert Cadosch lived next door at 25 Hanbury, his backyard separated from 29 Hanbury by a temporary wooden fence that was five to five and a half feet high. He later told police that at 5:25 A.M., he walked into his backyard and heard a voice say "No" from the other side of the fence. Several minutes later, something heavy fell against the palings. He did not check to see what had caused the noise or who had said "No."

Five minutes later, at 5:30 A.M., Elisabeth Long was walking along Hanbury Street, heading west to Spitalfields Market, when she noticed a man talking to a woman only a few yards from the fence around the yard at 29 Hanbury Street, where Annie Chapman's body would be found on the other side barely half an hour later. Mrs. Long testified at the inquest that she was "positive" the woman was Annie Chapman. Annie and the man were talking loudly but seemed to be getting along,

Mrs. Long recalled. The only fragment of the conversation she overheard as she made her way down the street was the man asking, "Will you?" and the woman identified as Annie replying, "Yes."

Obviously, the times given by witnesses conflict, and they never stated at the inquest how they happened to know what time it was when they walked past people or stumbled onto bodies. In that era, most people told time by their routines, the position of the sun in the sky, and church clocks that chimed the hour or half hour. Harriet Hardiman of 29 Han-bury testified at the inquest she was certain it was 6:00 A.M. when she was awakened by a commotion outside her window. She was a cat meat saleswoman whose shop was inside the rooming house; she made her living by going out with a barrow full of stinking fish or slop left over from slaughterhouses to sell to cat owners while long lines of felines followed along her routes.

Harriet was fast asleep on the ground floor when the excited voices woke her with a start. Fearing the building was on fire, she awakened her son and told him to go outside and look. When he returned, he said that a woman had been murdered in the yard. Both mother and son had slept soundly all night, and Harriet Hardiman later testified she often heard people on the stairs and in the passage that led into the yard, but all had been quiet. John Richardson's mother, Amelia, had been awake half the night and certainly she would have been aware had someone been arguing or screaming. But she claimed she had heard not a sound, either.

Residents were continually in and out of the rooming house at 29 Hanbury, and the front and back doors were always kept unlocked, as was the passage door that opened onto the enclosed yard at the rear of the house. It would have been easy for anyone to unlatch the gate and walk into the yard, which is what Annie Chapman must have done just before she was murdered. At 5:55 A.M., John Davis, a porter who lived in the rooming house, headed out to market and had the distinct misfortune of discovering Annie Chapman's body in the yard between the house and the fence, very close to where Richardson had been sitting on the stone steps about an hour earlier mending his boot.

She was on her back, her left hand on her left breast, her right arm by her side, her legs bent. Her disarrayed clothing was pulled up to her knees, and her throat was cut so deeply that her head was barely attached to her body. Annie Chapman's killer had slashed open her abdomen and removed her bowels and a flap of her belly. They were in a puddle of blood on the ground above her left shoulder, an arrangement that may or may not be symbolic.

Quite likely, the placement of the body organs and tissue was utilitarian - to get them out of the Ripper's way. It would become apparent that he was after the kidneys, uterus, and vagina, but one can't dismiss the supposition that he also intended to shock people. He succeeded. John Davis fled upstairs to his room and drank a glass of brandy. Then he frantically rushed inside his workshop for a tarpaulin to drape over the body and ran to find the nearest police constable.

Moments later, Inspector Joseph Chandler of the Commercial Street police station arrived. When he saw what he was dealing with, he sent for Dr. George Phillips, a divisional surgeon. A crowd was gathering and voices cried out, "Another woman has been murdered!" With little more than a glance, Dr. Phillips determined that the victim's throat had been cut before her "stomach" was mutilated, and that she had been dead about two hours. He noted that her face seemed swollen and that her tongue was protruding between her front teeth. She had been strangled to death, Dr. Phillips said - or at least rendered unconscious before the killer cut her throat. Rigor mortis was just beginning to set in, and the doctor noted "six patches" of blood on the back wall, about eighteen inches above Annie's head.

The droplets ranged from very small to the size of a sixpence and each "patch" was in a tight cluster. In addition, there were "marks" of blood on the fence in back of the house. Neatly arranged at Annie's feet were a bit of coarse muslin, a comb, and a piece of bloody torn envelope with the Sussex Regiment coat of arms on it and a London postmark with the date August 20,1888. Nearby were two pills. Her cheap metal rings were missing, and an abrasion on her finger indicated that they had been forcibly removed. Later, on an undated, unsigned postcard believed to have been sent by the Ripper to the City Police, the writer skillfully drew a cartoon figure with a cut throat. He wrote "poor annie" and claimed to have her rings "in my possession."

None of Annie's clothing was torn, her boots were on, and her black coat was still buttoned and hooked. The neck of the coat inside and out was stained with blood. Dr. Phillips also pointed out drops of blood on her stockings and her left sleeve. It was not mentioned in the newspaper or police reports, but Dr. Phillips must have scooped up her intestines and other body tissues and placed them back inside her abdominal cavity before covering her body with sacking. Police helped place her into the same shell that had cradled Mary Ann Nichols's body until the day before, when she had finally been taken away to be buried. Police transported Annie Chapman's body by hand ambulance to the Whitechapel mortuary.

It was daylight now. Hundreds of excited people were hurrying to the enclosed yard at 29 Hanbury. Neighbors on either side of the rooming house began charging admission to step inside for a better view of the bloodstained area where Annie had been slain.

If not Pay one Penny amp; Walk inside wrote Jack the Ripper on October 10.

On the same postcard, the Ripper added, "I am waiting every evening for the coppers at Hampstead heath," a sprawling parkland famous for its healing springs, its bathing ponds, and its longtime appeal to writers, poets, and painters, including Dickens, Shelley, Pope, Keats, and Constable. On bank holidays, as many as 100,000 people had been known to visit the rolling farmlands and dense copses. Walter Sickert's home in South Hampstead was no more than a twenty-minute walk away from Hampstead Heath.

Alleged Ripper letters not only drop hints - such as the "Have You Seen The 'Devil'" postcard, which could be an allusion to East End residents charging money for peeks at the Ripper's crime scenes - but also reveal an emerging geographical profile. Many of the locations mentioned - some of them repeatedly - are places and areas that were well known to Walter Sickert: the Bedford Music Hall in Camden Town, which he painted many times; his home at 54 Broadhurst Gardens; and theatrical, artistic, and commercial parts of London that Sickert would have frequented.

Postmarks and mentions of locations in close proximity to the Bedford Music Hall include Hampstead Road, King's Cross, Tottenham Court. Somers Town, Albany Street, St. Pancras Church.

Those that are in close proximity to 54 Broadhurst Gardens include Kilburn, Palmerston Road (mere blocks from his house), Princess Road, Kentish Town, Alma Street, Finchley Road (which runs off Broadhurst Gardens).

Postmarks and locations in close proximity to theaters, music halls, art galleries, and places of possible business or personal interest to Sicken include Piccadilly Circus, Haymarket, Charing Cross, Battersea (near Whistler's studio), Regent Street North, Mayfair, Paddington (where Paddington Station is located), York Street (near Paddington), Islington (where St. Mark's Hospital is located), Worcester (a favorite place for painters), Greenwich, Gipsy Hill (near the Crystal Palace), Portman Square (not far from the Fine Art Society, and also the location of the Heinz Gallery collection of architectural drawings), Conduit Street (close to the Fine Art Society, and during the Victorian era the site of the 19th Century Art Society and the Royal Institute of British Architects).

Sickert's sketches are remarkably detailed, his pencil recording what his eyes were seeing so that he could later paint the picture. His mathematical formula of "squaring up" paintings, or using a geometrical formula for enlarging his drawings without losing dimension and perspective, reveals an organized and scientific mind. Sickert painted many intricate buildings during his career, especially unusually detailed paintings of churches in Dieppe and Venice. One might suppose he would have been interested in architecture and perhaps visited the Heinz Gallery, which had the largest collection of architectural drawings in the world.

Sickert's first career was acting, which he is believed to have begun in 1879. In one of the earliest existing Sickert letters, one he wrote in 1880 to historian and biographer T. E. Pemberton, he described playing an "old man" in Henry V while on tour in Birmingham. "It is the part I like best of all," he wrote. Despite recycled stories that Sickert gave up acting because his true ambition was to be a painter, letters collected by Denys Sutton reveal a different story. "Walter was anxious to take up a stage career," one letter said. But, wrote another Sickert acquaintance, "He was not very successful so he took up painting."

In his early twenties, Sickert was still an actor and touring with Henry Irving's company. He was acquainted with the famous architect Edward W. Godwin, a theater enthusiast, costume designer, and good friend of Whistler's. Godwin lived with Ellen Terry during Sickert's early acting days and had built Whistler's house - the White House, on Tite Street in Chelsea. Godwin's widow, Beatrice, had just married Whistler on August 11, 1888. Although I can't prove that biographical and geographical details such as these were connected in Sickert's psyche when Ripper letters were mailed or purportedly written from the London locations cited, I can speculate that these areas of the metropolis at least would have been familiar to him. They were not likely places for "homicidal lunatics" or East End "low life paupers" to have spent much time.

While it is true that many of the Ripper letters were mailed in the East End, it is also true that many of them were not. But Sickert spent a fair amount of time in the East End and probably knew that run-down pan of London better than the police did. The orders of the day did not allow Metropolitan Police constables to enter pubs or mingle with the neighbors. Beat police were supposed to stay on their beats, and to enter lodging houses or pubs without cause or simply to stray from one's measured walks around assigned blocks was to invite reprimand or suspension. Sickert, however, could mingle as he pleased. No place was off-limits to him.

The police seemed to suffer from East End myopia. No matter how much the Ripper tried to inveigle them into investigating other locales or likely haunts, he was mostly ignored. There appears to be no record that the police thoroughly investigated the postmarks or locations of Ripper letters not mailed from the East End or thought twice about other letters that were allegedly written or mailed from other cities in Great Britain. Not all envelopes have survived, and without a postmark one has only the location that the Ripper wrote on his letter. That may or may not have been where he really was at the time.

According to the postmarks, the alleged locations of the Ripper at various times, or where he claimed to be going, include Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Bradford, Dublin, Belfast, Limerick, Edinburgh, Plymouth, Leicester, Bristol, Clapham, Woolwich, Nottingham. Portsmouth, Croydon, Folkestone, Gloucester, Leith, Lille (France), Lisbon (Portugal), and Philadelphia (U.S.A.).

A number of these locations seem extremely unlikely, especially Portugal and the United States. As far as anyone seems to know, Walter Sickert never visited either country. Other letters and their alleged dates make it almost impossible to believe that, for example, he could have mailed or written letters in London, Lille, Birmingham, and Dublin all on the same day, October 8. But again, what is unclear 114 years after the fact - when so many envelopes and their postmarks are missing, when evidence is cold and witnesses are dead - is whether letters really were written on a given date and where they were written from. Only postmarks and eyewitnesses could swear to that.

Of course not all the Ripper letters were written by Sickert, but he could disguise his handwriting in ways an average person could not, and no records have yet turned up to prove he wasn't in a given city on a given day. The month of October 1888 was a busy letter-writing period for the Ripper. Some eighty letters written that month still exist, and it would make sense for the killer to be on the run after multiple, closely spaced murders. As the Ripper himself wrote in several letters, Whitechapel was getting too hot for him and he was seeking peace and quiet in distant ports.

We know from modern cases that serial killers tend to move around. Some virtually live in their cars. October would have been a convenient time for Sickert to disappear from London. His wife, Ellen, was part of a Liberal delegation that was holding meetings in Ireland to support Home Rule and Free Trade. She was away from England almost the entire month of October. If she and Sickert had any contact at all during this separation, no letters or telegrams to each other seem to have survived.

Sickert loved to write letters and sometimes apologized to friends for writing them so often. He habitually wrote letters to newspapers. He had such a knack for stirring up news that letters by him and articles about him amounted to as many as six hundred in one year. It is daunting to go through Sickert's archives at Islington Public Libraries and look at his several reams of clippings. He began gathering them himself around the turn of the century, and then used clipping services to keep up with his seemingly endless publicity. Yet throughout his life, he was known as a man who refused to give interviews. He managed to create the myth that he was "shy" and hated publicity.

Sickert's obsession with writing letters to the editor became an embarrassment to some newspapers. Editors squirmed when they got yet another Sickert letter about art or the aesthetic quality of telephone poles or why all Englishmen should wear kilts or the disadvantages of chlorinated water. Most editors did not wish to insult the well-known artist by ignoring him or relegating his prose to a small, inconspicuous space.

From January 25 through May 25, 1924, Sickert delivered a series of lectures and articles that were published in the Southport Visiter, in South-port, north of Liverpool, on the coast. Although these articles came to more than 130,000 words, that wasn't enough. On May 6th, 12th, 15th, 19th, and 22nd, Sickert wrote or telegraphed W. H. Stephenson of the Visiter: "I wonder if the Visiter could bear one more article at once… If so you should have it at once" and "delighted writing" and "please ask printer to express early six copies" and "Do let me send you just one more article" and "if you hear of any provincial paper that would care to carry series over the summer let me know."

Throughout Sickert's life, his literary prolificacy was astonishing. His clippings book at Islington Public Libraries contains more than 12,000 news items about him and letters he wrote to editors in Great Britain alone, most of them written between 1911 and the late 1930s. He published some four hundred lectures and articles, and I believe these known writings do not represent the entirety of his literary output. Sickert was a compulsive writer who enjoyed persuading, manipulating, and impressing people with his words. He craved an audience. He craved seeing his name in print. It would have been in character for him to have written a startling number of the Ripper letters, including some of those mailed from all over the map.

He may have written far more of them than some document examiners would be inclined to believe, because one makes a mistake to judge Walter Sickert by the usual handwriting-comparison standards. He was a multitalented artist with an amazing memory. He was multilingual. He was a voracious reader and skilled mimic. There were a number of books on graphology available at the time, and the handwriting in many Ripper letters is similar to examples of writing styles that Victorian graphologists associated with various occupations and personalities. Sickert could have opened any number of graphology books and imitated the styles he found there. For graphologists to study Ripper letters must have struck Sickert as most amusing.

Using chemicals and highly sensitive instruments to analyze inks, paints, and paper is scientific. Handwriting comparison is not. It is an investigative tool that can be powerful and convincing, especially in detecting forgeries. But if a suspect is adept in disguising his handwriting, comparison can be frustrating or impossible. The police investigating the Ripper cases were so eager to pinpoint similarity in handwriting that they did not explore the possibility that the killer might use many different styles. Other leads, such as cities the Ripper mentioned and postmarks on envelopes, were not pursued. Had they been, it may have been discovered that most of the distant cities shared points in common, including theaters and racecourses. Many of these locations would appear on a map of Sickert's travels.

Let's start with Manchester. There were at least three reasons for Sicken: to visit that city and be quite familiar with it. His wife's family, the Cobdens, owned property in Manchester. Sickert's sister, Helena, lived in Manchester. Sickert had friends as well as professional connections in Manchester. Several Ripper letters mention Manchester. One of them that the Ripper claims to have written from Manchester on November 22, 1888, has a partial A Pirie amp; Sons watermark. Another letter the Ripper claims to have written from East London, also on November 22nd, has a partial A Pirie amp; Sons watermark. The stationery Walter and Ellen Sickert began using after they were married on June 10, 1885, has the A Pirie amp; Sons watermark.

Dr. Paul Ferrara, director of the Virginia Institute of Forensic Science and Medicine, made the first watermark connection when we were examining original Ripper and Sickert letters in London and Glasgow. Transparencies of the letters and their watermarks were submitted to the Institute, and when the Ripper partial watermark and a Sickert complete watermark were scanned into a forensic image-enhancement computer and superimposed on the video screen, they matched identically.

In September 2001, the Virginia Institute of Forensic Science and Medicine received permission from the British government to conduct nondestructive forensic testing on the original Ripper letters at the Public Record Office in Kew. Dr. Ferrara, DNA analyst Lisa Schiermeier, forensic image enhancement expert Chuck Pruitt, and others traveled to London, and we examined the Ripper letters. Some of what seemed the most promising envelopes - ones that still had flaps and stamps intact - were moistened and painstakingly peeled back for swabbing. Photographs were taken and handwriting was compared.

From London, we went on to other archival collections and examined paper, and took DNA samples from the letters, envelopes, and stamps of Walter Richard Sickert; his first wife, Ellen Cobden Sickert; James Mc-Neill Whistler; and so-called Ripper suspect Montague John Druitt. Some of these tests were exclusionary. Obviously, neither Ellen Sickert nor Whistler has ever been a suspect, but Walter Sickert worked in Whistler's studio. He mailed letters for him and was in close physical contact with the Master and his belongings. It is possible that Whistler's DNA - and certainly Ellen's DNA - could have contaminated Sickert evidence.

We swabbed Whistler envelopes and stamps at the University of Glasgow, where his massive archival collection is kept. We swabbed envelopes and stamps at the West Sussex Record Office, where Ellen Cobden Sickert's family archives - and, coincidentally, some of Montague John Druitt's family archives - are kept. Unfortunately, the only Druitt sample available to us was the letter he wrote in 1876 while he was a student at Oxford University. The DNA results from the envelope's flap and stamp are contaminated, but will be retested.

Other documents yet to be tested are two envelopes I believe were addressed and sealed by the Duke of Clarence, and an envelope of Queen Victoria's physician, Dr. William Gull. I do not believe that Druitt or any of these so-called suspects had a thing to do with murder and mutilation, and I would like to clear their names if I can. DNA testing will continue until all practical means are exhausted. The importance extends far beyond the Ripper investigation.

There is no one left to indict and convict. Jack the Ripper and all who knew him well have been dead for decades. But there is no statute of limitations on homicide, and the Ripper's victims deserve justice. And whatever we can learn that furthers our knowledge of forensic science and medicine is worth the trouble and expense. I was not optimistic we would set a DNA match, but I was surprised and quite crestfallen when the first round of testing turned up not a single sign of human life in all fifty-five samples. I decided to try again, this time swabbing different areas of the same envelopes and stamps.

Still, we came up with nothing. There are a number of possible explanations for these disappointing results: The one-billionth of a gram of cells in human saliva that would have been deposited on a stamp or envelope flap did not survive the years; heat used to laminate the Ripper letters for conservation destroyed the nuclear DNA; suboptimal storage for a hundred years caused degradation and destruction of the DNA; or perhaps the adhesives were the culprit.

The "glutinous wash," as adhesives were called in the mid-nineteenth century, was derived from plant extracts, such as the bark of the acacia tree. During the Victorian era, the postal system underwent an industrial revolution, with the first Penny Black stamp mailed on May 2, 1840, from Bath. The envelope folding machine was patented in 1845. Many people did not want to lick envelopes or stamps for "sanitary" reasons, and used a sponge. To add to the scientific odds against us when we swabbed envelopes and stamps, we could not possibly know who had licked their envelopes and who had not. The last genetic option left for us was to try a third round of testing, this time for mitochondrial DNA.

When one reads about DNA tests used in modern criminal or paternity cases, what is usually being referred to is the nuclear DNA that is located in virtually every cell in the body and passed down from both parents. Mitochondrial DNA is found outside the nucleus of the cell. Think of an egg: The nuclear DNA is found in the yolk, so to speak, and the mitochondrial DNA would be found in the egg white. Mitochondrial DNA is passed down only from the mother. While the mitochondrial region of a cell contains thousands more "copies" of DNA than the nucleus does, mitochondrial DNA testing is very complex and expensive, and the results can be limited because the DNA is passed down from only one parent.

The extracts of all fifty-five DNA samples were sent to The Bode Technology Group, an internationally respected private DNA laboratory, best known for assisting the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP) in using mitochondrial DNA to determine the identity of America's Vietnam War Unknown Soldier. More recently, Bode has been using mitochondrial DNA to identify victims of the 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. The examination of our samples took months, and while I was back in London's Public Record Office with art and paper experts. Dr. Paul Ferrara telephoned to tell me that Bode had finished the testing and had gotten mitochondrial DNA on almost every sample. Most of the genetic profiles were a mishmash of individuals. But six of the samples had the same mitochondrial DNA sequence profile component found on the Openshaw envelope.

"Markers" are locations. Markers in the Ripper/Sickert tests are where the base positions of DNA are located on the D loop sequence of the mitochondrial DNA - which is about as easy for most people to envision as it is for me to understand the mathematical equation for relativity, E = me2. An imposing challenge for DNA experts is to help the hoi polloi understand what DNA is and what test results mean. Posters showing matching fingerprints create a flurry of nods and "oh yes, I get it" looks from jurors. But the analysis of human blood - beyond its screaming fresh red or its old dark dried presence on clothing and weapons and at crime scenes - has always induced catatonia and pinpoint pupils in panicky eyes.

ABO blood-group typing was antenna-tangling enough. DNA blows mental transformers, and the hackneyed explanation that a DNA "fingerprint" or profile looks like a bar code on a soup can in the grocery store isn't helpful in the least. I can't envision my flesh and bones as billions of bar codes that can be scanned in a laboratory and come up as me. So I often use analogies, because I confess that without them I don't always comprehend the abstractions of science and medicine, even though I write about them for a living.

The swabbed samples in the Jack the Ripper case can be imagined as fifty-five sheets of white paper that are cluttered with thousands of different combinations of numbers. Most of the sheets of paper have smears, and illegible numbers, and mixtures of numbers that indicate they came from many different people. However, two sheets of paper each have a sequence of numbers that came from a single donor - or only one person: One sheet is James McNeill Whistler, and the other is a partial postage stamp on the back of a letter the Ripper wrote to Dr. Thomas Openshaw, the curator of the London Hospital Museum.

The Whistler sequence has nothing in common with any Ripper letter or any other non-Whistler item tested. But the Openshaw sequence is found in five other samples. These five samples are not single-donor, as far as we can tell at this point, and show a mixture of other base positions or "locations" in the mitochondrial region. This could mean that the sample was contaminated by the DNA of other people. A drawback in our testing is that the ever-elusive Walter Sickert has yet to offer us his DNA profile. When he was cremated, our best evidence went up in flames. Unless we eventually find a premortem sample of his blood, skin, hair, teeth, or bones, we will never resurrect Walter Richard Sickert in a laboratory. But we may have found pieces of him.

The clean single-donor sequence recovered from the partial stamp on the back of the Openshaw envelope is our best basis of comparison. Its sequence is the three markers, 16294 - 73 - 263, or the locations of DNA base positions in the mitochondrial regions - rather much as A7, G10, D12, and so on indicate places on a map. The five samples that have this same 16294 - 73 - 263 single-donor Openshaw sequence are the front stamp from the Openshaw envelope; an Ellen Sickert envelope; an envelope from a Walter Sickert letter; a stamp from a Walter Sickert envelope; and a Ripper envelope with a stain that tests positive for blood, but which may be too degraded to determine if it is human.

The results from the Ellen Sickert letter could be explained if she moistened the envelope and stamp with the same sponge her husband, Walter, used - assuming either one of them used a sponge. Or Sickert might have touched or licked the adhesive on the flap or stamp, perhaps because he mailed the letter for her.

Other samples contained one or two markers found in the single-donor Openshaw sequence. For example, a set of white coveralls that Sickert wore while painting had a mixture of markers that included 73 and 263. What is startling about this result is that there was a result. The coveralls are about eighty years old and had been washed, ironed, and starched before they were donated to the Tate Archive. I saw no point in swabbing around the collar, the cuffs, the crotch, and the armpits, but we did it anyway.

The Openshaw letter that yielded the mitochondrial DNA results was written on A Pirie amp;; Sons stationery. The letter is postmarked October 29, 1888, mailed in London, and reads:

ENVELOPE: Dr. Openshaw

Pathological curator

London Hospital

White chapel

LETTER: Old boss you was rite it was

the left kidny i was goin to

hopperate agin close to your

ospitle just as i was goin

to dror mi nife along of

er bloomin throte them

cusses of coppers spoilt

the game but i guess i wil

be on the job soon and will

send you another bit of

innerds Jack the ripper

O have you seen the devle

with his mikerscope and scalpul

a lookin at a Kidney

with a slide cocked up

One reason I believe this letter is genuine is that it is so blatantly contrived. The bad handwriting looks disguised and is jarringly inconsistent with the handwriting of someone with access to pen and ink and fine-quality watermarked stationery. The address on the envelope is literate, the spelling perfect, which is vastly different from the overblown illiteracy of the letter with its inconsistent misspellings, such as "kidny" and -Kidney," "wil" and "will," "of" and "o." Steward P. Evans and Keith Skinner point out in their extremely helpful book jack the Ripper: Letters from Hell that the postscript in the Dr. Openshaw letter alludes to i verse in an 1871 Cornish folktale:

Here's to the devil,

With his wooden pick and shovel,

Digging tin by the bushel,

With his tail cock'd up!

An allusion to a Cornish folktale makes no sense if we are supposed to believe this Openshaw letter was written by an uneducated homicidal maniac who ripped a kidney from a victim and sent it off in the mail.

Walter Sickert visited Cornwall as a boy. He painted in Cornwall when he was Whistler's apprentice. Sickert knew Cornwall and the Cornish people. He was well read and was familiar with folk tunes and music-hall songs. It is unlikely that a poor, uneducated person from London spent time in Cornwall or sat around in the slums reading Cornish folktales.

One could argue - and should - that the absence of a reliable known reference source, in this instance Walter Sickert's DNA, suggests we are assuming without conclusive scientific evidence that the single-donor sequence from the Openshaw letter was deposited by Walter Sickert, alias Jack the Ripper. We can't assume any such thing.

Although statistically the single-donor sequence excludes 99% of the population, in Dr. Ferrara's words, "The matching sequences might be a coincidence. They might not be a coincidence." At best, we have a "cautious indicator" that the Sickert and Ripper mitochondrial DNA sequences may have come from the same person.