Portrait Of A Killer: Jack The Ripper - Case Closed

Chapter Twenty-even. The Darkest Night In The Day

Sickert's roles changed like the light and shadow he painted on his canvases.

A shape should not have lines because nature doesn't, and forms reveal themselves in tones, shades, and the way light holds them. Sickert's life had no lines or boundaries, and his shape changed with every tilt and touch of his enigmatic moods and hidden purposes.

Those who knew him as well as those he brushed past only now and then accepted that being Sickert meant being the "chameleon," the "poseur." He was Sickert in the loud checked coat walking all hours through London's foreboding alleyways and streets. He was Sickert the farmer or country squire or tramp or bespectacled masher in the bowler hat or dandy in black tie or the eccentric wearing bedroom slippers to meet the train. He was Jack the Ripper with a cap pulled low over his eyes and a red scarf around his neck, working in the gloom of a studio illuminated by the feeble glow from a bull's-eye lantern.

Victorian writer and critic Clive Bell's relationship with Sickert was one of mutual love-hate, and Bell quipped that on any given day Sickert might be John Bull, Voltaire, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Pope, a cook, a dandy, a swell, a bookmaker, a solicitor. Bell believed Sickert wasn't the scholar he was reputed to be and appeared to "know a great deal more than he did," even if he was the greatest British painter since Constable, Bell observed. But one "could never feel sure that their Sickert was Sickert's Sickert, or that Sickert's Sickert corresponded with any ultimate reality." He was a man of "no standards," and in Bell's words, Sickert did not feel "possessively and affectionately about anything which was not part of himself."

Ellen was part of Sickert's self. He had use for her. He could not see her as a separate human being because all people and all things were extensions of Sickert. She was still in Ireland with Janie when Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddows were murdered and when George Lusk, the head of the East End Vigilance Committee, received half of a human kidney by post on October 16th. Almost two weeks later, the curator of the pathology museum of the London Hospital, Dr. Thomas Openshaw, received the letter written on A Pirie amp; Sons watermarked paper and signed "Jack the Ripper."

"Old boss you was rite it was the left kidny… I wil be on the job soon and will send you another bit of innerds."

The kidney was suspected of being Catherine Eddows's, and probably was unless the Ripper managed to get half of a human kidney from somewhere else. The organ was anatomically preserved at the Royal London Hospital until it became so disintegrated the hospital disposed of it in the 1950s - about the time Watson and Crick discovered the double helix structure of DNA.

In centuries past, bodies and body parts were preserved in "spirits" or alcoholic beverages such as wine. Some hospitals during the Ripper's time used glycerine. When a person of high status died aboard ship and required a proper burial, the only way to preserve the body was in mead or whatever spirits were handy. If John Smith, the founding father of Virginia, had died during his voyage to the New World, most likely he would have been returned to London pickled in a keg.

Police reports indicate that the kidney sent to George Lusk was almost two weeks old if it came from Eddows's body, and had been preserved in "spirits," probably wine. Mr. Lusk did not seem horrified or in a frantic hurry to get the kidney to the police. When he received the ghastly gift with a letter that has not survived, he didn't "think much about it." The Victorians were not accustomed to psychopathic killers who took body parts and enclosed them in taunting letters to the authorities.

At first, it was suggested that the kidney was from a dog, but Lusk and the police wisely sought other opinions. The kidney was a hoax, the police agreed as the marinated organ in its box made the rounds. Medical experts, such as pathologist Dr. Openshaw, believed the kidney was human - although it was a stretch to conclude it was from a "female" who had "Bright's disease." The kidney was turned over to Dr. Openshaw's care at the London Hospital. Had the kidney survived another few decades to be tested, and were Catherine Eddows exhumed for her DNA, there could have been a match. In court that would have hurt Walter Sickert quite a lot - were he still alive to be prosecuted - since the A Pirie amp; Sons watermark is on his stationery and also on the letter Jack the Ripper wrote to Dr. Openshaw, the stamps on the envelopes of the two letters have a DNA sequence in common, and the Ripper letter is confessional.

If Ellen was keeping up with the news at home, she would have known about the kidney. She would have known about the double murder that happened within a week of her leaving for Ireland. She may have heard of "human bones" wrapped in a parcel in a Peckham gutter, or the parcel containing a decomposing female arm found in the garden of a school for the blind in Lambeth Road, or the boiled leg that turned out to be from a bear.

Ellen should have known about the torso recovered from the foundation of the new Scotland Yard building. The headless, limbless dead woman was transported to the mortuary on Millbank Street, and she had little to say to Dr. Neville or the police, and they could not seem to agree about the arm found in Pimlico on October 11th. It was from the torso, of this Dr. Neville was certain, but its hand was rough, the fingernails unkempt - like those of a woman whose life was hard. When Dr. Thomas Bond was brought in to assist in the examination, he said that the hand was soft with well-shaped nails. The hand would have been dirty, possibly abraded, and the fingernails would have been caked with mud when the arm was found in the muck of low tide. Perhaps when it was cleaned up, it took on a higher social status.

In one report, the dismembered woman had a dark complexion. In another report, she had light skin. Her hair was dark brown, she was twenty-six years old, and five foot seven or eight, the doctor stated. The darkness of her skin could have been due to the discoloration of decomposition. In advanced stages, the skin turns dark greenish-black. Based on the condition of her remains, it may have been just as difficult to determine if her skin was fair.

Discrepancies in descriptions can cause serious problems in identifying the dead. Of course, forensic facial reconstructions - or the sculpting of the face based on the underlying architecture of the bone (assuming the head is found) - were not done in the nineteenth century, but a case some decades ago in Virginia makes my point. An unidentified man's face was reconstructed by using green clay to rebuild his features over his skull. His hair color was based on the racial characteristics of his skeleton, which were those of an African-American, and his orbits were fitted with artificial eyes.

A woman responded to a black-and-white photograph of the facial reconstruction in the newspaper, and appeared at the morgue to see if the missing person might be her son. She took one look at the facial reconstruction and told the medical examiner, "No, that's not him. His face wasn't green." As it turned out, the unidentified murdered young man was the woman's son. (These days, when forensic facial reconstructions or sculptures are done on the unidentified dead, the clay is dyed to approximate the person's color based on race.)

The estimate offered by both Dr. Neville and by Dr. Thomas Bond, that the torso was that of a woman about five foot seven or eight, could have been wrong, and the height they assigned to what was left of the victim could have precluded quite a number of people from coming forward to see if the remains were those of a relative or someone they knew. In that era, five foot seven or eight was quite tall for a woman. Were the doctors' estimate off by as little as two or three inches, it could have been enough to cause the torso never to be identified - and it never was.

I believe the doctors did the best they could, based on what they had to work with. They could not have known about forensic anthropology. The doctors would not have known about today's standard anthropological criteria used to place an individual into age categories, such as infant or 15 to 17 or 45-plus. They may not have known much about epiphyses or growth centers of bone, nor could they have seen them since neither the torso nor recovered limbs were defleshed by boiling them in water. Growth centers are attachments, such as those that connect the ribs to the sternum, and when one is young these attachments are flexible cartilage. With age, they calcify.

In 1888, there were no calibrations and algorithms. There were no late-twentieth-century gadgets such the Single Photon Absorptiometer or scintillation detectors to estimate height based on the length of the humerus, radius, ulna, femur, tibia, and fibula - the long bones of the arms and legs. The changes in density or mineral concentrations of bones are age-dependent. For example, a decrease in bone density usually correlates with an older age.

It could not accurately be claimed that the dismembered woman was exactly twenty-six years old, although it could have been said that her remains appeared to be those of a post-prepubescent female who probably was in her late teens or twenties, and that she had dark brown hair in her axillae, or armpits. The estimate that the woman had died five weeks earlier was also a guess. Doctors simply did not have the scientific means to judge time of death by decomposition. They knew nothing about entomology - the interpretation of insect development as a marker for time of death - and maggots teemed over the torso when it was found in the recesses of the new Scotland Yard building's foundation.

The autopsy revealed pale, bloodless organs that indicated hemorrhage and would have been consistent with the woman's throat having been cut before she was dismembered. At her inquest, Dr. Thomas Bond testified that the remains were those of a "well nourished" woman with "breasts that were large and prominent" and who at some point had suffered from severe pleurisy in one lung. Her uterus was missing, and her pelvis and legs had been sawn off at the fourth lumbar. The arms had been removed at the shoulder joints by several oblique cuts, and she had been decapitated by several incisions below the larynx. Dr. Bond said that the torso had been skillfully wrapped, and the flesh bore "clearly defined marks" where it had been bound with string. These marks left by string are noteworthy. Experiments conducted in the early- and mid-nineteenth century revealed that ligature marks are not formed on bodies that have been dead for a while, indicating that the string was tied around the dismembered woman either while she was alive, or more likely, not long - perhaps only hours - after her death.

The severing of the pelvis from the torso is quite unusual in dismemberments, but neither the doctors nor the police seemed to have given this detail much thought, or even offered opinions about it. No other body parts of the woman turned up, except what was believed to be her left leg, which had been severed just below the knee. The partial limb had been buried several yards from where the torso had been found. Dr. Bond described the foot and leg as "exquisitely molded." The foot was well cared for, the toenails neatly trimmed. There were no corns or bunions that might indicate that the victim had been a "poor woman."

Police and physicians were of the opinion that the dismemberment was an attempt to conceal the victim's identity. This conclusion is inconsistent with the killer severing the pelvis at the fourth lumbar and at the hip joints - or essentially removing the victim's sexual organs and genitalia. One might wonder if there is a similarity between such a mutilation and what the Ripper did when he slashed open the abdomen of his victim and took her uterus and part of her vagina.

When the torso was found on the site of Scotland Yard's new headquarters, it was bound in old cloth and "a lot of old string of different sorts tied all around in each direction," said Frederick Wildore, the carpenter who noticed a mysterious shape at six o'clock in the morning on October 2nd, when he reached inside a dark recess of the foundation, looking for his basket of tools. He dragged out the bundle and cut open the string and for a moment did not know what he was looking at. "I thought it was old bacon or something like that," he said at the inquest. The foundation was a labyrinth of recesses and trenches, and to hide the bundle there could not have been done unless the person knew his way, Wildore claimed. It was "always as dark as the darkest night in the day."

Adhering to the remains were bits of newspapers that were fragments from an old Daily Chronicle, and a blood-saturated six-inch-long, four-inch-wide section of the August 24, 1888, edition of the Echo, a daily paper that cost a halfpenny. Sickert was a news addict. A photograph of him in later life shows a studio that is a landfill of newspapers. The Echo was a liberal publication that published numerous articles about Sickert throughout his life. In the August 24, 1888, edition, on page 4 is the "Notes amp;c Queries" section with its instructions that all queries and answers must be written on postcards, and one is to refer to the query he is answering by using the number of that query as assigned by the newspaper. Advertising in disguise, the Echo warns, "is inadmissible."

Of eighteen "Answers" on August 24,1888, five of them were signed "W. S." They are as follows:

Answer One (3580): OSTEND. - I would not advise "W. B." to choose Ostend for a fortnight's holiday; he will be tired of it in two days. It is a show place for dresses, 8tc., and very expensive. The country around is flat and uninteresting; besides, the roads are all paved with granite. To an English tourist I can recommend the "Yellow House" or "Maison Jaune," which is kept by an Englishman, close by the railway station or steamboat pier; also the Hotel du Nord. Both are reasonable, but avoid grand hotels. The sands are lovely. No knowledge of French is required. - W.S.

(Ostend was a seaport and resort in Belgium accessible from Dover, and a place Sickert had visited.)

Answer Two (3686): POPULAR OPERAS. - The popularity of Trovatore is naturally due to the sweetness of the music and the taking airs. It is not generally accepted as a "high class" music - indeed, I have frequently heard "professional" musicians call it not music at all. For myself, I prefer it to any other opera, except Don Juan. - W.S.

Answer Three (3612): PASSPORTS. - I am afraid "An Unfortunate Pole" will have to confine his attention to those countries where no passports are required of which latter there are plenty, and are, besides more pleasant to travel in. I once met a countryman of his who traveled with a borrowed passport; he was caught at it and sent to quod [street slang for prison], where he remained some time. - W.S.

Answer Four (3623): CHANGE OF NAME. - All "Jones" has to do is to take a paint brush, obliterate "Jones" and substitute "Brown." Of course this will not relieve him from any liabilities as "Jones." He will simply be "Jones" trading under the name of "Brown." - W.S.

Answer Five (3627): LETTERS OF NATURALISATION. - In order to obtain these, a foreigner must have resided either five consecutive years, or at least five within the last eight years, in the United Kingdom; and he must also make a declaration that he intends to reside permanently therein. Strict proofs of this will be required from four British-born householders. - W.S.

To offer answers by using the original query number implies the writer was familiar with the Echo and was probably an avid reader of it. To send in five answers is compulsive and in keeping with Sickert's prolific writing and the stunning number of Ripper letters received by the police and press. Newsprint is a leitmotif that shows up repeatedly in Sickert's life and in the Ripper's game playing. A Ripper letter to a police magistrate is written in an exquisite calligraphy on a section of the Star newspaper, dated December 4th. The torn-out section of paper includes the notice of an etching exhibition, and on the back of the paper is a sub-headline "Nobody's Child."

Walter Sickert was never sure who he was or where he was from. He was "No Englishman," to quote the signatory of another Ripper letter. His stage name was "Mr. Nemo" (or Mr. Nobody), and in a telegraph the Ripper sent to the police (no date, but possibly the late fall of 1888) the Ripper crosses out "Mr. Nobody" as the sender and writes in "Jack the Ripper" instead. Sickert wasn't French but considered himself a French painter. He once wrote that he intended to become a French citizen - which he never did. In another letter he states that in his heart he will always be German.

Most Ripper letters mailed October 20, 1888, through November 10th were postmarked London, and it is a certainty Sickert was in London prior to October 22nd to attend an early showing of the "First Pastel Exhibition" that opened at the Grosvenor Gallery. In letters that Sickert wrote to Blanche, references to the New English Art Club's election of new members indicate that Sickert was based in London or at least was in England during the autumn, and most likely into November and possibly until the end of the year.

When Ellen returned home to 54 Broadhurst Gardens at the end of October, she came down with a terrible case of the flu that lingered and sapped her health well into November. I could find no record of her spending time with her husband or whether she knew where he was from one day to the next. I don't know if she was frightened by the violent atrocities happening a mere six miles from her home, but it is hard to imagine she wasn't. The Metropolis was terrorized, but the worst was yet to come.

Mary Kelly was twenty-four years old and very pretty with a fresh complexion, dark hair, and youthful figure. She was better educated than the other Unfortunates who trolled the area where she lived at 26 Dorset Street. The house was rented by John McCarthy, who owned a chandler's shop and let out all the rooms at 26 Dorset to the very poor. Mary's ground-floor room, number 13, was twelve feet square and separated from another room by a partition that was flush against her wooden bedstead. Her door and two large windows opened onto Miller's Court, and some time ago - she wasn't sure when - she had lost her key.

This hadn't caused a huge problem. Not so long ago, she had a bit too much to drink and got into a row with her man, Joseph Barnett, a coal porter. She couldn't remember, but she must have broken a windowpane then. She and Barnett would reach through the jagged hole in the glass to release the spring lock of the door. They never bothered repairing the glass or replacing the key, and probably didn't think either was a wise expenditure of what little money they had.

Mary Kelly and Joseph Barnett's last big row was ten days earlier. They exchanged blows, the cause of the fight being a woman named Maria Harvey. Mary had begun sleeping with her on Monday and Tuesday nights, and Barnett wouldn't put up with it. He moved out, leaving Mary to somehow pay off the?l 9s. owed in rent. Barnett and Mary patched up their relationship a bit, and he dropped by occasionally and gave her a little money.

Maria Harvey last saw Mary the Thursday afternoon of November 8th, when Maria visited Mary in her room. Maria was a laundress and asked if it would be all right to leave some dirty laundry: two men's shirts, a little boy's shirt, a black overcoat, a black crepe bonnet with black satin strings, a pawn ticket for a gray shawl, and a little girl's white petticoat. She promised to retrieve the garments later, and was still in the room when Barnett showed up unexpectedly for a visit.

"Well, Mary Jane," Maria said on her way out, "I shall not see you this evening again." She would never see Mary again.

Mary Kelly was born in Limerick, the daughter of John Kelly, an Irish iron worker. Mary had six brothers who lived at home, a brother in the Army, and a sister who worked in the markets. The family had moved to Caernarvonshire, Wales, when Mary was young, and at sixteen she married a collier named Davis. Two or three years later, he was killed in an explosion, and Mary left for Cardiff to live with a cousin. It was at this time that she began to drift into drink and prostitution, and for eight months she was in an infirmary to be treated for venereal disease.

She moved to England in 1884, and continued to have no trouble attracting business. There are no photographs I've found that show what she looked like, except after the Ripper completely destroyed her body. But contemporary sketches depict her as a very handsome woman with the hourglass figure coveted in that era. Her dress and manner were a remnant of a better world than the wretched one she tried to forget through alcohol.

Mary was a prostitute in the West End for a while, and met gentlemen who knew how to reward a pretty woman for her favors. A man took her to France, but she stayed only ten days and returned to London. Life in France, she told friends, did not suit her. She lived with a man on Rat-cliff Highway, then with another man on Pennington Street, then with a plasterer in Bethnal Green. Joseph Barnett was not certain how many men she had lived with or for how long, he testified at the inquest.

One Friday night in Spitalfields, the pretty Mary Kelly caught Joseph Barnett's eye and he treated her to a drink. Days later they decided to live together; this was eight months before he rented Room 13 at 26 Dorset Street. Now and then Mary got letters from her mother in Ireland, and unlike many Unfortunates, she was literate. But when the East End murders began, she got Barnett to read accounts of them to her. Perhaps the news of the slayings was too unnerving for her to take in alone and in the quiet of her own imagination. She may not have known the victims, but there is a good chance she had seen them on the street or in a public house at some point.

Mary's life with Joseph Barnett wasn't a bad one, he testified at her inquest, and the only reason he left her was "because she had a person who was a prostitute whom she took in and I objected to her doing so, that was the only reason, not because I was out of work. I left her on the 30th October between 5 amp;6 P.M." Barnett said he and Mary remained on "friendly terms" and the last time he saw her alive was Thursday night between 7:30 and 7:45, when he dropped by and discovered Maria in the room. Maria left, and Barnett stayed with Mary briefly. He told her he was sorry but he had no money to give her, and "We did not drink together," he testified. "She was quite sober, she was as long as she was with me of sober habits" and only got drunk now and then.

Mary Kelly was vividly aware of the monstrous murders happening within blocks of her rooming house, but she continued walking the streets at night after Barnett moved out. She had no other way to earn money. She needed her drinks, and she was about to get evicted with no prospect of another decent man to take her in. She was becoming desperate. Not so long ago she was an upscale prostitute who frequented the finer establishments of the West End. But recently, she had been sliding down deeper into the bottomless pit of poverty, alcoholism, and despair. Soon enough she would lose her looks. It probably did not occur to her that she might lose her life.

Few facts are known about Mary Kelly, but a number of rumors circulated at the time. It was said that she had a seven-year-old son and that she would rather kill herself than see him starve to death. If this son existed, there is no mention of him in police reports and inquest testimony. On the last night of her life, she supposedly ran into a friend at the corner of Dorset Street whom she told she had no money. "If she could not get any," the friend later told police, "she would never go out any more but would do away with herself."

Mary was quite noisy when she was drunk, and she had been in the drink Thursday night, November 8th. The weather had been wretched the entire month, with days of hard rain and fierce winds out of the southeast. Temperatures were dipping into the low forties and mist and fog enveloped the city like gauze. Mary was spotted several times that Thursday night, apparently heading off to the nearest pub not long after Joseph Barnett left her room. She was spotted on Commercial Street, quite drunk, and then at 10:00 P.M. on Dorset Street. Times cited are not to be trusted, and there is no certainty that when a person saw "Mary Kelly" it was really Mary Kelly. The streets were very dark. Many people were intoxicated, and after the Ripper's recent murderous spree, witnesses seemed to spring up from everywhere and their stories were not always to be trusted.

One of Mary's neighbors, a prostitute named Mary Ann Cox who lived in room 5 of Miller's Court, testified at the inquest that she saw Mary Kelly intoxicated at midnight. She wore a dark, shabby skirt, a red jacket, and no hat, and was accompanied by a short, stout man who had a blotchy complexion and a thick carroty mustache and who was dressed in dark clothing and a hard, black billycock hat. He carried a pot of beer as he walked Mary Kelly toward her door. Mary Ann was walking several steps behind them and bid Mary Kelly good night. "I'm going to have a song," Mary Kelly replied as the man shut the door to Room 13.

For more than an hour, Mary was heard singing the poignant Irish song "Sweet Violets."

"A violet I plucked from my mother's grave when a boy," she sang, and the light of a candle could be seen through her curtains.

Mary Ann Cox worked the streets, periodically stopping by her room to warm her hands before going out again in search of clients. At 3:00 A.M., she came in for the night and Mary Kelly's room was dark and silent. Mary Ann went to bed with her clothes on. A hard, cold rain was slapping the courtyard and streets. She did not sleep. She heard men in and out of the building as late as a quarter of six. Another neighbor, Elizabeth Prater in room 20 directly above Mary Kelly, said at the inquest that at close to 1:30 A.M., she could see a "glimmer" of light through the "partition" that separated Mary Kelly's room from hers.

I assume by "partition" Elizabeth was referring to cracks in the floor. Elizabeth Prater secured her door for the night by wedging two tables against it and went to bed. She'd had something to drink, she testified, and slept soundly until a kitten began restlessly walking over her at approximately 4:00 A.M., waking her up. By now, the room below her was dark, Elizabeth testified. Suddenly, she said, "I heard a cry of 'oh! Murder!' as the cat came on me and I pushed her down." She said the voice was faint and from close by and that she did not hear it a second time. Elizabeth fell back asleep and woke up again at 5:00 A.M. Men were harnessing horses in Dorset Street as she walked to the Ten Bells public house for an eye-opener of rum.

John McCarthy was working hard in his chandler's shop mid-morning. He was also trying to figure out what to do about room 13 in the building he leased at 26 Dorset Street. As he worked on that foggy, cold Friday morning, he was forced to ponder the inevitable. Joseph Barnett had moved out more than two weeks ago and Mary Kelly was?1 9s behind in the rent. McCarthy had been patient with Mary Kelly, but this simply could not continue.

"Go to number 13 and try and get some rent," he told his assistant, Thomas Bowyer. It was close to eleven when Bowyer walked over to Mary Kelly's room and knocked on the door. He got no response. He tugged on the handle, but the door was locked. He pushed the curtains aside and looked through the broken window and saw Mary Kelly naked on the bed, covered with blood. He ran back to his employer, and both he and McCarthy hurried to Mary's room and looked in. Bowyer ran to find the police.

An H Division inspector made haste to get to the scene, and he sent immediately for Police Surgeon Dr. George Phillips and wired Scotland Yard about the latest Ripper murder. Within half an hour, the crime scene was crowded with inspectors, including Frederick Abberline, who ordered that no one in the courtyard was allowed to leave, and no one could enter without police authorization.

Charles Warren was also telegraphed. Abberline inquired if the commissioner would like the bloodhounds to respond. The seasoned investigator probably knew full well what a waste of time that would be. But he was following orders. The order was countermanded and the dogs never came. By the end of the day, the press would learn that Warren had resigned.

There was no rush to get inside Mary Kelly's room. As Dr. Phillips said in the inquest, he looked through "the lower broken pane and satisfied myself that the mutilated corpse lying on the bed was not in need of any immediate attention from me." The police removed a window from Mary Kelly's room and Dr. Phillips began to take photographs through the opening. At 1:30 P.M., police used a pickaxe to pry open the door, and it banged against a table left of the bedstead. Police investigators and Dr. Phillips entered the room and what they saw was unlike any travesty the men had ever encountered in their entire careers.

"It looked more like the work of a devil than a man," McCarthy would later recount at the inquest. "I had heard about the Whitechapel murders but I swear to God I had never expected to see such a sight as this."

Mary Kelly's body was two-thirds of the way across the bed, almost against the door. Crime-scene photographs reveal remains so mutilated that she may as well have been run over by a train. The Ripper hacked off her ears and nose and slashed and defleshed her face down to the skull. She had no features left, only her dark hair, still neatly styled, probably because she never struggled with the Ripper. There wasn't room to attack her from behind the bed, so he attacked her from the front. Unlike the Camden Town murder, Mary was face-up when a strong, sharp blade severed her right carotid artery. Blood soaked through the bed and pooled on the floor.

Abberline, who was in charge of the case, searched the room. He found burned clothing in the fireplace and surmised that the killer continued to feed the fire while he worked so he would have enough light to see, "as there was only one piece of candle in the room," Abberline testified. The heat was so intense that it melted the spout of a kettle. One might wonder how a fire could burn so brightly and not have been noticed in the courtyard, even through drawn curtains. Someone might have worried that the room was on fire, unless the fire was a low, hot, steady one. As usual, people were minding their own affairs. Maybe the Ripper worked by the tiny light of the single candle in the room. Sickert didn't mind the dark. The "pitch dark," he said in a letter, "is lovely."

Except for a coat, all of Maria's dirty laundry had been burned. Mary Kelly's clothing was found neatly folded by the side of the bed, as if she had willingly undressed down to her chemise. Her killer ripped and cut and hacked into her body, laying it wide open, mutilating her genitalia to a pulp. He amputated her breasts and arranged them next to her liver on the side of the bed. He heaped her entrails on top of the bedside table. Every organ except her brain was removed, and her right leg was flayed open to the knee, exposing a completely defleshed, gleaming white femur.

Plainly visible on the left arm are curved cutting injuries, and a dark line encircling her right leg just below the knee suggests the Ripper may have been in the process of dismemberment when, for some reason, he stopped. Perhaps the fire had burned down or the candle was about to go out. Maybe it was getting late and time for him to make his escape. Dr. Thomas Bond arrived at the scene at 2:00 P.M., and in his report he said that rigor mortis had set in and increased during the course of his examination. He admitted he could not give an exact time of death, but the body was cold at 2:00 P.M. Based on that, and on rigor mortis and the presence of partially digested food in her ripped-open stomach and scattered over her intestines, he estimated she had been dead twelve hours by the time he reached the scene.

If Dr. Bond was correct in saying that rigor mortis was still in the process of forming when he began to examine the body at the scene by 2:00 P.M., then it is possible that Mary had not been dead as long as twelve hours. Her body would have been cold long before that. It was drained of blood, she was slender, her body cavity was exposed, and she was covered by nothing but a chemise in a room in which the fire had gone out. Also, if witnesses are to be believed, Mary Kelly was still alive at 1:30. Times given to police and at the inquest were based on area church clocks that rang the half hour and the hour, on changes of light, and when the East End was silent or beginning to stir.

It may be that the most reliable witness to time of death in Mary Kelly's murder is the kitten that began walking over Elizabeth Prater at around 4:00 A.M. Cats have extraordinarily good hearing and the kitten may have been disturbed by sounds directly below. It may have sensed the pheromones secreted by people who are terrified and panicking. About the time the kitten woke up Elizabeth, she said she heard from nearby someone cry, "Murder!"

Mary Kelly would have seen what was coming. She was undressed and on the bed. She was face-up. She might have seen him pull out the knife. Even if the Ripper threw a sheet over her face before cutting her throat, she knew she was about to die. She would have lived for minutes as she hemorrhaged and he began slashing her. We can't assume the Ripper's victims felt no pain and were already unconscious when he began mutilating them. It isn't possible to know in Mary Kelly's case if the Ripper started on her belly or her face.

If the Ripper hated Mary Kelly's sexually alluring, pretty face, he might have started there. Or it may have been her abdomen. She may have felt the cuts as the loss of blood quickly caused her to shiver. Her teeth might have begun to chatter, but not for long as she grew faint, went into shock, and died. She may have drowned as blood gushing out of her carotid artery was inhaled through the cut in her windpipe and filled her lungs.

"The air passage was cut through at the lower part of the larynx through the cricoid cartilage," reads page 16 of the original autopsy report.

She could not have screamed or uttered a sound.

"Both breasts were removed by more or less circular incisions, the muscles down to the ribs being attached to the breasts."

This would require a sharp, strong knife with a blade that was not so long as to make the weapon unwieldy. A dissecting knife has a four- to six-inch blade and a handle with a good grip. But a common killing knife available to the Ripper would have been the kukri, with its unique blade that sweeps into a forward bend. The blade lengths can vary, and the knives are sturdy enough for chopping vines, branches, or even small trees. When Queen Victoria was the Empress of India, many British soldiers wore kukris, and the knives would have found their way into the English market.

Jack the Ripper wrote in a letter dated October 19th that he "felt rather down hearted over my knife which I lost comming [sic] here must get one tonight." Two days later, on the Sunday night of October 21st, a constable discovered a bloody knife in the shrubbery not far from where Sickert's mother lived. The knife was a kukri. Such a knife could have been used on Mary Kelly. The kukri was used in battle to cut throats and sever limbs, but because of its curved blade, it is not a stabbing knife.

"The skin 8t tissues of the abdomen… were removed in three large places… The right thigh was denuded in point to the bone… The lower part of the [right] lung was broken and torn away… The Pericardium was open below 8t the heart absent."

These autopsy details come from pages 16 and 18 of the original report and seem to be the only pages from any of the autopsies to have survived. The loss of these reports is truly a calamity. The medical details that would tell us the most about what the killer did to his victim are not as clearly defined in the inquests as they would be in autopsy reports. It was not mentioned in Mary Kelly's inquest that her heart was taken. That was a detail the police, the doctors, and the coroner thought the public didn't need to know.

Mary Kelly's postmortem examination was held at the Shoreditch mortuary and lasted six and a half hours. The most experienced forensic medical men were present: Dr. Thomas Bond of Westminster, Dr. Gordon Brown of the City, a Dr. Duke from Spitalfields, and Dr. George Phillips and an assistant. Accounts say that the men would not complete their examination until every organ had been accounted for. Some reports suggest no organs were missing, but that isn't true. The Ripper took Mary Kelly's heart and possibly portions of her genitals and uterus.

The inquest began and ended on November 11th. Dr. Phillips had barely described the crime scene when Dr. Roderick McDonald, the coroner for Northeast Middlesex, said that it would not be necessary for the doctor to go into any further particulars at that time. The jurors - all of whom had viewed Mary Kelly's remains at the mortuary - could reconvene and hear more later, unless they were prepared to reach a verdict now. They were. They had heard quite enough. "Wilful murder against some person unknown."

Immediately, the press fell silent. It was as if the Ripper case was closed. Scans through days and weeks and months of newspapers after Mary Kelly's inquest and burial reveal few mentions of the Ripper. His letters continued to arrive and they were filed "with the others." They were not printed in respectable newspapers. Any subsequent crimes that might have brought up the question of the Ripper were eventually dismissed as not being the work of the Whitechapel fiend.

In June 1889, dismembered female remains were found in London. They were never identified.

On July 16, 1889, an Unfortunate named Alice McKenzie, known to "be the worse for drink" now and then, went out to the Cambridge Music-hall in the East End and was overheard by a blind boy to ask a man to treat her to a drink. At close to 1:00 A.M., her body was found in Castle Alley, Whitechapel, her throat cut, and her clothing pushed up to display severe mutilation to her abdomen. Dr. Thomas Bond performed her autopsy and wrote, "I am of the opinion that the murder was performed by the same person who committed the former series of Whitechapel murders." The case was never solved. Little public mention was made of the Ripper.

On August 6,1889, an eight-year-old girl named Caroline Winter was murdered in Seaham Harbour on England's northeast coast, not far from Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Her skull was bashed in, her body "bearing other terrible injuries," and she was dumped in a pool of water near a sewer. She was last seen playing with a friend who told police that Caroline was talking to a man with black hair, a black mustache, and dressed in a shabby gray suit. He offered Caroline a shilling to come with him, and she did.

The female torso found in the railway arch off Pinchin Street on September 10th showed no sign of mutilation, except for dismemberment, and there was no evidence her death was caused by a cut throat, even if she had been decapitated. An incision down the front of the torso could not have been the work of the Ripper, according to the official report. "The inner coating of the bowel is hardly touched and the termination of the cut towards the vagina looks almost as if the knife had slipped, and as if this portion of the wound had been accidental. Had this been the work of the previous frenzied murderer we may be tolerably sure that he would have continued his hideous work in the way which he previously adopted." The case was never solved.

On December 13, 1889, at the Middlesbrough docks, also on England's northeast coast, just south of Seaham Harbour, decomposing human remains were found, including a woman's right hand that was missing two joints of the little finger.

"I am trying my hand at disjointing," the Ripper wrote December 4, 1888, "and if can manage it will send you a finger."

On February 13, 1891, a prostitute named Francis Coles was found with her throat cut in Swallow Gardens, Whitechapel. She was approximately twenty-six years old, and "of drunken habits," according to police reports. Dr. George Phillips performed the postmortem examination and was of the opinion that the body wasn't mutilated and he did "not connect this with the series of previous murders." The case was never solved.

A case involving dismembered female body parts found in London in June 1902 was never solved.

Serial killers keep killing. Sickert kept killing. His body count could have been fifteen, twenty, forty before he died peacefully in his bed in Bathampton, January 22, 1942, at the age of 81. After Mary Kelly's butchery, Jack the Ripper faded into a nightmare from the past. He was probably that sexually insane young doctor who was really a barrister and who threw himself into the Thames. He could have been a lunatic barber or a lunatic Jew who was safely locked up in an asylum. He could be dead. What a relief to make such assumptions.

After 1896, it seems the Ripper letters stopped. His name wasn't connected to current crimes anymore, and his case files were sealed for a century. In 1903, James McNeill Whistler died and Walter Sickert gracefully assumed center stage. Their styles and themes were quite different - Whistler didn't paint murdered prostitutes and his work was beginning to be worth a fortune - but Sickert was coming into his own. He was evolving into a cult figure as an artist and a "character." By the time he was an old man, he was the greatest living artist in England. Had he ever confessed to being Jack the Ripper, I don't think anybody would have believed him.