Portrait Of A Killer: Jack The Ripper - Case Closed

Chapter Two. The Tour

Not long before Christmas, 2001, I was walking to my apartment in New York's Upper East Side, and I knew I seemed downcast and agitated, despite my efforts to appear composed and in a fine mood.

I don't remember much about that night, not even the restaurant where a group of us ate. I vaguely recall that Lesley Stahl told a scary story about her latest investigation for 60 Minutes, and everyone at the table was talking politics and economics. I offered another writer encouragement, citing my usual empowerment spiels and do-what-you-love lines, because I did not want to talk about myself or the work that I worried was ruining my life. My heart felt squeezed, as if grief would burst in my chest any moment.

My literary agent, Esther Newberg, and I set out on foot for our part of town. I had little to say on the dark sidewalk as we passed the usual suspects out walking their dogs and the endless stream of loud people talking on cell phones. I barely noticed yellow cabs or horns. I began to

imagine some thug trying to grab our briefcases or us. I would chase him and dive for his ankles and knock him to the ground. I am five foot five and weigh 120 pounds, and I can run fast, and I'd show him, yes I would. I fantasized about what I would do if some psychopathic piece of garbage came up from behind us in the dark and suddenly…

"How's it going?" Esther asked.

"To tell you the truth…" I began, because I rarely told Esther the truth.

It was not my habit to admit to my agent or my publisher, Phyllis Grann, that I was ever frightened or uneasy about what I was doing. The two women were the big shots in my professional existence and had faith in me. If I said I had been investigating Jack the Ripper and knew who he was, they didn't doubt me for a moment.

"I'm miserable," I confessed, and I was so dismayed that I felt like crying.

"You are?" Esther's stop-for-nothing stride hesitated for a moment on Lexington Avenue. "You're miserable? Really? Why?"

"I hate this book, Esther. I don't know how the hell…All I did was look at his paintings and his life, and one thing led to another…"

She didn't say a word.

It has always been easier for me to get angry than to show fear or loss, and I was losing my life to Walter Richard Sickert. He was taking it away from me. "I want to write my novels," I said. "I don't want to write about him. There's no joy in this. None."

"Well, you know," she said very calmly as she resumed her pace, "you don't have to do it. I can get you out of it."

She could have gotten me out of it, but I could never have gotten myself out of it. I knew the identity of a murderer and I couldn't possibly avert my gaze. "I am suddenly in a position of judgment," I told Esther. "It doesn't matter if he's dead. Every now and then this small voice asks me, what if you're wrong? I would never forgive myself for saying such a thing about somebody, and then finding out I'm wrong."

"But you don't believe you're wrong…"

"No. Because I'm not," I said.

It all began innocently enough, like setting out to cross a lovely country lane and suddenly being hit by a cement truck. I was in London in May 2001, promoting the archaeological excavation of Jamestown. My friend Linda Fairstein, head of the sex crimes unit for the New York District Attorney's Office, was in London, too, and asked if I'd like to drop by Scotland Yard for a tour.

"Not right now," I said, and even as the words left my mouth, I imagined how little my readers would respect me if they knew that sometimes I just don't feel like touring one more police department, laboratory, morgue, firing range, cemetery, penitentiary, crime scene, law-enforcement agency, or anatomical museum.

When I travel, especially abroad, my key to the city is often an invitation to visit its violent, sad sights. In Buenos Aires, I was given a proud tour of that city's crime museum, a room of decapitated heads preserved in formalin inside glass boxes. Only the most notorious criminals made it into this gruesome gallery, and they had gotten what was coming to them, I supposed, as they stared back at me with milky eyes. In Salta, in northwestern Argentina, I was shown five-hundred-year-old mummies of Inca children who had been buried alive to please the gods. A few years ago in London, I was given VIP treatment in a plague pit where one could scarcely move in the mud without stepping on human bones.

I worked in the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Richmond, Virginia, for six years, programming computers, compiling statistical analyses, and helping out in the morgue. I scribed for the forensic pathologists, weighed organs, wrote down trajectories and the sizes of wounds, inventoried the prescription drugs of suicide victims who would not take their antidepressants, helped undress fully rigorous people who rigidly resisted our removing their clothes, labeled test tubes, wiped up blood, and saw, touched, smelled, and even tasted death because the stench of it clings to the back of one's throat.

I don't forget the faces of or the smallest details about people who are murdered. I've seen so many. I couldn't possibly count how many, and I wish I could fill a huge room with them before it happened and beg them to lock their doors or install an alarm system - or at least get a dog - or not park there or stay away from drugs. I feel the prick of pain when I envision the dented aerosol can of Brut deodorant in the pocket of the teenaged boy showing off and deciding to stand up in the back of a pickup truck. He didn't notice it was about to drive under a bridge. I still can't comprehend the randomness of the death of the man struck by lightning after he was handed a metal-tipped umbrella as he got off a plane.

My intense curiosity about violence hardened long ago into a suit of clinical armor that is protective but so heavy sometimes I can barely walk after visits with the dead. It seems the dead want my energy and desperately try to suck it out of me as they lie in their own blood on the street or on top of a stainless-steel table. The dead stay dead and I stay drained. Murder is not a mystery, and it is my mission to fight it with my pen.

It would have been a betrayal of what I am and an insult to Scotland Yard and every law enforcer in Christendom for me to be "tired" the day Linda Fairstein said she could arrange a tour.

"That's very kind of Scotland Yard," I told her. "I've never been there."

The next morning, I met with Deputy Assistant Commissioner John Grieve, the most respected investigator in Great Britain, and, as it turned out, an expert in Jack the Ripper's crimes. The fabled Victorian killer interested me mildly. I had never read a Ripper book in my life. I knew nothing about his homicides. I did not know his victims were prostitutes or how they died. I asked a few questions. Perhaps I could use Scotland Yard in my next Scarpetta novel, I thought. If so, I would need to know factual details about the Ripper cases, and perhaps Scarpetta would have new insights to offer about them.

John Grieve offered to take me on a retrospective tour of the Ripper crime scenes - what was left of them after 113 years. I cancelled a trip to Ireland to spend a rainy, freezing morning with the famous Mr. Grieve and Detective Inspector Howard Gosling, walking about Whitechapel and Spitalfields, to Mitre Square, and to Miller's Court where Mary Kelly was flayed to the bone by this serial murderer people call the Ripper.

"Has anyone ever tried to use modern forensic science to solve these crimes?" I asked.

"No," John Grieve said, and he gave me a very short list of very weak suspects. "There's one other interesting chap you might want to check out, as long as you're going to look into it. An artist named Walter Sickert. He painted some murder pictures. In one of them in particular, a clothed man is sitting on the edge of a bed with the body of the nude prostitute he just murdered. It's called The Camden Town Murder. I've always wondered about him."

It wasn't the first time Sickert had been connected with Jack the Ripper's crimes. Most people have always found the notion laughable.

I began to wonder about Sickert when I was flipping through a book of his art. The first plate I landed on was an 1887 painting of the well-known Victorian performer Ada Lundberg at the Marylebone Music Hall. She is supposed to be singing but looks as if she is screaming as the leering, menacing men look on. I am sure there are artistic explanations for all of Sickert's works. But what I see when I look at them is morbidity, violence, and a hatred of women. As I continued to follow Sickert and the Ripper, I began to see unsettling parallels. Some of his paintings bear a chilling resemblance to mortuary and scene photographs of Jack the Ripper's victims.

I noticed murky images of clothed men reflected in mirrors inside gloomy bedrooms where nude women sit on iron bedsteads. I saw impending violence and death. I saw a victim who had no reason to fear the charming, handsome man who had just coaxed her into a place and state of utter vulnerability. I saw a diabolically creative mind, and I saw evil.

I began adding layer after layer of circumstantial evidence to the physical evidence discovered by modern forensic science and expert minds.

All along, forensic scientists and I have hoped for DNA. But it would be a year and more than a hundred tests later before we would begin to see the first shadows of the 75- to 114-year-old genetic evidence that Walter Sickert and Jack the Ripper left when they touched and licked postage stamps and envelope flaps. Cells from the inside of their mouths sloughed off into their saliva and were sealed in adhesive until DNA scientists apprehended the genetic markers with tweezers, sterile water, and cotton swabs.

The best result came from a Ripper letter that yielded a single-donor mitochondrial DNA sequence, specific enough to eliminate 99% of the population as the person who licked and touched the adhesive backing of that stamp. This same DNA sequence profile turned up as a component of another Ripper letter, and two Walter Sickert letters.

Genetic locations from this DNA sequence were found on other Sickert items, such as coveralls he wore when he painted. The DNA in all but the single-donor Ripper stamp is mixed with other genetic sequence profiles from other people. (This is neither surprising nor damning.) The DNA evidence is the oldest ever tested in a criminal case.

This is only the beginning. We aren't finished with our DNA testing and other types of forensic analyses. These could go on for years as the technology advances at an exponential rate.

There is other physical evidence as well. Forensic scientists as well as art, paper, and lettering experts found the following: a Ripper letter written on artists' paper; watermarks on paper used in Ripper letters that match watermarks on paper used by Walter Sickert; Ripper letters written with the waxy-soft crayonlike ground used in lithography; Ripper letters with paint or ink applied with a paintbrush. A microscopic exam revealed that the "dried blood" on Ripper letters is consistent with the oil-and-wax mixtures used in etching ground, and under ultraviolet light it fluoresced milky white, which is also consistent with etching ground. Art experts say that sketches in Ripper letters are professional and are consistent with Walter Sickert's art works and technique.

As an interesting aside, a blood-detection test conducted on the blood-like etching ground smeared and painted on Ripper letters came up as inconclusive - which is very unusual. Two possible explanations are as follows: It could be a reaction to microscopic particles of copper, since in this type of testing copper could cause inconclusive results or a false positive; or it could be the presence of blood mixed with the brown etching ground.

Handwriting quirks and the position of the Ripper's hand when he wrote his taunting, violent letters lurk in other Ripper writings that are disguised. These same quirks and hand positions lurk in Sickert's erratic handwriting as well.

Paper of letters the Ripper sent to the Metropolitan Police precisely matches paper of a letter the Ripper sent to the City of London Police - even though the handwriting is different. It is evident that Sickert was right-handed, but video footage taken of him when he was in his 70s shows he was quite adept at using his left hand. Lettering expert Sally Bower believes that in some Ripper letters the writing was disguised by a right-handed person writing with his left hand. It is obvious that the actual Ripper wrote far more of the Ripper letters than he has ever been credited with. In fact, I believe he wrote most of them. In fact, Walter Sickert wrote most of them. Even when his skilled artistic hands altered his writing, his arrogance and characteristic language cannot help but assert themselves.

No doubt there will always be skeptics and critics tainted by self-interest who will refuse to accept that Sickert was a serial killer, a damaged, diabolical man driven by megalomania and hate. There will be those who will argue that it's all coincidence.

As FBI profiler Ed Sulzbach says, "There really aren't many coincidences in life. And to call coincidence after coincidence after coincidence a coincidence is just plain stupid."

Fifteen months after my first meeting with Scotland Yard's John Grieve, I returned to him and presented the case.

"What would you do had you known all this and been the detective back then?" I asked him.

"I would immediately put Sickert under surveillance to try to find where his bolt holes [secret rooms] were, and if we found any, we would get search warrants," he replied as we drank coffee in an East End Indian restaurant.

"If we didn't get any more evidence than what we've now got," he went on, "we'd be happy to put the case before the crown prosecutor."