Portrait Of A Killer: Jack The Ripper - Case Closed

Chapter Twenty. Beyond Identity

At two thirty that Sunday afternoon, Dr. Brown and a team of doctors performed the postmortem examination.

Other than one small fresh bruise on Catherine Eddows's left hand, the doctors found no other injuries that might have indicated she fought with her assailant, was struck, yoked, or thrown to the ground. The cause of her death was a six- or seven-inch cut across the neck that began at the left ear lobe - severing it - and terminated about three inches below the right ear. The incision severed the larynx, vocal cords, and all deep structures of the neck, nicking the intervertebral cartilage.

Dr. Brown determined that Catherine Eddows had hemorrhaged from her severed left carotid artery, that death "was immediate," and that the other mutilations were inflicted postmortem. He believed there was only one weapon, probably a knife, and it was pointed. Much more could have been said. The autopsy report indicates that the Ripper cut through Catherine's clothing. Considering the many layers she was wearing, this poses questions and difficulties.

Not just any type of cutting instrument could be used to cut through wool, linen, and cotton, no matter how old and rotted some of the fabrics might have been. I experimented with a variety of nineteenth-century knives, daggers, and straight razors and discovered that cutting through clothing with a blade that is curved or long is tricky, if not treacherous. The blade would have to be very sharp, strong, and pointed. The best choice, I found, was a six-inch dagger with a guard that prevents the hand from slipping down the blade.

I suspect the Ripper didn't actually "cut through" the clothing, but rather stabbed through layers and tore them open, exposing the abdomen and genitals. This is a variation of his method and worth analyzing, because it does not appear that he cut through Mary Ann Nichols's or Annie Chapman's clothing. One simply can't be certain of the details in earlier cases. Records appear to be incomplete and possibly were not meticulously made or kept at the time. Although the City would come no closer to capturing Jack the Ripper, it was better equipped to handle his carnage.

Catherine Eddows's records are surprisingly well preserved and reveal that the examination of her body was very thorough and professional. The City Police had certain advantages, not the least of which was learning from recent, much-publicized mistakes. City Police had a substantially smaller, wealthier jurisdiction to control, a suitable mortuary, and access to superb medical men. When Catherine was transported to the mortuary, the City Police assigned an inspector whose only responsibility was to look after the body, clothing, and personal effects. When Dr. Brown performed the autopsy, he was assisted by two other physicians, including the Metropolitan Police surgeon, Dr. George Phillips. If one assumes that Catherine was the first victim whose clothing was "cut off" instead of pushed up, the change of MO shows an escalation in the Ripper's violence and confidence, as well as a heightened contempt and need to shock.

Catherine's body was almost nude, her legs spread, and she was butchered in the middle of a sidewalk. The blood flowing out of her severed carotid artery seeped under her and left an outline of her body on the pavement that was visible to passersby and trodden on the next day. The Ripper struck practically within view of a watchman, a sleeping constable who lived on the Square, and a City officer whose beat took him past the murder scene every twenty-five minutes. The damage the Ripper inflicted on Catherine's body required not so much as a glint of surgical skill. He simply slashed like mad.

The cuts to her face were quick and forceful, the slices to her lips completely dividing them and cutting into the underlying gums. The cut to the bridge of her nose extended down to the angle of her left jaw and laid open her cheek to the bone. The tip of the nose was completely severed, and two other cuts to the cheeks peeled up the skin into triangular flaps. The damage to her abdomen, genitalia, and internal organs was just as brutal. The incisions that laid her open were jagged and were mixed with stabbing injuries. Her left kidney was removed and taken, and half of her uterus was sloppily cut off and taken as well.

She had cuts to her pancreas and spleen, and one in her vagina that extended through her rectum. Hacks to the right thigh were so deep they severed ligaments. There was nothing careful or even purposeful in the damage. The intention was mutilation, and the Ripper was frenzied. He could have done this damage to Catherine Eddows's body in less than ten minutes - maybe as few as five. It was requiring more daring and savagery to achieve the same thrill. The Ripper's "catch me if you can" taunt seemed to be straining to the limit.

Artist, critic, and Sickert supporter D. S. MacColl once wrote in a letter that Walter Sickert "will over calculate himself one day." Sickert didn't, at least not during his lifetime. Law enforcement was not equipped to follow the forensic and psychological traces he left each time he killed. In today's investigations, evidence collection would have been conducted in a way that would have seemed to the Victorians like some fantasy out of Jules Verne. Catherine Eddows's crime scene was a difficult one because it was outdoors in a public place that would have been contaminated by the multitudes. The lighting was terrible, and the sensationalism of the crime would have caused police to fear further contamination by the curious who were certain to gather - even long after the body had been removed to the City mortuary on Golden Lane.

The most important piece of evidence in any homicide is the body. All evidence connected to it must be preserved by any means possible. At this writing, were Catherine Eddows's body discovered in Mitre Square, the police would immediately seal off the scene, radio for more troops to secure the area, and contact the medical examiner. Lights would be set up, and rescue vehicles would arrive with emergency lights flashing. All avenues, roads, and passageways leading to the crime scene would be barricaded and guarded by police.

A detective or member of a forensic unit would begin videotaping the scene from the outer perimeter, again aware of bystanders. It is quite possible - in fact, I would bet on it - that Sickert showed up at every crime scene and blended into the crowds. He would not have been able to resist seeing the reaction of his audience. In a painting of his called The Fair at Night, Dieppe, the scene he depicts looks very much like what one might expect to see when spectators surrounded the East End locations where the murders took place.

The Fair at Night, Dieppe, circa 1901, shows a mob of people from the rear, as if we are looking through the eyes of an observer who is standing some distance behind the curious crowd. Were it not for what appears to be a carousel tent intruding into the painting from the right, there would be no reason to think the scene has anything to do with a fair. The people don't necessarily seem interested in the carousel, but in the activity occurring in the direction of tenement housing or row houses.

Sickert painted The Fair at Night, Dieppe from a sketch. He drew what he witnessed until he was in his sixties. Then he began to paint from photographs, as if the more his sexual energy waned, the less he felt the compulsion to go out and experience his art. "One can't work at all over 50 like one did at 40," Sickert admitted.

A fair or carnival is exactly what the Ripper's crime scenes became, with boys hawking special editions of newspapers, vendors arriving with carts, and neighbors selling tickets. The International Working Men's Educational Club on Berner Street charged admission to enter the yard where Elizabeth Stride was murdered, thereby raising money to print its socialist tracts. For a penny, one could purchase "A Thrilling Romance" about the Whitechapel Murders that included "all details connected with these Diabolical Crimes, and faithfully pictures the Night Horrors of this portion of the Great City."

In all of the Ripper's murders, no footprints or tracks leading away from the bodies were ever found. It is hard for me to imagine that he didn't step in blood when pints of it were spurting and flowing from the fatal injuries he inflicted on his victims. But these bloody footprints would not have been visible without the aid of alternate light sources and chemicals. Trace evidence would have been missed, and one can be certain that the Ripper left hairs, fibers, and other microscopic particles at the scene and on his victims. He carried trace evidence away with him on his person, footwear, and clothing.

The Ripper's victims would have been a forensic nightmare because of the contamination and mixture of trace evidence - including seminal fluid - from multiple clients, all of it exacerbated by the women's pitiful hygiene. But there would have been some substance, organic or inorganic, worth collecting. Unusual evidence may very well have been discovered. Cosmetics worn by a killer are easily transferred to a victim. Had Sickert applied grease paint to darken his skin, had he temporarily dyed his hair, or had he been wearing adhesives for false mustaches and beards, these substances could be discovered by using a polarized light microscope or chemical analysis or spectrophotofluorometric methods, such as the Omnichrome light, that are available to forensic scientists today.

Some dyes in lipsticks are so easily identifiable by scientific methods that it is possible to determine the brand and trade name of the color. Sickert's grease paints and paints from his studio would not have eluded the scanning electron microscope, the ion microprobe, the x-ray diffractometer, or thin-layer chromatography, to list a few of the resources available now. Tempera paint on a 1920s Sickert painting titled Broad-stairs lit up a neon blue when we examined it with a nondestructive alternate light source at the Virginia Institute of Forensic Science and Medicine. If Sickert had transferred a microscopic residue of a similar tempera paint from his clothing or hands to a victim, the Omnichrome would have detected it and chemical analysis would have followed.

Finding an artist's paint on a murder victim would have been a significant break in the investigation. Had it been possible in the Victorian era to detect paints adhering to a victim's blood, the police might not have been so quick to assume Jack the Ripper was a butcher, a lunatic Pole or Russian Jew, or an insane medical student. The presence of residues consistent with cosmetics or adhesives would have raised significant questions as well. Stray knives turning up would have given answers instead of only posing questions.

A preliminary quick-and-easy chemical test could have determined whether the dried reddish material on the blades was blood instead of rust or some other substance. Precipitin tests that react to antibodies would have determined if the blood was human, and finally, DNA would either match a victim's genetic profile or not. It is possible that latent fingerprints could have been found on a knife. It is possible that the killer's DNA could have been determined had Jack the Ripper cut himself or perspired into the handkerchief he wrapped around a knife handle.

Hairs could be compared or analyzed for non-nuclear or mitochondrial DNA. Tool marks imparted by the weapon to cartilage or bone could have been compared to any weapon recovered. These days, all that could be done would be, but what we can't account for is how much Sickert would know were he committing his murders now. He was described by acquaintances as having a scientific mind. His paintings and etchings demonstrate considerable technical skill.

He did some of his drawings in a tradesman's day book that had columns for pounds, shillings, and pence. On the backs of other drawings are mathematical scribbles, perhaps from Sickert's calculating the prices of things. These same sorts of scribbles are on a scrap of lined paper the Ripper wrote a letter on. Apparently he was figuring out the price of coal.

Sickert's art was premeditated and so were his crimes. I strongly suspect he would know about today's forensic science, were he committing his murders now, just as he knew what was available in 1888, which was handwriting comparison, identification by physical features, and "fingermarks." He also would have been keenly aware of sexually transmitted diseases, and it is likely he exposed himself to his victims' body fluids as little as possible. He may have worn gloves when he killed and then removed his bloody clothing as quickly as he could. He may have worn rubber-soled boots that were quiet on the street and easy to clean. He could have carried changes of clothing, disguises, and weapons in a Gladstone bag. He could have wrapped items in newspaper and string.

The day after Mary Ann Nichols's murder, Saturday, September 1st, the Daily Telegraph and the Weekly Dispatch ran stories about the peculiar experience a dairyman claimed to have had at 11:00 P.M. the night before, or within hours of Mary Ann's murder. The dairyman's shop was in Little Turner Street, off Commercial Road, and he reported to police that a stranger carrying a shiny black bag came to the door and asked to buy a penny's worth of milk, which he drank in one gulp.

He then asked to borrow the dairyman's shed for a moment, and while the stranger was inside it, the dairyman noticed a flash of white. He went to investigate and caught the stranger covering his trousers with a "pair of white overalls, such as engineers wear." The stranger next snatched out a white jacket and quickly pulled it over his black cutaway as he said, "It's a dreadful murder, isn't it?" He grabbed his black bag and rushed into the street, exclaiming, "I think I have a clue!"

The dairyman described the stranger as about twenty-eight years old with a ruddy complexion, a three days' growth of beard, dark hair and large staring eyes, and as having the general appearance of a "clerk" or "student." The white coveralls and jacket - similar to what an "engineer" wore - were also what Sickert used to cover his clothing when he painted in his studios. Three sets of these white coveralls were donated by his second wife's family to the Tate Archive.

The dairyman's story takes on even more suspicious shadings when added to it is another account of clothing in the news after Elizabeth Stride's and Catherine Eddows's murders. The day following their murders, Monday, October 1st, at nine o'clock, a Mr. Chinn, who was the proprietor of Nelson Tavern in Kentish Town, discovered a newspaper-wrapped package behind the door of an outbuilding behind the tavern. He ignored the package until he happened to read about Elizabeth Stride's murder and realized that the package in his outbuilding matched the description of the one carried by a man who was seen talking to Elizabeth less than half an hour before her death.

Mr. Chinn went to the police station on Kentish Town Road to report the matter. When a detective arrived at the tavern, the package had been kicked into the roadway and had burst open. Inside was a pair of blood-soaked dark trousers. Hair was found adhering to coagulated bloodstains on the newspaper wrapping. No further description of the hair or newspaper wrapping seems to be known, and the trousers were subsequently carried off by a street person. I suppose the detective had no further use of them and simply left them in the road.

The description of the man carrying a newspaper-wrapped package whom Police Constable William Smith observed talking to Elizabeth Stride is similar to the description the dairyman gave police: Both men had a dark complexion, were clean-shaven - or at least had no full beard - and were approximately twenty-eight years old. The Nelson Tavern in Kentish Town was about two miles east of where Sickert lived in South Hampstead. He did not have a dark or weathered complexion, but it would have been easy enough for him to create one with makeup. He did not have dark hair. But actors wore wigs and dyed their hair.

It would have been a simple matter to leave wrapped packages or even Gladstone bags in hidden places, and it is doubtful that Sickert would have cared whether the police recovered a pair of bloody trousers. In those days, nothing useful could be learned from them unless they bore some sort of marking that could have been traced back to the owner.

Facial mutilations can be extremely revealing, and a forensic psychologist or profiler would assign great importance to the mutilation of Catherine Eddows's face, which, in Chief Inspector Donald Swanson's words, damaged her "almost beyond identity." The face is the person. To mutilate it is personal. Often this degree of violence occurs when the victim and assailant are known to each other, but not always. Sickert used to slash paintings to tatters when he decided to destroy his work. On one occasion he instructed his wife Ellen to go out and buy two curved, sharp knives that he said were just like ones she used for pruning.

This took place in Paris, according to the story Sickert told to writer Osbert Sitwell. Sickert said he needed the knives to help slash Whistler's paintings. The Master had a habit of being discontented with his work, and when all else failed, he destroyed his art. Burning was one method. Cutting up paintings was another. While Sickert was an apprentice, he probably would have assisted in ripping up canvases, just as he claimed, and perhaps with the very knives he mentioned to Sitwell. Exactly when those knives would have been purchased can't be determined, but it was most likely between 1885 and 1887 or early 1888. Before 1885, Sickert wasn't married. In 1888 Whistler was, and his relationship with Sickert was tapering off and would end entirely less than ten years later.

An artist destroying a painting that he or she has grown to hate is in some measure analogous to a killer destroying the face of a victim. The destruction could be an effort to eradicate an object that causes the artist frustration and rage. Or it could be an attempt to ruin what one can't possess, whether it is artistic perfection or another human being. If one wants sex and can't have it, to destroy the object of lust is to make it no longer desirable.

Night after night, Sickert watched sexually provocative performances at music halls. During much of his career, he would sketch nude female models. He spent time behind locked studio doors, staring, even touching, but never consummating except through a pencil, a brush, a palette knife. If he was capable of sexual desire but completely incapable of gratifying it, his frustration must have been agonizing and enraging. In the early 1920s, he was painting portraits of a young art student named Ciceley Hey, and one day when he was alone with her in the studio, he sat next to her on the sofa and without warning or explanation, started screaming.

One of the portraits he painted of her is Death and the Maiden. At some point between the early 1920s and his death in 1942, he gave her Jack the Ripper's Bedroom. Where the painting had been since its completion in 1908, no one seems to know. Why he gave it to Ciceley Hey is also a mystery, unless one chooses to suppose that he entertained sexually violent fantasies about her. If she thought there was anything peculiar about Sickert's producing a foreboding piece of work with an equally foreboding title, I am unaware of it.

Perhaps one reason Sickert liked his models ugly is that he preferred to be around flesh he did not desire. Perhaps murder and mutilation were a powerful cathartic for his frustration and rage, and a way to destroy his desire. This is not to say he lusted after prostitutes. But they represented sex. They represented his immoral grandmother, the Irish dancer, whose fault it may have been - in Sickert's twisted psyche - that he was born with a severe deformity. One can offer conjectures that may sound reasonable, but they will never comprise the whole truth. Why any person has such a disregard for life that he or she enjoys destroying it is beyond comprehension.

The theory that each victim's throat was cut while she was lying on the ground remained the predominant one even after the murders of Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddows. Physicians and police were convinced that based on blood patterns, the women could not have been standing when the killer severed their carotid arteries. Possibly what the doctors were assuming was that arterial bleeding would have spurted a certain distance and at a certain height had the victims been on their feet. There may also have been an assumption that the victims lay down to have sex.

Prostitutes weren't likely to lie down on hard pavers or in mud or wet grass, and the doctors were not interpreting blood patterns based on scientific testing. In modern laboratories, blood spatter experts routinely conduct experiments with blood to get a better idea of how it drips, flies, sprays, spurts, and spatters according to the laws of physics. In 1888, no one working the Ripper cases was spending his time researching how far or how high blood arced when an upright person's carotid artery was cut.

No one knew about the back spatter pattern caused by the repeated swinging or stabbing motions of a weapon. It does not appear that the doctors who responded to the death scenes considered that perhaps Jack the Ripper simultaneously cut his victim's throat and pulled her backward to the ground. Investigators didn't seem to contemplate the possibility that the Ripper might have assiduously avoided being bloody in public by quickly getting out of his bloody clothes, coveralls, or gloves, and retreating to one of his hovels to clean up.

Sickert was afraid of diseases. He had a fetish about hygiene and was continually washing his hands. He would immediately wash his hair and face if he accidentally put on another person's hat. Sickert would have known about germs, infections, and diseases; he would have known that one didn't have to engage in oral, vaginal, or anal intercourse to contract them. Blood splashed into his face or transferred from his hands to his eyes or mouth or an open wound was enough to cause him a serious problem. Years later, he would go through a time of worry when he thought he had a sexually transmitted disease that turned out to be gout.