After a while, Mary Ann moved on to White Houseon nearby Flower and Dean Street and stayed there until she ran outof money and was evicted on August 29th. The following night, shewalked the streets wearing everything she owned: a brown ulsterfastened with big brass buttons engraved with the figures of a manand a horse; a brown linsey frock; two gray woolen petticoats withthe stenciled marks of the Lambeth Workhouse; two brown stays(stiff bodices made of whalebone); flannel underclothing; ribbedblack woolen stockings; men's sidespring boots that had been cut onthe uppers, tips, and heels for a better fit; and a black strawbonnet trimmed in black velvet. In a pocket she had tucked a whitehandkerchief, a comb, and a bit of broken looking glass.
Mary Ann was spotted several times between11:00 P.M. and 2:30 the following morning, and in each instance,she was alone. She was seen on Whitechapel Road, and then at theFrying Pan Public House. At around 1:40 A.M., she was in thekitchen of her former lodging house at 18 Thrawl Street, where shesaid she was penniless and asked that her bed be kept for her,promising to return soon with money for payment. She wasintoxicated, witnesses said, and on her way out the door shepromised to be back soon and bragged about her "jolly" bonnet,which appeared to have been recently acquired.
Mary Ann was last seen alive at 2:30 A.M. whenher friend Nelly Holland came upon her at the corner of OsbornStreet and Whitechapel Road, across from the parish church. MaryAnn was drunk and staggering along a wall. She told Nelly that sofar this night she had earned three times what she needed for herbed at the lodging house but had spent it. Despite her friend'spleas that she come with her and go to bed, Mary Ann insisted ontrying one last time to earn a few pennies. The parish church clockchimed as Mary Ann wove her way along the un-lighted WhitechapelRoad, dissolving into darkness.
Approximately an hour and fifteen minutes laterand half a mile away on a street called Buck's Row that borderedthe Jews' Cemetery in Whitechapel, Charles Cross, a carman, waswalking along Buck's Row on his way to work and passed a dark shapeagainst some gates on a footpath near a stableyard. At first hethought the shape was a tarpaulin, but he realized it was a womanlying motionless, her head to the east, her bonnet on the ground byher right side, her left hand up against the closed gateway. AsCross was trying to get a better look to see what was wrong withher, he heard footsteps and turned around as another carman namedRobert Paul appeared in the street.
"Take a look," Cross called out as he touchedthe woman's hand. "I believe she is dead." Robert Paul croucheddown and put a hand on her breast. He thought he felt a slightmovement and said, "I believe she is still breathing."
Her clothing was disarrayed, and her skirt wasraised above her hips, so the men decided she had been "outraged"or raped. They chastely rearranged her clothing to cover her, notnoticing any blood because it was too dark. Paul and Cross rushedoff to find the nearest constable and happened upon G. Mizen 55Division H, who was making his rounds at the nearby corner ofHanbury and Old Montague streets, on the west side of the Jews'Cemetery. The men informed the constable that there was a woman onthe pavement either dead or "dead drunk."
When Mizen and the two men reached the stableyard on Buck's Row, Constable John Neil had come across the bodyand was alerting other police in the area by calling out andflashing his bull's-eye lantern. The woman's throat had beenseverely cut, and Dr. Rees Ralph Llewellyn, who lived nearby at 152Whitechapel Road, was immediately roused from bed and summoned tothe scene. Mary Ann Nichols's identity was unknown at this time,and according to Dr. Llewellyn, she was "quite dead." Her wristswere cold, her body and lower extremities were still very warm. Hewas certain she had been dead less than half an hour and that herinjuries were "not self-inflicted." He also observed that there waslittle blood around her neck or on the ground.
He ordered the body moved to the nearbyWhitechapel Workhouse mortuary, a private "dead house" forworkhouse inmates and not intended for any sort of proper forensicpostmortem examination. Llewellyn said he would be there shortly totake a better look, and Constable Mizen sent a man to fetch anambulance from the Bethnal Green police station. Victorian Londonhospitals did not have ambulances and there was no such thing asrescue squads.
The usual means of rushing a desperately sickor injured person to the nearest hospital was for friends or GoodSamaritan passersby to carry the patient by the arms and legs.Sometimes the cry "Send for a shutter!" rang out, and the afflictedone would be conveyed on a window shutter carried like a stretcher.Ambulances were used by police, and most police stations had one ofthese unwieldy wooden-sided handcarts with its lashed-in sturdyblack leather bottom that was equipped with thick leather straps. Atan leather convertible top could be unfolded, but probably didlittle more than offer partial protection from prying eyes or badweather.
In most cases, an ambulance was used to removea drunk from a public place, but occasionally the cargo was thedead. It must have been quite a chore for a constable to navigate ahandcart at night along unlighted, narrow, rutted streets. Such anambulance is extremely heavy, even without a patient, and is verydifficult to turn. Based on the one I found in Metropolitan Policestorage, I would guess that the cart weighs several hundred poundsand would have been extremely difficult to pull up the most gentlehill, unless the constable at the handles was strong and had a goodgrip.
This morbid means of transportation was onethat Walter Sickert would have seen had he lingered in the dark andwatched his victims being carted away. It must have been thrillingto spy on a constable huffing and straining as Mary Ann Nichols'salmost severed head lolled from side to side while the big wheelsbounced and her dripping blood speckled the street.
Sickert is known to have drawn, etched, andpainted only what he saw. Without exception, this is true. Hepainted a handcart that is almost identical to the one I saw inpolice storage. His picture is unsigned, undated, and titled TheHand Cart, Rue Stjean, Dieppe. Some catalogues refer to it as TheBasket Shop, and in the painting the view is from the rear of ahandcart that has what looks very much like a folded-down tanconvertible top. Stacked in front of a shop across the narrow,deserted street are what appear to be large, long baskets, similarto what the French used as stretchers for the dead. A barelyvisible figure, possibly a man wearing some sort of hat, is walkingalong a sidewalk, looking over to see what is inside the cart. Athis feet is an inexplicable black square shape that might be apiece of luggage, but could be part of the sidewalk, rather muchlike an open iron sewer trap. In Mary Ann Nichols's murder case,the newspapers reported that the police did not believe the "trap"in the street had been opened, implying that the killer had notescaped through the labyrinth of vaulted brick sewers that ranbeneath the Great Metropolis.
A trap is also an opening in stage floors thatgives actors quick and easy access to a scene in progress, usuallyto the surprise and delight of the unsuspecting audience. In mostproductions of Shakespeare's Hamlet, the ghost enters and exitsthrough the trap. Sickert probably knew far more about stage trapsthan sewer traps. In 1881, he played the ghost in Henry Irving'sHamlet at the Lyceum Theater. The dark shape at the figure's feetin Sickert's painting could be a theater trap. It could be a sewertrap. Or it could be a detail Sickert created to tease viewers.
Mary Ann Nichols's body was lifted off thestreet and placed inside a wooden shell that was strapped into theambulance. Two constables accompanied the body to the mortuary,where it was left in the ambulance outside in the yard. By now, itwas after 4:30 A.M., and while the constables waited at themortuary for Inspector John Spratling, a boy who lived in GeorgeYard Buildings helped the police clean up the crime scene. Pails ofwater were splashed on the ground, and blood flowed into thegutter, leaving only a trace between the stones.
Police Constable John Phail later testifiedthat as he watched the washing of the pavement he noticed a "massof congealed" blood about six inches in diameter that had beenunder the body. It was his observation that contrary to what Dr.Llewellyn had said, there was quite a lot of blood, and it appearedto Phail that it had flowed from the murdered woman's neck underher back and as far down as her waist. Dr. Llewellyn might havenoticed the same details had he turned over the body.
Inspector Spratling arrived at the mortuary andimpatiently waited in the dark for the keeper to arrive with thekeys. By the time Mary Ann Nichols's body was carried inside, itmust have been after 5:00 A.M., and she had been dead for at leasttwo hours. Her body, still inside the shell, was placed on a woodenbench that was typical of those used in mortuaries then. Sometimesthese benches or tables were acquired secondhand from butchers atthe local slaughterhouses. Inspector Spratling pulled up Mary Ann'sdress for a closer inspection in the gas lamp's gloom anddiscovered that her abdomen had been slashed open, exposing theintestines. The next morning, Saturday, September 1st, Dr.Llewellyn performed the autopsy and Wynne Edwin Baxter, the coronerfor the South-Eastern Division of Middlesex, opened the inquestinto Mary Ann Nichols's death.
Unlike grand jury proceedings in the UnitedStates, which are closed to everyone except those subpoenaed, deathinquests in Great Britain are open to the public. In an 1854treatise on the office and duties of coroners, it was noted thatwhile it may be illegal to publish evidence that could proveimportant in the trial, these facts were routinely published anywayand benefitted the public. Details might serve as a deterrent, andby knowing the facts - especially when there are no suspects - thepublic becomes part of the investigative team. Someone might readabout the case and realize that he or she has helpful informationto add.
Whether this reasoning is valid or not,coroners' inquisitions and even ex parte proceedings were usuallyfair game to journalists in 1888, as long as their reporting wastruthful and balanced. As appalling as this may seem to anyoneunaccustomed to the publication of evidence and testimony beforethe actual trial, were it not for Britain's open policy there wouldbe virtually no detailed death investigation records of Jack theRipper's crimes. With the exception of a few pages here and there,the autopsy reports have not survived. Many of them were lostduring World War II, and others may have disappeared in a clerical,or careless, or dishonest Bermuda Triangle.
It is regrettable that so many documents aremissing, because much more could be learned if we had access to theoriginal police reports, photographs, memorandums, and whateverelse is gone. But I doubt there was a cover-up. There was no"Rippergate" instigated by police authorities and politicians whowere trying to shield the public from a shocking truth. Yet thedoubters continue to champion their theories: Scotland Yard hasalways known who the Ripper was but protected him;
Scotland Yard accidentally let him go or tuckedhim into an asylum and didn't inform the public; the royal familywas involved; Scotland Yard didn't care about murdered prostitutesand wanted to hide how little the police did to solve thehomicides.
Untrue. No matter how badly the MetropolitanPolice may have botched the Ripper investigation, there was nodeliberate mendacity or disinformation that I could find. Theboring fact is that most of what went wrong was due to sheerignorance. Jack the Ripper was a modern killer born a hundred yearstoo soon to be caught, and over the decades, records, including theoriginal autopsy report of Mary Ann Nichols, have been lost,misplaced, or spirited away. Some ended up in the hands ofcollectors. I myself bought an alleged original Ripper letter for$1,500.
I suspect the document is authentic andpossibly even written by Sickert. If a Ripper letter was availablein 2001 through a search by a rare-documents dealer, then thatletter at some point must have disappeared from the case files. Howmany others disappeared? I was told by officials at Scotland Yardthat the overriding reason they finally turned over all Ripperfiles to the Public Record Office in Kew is that so much hadvanished. Police officials feared that eventually there would benothing left except reference numbers linked to empty folders.
The fact that the Home Office sealed the Rippercase records for a hundred years only increased the suspicion ofconspiracy enthusiasts. Maggie Bird, the archivist in ScotlandYard's Records Management Branch, offers a historical perspectiveon the subject. She explains that in the late nineteenth century itwas routine to destroy all police personnel files once the officerturned sixty-one, which accounts for the absence of significantinformation about the police involved in the Ripper cases.Personnel files on Inspector Frederick Abberline, who headed theinvestigation, and his supervisor, Chief Inspector Donald Swanson,are gone.
As a matter of routine, Ms. Bird says, even nowhigh-profile murder cases are sealed for twenty-five, fifty, orseventy-five years, depending on the nature of the crime andwhether there remains a privacy issue for family of the victim orvictims. If the Ripper case records had not been sealed for acentury, there might not be anything left of them at all. It tooktwo short years after the records were unsealed for "half of them"to vanish or be stolen, according to Ms. Bird.
At present, all Scotland Yard files are storedin a huge warehouse, the boxes labeled, numbered, and logged into acomputer system. Ms. Bird claims "with hand on heart" that thereare no Ripper files lurking about or lost in those boxes. As far asshe knows, all have been turned over to the Public Record Office,and she attributes any gaps in the records to "bad handling, humannature or pinching, and the bombings of World War II," whenheadquarters - where the records were then stored - were partiallydestroyed during a blitzkrieg.
While it may have been appropriate to preventthe publication of the graphic details and morgue photographs ofnude, mutilated bodies for a period of time, I suspect discretionand sensitivity were not the only motives behind locking up filesand hiding the key. No good could come from reminding the worldthat the Yard never caught its man, and there was no point indwelling on an ugly chapter in English history when theMetropolitan Police Department was disgraced by one of its worstcommissioners.
Her Majesty the Queen must have been sufferinga spell of some sort when she decided to drag a tyrannical generalout of Africa and put him in charge of the civilian police in acity that already hated "blue bottles" / and "coppers."
Charles Warren was a brusque, arrogant man whowore elaborate uniforms. When the Ripper crimes began in 1888,Warren had been commissioner for two years, and his answer toeverything was political subterfuge and force, as he had proven theyear before on Bloody Sunday, November 13th, when he forbade apeaceful socialist demonstration in Trafalgar Square. Warren'sorder was illegal, and it was ignored by socialist reformers suchas Annie Besant and Member of Parliament Charles Bradlaugh, and thepeaceful demonstration was to go on as planned.
Following Warren's orders, the police attackedthe unsuspecting and unarmed protesters. Mounted police charged in,"rolling men and women over like ninepins," wrote Annie Besant.Soldiers arrived, ready to fire and swinging truncheons, andpeace-loving, law-abiding working men and women were left withshattered limbs. Two were dead, many were wounded, people wereimprisoned without representation, and the Law and Liberty Leaguewas formed to defend all victims of police brutality.
To add to Warren's abuse of power, when thefuneral for one of those slain was scheduled, he forbade the hearseto travel along any of the main roads west of Waterloo Bridge. Themassive procession moved slowly along Aldgate, through Whitechapel,and ended at a cemetery on Bow Road, passing through the verysection of the Great Metropolis where a year later the Ripper beganmurdering the Unfortunates whom Annie Besant, Charles Bradlaugh,and others were trying to help. Sickert's brother-in-law, T. FisherUnwin, published Annie Besant's autobiography, and Sickert paintedCharles Bradlaugh's portrait twice. Neither was a coincidence.Sickert knew these people because Ellen and her family were activeLiberals and moved in those political circles. In the early days ofSickert's career, Ellen helped him professionally by introducinghim to well-known figures whose portraits he might paint.
Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh gave theirlives to the poor. Walter Sickert took the lives of the poor, andit was disgraceful that some newspapers began to suggest that theRipper's crimes were a socialist statement directed at graphicallyexposing the underside of the class system and the dirty secrets ofthe greatest city in the world. Sickert murdered sick and miserableprostitutes who were old long before their time. He murdered thembecause it was easy.
He was motivated by his lust for sexualviolence, his hatred, and his insatiable need for attention. Hismurders had nothing to do with making socialist politicalstatements. He killed to satisfy his uncontrollable violentpsychopathic needs. No doubt when the papers and public hinted atmotive - especially a social or ethical one - Sickert enjoyed asecret delight and rush of power. "[H]a! ha! ha!" the Ripper wrote."To tell you the truth you ought to be obliged to me for killingsuch a deuced lot of vermin, why they are ten times worse thanmen."
CHAPTER NINE
THE DARK LANTERN
During the reign of George III, robbers ruledthe high roads and byways, and most villains could buy their wayout of trouble with a bribe.
London was protected by night watchmen armedwith staves, lanterns, and wooden noisemakers called rattles thatmade a startling clack-clack-clack sound when the head was spun. Itwasn't until 1750 that times began to change. Henry Fielding,better known as an author than a magistrate, gathered a faithfulgroup of constables under his command. With £400 allotted by thegovernment, Fielding formed the first squadron of"thief-takers."
They broke up gangs and other scoundrels whoterrorized the lives of Londoners. When Henry Fielding was ready tomove on, he was followed by his brother John, in whose case justicewas truly blind. Sir John Fielding had lost his eyesight and wasfamous for wearing a bandage over his eyes when he confrontedprisoners. He was said to recognize criminals by voice.
Under Sir John Fielding's supervision, thethief-takers were headquartered on Bow Street and became known asthe Bow Street Patrol and then the Bow Street Runners. At thisstage, policing was somewhat privatized, and a Bow Street Runnermight investigate the burglary of a resident's town house for a feeor simply find the perpetrator and coax him to agree on asettlement with the victim. In an odd way, criminal and civil lawwere combined, because while it was unlawful to commit bad deeds,order could be restored and a lot of fuss and bother could beavoided through dealmaking.
Better to have half of one's belongingsreturned than none at all. Better to give back half of what one hadstolen than to lose it all and end up in prison. Some Bow StreetRunners retired as wealthy men. Nothing much could be done aboutriots and murders, which were rampant, as were other evil deeds.Dogs were stolen and killed for their hides. Cattle were torturedby "bullock-baiting," and sporting mobs chased the pain-crazedanimals until they collapsed and died. From the late 1700s until1868, executions were public and drew tremendous crowds.
Hanging days were holidays, and the gruesomespectacle was considered a deterrent to crime. During the days ofthief-takers and Bow Street Runners, violations of the lawpunishable by death included horse stealing, forging, andshoplifting. In 1788, thousands gathered at Newgate to watchthirty-year-old Phoebe Harris burned at the stake forcounterfeiting coins. Highwaymen were heroes, and admirers cheeredthem on as they dangled, but the convicted upper class wereridiculed no matter their crime.
When Governor Joseph Wall was hanged in 1802,onlookers fought over the executioner's rope, buying it for ashilling per inch. In 1807, a crowd of 40,000 gathered to watch theexecution of two convicted murderers, and men, women, and childrenwere trampled to death. Not every prisoner died quickly oraccording to plan, and some of the agonal scenes were ghastly. Theknot slipped or didn't catch just right and instead of compressionof the carotid causing unconsciousness fast, the stranglingprisoner flailed violently as men grabbed his kicking legs andpulled down hard to hasten death along. Usually the condemned manlost his pants and twisted and writhed naked in front of thescreaming mob. In the old days of the axe, a refusal to place a fewcoins into an executioner's hand could result in bad aim thatrequired a few extra chops.
In 1829, Sir Robert Peel convinced governmentand the public that they had a right to sleep safely within theirown homes and walk the streets without worry. The MetropolitanPolice were established and headquartered at 4 Whitehall Place, itsback door opening onto Scotland Yard, the former site of a Saxonpalace that had served as a residence for visiting Scottish kings.By the late seventeenth century, most of the palace had fallen toruin and was demolished, and what remained was used as offices forBritish government. Many well-known figures once served the crownfrom Scotland Yard, including the architects Inigo Jones andChristopher Wren and the great poet John Milton, who at one timewas the Latin secretary to Oliver Cromwell. Architect and comicwriter Sir John Vanbrugh built a house on the old palace groundsthat Jonathan Swift compared to a "goose pie."
Few people realize that Scotland Yard hasalways been a place and not a police organization. Since 1829,"Scotland Yard" has referred to the headquarters of theMetropolitan Police, and that remains true today, although theofficial name now is "New Scotland Yard." I suspect the public willcontinue to hold to the belief that Scotland Yard is a group ofsleuths like Sherlock Holmes and that a London uniform officer is abobby. Perhaps there will always be books and movies withprovincial police who are stumped by a murder and deliver thatdelightfully hackneyed line, "I think this is a job for ScotlandYard."
From its earliest days, Scotland Yard and itsuniformed divisions were resented by the public. Policing wasviewed as an affront to the Englishman's civil rights andassociated with martial law and the government's way of spying andbullying. When the Metropolitan Police were first organized, theydid their best to avoid a military appearance by dressingthemselves in blue coats and trousers and topped themselves offwith rabbit-skin stovepipe hats reinforced with steel frames justin case an apprehended criminal decided to knock an officer on thehead. The hats also came in handy as footstools for climbing overfences and walls or getting into windows.
At first, the Metropolitan Police had nodetectives. It was bad enough having bobbies in blue, but the ideaof men in ordinary garb sneaking about to collar people wasviolently opposed by citizens and even by the uniformed police, whor*sented the fact that detectives would get better pay and worriedthat the real purpose of these plainclothesmen was to tattle on therank and file. Developing a solid detective division by 1842 andintroducing plainclothes officers in the mid-1840s entailed a fewfumbles, including the unenlightened decision to hire educatedgentlemen who had no police training. One can only imagine such aperson interviewing a drunk East End husband who has just smashedhis wife in the head with a hammer or taken a straight razor to herthroat.
The Criminal Investigation Department (CID) wasnot formally organized until 1878, or a mere ten years before Jackthe Ripper began terrorizing London. By 1888, public sentimentabout detectives had not changed much. There remained misgivingsabout police wearing plain-clothes or arresting people by artifice.The police were not supposed to trap citizens, and Scotland Yardstrictly enforced the rule that plain-clothes policing could takeplace only when there was ample evidence that crimes in a certainarea were being committed repeatedly. This approach wasenforcement, not prevention. It delayed Scotland Yard's decision toorder undercover measures when the Ripper began his slaughters inthe East End.
Scotland Yard was completely unprepared for aserial killer like the Ripper, and after Mary Ann Nichols's murder,the public began to cast its eye on the police more than ever, andto criticize, belittle, and blame. Mary Ann's murder and inquesthearings were obsessively covered by every major English newspaper.Her case made the covers of tabloids such as The Illustrated PoliceNews and the budget editions of Famous Crimes, which one could pickup for a penny. Artists rendered sensational, salacious depictionsof the homicides, and no one - neither the officials of the HomeOffice nor the policemen nor the detectives and brass at ScotlandYard nor even Queen Victoria - had the slightest comprehension ofeither the problem or its solution.
When the Ripper began making his rounds therewere only uniformed men walking their beats, all of them overworkedand underpaid. They were issued the standard equipment of awhistle, a truncheon, perhaps a rattle, and a bull's-eye lantern,nicknamed a dark lantern because all it really did was vaguelyilluminate the person holding it. A bull's-eye lantern was adangerous, cumbersome device comprised of a steel cylinder teninches high, including a chimney shaped like a ruffled dust cap.The magnifying lens was three inches in diameter and made of thick,rounded, ground glass, and inside the lamp were a small oil pan andwick.
The brightness of the flame could be controlledby turning the chimney. The inner metal tube would rotate and blockout as much of the flame as needed, allowing a policeman to flashhis lantern and signal another officer out on the street. I supposethat flash is a bit of an exaggeration if one has ever seen abull's-eye lantern lit up. I found several rusty but authenticHiatt & Co., Birmingham, bull's-eye lanterns that weremanufactured in the mid-1800s, precisely the sort used by thepolice during the Ripper investigation. One night I carried alantern out to the patio and lit a small fire in the oil pan. Thelens turned into a reddish-orange wavering eye. But the convexityof the glass causes the light to vanish when viewed from certainother angles.
I held my hand in front of the lantern and at adistance of six inches could barely see a trace of my palm. Smokewisped out the chimney and the cylinder got hot - hot enough,according to police lore, to brew tea. I imagined a poor constablewalking his beat and holding such a thing by its two metal handlesor clipping the lantern to his leather snake-clasp belt. It's awonder he didn't set himself on fire.
The typical Victorian may not have had a clueabout the inadequacy of bull's-eye lanterns. Magazines and pennytabloids showed constables shining intense beams into the darkestcorners and alleyways while frightened suspects reel back from theblinding glare. Unless these cartoonlike depictions weredeliberately exaggerated, they lead me to suspect that most peoplehad never seen a bull's-eye lantern in use. But that shouldn't comeas a surprise. Police patrolling the safer, less crime-ridden areasof the metropolis would have little or no need to light theirlanterns. It was in the forbidden places that the lanterns shonetheir bloodshot eyes as they blearily probed the constables' beats,and most Londoners traveling by foot or in horse-drawn cabs did notfrequent those parts.
Walter Sickert was a man of the night and theslums. He would have had good reason to know exactly what abull's-eye lantern looked like because it was his habit to wanderthe forbidden places after his visits to the music halls. Duringhis Camden Town period, when he was producing some of his mostblatantly violent works, he used to paint murder scenes in thespooky glow of a bull's-eye lantern. Fellow artist Marjorie Lilly,who shared his house and one of his studios, observed him doingthis on more than one occasion, and later described it as "Dr.Jekyll" assuming the "mantle of Mr. Hyde."
The dark blue woolen uniforms and capes thepolice wore could not keep them warm and dry in bad weather, andwhen days were warm, a constable's discomfort must have beenpalpable. He could not loosen the belt or tunic or take off hismilitary-shaped helmet with its shiny Brunswick star. If theill-fitting leather boots he had been issued maimed his feet, hecould either buy a new pair with his own pay or suffer insilence.
In 1887, a Metropolitan policeman gave thepublic a glimpse of what the average constable's life was like. Inan anonymous article in the Police Review and Parade Gossip, hetold the story of his wife and their dying four-year-old son havingto live in two rooms in a lodging house on Bow Street. Of thepoliceman's twenty-four-shillings-a-week salary, ten went to rent.It was a time of great civil unrest, he wrote, and animosity towardthe police ran hot.
With nothing more than a small truncheon tuckedinto a special pocket of a trouser leg, these officers went out dayafter day and night after night, "well nigh exhausted with [our]constant contact with passionate wretches who had been made madwith want and cupidity." Angry citizens screamed vile insults andaccused the police of being "against the people and the poor," readthe unsigned article. Other better-off Londoners sometimes waitedfrom four to six hours before calling the police after a robbery orburglary and then publicly complained that the police were unableto bring offenders to justice.
Policing was not only a thankless job but alsoan impossible one, with one sixth of the 15,000-member force outsick, on leave, or suspended on any given day. The supposed ratioof one policeman to 450 citizens was misleading. The number of menactually on the street depended on which shift was on duty. Sincethe number of policemen on duty always doubled during night shift(10:00 P.M. to 6:00 A.M.), this meant that during day shift (6:00A.M. to 2:00 P.M.) and late shift (2:00 P.M. to 10:00 P.M.) therewere only some 2,000 beat officers working. That is a ratio of onepoliceman to every 4,000 citizens, or one policeman to cover everysix miles of street. In August, the ratio got even worse when asmany as 2,000 men took vacation leave.
During the night shift a constable was expectedto walk his beat in 10 to 15 minutes at an average pace of two anda half miles per hour. By the time the Ripper began his crimes,this requirement was no longer enforced, but the habit was deeplyingrained. Criminals, in particular, could tell a constable'sregular leathery walk quite a ways off.
The greater London area was seven hundredsquare miles, and even if the police ranks doubled during the earlymorning hours, the Ripper could have prowled East End passageways,alleys, courtyards, and back streets without seeing a singleBrunswick star. If a constable was drawing near, the Ripper wasforewarned by the unmistakable walk. After the kill, he could slipinto the shadows and wait for the body to be discovered. He couldeavesdrop on the excited conversations of witnesses, the doctor,and the police. Jack the Ripper could have seen the moving orangeeyes of the bull's-eye lanterns without any threat of beingseen.
Psychopaths love to watch the drama theyscript. It is common for serial killers to return to the crimescene or insert themselves in the investigation. A murderer showingup at his victim's funeral is so common that today's police oftenhave plainclothes officers clandestinely videotape the mourners.Serial arsonists love to watch their fires burn. Rapists love towork for social services. Ted Bundy worked as a volunteer for acrisis clinic.
When Robert Chambers strangled Jennifer Levinto death in New York's Central Park, he sat on a wall across thestreet from his staged crime scene and waited two hours to watchthe body discovered, the police arrive, and the morgue attendantsfinally zip up the pouch and load it into an ambulance. "He foundit amusing," recalled Linda Fairstein, the prosecutor who sentChambers to prison.
Sickert was an entertainer. He was also aviolent psychopath. He would have been obsessed with watching thepolice and doctors examining the bodies at the scenes, and he mighthave lingered in the dark long enough to see the hand ambulancewheel his victims away. He might have followed at a distance tocatch a glimpse of the bodies being locked inside the mortuaries,and he might even have attended the funerals. In the early 1900s hepainted a picture of two women gazing out a window, andinexplicably titled the work A Passing Funeral. Several Ripperletters make taunting references to his watching the police at thescene or being present for the victim's burial.
"I see them and they cant see me," the Ripperwrote.
Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir CharlesWarren did not care much about crime, and he didn't know much aboutit, either. He was an easy target for a psychopath with thebrilliance and creativity of Walter Sickert, who would have enjoyedmaking a fool of Warren and ruining his career. And in the endWarren's failure to capture the Ripper, among his other blunders,brought about his resignation on November 8,1888.
Drawing public attention to the deplorableconditions of the East End and ridding London of Warren may be theonly good deeds Jack the Ripper did, even if his motivation wassomewhat less than altruistic.
CHAPTER TEN
MEDICINE OF THE COURTS
Dr. Llewellyn testified at the Mary Ann Nicholsinquest that she had a slight laceration of the tongue and a bruiseon the lower right jaw from the blow of a fist or the "pressure ofa thumb." She had a circular bruise on the left side of her facethat may have been from the pressure of a finger.
Her neck had been cut in two places. Oneincision was four inches long, beginning an inch below the leftjaw, just below the left ear. A second incision also began on theleft side, but about an inch lower than the first incision and alittle forward of the ear. The second incision was "circular," Dr.Llewellyn stated. I don't know what he meant by "circular" unlesshe was trying to say that the incision was curved instead ofstraight - or simply that it encircled her neck. It was eightinches long, severed all blood vessels, muscle tissue, andcartilage, and nicked the vertebrae before terminating three inchesbelow her right jaw.
Dr. Llewellyn's recital of the injuries to MaryAnn's abdomen was as unspecific as his other determinations. On theleft side were one jagged incision "just about at the lower part ofthe abdomen" and "three or four" similar cuts that ran in adownward direction on the right side of the abdomen. In addition,there were "several" cuts running across the abdomen and smallstabs to her "private parts." In his conclusion, Dr. Llewellyn saidthat the abdominal wounds were sufficient to cause death, and hebelieved they had been inflicted before her throat was cut. Hebased his conclusion on the lack of blood around her neck at thescene, but he failed to tell the coroner or the jurors that he hadneglected to turn over the body. It is possible that he stilldidn't know that he had overlooked - or failed to see - a largequantity of blood and a six-inch clot.
All injuries were from left to right, Dr.Llewellyn testified, and this led him to the conclusion that thekiller was "left handed." The weapon - and there was only one thistime, he stated - was a long-bladed, "moderately" sharp knife usedwith "great violence." The bruises on her jaw and face, he said,were also consistent with a left-handed assailant, and he theorizedthat the killer placed his right hand over Mary Ann's mouth to stopher from screaming as he used his left hand to repeatedly slash herabdomen. In the scenario Dr. Llewellyn describes, the killer wasfacing Mary Ann when he suddenly attacked her. Either they werestanding or the killer already had her on the ground, and hesomehow managed to keep her from shrieking and thrashing about ashe shoved up her clothes and started cutting through skin, fat,right down to her bowels.
It makes no sense for a calculating, logical,and intelligent killer like Jack the Ripper to slash open avictim's abdomen first, leaving her ample opportunity to put up aferocious struggle as she suffered unimaginable terror, panic, andpain. Had the coroner carefully questioned Dr. Llewellyn about therelevant medical details, a very different reconstruction of MaryAnn Nichols's murder might have emerged. Maybe the killer did notapproach her from the front. Maybe he never said a word to her.Maybe she never saw him.
A prevailing theory is that Jack the Ripperapproached his victims and talked to them before they walked offtogether to an isolated, dark area where he suddenly and swiftlykilled them. For quite some time, I assumed that this was theRipper's modus operandi (MO) in all cases. As countless otherpeople have done, I envisioned the Ripper using the ruse of wantingto solicit sex to get the woman to go with him. Since sex withprostitutes was often performed while the woman's back was turnedto her client, this seemed like the perfect opportunity for theRipper to cut her throat before she had any idea what washappening.
I don't discount the possibility that this MOmight have been the Ripper's - at least in some of the murders. Itreally never occurred to me that it might be incorrect in any ofthem until I had a moment of enlightenment during the Christmasholiday of 2001 when I was in Aspen with my family. I was spendingan evening alone in a condo at the base of Ajax Mountain, and asusual, I had several suitcases of research materials with me. Ihappened to be going through a Sickert art book for what must havebeen the twentieth time and stopped flipping pages when I got tohis celebrated painting Ennui. What a strange thing, I thought,that this particular work of his was considered so extraordinarythat Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother bought one of its fiveversions and hung it in Clarence House. Other versions areprivately owned or hang in various prestigious museums, such as theTate.
In all five versions of Ennui, a bored olderman sits at a table, his cigar lit, a tall glass of what I assumeto be beer in front of him. He stares off, deep in thought andcompletely uninterested in the woman behind him, leaning against adresser, her head resting on her hand as she gazes unhappily atstuffed doves inside a glass dome. Central to the picture is apainting of a woman, a diva, on the wall behind the bored couple'sheads. Having seen several versions of Ennui, I was aware that thediva in each has a slightly different appearance.
In three of them, she has what appears to be athick feather boa thrown around her naked shoulders. But in thelate Queen Mother's version and the one in the Tate there is nofeather boa, just some indistinguishable reddish-brown shape thatenvelopes her left shoulder and extends across her upper arm andleft breast. It wasn't until I was feeling ennui myself as I sat inthe Aspen condo that I noticed a vertical crescent, ratherfleshy-white, above the diva's left shoulder. The fleshy-whiteshape has what appears to be a slight bump on the left side thatlooks very much like an ear.
Upon closer inspection, the shape becomes aman's face half in the shadows. He is coming up behind the woman.She is barely turning her face as if she senses his approach. Underthe low magnification of a lens, the half-shadowed face of the manis more apparent, and the woman's face begins to look like a skull.But at a higher magnification, the painting dissolves into theindividual touches of Sickert's brushes. I went to London andlooked at the original painting at the Tate, and I did not changemy mind. I sent a transparency of the painting to the VirginiaInstitute of Forensic Science and Medicine to see if we could get asharper look through technology.
Computerized image enhancement detects hundredsof gray shades that the human eye can't see and makes it possiblefor a fuzzy photograph or erased writing to become visible ordiscernible. While forensic image enhancement might work with bankvideotapes or bad photographs, it does not work on paintings. Allour efforts accomplished with Ennui was to separate Sickert's brushstrokes until we ended up with the reverse of what he was doingwhen he put the strokes together. I was reminded, as I would berepeatedly in the Ripper case, that forensic science does not andwill not ever take the place of human detection, deduction,experience, and common sense - and very hard work.
Sickert's Ennui was mentioned in the Ripperinvestigation long before I gave the matter a thought, but in avery different way from what I have just described. In one versionof the painting, the feather-boa-enveloped diva has a white blob onher left shoulder that is slightly reminiscent of one of thestuffed doves under the glass dome on top of the dresser. SomeRipper enthusiasts insist that the "bird" is a "sea gull" and thatSickert cleverly introduced the "gull" into his painting to dropthe clue that Jack the Ripper was Sir William Gull, who was QueenVictoria's surgeon. The advocates of this interpretation usuallysubscribe to the so-called royal conspiracy that implicates Dr.Gull and the Duke of Clarence in five Ripper murders.
The theory was advanced in the 1970s. Althoughmy intention in this work is not to focus on who the Ripper wasnot, I will state categorically that he was not Dr. Gull or theDuke of Clarence. In 1888, Dr. Gull was seventy-one years old andhad already suffered a stroke. The Duke of Clarence no more used asharp blade than he was one. Eddy, as he was called, was born twomonths prematurely after his mother went out to watch her husbandplay ice hockey and apparently spent too much time being "whirled"about in a sledge. Not feeling well, she was taken back toFrogmore, where there was only a local practitioner to overseeEddy's unexpected birth.
His developmental difficulties probably hadless to do with his premature birth than they did with the smallroyal gene pool that spawned him. Eddy was sweet but obtuse. He wassensitive and gentle but a dismal student. He could barely ride ahorse, was unimpressive during his military training, and was fartoo fond of clothes. The only cure his frustrated father, thePrince of Wales, and his grandmother the Queen could come up withwas from time to time to launch Eddy on long voyages to distantlands.
Rumors about his sexual preferences andindiscretions continue to this day. It may be that he engaged inhom*osexual activity, as some books claim, but he was also involvedwith women. Perhaps Eddy was sexually immature and experimentedwith both sexes. He would not have been the first member of a royalfamily to play both sides of the net. Eddy's emotional attachmentswere to women, especially to his beautiful, doting mother, who didnot seem unduly concerned that he cared more about clothes than thecrown.
On July 12, 1884, Eddy's frustrated father, thePrince of Wales and future king, wrote to Eddy's German tutor, "Itis with sincere regret that we learn from you that our son dawdlesso dreadfully in the morning---
He will have to make up the lost time byadditional study." In this unhappy seven-page missive the fatherwrote from Marlborough House, he is emphatic - if not desperate -that the son, who was in direct line to the throne, "must put hisshoulder to the wheel."
Eddy had neither the energy nor the interest togo about preying on prostitutes, and to suggest otherwise isfarcical. On the nights of at least three of the murders, heallegedly was not in London or even close by (not that he needs analibi), and the murders continued after his untimely death onJanuary 14,1892. Even if the royal family's surgeon, Dr. Gull, hadnot been elderly and infirm, he was far too consumed by fussingover the health of Queen Victoria and that of the rather frail Eddyto have had interest or time to run about Whitechapel in a royalcarriage at all hours of the night, hacking up prostitutes who wereblackmailing Eddy because of his scandalous "secret marriage" toone of them. Or something like that.
It is true, however, that Eddy had beenblackmailed before, as evidenced by two letters he wrote to GeorgeLewis, the formidable barrister who would later represent Whistlerin a lawsuit involving Walter Sickert. Eddy wrote to Lewis in 1890and 1891 because he had gotten himself into a compromisingsituation with two ladies of low standing, one of them a MissRichardson. He was trying to disengage himself by paying for thereturn of letters he imprudently had written to her and anotherlady friend.
"I am very pleased to hear you are able tosettle with Miss Richardson," Eddy wrote Lewis in November of 1890,"although £200 is rather expensive for letters." He goes on to sayhe heard from Miss Richardson "the other day" and that she wasdemanding yet another £100. Eddy promises he will "do all I can toget back" the letters he wrote to the "other lady," as well.
Two months later, Eddy writes, in "November"[crossed out] "December," 1891 from his "Cavelry [sic] Barracks"and sends Lewis a gift "in acknowledgement for the kindness youshowed me the other day in getting me out of that trouble I wasfoolish enough to get into." But apparently "the other lady" wasn'tso easily appeased because Eddy tells Lewis he had to send a friendto see her "and ask her to give up the two or three letters I hadwritten to her... you may be certain that I shall be careful in thefuture not to get into any more trouble of the sort."
Whatever was in the letters the Duke ofClarence wrote to Miss Richardson and "the other lady" isn't known,but one might infer that he acted in a manner bound to cause theroyal family trouble. He was well aware that news of hisinvolvement with the sorts of women who would blackmail him wouldnot have been well received by the public and certainly not by hisgrandmother. What this attempted extortion does show is that Eddy'sinclination in such situations was not to have the offendingparties murdered and mutilated, but to pay them off.
Sickert's works of art may contain "clues," butthey are about himself and what he felt and did. His art is aboutwhat he saw, and it was filtered through an imagination that wassometimes childlike and at other times savage. The point of view inmost of his works indicates that he watched people from behind. Hecould see them, but they could not see him. He could see hisvictims, but they could not see him. He would have watched Mary AnnNichols for a while before he struck. He would have determined herdegree of drunkenness and worked out his best approach.
He may have drifted up to her in the dark andshowed her a coin and given her a line before going around behindher. Or he may have come out of the damp dark and suddenly was onher. Her injuries, if they were accurately described, areconsistent with her killer yoking her and jerking her head back ashe slashed his knife across her exposed throat. She may have bittenher tongue, explaining the abrasion Dr. Llewellyn found. If shetried to twist away, that could explain why the first incision wasincomplete and basically a failed attempt. The bruising of her jawand face may have come about as her killer tightened his restraintof her and cut her throat a second time, this incision so violentthat in one stroke he almost decapitated her.
His position behind her would have preventedhim from being splashed by the arterial blood that would havespurted out of her severed left carotid artery. Few murderers wouldchoose to have blood spattering their faces, especially the bloodof a victim who probably had diseases - at the very least, sexuallytransmitted ones. When Mary Ann was on her back, her killer movedto the lower part of her body and shoved up her clothes. She couldnot scream. She may have made no sound except the wet chokingrushes and gurgles of air and blood sucking in and out of hersevered windpipe. She may have aspirated her own blood and drownedin it as virtually all of her blood bled out from her body. All ofthis takes minutes.
Coroners' reports, including Dr. Llewellyn's,tend to assure us that the person "died instantly." There is nosuch thing. One might be disabled instantly by a gunshot wound tothe head, but it takes minutes for someone to bleed to death,suffocate, drown, or cease all bodily functions due to a stroke orcardiac arrest. It is possible that Mary Ann was still consciousand aware of what was happening when her murderer began cutting upher abdomen. She may have been barely alive when he left her bodyin the courtyard.
Robert Mann was the Whitechapel Workhouseinmate in charge of the mortuary the morning her body was broughtin. During the inquest inquiry of September 17th, Mann testifiedthat at some point after 4:00 A.M., the police arrived at theworkhouse and ordered him out of bed. They said there was a bodyparked outside the mortuary and to hurry along, so he accompaniedthem to the ambulance parked in the yard. They carried the bodyinside the mortuary, and Inspector Spratling and Dr. Llewellynappeared briefly to take a look. Then the police left, and Mannrecalled that it must have been around 5:00 A.M. when he locked themortuary door and went to breakfast.
An hour or so later, Mann and another inmatenamed James Hatfield returned to the mortuary and began to undressthe body without police or anyone else present. Mann swore toCoroner Baxter that no one had instructed him not to touch thebody, and he was sure the police weren't present. You're absolutelycertain of that? He was, well, maybe not. He could be mistaken. Hecouldn't remember. If the police said they were there, then maybethey were. Mann got increasingly confused during his testimony, and"was subject to fits... his statements hardly reliable," The Timesreported.
Wynne Baxter was a solicitor and an experiencedcoroner who would preside over the inquest of Joseph Merrick twoyears later. Baxter would not tolerate lying in his courtroom orthe abuse of proper protocol in a case. He was more than a littleirked that inmates had removed Mary Ann Nichols's clothing. Herigorously questioned the confused, fitful Mann, who steadfastlymaintained that the clothing was neither torn nor cut when the bodyarrived. All he and Hatfield had done was strip the dead womannaked and wash her before the doctor showed up so he wouldn't haveto waste his time doing it.
They cut and tore clothing to speed thingsalong and make their chore a bit easier. She was wearing a lot oflayers, some of them stiff with dried blood, and it is verydifficult to pull clothing over the arms and legs of a body that isas rigid as a statue. When Hatfield took the stand, he agreed witheverything Mann had said. The two inmates unlocked the mortuaryafter breakfast. They were by themselves when they cut and tore offthe dead woman's clothing.
They washed her, they were alone with her body,and they had no reason to think there was anything inappropriateabout that. Transcripts of their testimonies at the inquest givethe impression that the men were frightened and bewildered becausethey didn't think they had done anything wrong. They really didn'tunderstand what the fuss was about. The workhouse mortuary wasn'tsupposed to handle police cases, anyway. It was just a whistle-stopfor dead inmates on their way to a pauper's grave.
In Latin, forensic means "forum," or a publicplace where Roman lawyers and orators presented their cases beforejudges. Forensic or legal medicine is the medicine of the courts,and in 1888, it hardly existed in practice. The sad truth is, therewasn't much physical evidence that could have been either utilizedor ruined in Mary Ann Nichols's murder. But not knowing withcertainty whether Mary Ann's clothing was already cut or torn whenher body arrived at the mortuary is a significant loss. Whateverthe killer did would reveal more about him and his emotions at thetime of the murder.
Based on the descriptions of Mary Ann's body atthe scene, I suspect her clothing was disarrayed but not cut ortorn off, and it was on the early morning of August 31st when theRipper advanced to his next level of violence. He shoved up herulster, woolen petticoats, flannel underclothing, and skirts. Hemade one jagged, then "three or four" quick slashes downward, and"several" across, almost in the pattern of a grid. A few smallstabs to the genitals and he was gone, vanished in the dark.
Without reviewing autopsy diagrams orphotographs, it is very difficult to reconstruct injuries andre-create what a killer did and what he might have been feeling.Wounds can be fierce or they can be tentative. They can showhesitation or rage. Three or four shallow incisions on a wrist inaddition to the deep one that severed veins tell a different storyabout a person's suicide than one decisive cut does.
Psychiatrists interpret mental states andemotional needs through a patient's demeanor and confessions offeelings and behavior. The physicians of the dead have to makethose same interpretations through the braille of injuries old andnew and debris on the body and the way the person was dressed andwhere he or she died. Listening to the dead speak is a unique giftand demands highly specialized training. The language of silence ishard to read, but the dead do not lie. They may be difficult tounderstand, and we might misinterpret them or fail to find thembefore their communications have begun to fade. But if they stillhave something to say, their veracity is unimpeachable. Sometimesthey continue to talk long after they have been reduced tobone.
If people have a great deal to drink and getinto their cars or into fights, their dead bodies admit it throughalcohol levels. If a man was a heroin and cocaine addict, his deadbody displays the needle tracks, and the metabolites morphine andbenzoylecgonine show up in urine, the vitreous fluid of the eye,and the blood. If one frequently engaged in anal sex or was intogenital tattoos and body piercing, or if a woman shaved off herpubic hair because her lover's fantasy was to have sex with a child- these people speak openly after they are dead. If a teenage boytried for a more intense org*sm by masturbating while dressed inleather and partially compressing the blood vessels in his neckwith a noose - but he didn't mean to slip off the chair he wasstanding on and hang himself - he'll confess. Shame and lies arefor those left behind.
It is startling what the dead have to say. Inever cease to be amazed and pained. One young man was sodetermined to end his life that when he shot himself in the chestwith his crossbow and didn't die, he pulled out the arrow and shothimself again. Anger. Desperation. Hopelessness. No turning back. Iwant to die, but I'll go ahead and make family vacation plans andwrite down the details of my funeral so I don't inconvenience myfamily. I want to die, but I want to look nice, so I'll put onmakeup and fix my hair and shoot myself in the heart because Idon't want to ruin my face, the wife decides after her husband hasrun off with a younger woman.
I'll shoot you in the mouth, bitch, because I'mtired of hearing you nag. I'll throw your body in the tub and dumpacid all over it, you c*nt. That's what you get for screwing aroundon me. I'll stab you in the eyes because I'm tired of you staringat me. I'll drain your blood and drink it because aliens are takingall of mine. I'll dismember you and boil you piece by piece so Ican flush you down the toilet and no one will ever know. Hop on theback of my Harley, you slu*t, and I'll take you to a motel and cutyou hundreds of times with a razor and scissors and watch youslowly die, because that's the initiation I gotta do before I canbe a member of the gang.
Mary Ann Nichols's wounds tell us that theRipper did not want her to struggle or scream, and he was ready forthe next step of taking his knife below her throat and destroyingher naked body. But he wasn't a master of this move yet and couldgo only so far. He did not remove her bowels or organs. His cutswere only so deep. He took no body part with him as a trophy or atalisman that might bring him sexual fantasy and wonder when he wasalone in one of his secret rooms. For the first time, I believe,the Ripper had ripped, and he needed to think about that for awhile and feel what it was like and if he wanted more.
"I like the work some more blood," the Ripperwrote October 5th.
"I must have some more," the Ripper wroteNovember 2nd.
It was scarcely a week later when Jack theRipper would publicly call himself by that infernal name. Perhapsit makes sense. Before his murder of Mary Ann Nichols, he had not"ripped" yet. Sickert came up with the stage name "Mr. Nemo" for areason, and it wasn't one driven by modesty. Sickert would havepicked the name "Jack the Ripper" for a good reason, too. We canonly guess what it was.
"Jack" was street slang for sailor or man, and"Ripper" is someone who "rips." But Walter Sickert was neverobvious. I scanned through a dozen dictionaries and encyclopediasdating from 1755 to 1906, checking definitions. Sickert could havecome up with the name "Jack the Ripper" by reading Shakespeare. AsHelena Sickert said in her memoirs, when she and her brothers weregrowing up, they were all "Shakespeare mad," and Sickert was knownto quote long passages of Shakespeare as an actor. Throughout hislife he loved to stand up at dinner parties and deliverShakespearean soliloquies. The word "Jack" is found in Coriolanus,The Merchant of Venice, and Cymbeline. Shakespeare doesn't use theword "ripper," but there are variations of it in King John andMacbeth.
Definitions of "Jack" include: boots; adiminutive of John used contemptuously to mean a saucy fellow; afootboy who pulls off his master's boots; a scream; a male;American slang for a stranger; American slang for a jackass; acunning fellow who can do anything - such as a "Jack of alltrades." Definitions of "Ripper" include: one who rips; one whotears; one who cuts; a fine fellow who dresses well; a good fasthorse; a good play or part.
Jack the Ripper was the stranger, the cunningfellow who could do anything. He "hath his belly-full of fighting."He was a "co*ck that nobody can match." He ripped "up the womb ofyour dear mother England." Sickert, in the deep crevices of hispsyche, might have felt that from his own mother's womb he had been"ripp'd." What happened inside his mother's womb was unjust and nothis fault. He would repay.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
SUMMER NIGHT
Mary Ann Nichols's eyes were wide open when herbody was discovered on the pavement. She stared blindly into thedark, her face a wan yellow in the weak flame of a bull's-eyelantern.
In Charles Darwin's Expression of the Emotions,wide staring eyes are the accompaniment to "horror," which Darwinassociates with "extreme terror" or the "horrible pain of torture."It is a centuries-old fallacy that a person dies with the lastemotion frozen on his or her face. But symbolically, Mary Ann'sexpression seemed to capture the last thing she saw in her life -the dark silhouette of her murderer cutting her up. The fact thatthe police made note in their reports of her wide, staring eyes mayreflect what the men in blue on the street were beginning to feelabout the Whitechapel murderer: He was a monster, a phantom who, inInspector Abberline's words, did not leave "the slightestclue."
The image of a woman with her throat slashedand her wide eyes staring up blindly from the pavement would noteasily be forgotten by those who saw it. Sickert would not haveforgotten it. More than anyone else, he would have remembered herstare as life fled from her. In 1903, if his dates are reliable, hedrew a sketch of a woman whose eyes are wide open and staring. Shelooks dead and has an inexplicable dark line around her throat. Thesketch is rather innocuously titled Two Studies of a VenetianWoman's Head. Three years later he followed it with a painting of anude grotesquely sprawled on an iron bedstead and titled thatpicture Nuit d'Ete, or Summer Night. One recalls that Mary AnnNichols was murdered on a summer night. The woman in the sketch andthe woman in the painting look alike. Their faces resemble the faceof Mary Ann Nichols, based on a photograph taken of her when shewas inside her shell at the mortuary and had already been "cleanedup" by workhouse inmates Mann and Hatfield.
Mortuary photographs were made with a bigwooden box camera that could shoot only directly ahead. Bodies thepolice needed to photograph had to be stood up or propped uprightagainst the dead-house wall because the camera could not be pointeddown or at an angle. Sometimes the nude dead body was hung on thewall with a hook, nail, or peg at the nape of the neck. A closeinspection of the photograph of a later victim, Catherine Eddows,shows her nude body suspended, one foot barely touching thefloor.
These grim, degrading photographs were forpurposes of identification and were not made public. The only way aperson could know what Mary Ann Nichols's dead body looked like wasto have viewed it at the mortuary or at the scene. If Sickert'ssketch of the so-called Venetian woman is indeed a Representationof Mary Ann Nichols's staring dead face, then he might well havebeen at the scene or somehow got hold of the police reports -unless the detail was in a news story I somehow missed. Even ifSickert had seen Mary Ann at the mortuary, her eyes would have beenshut by then, just as they are in her photograph. By the time shewas photographed and viewed by those who might identify her and bythe inquest jurors, her wounds had been sutured, and her body hadbeen covered to the chin to hide the gaping cuts to the throat.
Unfortunately, few morgue photographs of theRipper's victims exist, and the ones preserved at the Public\Record Office are small and have poor resolution, which worsenswith enlargement. Forensic image enhancement helps a little, butnot much. Other cases that were not linked to the Ripper at thetime - or ever - may not have been photographed at all. If theywere, those photographs seem to have vanished. Crime-scenephotographs usually weren't taken unless the victim's body wasindoors. Even then the case had to be unusual for the police tofetch their heavy box camera.
In today's forensic cases, bodies arephotographed multiple times and from many angles with a variety ofphotographic equipment, but during the Ripper's violent spree, itwas rare to call for a camera. It would have been even rarer for amortuary or a dead house to be equipped with one. Technology hadnot advanced enough for photographs to be taken at night. Theselimitations mean that there is only a scant visual record of Jackthe Ripper's crimes, unless one browses through a Walter Sickertart book or takes a look at his "murder" pictures and nudes thathang in fine museums and private collections. Artistic andscholarly analysis aside, most of Sickert's sprawling nudes lookmutilated and dead.
Many of the nudes and other female subjectshave bare necks with black lines around them, as if to suggest acut throat or decapitation. Some dark areas around a figure'sthroat are intended to be shadows and shading, but the dark, solid,black lines I refer to are puzzling. They are not jewelry, so ifSickert drew and painted what he saw, what are these lines? Themystery grows with a picture titled Patrol, dated 1921 - a paintingof a policewoman with bulging eyes and an open-neck tunic thatreveals a solid, black line around her throat.
What is known about Patrol is vague. Sickertmost likely painted it from a photograph of a policewoman, possiblyDorothy Peto of the Birmingham police. Apparently, she acquired thepainting and moved to London, where she signed on with theMetropolitan Police, to which she eventually donated the life-sizeSickert portrait of herself. The intimation of at least oneMetropolitan Police archivist is that the painting may be Taluable,but it is disliked, especially by women. When I saw Patrol, it washanging behind a locked door and chained to a wall. No one seemsquite sure what to do with it. I suppose it's another Ripper "haha" - albeit an accidental one - that Scotland Yard owns a paintingby the most notorious murderer the Yard never caught.
Patrol isn't exactly a tribute to women orpolicing, nor would it appear that Sickert intended it to beanything other than another one of his subtle, scary fantasies. Thefrightened expression on the policewoman's face belies the power ofher profession, and in typical Sickert fashion, the painting hasthe patina of morbidity and of something very bad about to happen.The wooden-framed 741A-by-461/4-inch canvas Patrol is a dark mirrorin the bright galleries of the art world, and references to it andreproductions of it are not easily found.
Certain of his paintings do seem as secret asSickert's many hidden rooms, but the decision to keep them undercover may not have been made solely by their owners. Sickerthimself had a great deal to say about which of his works were to beexhibited. Even if he gave a painting to a friend - as is the casewith Jack the Ripper's Bedroom - he could have asked the person tolend it to various exhibitions, or keep it private. Some of hiswork was probably part of his catch-me-if-you-can fun. He wasbrazen enough to paint or draw Ripperish scenes, but not alwaysreckless enough to exhibit them. And these unseemly works continueto surface, now that the search is on.
Most recently, an uncatalogued Sickert sketchwas discovered that seems to be a flashback to his music-hall daysin 1888. Sickert made the sketch in 1920, and it depicts a beardedmale figure talking to a prostitute. The man's back is partially tous, but we get the impression that his penis is exposed and that heis holding a knife in his right hand. At the bottom of the sketchis what appears to be a disemboweled woman whose arms have beendismembered - as if Sickert is showing the before and after of oneof his kills. Art historian Dr. Robins believes the sketch wentunnoticed because, in the past, the notion of looking for this sortof violence in Sickert's works was not foremost on the minds ofpeople such as herself, and archival curators, and Sickertexperts.
But when one works hard and begins to know whatto look for, the unusual turns up, including news stories. Mostpeople interested in news accounts of Jack the Ripper's murdersrely on facsimiles from public records or microfilm. When I beganthis investigation, I chose The Times as the newspaper of recordand was fortunate to find copies of the originals for 1888-91. Inthat era, newsprint had such a high cotton fiber content that TheTimes papers I own could be ironed, sewn together, and bound, goodas new.
I have continued to be surprised by the numberof news publications that have survived for over a hundred yearsand are still supple enough for one to turn their pages withoutfear. Having begun my career as a journalist, I know full well thatthere are many stories to a story and that without looking at asmany bits and pieces of reportage as I can find I can't begin toapproach the whole truth. Ripper journalism in the major papers ofthe day is not scarce, but what is often overlooked are the quietwitnesses of lesser-known publications, such as the SundayDispatch.
One day, my dealer at an antiquarian bookshopin Chelsea, London, called to tell me he had found at auction aledger book filled with, quite possibly, every Sunday Dispatcharticle written about the Ripper murders and others that might berelated. The clippings, rather sloppily cut out and crookedlypasted into the ledger, were dated from August 12, 1888, throughSeptember 29, 1889. The story of the book continues to mystify me.Dozens of pages throughout the ledger were slashed out with arazor, enormously piquing my curiosity about their contents.Alongside the clippings are fascinating annotations written eitherin blue and black ink or with gray, blue, and purple pencils. Whowent to all this trouble and why? Where has the ledger been formore than a century?
The annotations themselves suggest that mostlikely they were written by someone quite familiar with the crimesand most interested in how they were being worked by the police.When I first acquired the ledger, I fantasized that it might havebeen kept by Jack the Ripper himself. It seems that whoever cut outthe clippings was focused on reports of what the police knew, andhe agrees or disagrees with them in his notes. Some details arecrossed out as inaccurate. Comments such as "Yes! Believe me" or"unsatisfactory" or "unsatisfactory - very" or "important. Find thewoman" - and most peculiar of all, "7 women 4 men" - are scribblednext to certain details in the articles. Sentences are underlined,especially if they relate to descriptions witnesses gave of men thevictims were last seen with.
I doubt I will ever know whether an amateursleuth kept this ledger or whether a policeman or a reporter did,but the handwriting is inconsistent with that of Scotland Yard'sleading men, such as Abberline, Swanson, and other officers whosereports I have read. The penmanship in the ledger is small and verysloppy, especially for a period when script was consistently wellformed, if not elegant. Most police, for example, wrote with a verygood and in some instances beautiful hand. In fact, the handwritingin the clippings book reminds me of the rather wild and sometimescompletely illegible way Walter Sickert wrote. His handwriting ismarkedly different from the average Englishman's. Since theprecocious Sickert taught himself to read and write, he was notschooled in traditional calligraphy, although his sister Helenasays he was capable of a "beautiful hand" when it suited him.
Was the ledger Sickert's? Probably not. I haveno idea who kept it, but the Dispatch articles add anotherdimension to the reportage of the time. The journalist who coveredcrime for the Dispatch is anonymous - bylines then were as rare asfemale reporters - but had an excellent eye and a very inquisitivemind. His deductions, questions, and perceptions add new facets tocases such as the murder of Mary Ann Nichols. The Dispatch reportedthat the police suspected she was the victim of a gang. In London,at that time, roving packs of violent young men preyed upon theweak and poor. These hooligans were vindictive when they attemptedto rob an Unfortunate who turned out to have no money.
The police maintained that Mary Ann had notbeen killed where her body was found, nor had Martha Tabran. Thetwo slain women had been left in the "gutter of the street in theearly hours of the morning," and no screams were heard. So theymust have been murdered elsewhere, possibly by a gang, and theirbodies dumped. The anonymous Dispatch reporter must have asked Dr.Llewellyn if it was possible that the killer had attacked Mary AnnNichols from the rear and not the front, which would have made thekiller right-handed - not left-handed, as Dr. Llewellynclaimed.
If the killer had been standing behind thevictim when he cut her throat, the reporter explains, and thedeepest wounds were on the left side and trailed off to the right,which was the case, then the killer must have held the knife in hisright hand. Dr. Llewellyn made a bad deduction. The reporter madean excellent one. Walter Sickert's dominant hand was his right one.In one of his self-portraits he appears to be holding a paintbrushin his left hand, but it is an optical illusion created by hispainting his reflection in a mirror.
Dr. Llewellyn might not have been veryinterested in a reporter's point of view, but perhaps he shouldhave been. If the Dispatch journalist's beat was crime, he hadprobably seen more cut throats than Dr. Llewellyn had. Cutting aperson's throat was not an uncommon way to murder someone,especially in cases of domestic violence. It was not an unusual wayto commit suicide, but people who cut their own throats usedstraight razors, rarely knives, and they almost never sliced theirnecks all the way through to the vertebra.
The Royal London Hospital still has itsadmission and discharge record books for the nineteenth century,and a survey of entries shows die illnesses and injuries typical ofthe 1880s and 1890s. It must be kept in mind that the patients werepresumed alive when they arrived at the hospital, which coveredonly the East End. Most people who cut their throats, assuming theysevered a major blood vessel, would never have made it to ahospital but would have gone straight to the mortuary. They wouldnot be listed in the admission and discharge record books.
Only one of the homicides cited during theperiod of 1884 to 1890 was eventually considered a possible Rippercase, and that is the murder of Emma Smith, forty-five, of ThrawlStreet. On April 2, 1888, she was attacked by what she described asa gang of young men who beat her, almost ripped off an ear, andshoved an object, possibly a stick, up her vagin*. She wasintoxicated at the time, but she managed to walk home, and friendshelped her to the London Hospital, where she was admitted and diedtwo days later of peritonitis.
In Ripperology, there is considerablespeculation about when Jack the Ripper began killing and when hestopped. Since his favorite killing field seems to have been theEast End, the records of the London Hospital are important, notbecause the Ripper's dead-at-the-scene victims would be listed inthe books, but because patterns of how and why people were hurtingthemselves and others can be instructive. I was worried that "cutthroats" might have been miscalled suicides when they were reallymurders that might be additional ones committed by the Ripper.
Unfortunately, the hospital records don'tinclude much more detail than the patient's name, age, address, insome cases the occupation, the illness or injury, and if and whenhe or she was discharged. Another one of my purposes in scanningthe London Hospital books was to see if there were any statisticalchanges in the number and types of violent deaths before, during,and after the so-called Ripper rampage of late 1888. The answer is,not really. But the records reveal something about the period,especially the deplorable conditions of the East End and theprevailing misery and hopelessness of those who lived and diedthere by unnatural causes.
During some years, poisoning was the favoredform of taking one's life, and there were plenty of toxicsubstances to choose from, all of them easily acquired. Substancesthat East End men and women used to poison themselves from 1884 to1890 include oxalic acid, laudanum, opium, hydrochloric acid,belladonna, ammonia carbonate, nitric acid, carbolic acid, lead,alcohol, turpentine, camphorated chloroform, zinc, and strychnine.People also tried to kill themselves by drowning, gunshots,hanging, and jumping out of windows. Some leaps out of upper-storywindows were actually accidental deaths when fire engulfed arooming or common lodging house.
It is impossible to know how many deaths ornear-deaths were poorly investigated - or not investigated at all.I also suspect that some deaths thought to be suicides might havebeen homicides. On September 12, 1886, twenty-three-year-old EstherGoldstein of Mulberry Street, White-chapel, was admitted to theLondon Hospital as a suicide by cut throat. The basis of thisdetermination is unknown, but it is hard to imagine that she cuther neck through her "thyroid cartilage." A slice through a majorblood vessel close to the skin surface is quite sufficient to endone's life, and cutting through the muscles and cartilage of theneck is more typical in homicides because more force isrequired.
If Esther Goldstein was murdered, that doesn'tmean she was a victim of Jack the Ripper, and I doubt she was. Itis unlikely that he killed an East End woman or two every now andthen. When he started, he made a dramatic entrance and continuedhis performance for many years. He wanted the world to know abouthis crimes. But I can't say with certainty when he made his firstkill.
In the same year that the Ripper crimes began,in 1888, four other East End women died from cut throats - allsupposed to be suicides. When I first went through the musty oldpages of the Royal London Hospital record books and noticed thenumerous women admitted with cut throats, I anticipated that thesedeaths might have been Ripper murders assumed to be suicides. Butmore time and research revealed that cut throats were not unusualin a day when most impoverished people did not have access toguns.
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE YOUNG AND BEAUTIFUL
People of the East End were put out of theirmisery by infections and diseases such as tuberculosis, pleurisy,emphysema, and pneumoconiosis. Men, women, and children were burnedand scalded to death by accidents at home and at work.
Starvation killed, as did cholera, whoopingcough, and cancer. Parents and their children, weakened bymalnutrition and surrounded by filth and vermin, did not haveimmune systems that could fight off non-lethal illnesses. Colds andflu became bronchitis and pneumonia and death. Many infants weren'tlong for the world of the East End, and the people who lived andsuffered there hated the London Hospital and avoided it if theycould. To go there was to get worse. To let a doctor touch them wasto die. Often this was true. An abscessed toe requiring amputationcould lead to osteomyelitis - a bone infection - and death. A cutrequiring sutures could lead to a staph infection - and death.
A sampling of hospital admissions for allegedsuicides shows that in 1884, five men tried to kill themselves bycutting their throats, while four women cut their throats and twoslit their wrists. In 1885, five women are listed as suicides orattempted suicides by poisoning and one by drowning. Eight menslashed their throats, one used a gun, and another a noose. In1886, five women attempted suicide by cutting their throats. Twelvewomen and seven men tried to poison themselves, and another twelvemen cut their throats or stabbed or shot themselves.
It simply isn't possible to sort out who reallycommitted suicide and who might have been murdered. If theindividual was a person of the dustbin in the East End, and thedeath or attempted death was witnessed, then police tended toaccept what witnesses said. When a woman's abusive, drunk husbandhurled two lit oil lamps at her, setting her on fire, she toldpolice in her dying breath that it was entirely her fault. Herhusband wasn't charged. Her death was listed as an accident.
Unless a case was obvious, there was nocertainty that the manner or even cause of death would be accurate.If a woman's throat was cut indoors and the weapon was nearby, thepolice assumed she had killed herself. Such assumptions, includingthose made by the well-meaning Dr. Llewellyn, not only sent policedown a false trail - if they bothered following up at all - but baddiagnoses and determinations of injury and death could destroy acase in court. Forensic medicine was not sophisticated in Dr.Llewellyn's day, and this rather than carelessness is the mostlikely explanation for his hasty, baseless conclusions.
Had he examined the pavement after Mary Ann'sbody was picked up and loaded into the ambulance, he would havenoticed the blood and the blood clot that Constable Phail observed.Dr. Llewellyn might have noticed blood or a bloody fluid tricklinginto the gutter. Visibility was bad, so maybe he should havethought to wipe up some of this fluid to determine first whether itwas blood, and second whether the serum was separating from theblood as it does during coagulation, which would have offeredanother clue about time of death.
Although taking the ambient temperature at thecrime scene and the temperature of the body wasn't standard indeath investigation, Dr. Llewellyn should have noted the stage ofrigor mortis or stiffness, which occurs when the body no longerproduces the adenosine triphosphate (ATP) needed for muscles tocontract. Dr. Llewellyn should have checked for livor mortis, whichoccurs when the blood no longer circulates and accumulates incertain parts of the body due to gravity. In a hanging, forexample, the lower body will turn purplish-red if the victim hasbeen suspended by his or her neck for as little as half an hour.Livor mortis becomes fixed after about eight hours. Not only couldlivor mortis have suggested the time of Mary Ann Nichols's death,it could have told Dr. Llewellyn if her body had been moved at somepoint after her murder.
I remember a case from years ago when policearrived at the scene to discover a body as stiff as an ironingboard propped against an armchair. The people in the house didn'twant anyone to know the man had died in bed during the middle ofthe night, so they tried to move him to a chair. Rigor mortisreplied, "Lie." In another instance from my early days of workingin the medical examiner's office, the fully dressed body of a mancame into the morgue accompanied by the story that he had beenfound dead on the floor. Livor mortis replied, "Lie." The blood hadsettled to his lower body, and on his buttocks was the perfectshape of the toilet seat he was still sitting on hours after hisheart went into arrhythmia.
To determine time of death from any singlepostmortem artifact is like diagnosing a disease from one symptom.Time of death is a symphony of many details, and one plays onanother. Rigor mortis is hastened along by the victim's musclemass, the temperature of the air, the loss of blood, and even theactivity preceding death. The nude body of a thin woman who hashemorrhaged to death outside in fifty-degree weather will coolfaster and stiffen more slowly than the same woman clothed in awarm room and dead from strangulation.
Ambient temperature, body size, clothing,location, cause of death, and many more postmortem minutiae can benaughty little talebearers that fool even an expert and completelyconfuse him or her as to what really happened. Livor mortis -especially in Dr. Llewellyn's day - can be mistaken for freshbruises. An object pressing against the body, such as part of anoverturned chair wedged beneath the victim's wrist, will leave apale area - or blanching - in the shape of that object. If this ismisinterpreted as "pressure marks," then a case of nonviolent deathcan suddenly turn criminal.
There is no telling how much was hopelesslygarbled in the Ripper murders and what evidence might have beenlost, but one can be sure that the killer left traces of hisidentity and daily life. They would have adhered to the blood onthe body and the ground. He also carried away evidence such ashairs, fibers, and his victim's blood. In 1888, it wasn't standardpractice for police or doctors to look for hairs, fibers, or otherminuscule amounts of evidence that might have required microscopicexamination. Fingerprints were called "finger marks" and simplymeant that a human being had touched an object such as a glasswindowpane. Even if a patent (visible) fingerprint withwell-defined ridge detail was discovered, it didn't matter. Itwouldn't be until 1901 that Scotland Yard would establish its firstCentral Finger Print Bureau.
Five years earlier, in 1896, two patentfingerprints in red ink were left on a Ripper letter the policereceived October 14th. The letter is written in red ink, and thered ink fingerprints appear to have been made by the first andsecond fingers of the left hand. The ridge detail is good enoughfor comparison. Perhaps the prints were left deliberately - Sickertwas the sort to know the latest criminal investigative technology,and leaving prints would be another "ha ha."
Police would not have linked them to him.Police never noticed the prints, as far as I can tell, and somesixty years after his death, it is still unlikely a comparisonbetween those prints and Sickert's will ever be made. At present,we don't have his prints. They were burned up when he was cremated.The best I have been able to do so far is to find a barely visibleprint left in ink on the back of one of his copper etching plates.The print has yet to reveal sufficient ridge detail for a match,and one has to consider the possibility that the print wasn't leftby Sickert but by a printer.
Fingerprints were known about long before theRipper began his murders. Ridge detail on human finger pads givesus a better grip and is unique to every individual, includingidentical twins. It is believed that the Chinese used fingerprintssome three thousand years ago to "sign" legal documents, butwhether this was ceremonial or for purposes of identification isunknown. In India, fingerprints were used as a means of "signingcontracts" as early as 1870. Seven years later, an Americanmicroscopist published a journal article suggesting thatfingerprints should be used for identification, and this was echoedin 1880 by a Scottish physician working in a hospital in Japan. Butas is true with every major scientific breakthrough - including DNA- fingerprints weren't instantly understood, immediately utilized,or readily accepted in court.
During the Victorian era, the primary means ofidentifying a person and linking him or her to a crime was a"science" called anthropometry, which was developed in 1879 byFrench criminologist Alphonse Bertillon. He believed that peoplecould be identified and classified through a detailed descriptionof facial characteristics and a series of eleven body measurementsincluding height, reach, head width, and length of the left foot.Bertillon maintained that skeletons were highly individualized, andanthropometry continued to be used to classify criminals andsuspects until the turn of the century.
Anthropometry was not only flawed, it wasdangerous. It was contingent on physical attributes that aren't asindividualized as believed. This pseudoscience placed far too muchemphasis on what a person looked like and seduced the police intoconsciously or subconsciously accepting as facts the superstitionsof yet another pseudoscience - physiognomy, which asserts thatcriminality, morality, and intellect are reflected in a person'sbody and face. Thieves are usually "frail," while violent men areusually "strong" and "in good health." All criminals have superior"finger reach," and almost all female offenders are "homely, if notrepulsive." Rapists tend to be "blond," and pedophiles often are"delicate" and look "childish."
If people in the twenty-first century havedifficulty accepting the fact that a psychopathic killer can beattractive, likeable, and intelligent, imagine the difficulty inthe Victorian era, when standard criminology books included longdescriptions of anthropometry and physiognomy. Victorian policewere programmed to identify suspects by their skeletal structureand facial features and to assume that a certain "look" could belinked to a certain type of behavior.
Walter Sickert would not have been tagged as asuspect during the time of the Ripper murders. The "young andbeautiful Sickert" with "his well known charm," as Degas oncedescribed him, couldn't possibly be capable of cutting a woman'sthroat and slashing open her abdomen. I have even heard itsuggested in recent years that if an artist such as Sickert hadviolent proclivities, he would have sublimated them through hiscreative work and not acted them out.
When the police were looking for Jack theRipper, a great deal of importance was placed on witnessdescriptions of men last seen with the victims. Investigativereports reveal that much attention was paid to hair color,complexion, and height, with the police not taking into accountthat all of these characteristics can be disguised. Height not onlyvaries in an individual depending on posture, hats, and footwear,but can be altered by "trickery." Actors can wear tall hats andspecial lifts in their shoes. They can stoop and slightly bend theknees under voluminous coats or capes; they can wear caps low overtheir eyes, making themselves appear to be inches taller or shorterthan they are.
Early publications on medical jurisprudence andforensic medicine reveal that much more was known than was actuallyapplied in crime cases. But in 1888, cases continued to be made orlost based on witness descriptions instead of physical evidence.Whether the police knew anything at all about forensic science,there was no practical way to get evidence tested. The Home Office- the department of government that oversees Scotland Yard - didnot have forensic laboratories then.
A physician such as Dr. Llewellyn might neverhave touched a microscope; he might not have known that hair, bone,and blood could be identified as human. Robert Hooke had writtenabout the microscopic properties of hairs, fibers, and evenvegetable debris and bee stings more than two hundred yearsearlier, but to death investigators and the average doctor,microscopy was as rarified as rocket science or astronomy must haveseemed.
Dr. Llewellyn attended the London HospitalMedical College and had been a licensed physician for thirteenyears. His surgery or medical office was no more than three hundredyards from where Mary Ann Nichols was murdered. He was in privatepractice. Although the police knew him well enough to request himby name when Mary Ann Nichols's body was discovered, there is noreason to suppose that Llewellyn was a divisional surgeon forScotland Yard; that is, he was not a physician who offered hisservices part-time to a particular division, which in this instancewas the H Division covering Whitechapel.
The job of a divisional surgeon was to attendto the troops. Free medical care was a benefit of working for theMetropolitan Police, and a police surgeon was to be available whenneeded to examine prisoners, or to go to the local jail todetermine if a citizen was drunk, ill, or suffering from an excessof "animal spirits," which I presume refers to excitement orhysteria. In the late 1880s, the divisional surgeon also respondedto death scenes for a fee of one pound one shilling per case; hewas paid two pounds two shillings if he performed the autopsy. Butby no means was he expected to be well acquainted with themicroscope, the nuances of injuries and poisonings, and what thebody can reveal after death.
Most likely, Dr. Llewellyn was a local doctorthe police felt comfortable calling upon, and it is possible thathe had located in Whitechapel for humanitarian reasons. He was aFellow of the British Gynecological Society, and would have beenaccustomed to being called upon at all hours of the night. When thepolice rapped on his door on the cool, overcast early morning ofAugust 31st, he probably got to the scene as quickly as possible.He wasn't trained to do much more than determine that the victimwas really dead and offer the police an educated guess as to whendeath had occurred.
Unless the body was turning green around theabdomen, which would indicate the beginning stages ofdecomposition, it was traditional in the early days of deathinvestigation to wait at least twenty-four hours before performingthe postmortem, on the remote chance that the person might still bealive and "come to" as he or she was being cut open. For centuries,the fear prevailed that one might be mistaken for dead and buriedalive. Bizarre stories of people suddenly trying to sit up insidetheir coffins were in circulation, prompting some who weresufficiently concerned about such a fright to have their graverigged with a bell attached to a string that ran through the earthto the coffin. Some stories may have been veiled references tocases of necrophilia. In one instance, a woman in her coffin wasn'treally dead when a man had sex with her. She was paralyzed, itturned out, but conscious enough to consent to the weakness of theflesh.
Police reports of Mary Ann Nichols's murderleave little doubt that Dr. Llewellyn did not seem particularlyinterested in a victim's clothing, especially the filthy rags of aprostitute. Clothing was not a source of evidence butidentification. Perhaps someone recognized a victim by what he orshe was wearing. People did not carry around forms ofidentification in the late 1800s, unless it was a passport or visa.But that would have been rare. Neither one was required for Britishcitizens to travel to the Continent. A body was unidentified whenit was collected off the street and came to the mortuary unless heor she was known by the locals or the police.
I have often wondered how many poor souls wentto their graves unidentified or misnamed. It would not have been adifficult task to murder someone and conceal the victim's identity,or to fake one's own death. During the investigations of the Rippermurders, no attempt was made to distinguish human blood from thatof birds or fish or mammals. Unless the blood was on the body ornear it, or on a weapon at the scene, the police could not say thatthe blood was related to the crime or came from a horse or a sheepor a cow. In the 1880s, the streets of Whitechapel nearslaughterhouses were putrid with blood and entrails, and men walkedabout with blood on their clothing and hands.
Dr. Llewellyn misinterpreted just about everydetail in Mary Ann Nichols's murder. But he probably did the besthe could with his limited training and what was available at thetime. It might be interesting to imagine how the murder of Mary AnnNichols would be investigated today. I'll place the scene inVirginia - not because it is where I once worked and have continuedto be mentored, but because it has one of the best statewidemedical examiner systems in America.
In Virginia, each of the four district officeshas forensic pathologists who are medical doctors trained inpathology and the subspecialty of forensic pathology, training thatinvolves ten years of postgraduate education, not counting threeadditional years if the forensic pathologist also wants a lawdegree. Forensic pathologists perform the autopsies, but it is themedical examiner - a physician of any specialty working part-timeto assist the pathologist and the police - who is called to thescene of a sudden, unexpected, or violent death.
If Dr. Rees Ralph Llewellyn were employed inVirginia, he would have a private practice and serve part-time as amedical examiner for one of the four districts, depending on wherehe lived. If Mary Ann Nichols were murdered at the time of thiswriting, the local police would call Dr. Llewellyn to the scene,which would be cordoned off and protected from the public and badweather. A tent would be set up, if need be, and there would be aperimeter of strong lights and spitting flares. Officers would beon the street to keep away the curious and divert traffic.
Dr. Llewellyn would use a clean chemicalthermometer and insert it into the rectum - providing there was noinjury to it - and take the temperature of the body; then he wouldtake the temperature of the air. A quick calculation could give hima very rough idea of when Mary Ann was killed because a body underrelatively normal circ*mstances, assuming an ambient temperature ofabout seventy-two degrees, would cool one and a half degreesFahrenheit per hour for the first twelve hours. Dr. Llewellyn wouldcheck the stages of livor mortis and rigor mortis and carefullyperform an external examination of the body and what is around andunder it. He would take photographs, and collect any obviousevidence on the body that might be dislodged or contaminated duringtransportation. He would ask the police many questions and makenotes. He would then send the body to his district medicalexaminer's office or morgue, where a forensic pathologist wouldperform the autopsy. All other scene evidence collected andphotography would be handled by police detectives or a policeforensic squad.
Fundamentally, this is not so different fromthe way a homicide is handled in England today, except that acoroner's court would hold an inquest at the conclusion of thescene investigation and examination of the body. Information andwitnesses would be marshalled before the coroner and a jury, and adecision would be rendered by verdict as to whether the death wasnatural, an accident, a suicide, or a homicide. In Virginia, themanner of death would be the sole decision of the forensicpathologist who performed the autopsy. In England, the decisionwould rely on jurors, which can be unfortunate if a majority ofthem don't comprehend the medico-legal facts of the case,especially if those facts are weak.
However, jurors can go a step further than theforensic pathologist and commit an "undetermined" case to trial. Ithink of the case of a "drowned" woman whose husband has just takenout a large life insurance policy on her. The medical expert's jobis not to make deductions, no matter what he or she privatelybelieves. But jurors can. Jurors could convene in their privateroom and suspect the woman was murdered by her greedy husband andsend the case to court.
The American way of investigating death wasimported from England. But over the decades, individual U.S.states, counties, and cities have slowly been withdrawing from thenotion of the "coroner," who is usually a nonmedical person electedand invested with the power to decide how someone died and whethera crime was committed. When I first began working at the Office ofthe Chief Medical Examiner in Richmond, I assumed that otherjurisdictions had the same medical examiner system that Virginiadid. I was dismayed to learn this wasn't true. Many electedcoroners in other states were funeral home directors, which at bestis a conflict of interest. At worst, it is an occasion formedico-legal incompetence and the financial abuse of people who aregrieving.
The U.S. has never had a national standard ofdeath investigation, and we are far from it now. Some cities orstates continue to have elected coroners who go to the scenes butdo not perform the autopsies because they are not forensicpathologists or even physicians. There are offices - such as theone in Los Angeles - in which the chief medical examiner is calleda coroner, even though he isn't elected and is a forensicpathologist.
Then there are states that have medicalexaminers in some cities and coroners in others. Some locales haveneither, and local government be-grudgingly pays a small fee forwhat I call a "circuit forensic pathologist" to ride in and handlea medico-legal case, usually in an inadequate - if not appalling -location such as a funeral home. The worst facility I remember wasone in Pennsylvania. The autopsy was performed in a hospital"morgue" used as a temporary storage room for stillborn infants andamputated body parts.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
HUE AND CRY
The English system of investigating death canbe traced back some eight hundred years to the reign of Richard I,when it was decreed that in every county of His Majesty's realm,officers would insure the "pleas of the crown." These men werecalled "crowners," a name that eventually evolved into"coroner."
Coroners were elected by the freeholders of thecounty and were required to be a knight, assuring they werefinancially secure, of good standing, and, of course, objective andhonest in their collection of revenues due to the crown. A suddendeath was a potential source of income for the king if there was afinding of wrongdoing in murders and suicides, or even if there wasan inappropriate response by the one who discovered the dead body -such as not responding at all and looking the other way.
It is human nature to make a hue and cry whenone stumbles upon a dead body, but during the medieval era, not todo so was to risk punishment and financial penalty. When a persondied suddenly, the coroner was to be notified immediately. He wouldrespond as quickly as he could and assemble a jury for what wouldlater be called an inquest. It is frightening to consider how manydeaths were labeled evil deeds when the truth may have been thatthe poor soul simply choked on his mutton, had a stroke, or droppeddead at a young age from a congenitally bad heart or an aneurysm.Suicides and homicides were sins against God and the King. If aperson took his or her own life or someone else did, the coronerand jury determined wrongdoing by the deceased or perpetrator, andthe offender's entire estate could end up in the crown's coffers.This placed the coroner in a tempting position to perhaps bargain abit and show a little compassion before riding off with coinsjingling in his pockets.
Eventually, the coroner's power placed him in aseat of judgment and he became an enforcer of the law. Suspectsseeking refuge in the church would soon enough find themselvesface-to-face with the coroner, who would demand a confession andarrange the seizure of the man's assets in the name of the crown.Coroners were involved in the gruesome practice of trial by ordeal,requiring a person to prove innocence by showing no pain or injuryafter holding a hand in the fire or enduring other dreadfultortures while the coroner sat nearby and somberly watched. Beforethe days of medico-legal autopsies and professional policeinvestigation, a wife's tumble down the castle steps might bemurder if her husband could not endure terrible tortures and escapeunscathed.
Coroners of old were the equivalent of today'sforensic pathologist having no medical training and driving amorgue van to a death scene, glancing at the body, listening towitnesses, finding out how much the dead person is worth, decidingthat a sudden death from a bee sting was a homicidal poisoning,testing the wife's innocence by holding her head under water, andif she didn't drown after five or ten minutes, concluding she wasinnocent. If she drowned, wrongdoing was the verdict and the familyestate was forfeited to the Queen or the president of the UnitedStates, depending on where the death occurred. In the coronersystem of days gone by, jurors could be bribed. Coroners couldincrease their wealth. Innocent people could lose everything theyowned or be hanged. It was best not to die suddenly, ifpossible.
Times did change for the better. In thesixteenth century, the coroner's role narrowed its focus to theinvestigation of sudden deaths and stayed clear of law enforcementand trial by ordeal. In 1860 - the year Walter Sickert was born - acommittee recommended that the election process for coroner betreated as seriously as voting for Members of Parliament. A growingawareness of the importance of competent postmortem examinationsand handling of evidence added further value and prestige to theoffice of coroner, and in 1888 - when the Ripper murders began - agovernmental act mandated that death investigation findings bycoroners would no longer render any sort of financial benefit tothe crown.
These important pieces of legislation arerarely if ever mentioned in connection with the Ripper crimes.Objective death investigation became a priority, and thepossibility of material gain by the crown was removed. The changein law meant a change of mind-set that allowed and encouraged thecoroner to concentrate on justice and not insidious pressure fromthe royals. The crown had nothing to gain by interfering with theinquests of Martha Tabran, Mary Ann Nichols, or the Ripper's othervictims - even if the women had been upper-class subjects withinfluence and wealth. The coroner had nothing to gain but plenty tolose if the freewheeling press depicted him as an incompetent fool,a liar, or a greedy tyrant. Men such as Wynne Baxter supportedthemselves through respectable legal practices. They did not addmuch to their incomes by presiding over inquests, but put theirlivelihoods at risk if their integrity and skills wereimpugned.
The evolution in the coroner's system hadreached a new level of objectivity and seriousness in 1888,reinforcing my belief that there was no investigative or politicalconspiracy to "cover up" some nefarious secret during the Rippermurders or after they were believed to have ended. There were, ofcourse, the usual bureaucratic attempts to prevent furtherembarrassment by discouraging the publication of police memoirs andclassifying secret official memorandums that were never written forthe public to see. Discretion and nondisclosure may not be popular,but they do not always imply scandal. Honest people delete personale-mails and use shredding machines. But try as I might, for thelongest time I could find no excuse for the silence of the elusiveInspector Abberline. So much is made of him. So little is known. Soabsent does he seem from the Ripper investigation he headed.
Frederick George Abberline was a modest,courteous man of high morals who was as reliable and methodical asthe clocks he repaired before he joined the Metropolitan Police in1863. During his thirty years of service, he earned eighty-fourcommendations and rewards from judges, magistrates, and thecommissioner of police. As Abberline himself matter-of-factly putit, "I think [I] was considered very exceptional."
He was admired, if not cherished, by hiscolleagues and the public he served, and does not seem the sort todeliberately outshine anyone, but took great pride in a job welldone. I find it significant that there is not a single photographof him that anybody seems to know of, and I don': believe this isso because all of them "walked away" from Scotland Yard's archivesand files. I would expect "pinched" pictures would have beenrecirculating for years, their prices mounting with each resale. Italso seems that any existing pictures would have been published atleast once somewhere.
But if there is even one photograph ofAbberline, I do not know of it. The only hint of what he lookedlike is to be found in a few sketches published in magazines thatdon't always spell his name correctly. Artistic versions of thelegendary inspector show an indistinct-looking man with muttonchops, small ears, a straight nose, and a high forehead. In 1885.it appears, he was losing his hair. He may have slumped a bit anddoesn't impress me as particularly tall. As was true of themythical East End monster Abberline tracked but never caught, thedetective could disappear at will and become anybody in acrowd.
His love of clocks and gardening says a greatdeal about him. These are solitary, gentle pursuits that requirepatience, concentration, tenacity, meticulousness, a light touch,and a love of life and the way things work. I can't think of manybetter qualities for a detective, except, of course, honesty, and Ihave no doubt that Frederick Abberline was as true as a tuningfork. Although he never wrote his autobiography or allowed anyoneelse to tell his story, he did keep a diary of sorts, ahundred-page clipping book about crimes he worked interspersed withcomments written in his graceful, generous hand.
Based on the way he assembled his clippingbook, I would say that he didn't get around to it until after hisretirement. When he died in 1929, this collection of newsprintremnants of his shining career remained the property of hisdescendants, who eventually donated it to a person or personsunknown. I knew nothing about it until early in 2002 when I wasdoing further research in London and an official with the Yardshowed me the eight-by-eleven book bound in black. I don't know ifit had just been donated or had just turned up. I don't know if itactually belongs to Scotland Yard or perhaps to someone who worksthere. Exactly where this little-known clipping book has been sinceAbberline pasted it together and when it turned up at Scotland Yardare questions I can't answer. Typically, Abberline remainsmysterious and offers few answers even now.
His diary is neither confessional nor full ofdetails about his life, but he does reveal his personality in theway he worked cases and in the comments he wrote. He was a brave,intelligent man who kept his word and abided by the rules, whichincluded not divulging details about the very sorts of cases Iexpected and hoped to find hidden between his clipping book'scovers. Abberline's entries abruptly stop with an October 1887 caseof what he called "spontaneous combustion" and do not resume untila March 1891 case of trafficking in infants.
There is not so much as a hint about Jack theRipper. One won't find a single word about the 1889 ClevelandStreet male brothel scandal that must have been a briar patch forAbberline, as accusations included the names of men close to thethrone. To read Abberline's diary is to think the Ripper murdersand the Cleveland Street scandal never happened, and I have noreason to suspect that someone removed any related pages from thecuttings book. It appears Abberline chose not to include what heknew would be the most sought-after and controversial details ofhis investigative career.
On pages 44-45 of his diary, he offers anexplanation for his silence:
I think it is just as well to record here thereason why as from the various cuttings from the newspapers as wellas the many other matters that I was called upon to investigatethat never became public property - it must be apparent that Icould write many things that would be very interesting to read.
At the time I retired from the service theauthorities were very much opposed to retired officers writinganything for the press as previously some retired officers had fromtime to time been very indiscreet in what they had caused to bepublished and to my knowledge had been called upon to explain theirconduct - and in fact - they had been threatened with action forlibel.
Apart from that there is no doubt the fact thatin describing what you did in detecting certain crimes you areputting the criminal closer on their guard and in some cases youmay be absolutely telling them how to commit crime.
As an example in the Finger-Print detection youfind now the expert thief wears gloves.
The opposition to former officers writing theirmemoirs did not deter everyone, whether it was the men of ScotlandYard or the City of London Police. I have three examples on mydesk: Sir Melville Macnaghten's Days of My Years, Sir Henry Smith'sFrom Constable to Commissioner, and Benjamin Leeson's Lost London:The Memoirs of an East End Detective. All three include Jack theRipper anecdotes and analyses which I think the world would bebetter without. It is sad that men whose lives and careers weretouched by the Ripper cases would spin theories almost as baselessas some of those offered by people who weren't even born at thetime of the crimes.
Henry Smith was the Acting Commissioner of theCity of London Police during the murders of 1888, and he modestlywrites, "There is no man living who knows as much of those murdersas I do." He declares that after the "second crime" - which mayhave been Mary Ann Nichols, who was not murdered in Smith'sjurisdiction - he "discovered" a suspect he was fairly sure was themurderer. Smith described him as a former medical student who hadbeen in a lunatic asylum and had spent "all of this time" withprostitutes, whom he cheated by passing off polished farthings assovereigns.
Smith conveyed this intelligence to Sir CharlesWarren, who did not find the suspect, according to Smith. It wasjust as well. The former lunatic turned out to be the wrong man. Ifeel compelled to add that a sovereign would have been unusuallygenerous payment for an Unfortunate who was more than accustomed toexchanging favors for farthings. The damage done by Smith duringthe Ripper investigation was to perpetuate the notion that theRipper was a doctor or a medical student or someone involved in afield connected with medicine.
I don't know why Smith made such an assumptionas early as the "second case," when no victim had been disemboweledyet and no organs had been taken. Following Mary Ann Nichols'smurder, there was no suggestion that the weapon was a surgicalknife or that the killer possessed even the slightest surgicalskills. Unless Smith simply has the timing wrong in hisrecollections, there was no reason for the police to suspect aso-called medically trained individual this early in theinvestigation.
Smith's overtures to Charles Warren apparentlyevoked no response, and Smith took it upon himself to put "nearly athird" of his police force in plainclothes and instruct them to "doeverything which, under ordinary circ*mstances, a constable shouldnot do," he says in his memoirs. These clandestine activitiesincluded sitting on doorsteps smoking pipes and lingering in publichouses, gossiping with the locals. Smith wasn't idle, either. Hevisited "every butcher's shop in the city," and I find this almostcomical as I imagine the commissioner - perhaps in disguise or asuit and tie - dropping by to quiz slaughterhouse butchers aboutsuspicious-looking men of their profession who might be going aboutcutting up women. I feel quite sure the Metropolitan Police wouldnot have appreciated his enthusiasm or violation of boundaries.
Sir Melville Macnaghten probably detoured ifnot derailed the Ripper investigation permanently with hiscertainties that were not based on firsthand information or theopen-minded and experienced deductions of an Abberline. In 1889,Macnaghten joined the Metropolitan Police as assistant commissionerof CID. He had nothing to recommend him but twelve years of work onhis family's tea plantations in Bengal, where he went out eachmorning to shoot wild cats, foxes, alligators, or maybe have a goat a good pig sticking.
When his memoirs were published in 1914, fouryears after Smith published his recollections, Macnaghtenrestrained himself until page 55, where he began engaging in alittle literary pig sticking that was followed by amateurishsleuthing and pomposity. He alluded to Henry Smith as being "on thetiptoe of expectation" and having a "prophetic soul" since Smithwas in hot pursuit of the murderer weeks before the first murderhad even happened - according to Macnaghten. Smith considered theAugust 7th slaying of Martha Tabran as the Ripper's debut, whileMacnaghten was certain that the first murder was Mary Ann Nicholson August 31st.
Macnaghten goes on to recall those terriblefoggy evenings and the "raucous cries" of newsboys shouting outthat there had been "Another horrible murder... !" The scene hesets becomes more dramatic with each page until one can't help butget annoyed and wish that his autobiography had been one of thosequashed by the Home Office. I suppose it is possible Macnaghtenheard those raucous cries and experienced those fatal foggy nights,but I doubt he was anywhere near the East End.
He had just returned from India and was stillworking for his family. He did not begin at Scotland Yard untilsome eight months after the Ripper murders supposedly had ended andwere no longer foremost on the Yard's mind, but this didn't keephim from deciding not only who Jack the Ripper probably was, butalso that he was dead and had murdered five victims "& 5victims only": Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride,Catherine Eddows, and Mary Kelly. It was Melville Macnaghten's"rational theory" that after the "fifth" murder of November 9,1888, the Ripper's "brain gave way altogether" and he most likelycommitted suicide.
When the young, depressed barrister MontagueJohn Druitt threw himself into the Thames toward the end of 1888,he unwittingly cast himself as one of three main suspectsMacnaghten named in Jack the Ripper's bloody drama. The other two,lower on Macnaghten's list, were a Polish Jew named AaronKosminski, who was "insane" and "had a great hatred of women," andMichael Ostrog, a Russian doctor who was committed to a "lunaticasylum."
For some reason, Macnaghten thought thatMontague Druitt was a doctor. This erroneous supposition was passeddown the line for quite a long time, and I suppose some people maystill think Druitt was a doctor. I don't know where Macnaghten gothis information, but perhaps he was confused because Montague'suncle, Robert Druitt, was a prominent physician and medical writer,and Montague's father, William, was a surgeon. I am afraid thatMontague or "Monty" will always remain a bit shadowy because itdoes not appear there is much information available about him.
In 1876, when he was a dark, handsome, athleticnineteen-year-old, Druitt enrolled at New College, OxfordUniversity, and five years later was admitted to the Inner Templein London to pursue a career in law.
He was a good student and an exceptionallytalented cricket player, and worked a part-time job as an assistantat Valentine's School, a boys' boarding school in Blackheath.hom*osexuality or child molesting - or both - are suggested as thereasons why Druitt, a thirty-one-year-old bachelor when he died,was fired from Valentine's School in the fall of 1888. Macnaghtenclaimed in his memo that Druitt was "sexually insane," which in theVictorian era could have referred to hom*osexuality. But Macnaghtenbacks up his accusation with nothing more than so-called reliableinformation that he supposedly destroyed.
Mental illness ran in Druitt's bloodline. Hismother was committed to an asylum in the summer of 1888 and hadattempted suicide at least once. One of Druitt's sisters latercommitted suicide as well. When Druitt drowned himself in theThames in the early winter of 1888, he left a suicide note thatindicated he feared he would end up like his mother and thought itbest for him to kill himself. His family archives at the DorsetRecord Office and the West Sussex Record Office turned up only oneletter of his, which he wrote to his uncle Robert in September1876. Although Druitt's handwriting and language do not resembleanything found in alleged Ripper letters, even to consider making ajudgment based on this isn't meaningful or fair. In 1876, Druittwasn't yet twenty years old. Handwriting and verbal performance cannot only be disguised - they also tend to change as one ages.
Druitt became a suspect in the Ripper murdersfor the convenient reason that he happened to commit suicide notlong after what Macnaghten considers the last Ripper strike onNovember 9, 1888. The young barrister was probably guilty ofnothing more than a hereditary mental illness, and perhaps whatfatally tipped the scales against him was acute distress overwhatever he allegedly had done to be fired from Valentine's School.We can't know his mind or feelings at that point in his life, buthis despair was sufficient for him to put rocks in the pockets ofhis top coat and jump into the frigid, polluted Thames. Druitt'sbody was recovered from the water the last day of 1888, and it wassupposed, based on the degree of decomposition, that he had beendead for about a month. At his inquest in Chiswick, the juryreturned a verdict of "suicide whilst of unsound mind."
Doctors and lunatics seem to have been popularRipper suspects. B. Leeson, a constable at the time of the Rippermurders, states in his memoirs that when he began his career, thetraining consisted of ten days' attendance at a police court and a"couple of hours" of instruction from a chief inspector. The restone had to learn through experience. Leeson wrote, "I am afraid Icannot throw any light on the problem of the Ripper's identity."However, he added, there was a particular doctor who was never faraway when the crimes were committed. I guess Leeson was never faraway when the murders were committed, either, otherwise he couldn'tpossibly have noticed this "same" doctor.
Perhaps Frederick Abberline refrained fromwriting about the Ripper cases because he was smart enough not totrot out what he didn't know. In his clipping books, every case heincludes is one he personally investigated and solved. The newsarticles he pasted on pages and underlined (precisely, with astraight edge), and his comments are neither copious nor especiallyenthusiastic. He made it plain that he worked very hard and wasn'talways happy about it. On January 24,1885, when the Tower of Londonwas bombed, for example, he found himself "especially overworked,as the then Home Secretary Sir Wm. Harcourt wished to be suppliedevery morning with the progress of the case and after working veryhard all day I had to remain up many nights until 4 and 5 A.M. thefollowing morning making reports for his information."
If Abberline had to do this in the Tower ofLondon bombing case, one can be sure that during the Ripper murdershe was often up all night and in the Home Secretary's office firstthing in the morning for briefings. In the Tower bombing, Abberlinearrived "immediately after the explosion" and suggested that allpeople on the scene were to remain there and be interviewed by thepolice. Abberline conducted many of the interviews himself, and itwas during this process that he "discovered" one of theperpetrators through "the hesitation in his replies and his generalmanner." There was quite a lot of press about the bombing andAbberline's excellent detective work, and if four years later hispresence seemed to fade, it was probably because of his supervisoryposition and his discretion. He was a man who worked relentlesslyand without applause, the quiet clockmaker who did not wantattention but was determined to fix what was wrong.
I suspect he anguished over the Ripper murdersand spent much time walking the streets at night, speculating,deducing, trying to coax leads out of the foggy, filthy air. Whenhis colleagues, friends, family, and the merchants of the East Endgave him a retirement dinner in 1892, they presented him with asilver tea and coffee service and praised his honorable andextraordinary work in the detection of crime. According to the EastLondon Observer's account of the appreciation dinner, H Division'sSuperintendent Arnold told those who had gathered to celebrateAbberline's career that during the Ripper murders, "Abberline camedown to the East End and gave the whole of his time with the objectof bringing those crimes to light. Unfortunately, however, thecirc*mstances were such that success was impossible."
It must have been painful and infuriating forAbberline when he was forced in the fall of 1888 to confess to thepress that "not the slightest clue can at present be obtained." Hewas used to outwitting criminals. It was reported that he worked sohard to solve the Ripper murders that he "almost broke down underthe pressure." Often he did not go to bed and went days withoutsleep. It wasn't uncommon for him to wear plain-clothes and minglewith the "shady folk" in doss-house kitchens until the early hoursof the morning. But no matter where Abberline went, the "miscreant"was not there. I have to wonder if his path ever crossed WalterSickert's. It would not surprise me if the two men had talked atone time or another and if Sickert had offered suggestions. What a"real jolly" that would have been.
"Theories!" Abberline would later thunder whensomeone brought up the Ripper murders. "We were lost almost intheories; there were so many of them." By all indications, it wasnot a pleasant subject to bring up with him in later years, afterhe had moved on to other cases. Better to let him talk about theimproved sanitation in the East End or how he solved a long stringof bond robberies by tracing clues that led to an unclaimed hatboxin a railway station.
For all his experience and gifts, Abberline didnot solve the biggest crime of his life. It is a shame if thatfailure gave him pain and regret for even a moment when he workedin his garden during his retirement years. Frederick Abberline wentto his grave having no idea what he had been up against. WalterSickert was a murderer unlike any other.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CROCHET WORK AND FLOWERS
Mary Ann Nichols's body remained at themortuary in Whitechapel until Thursday, September 6, when herdecomposing flesh was finally allowed privacy and rest.
She was enclosed in a "solid-looking" woodencoffin and loaded into a horse-drawn hearse that carried her sevenmiles to Ilford Cemetery, where she was buried. The sun shone onlyfive minutes that day, and it was misty and rainy.
The next day, Friday, the British Association'sfifty-eighth annual meeting took up important topics such as thenecessity of lightning rods being properly installed and inspected,and the vagaries of lightning and the great damage it and wildgeese could do to telegraph wires. The hygienic qualities ofelectric lighting were presented, and a physicist and an engineerdebated whether electricity was a form of matter or energy. It wasannounced that poverty and misery could be eliminated if "you couldprevent weakness and sickness and laziness and stupidity." One bitof good news was that Thomas Edison had just started a factory thatwould begin producing 18,000 phonographs a year for £20 or £25each.
The weather had been worse this day thanyesterday, with no sunshine reported at all, and squalls roared infrom the north. Heavy rain and sleet smacked down, and Londonersmoved about in a cold mist, going to and from work and later to thetheaters. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was still drawing large audiencesat the Lyceum, and a parody of it called Hide and Seekyll hadopened at the Royalty Theater. The play She was reviewed in thatday's paper as "a formidable experiment of dramatizing," offering amurder and cannibals at the Gaiety. At the Alhambra, one of WalterSickert's favorite music halls, the doors opened at 10:30 P.M. witha cast of dancing women and Captain Clives and his "marvelousdog."
Annie Chapman was sleeping off her last glassof spirits while London's early night life was going on. The weekhad been a bad one, worse than usual. Annie was forty-seven yearsold and missing her two front teeth. She was five feet tall,overweight, with blue eyes and short, dark-brown, wavy hair. As thepolice later put it, "she had seen her better day." On the streetshe was known as "Dark Annie." In some accounts her estrangedhusband was said to be a veterinary surgeon, but in most of them hewas described as a coachman employed by a gentleman who lived inthe Royal Borough of Windsor.
Annie and her husband had no contact with eachother after they separated, and she made no inquiries into his lifeuntil her weekly allowance of ten shillings suddenly stopped inlate 1886. One day, a wretched-looking woman, having the appearanceof a tramp, appeared at the Merry Wives of Windsor public house andinquired about Chapman. She said she had walked twenty miles fromLondon, staying in a lodging house along the way, and wanted toknow if her husband was ill or using that as an excuse not to sendmoney. The woman at the door of the Merry Wives of Windsor informedthe tramp that Mr. Chapman had died on Christmas Day. He left Annienothing but two children who wanted nothing to do with her: a boywho was an inmate of the Cripples' Home, and a well-educateddaughter 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, whofinally cut her off. She had no further contact with any members ofher family, and when her health allowed, she made pennies byselling crochet work and flowers. Acquaintances described her as"clever" and industrious by nature, but the more her addiction toalcohol tightened its grip on her life, the less she cared what shedid to earn her keep.
During the four months before her death, Anniehad been in and out of the infirmary. She was spending her nightsin Spitalfields doss-houses, the most recent one located at 35Dorset Street, which joined Commercial Street and Crispin Streetlike a short rung on a ladder. There were an estimated 5,000lodging-house beds in the hellish dens of Spitalfields, and TheTimes later observed that at Annie's inquest the "glimpse oflife... was sufficient to make [jurors] feel there was much in the19th century civilization of which they had small reason to beproud." In Annie Chapman's world, the poor were "herded likecattle," and were "near starvation." Violence smoldered day andnight, fueled by misery, alcohol, and rage.
Four nights before her death, Annie got into analtercation with another lodger named Eliza Cooper, who confrontedher in the lodging-house kitchen, demanding the return of a scrapof soap Annie had borrowed. Annie angrily threw a halfpenny on thetable and told her to go buy it herself. The two women began toquarrel and carried their disagreement to the nearby Ringer publichouse, where Annie slapped Eliza across the face and Eliza punchedAnnie in the left eye and chest.
Annie's bruises were still noticeable the earlySaturday morning of September 8th, when John Donovan, the deputy ofthe lodging house on Dorset Street, demanded payment of eightpennies for a bed if she planned to stay. She replied, "I have notgot it. I am weak and ill and have been in the infirmary." Donovanreminded her that she knew the rules. She replied that she would goout and get the money and please not to let her bed to someoneelse. Donovan would later tell police that she "was under theinfluence of drink" when the night watchman escorted her off theproperty.
Annie took the first right on LittlePaternoster Row, and when the night watchman saw her last she wason Brushfield Street, which ran east to west between what was thencalled Bishopsgate Without Norton Folgate and Commercial Street.Had she headed but a few blocks north on Commercial Street, shewould have reached Shoreditch, where there were several music halls(the Shoreditch Olympia, Harwood's, and Griffin's). A littlefarther north was Hoxton - or the very route Walter Sickertsometimes took when he walked home to 54 Broadhurst Gardens afterevenings at various music halls, theaters, or wherever it was hewent on his obsessive wanderings late at night and in the earlymorning hours.
At 2:00 A.M., when Annie emerged onto London'sEast End streets, it was fifty degrees and sodden out. She wasdressed in a black skirt, a long black jacket hooked at the neck,an apron, wool stockings, and boots. Around her neck was a piece ofa black woollen scarf tied in front with a knot, and under it shewore a handkerchief that she recently had bought from anotherlodger. On the wedding ring finger of her left hand she wore threebase metal or "flash" rings. In a pocket on the inside of her skirtwas a small comb case, a piece of coarse muslin, and a torn bit ofenvelope that she had been seen to pick off the lodging-house floorand 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 threeand a half hours, no witness ever came forward. At quarter to five,thirty-seven-year-old John Richardson, a porter at the SpitalfieldsMarket, headed toward 29 Han-bury Street, a rooming house for thepoor that, like so many other dilapidated dwellings inSpitalfields, had once been a barnlike workplace for weavers totoil on hand looms until steam power had put them out of business.Richardson's mother rented the house and sublet half of its roomsto seventeen people. He, being the dutiful son, had dropped by,just as he always did when he was up early, to check the securityof the cellar. Two months ago someone had broken into it and hadstolen two saws and two hammers. His mother also ran a packing-casebusiness, and stolen tools were no small matter.
Satisfied that the cellar was safely locked,Richardson went through a passage that led into the backyard andsat on the steps to cut a bothersome piece of leather off his boot.His knife was "an old table knife," he later testified at theinquest, "about five inches long," and he had used it earlier tocut "a bit of carrot," then absently tucked the knife into apocket. He estimated he was sitting out on the steps no longer thanseveral minutes, his feet resting on flagstone that was just inchesfrom where Annie Chapman's mutilated body would be found. Heneither heard nor saw anyone. Richardson laced up his mended bootand 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 fencethat was five to five and a half feet high. He later told policethat at 5:25 A.M., he walked into his backyard and heard a voicesay "No" from the other side of the fence. Several minutes later,something heavy fell against the palings. He did not check to seewhat had caused the noise or who had said "No."
Five minutes later, at 5:30 A.M., ElisabethLong was walking along Hanbury Street, heading west to SpitalfieldsMarket, when she noticed a man talking to a woman only a few yardsfrom the fence around the yard at 29 Hanbury Street, where AnnieChapman's body would be found on the other side barely half an hourlater. Mrs. Long testified at the inquest that she was "positive"the woman was Annie Chapman. Annie and the man were talking loudlybut seemed to be getting along,
Mrs. Long recalled. The only fragment of theconversation she overheard as she made her way down the street wasthe man asking, "Will you?" and the woman identified as Anniereplying, "Yes."
Obviously, the times given by witnessesconflict, and they never stated at the inquest how they happened toknow what time it was when they walked past people or stumbled ontobodies. In that era, most people told time by their routines, theposition of the sun in the sky, and church clocks that chimed thehour or half hour. Harriet Hardiman of 29 Han-bury testified at theinquest she was certain it was 6:00 A.M. when she was awakened by acommotion outside her window. She was a cat meat saleswoman whoseshop was inside the rooming house; she made her living by going outwith a barrow full of stinking fish or slop left over fromslaughterhouses to sell to cat owners while long lines of felinesfollowed along her routes.
Harriet was fast asleep on the ground floorwhen the excited voices woke her with a start. Fearing the buildingwas on fire, she awakened her son and told him to go outside andlook. When he returned, he said that a woman had been murdered inthe yard. Both mother and son had slept soundly all night, andHarriet Hardiman later testified she often heard people on thestairs and in the passage that led into the yard, but all had beenquiet. John Richardson's mother, Amelia, had been awake half thenight and certainly she would have been aware had someone beenarguing or screaming. But she claimed she had heard not a sound,either.
Residents were continually in and out of therooming house at 29 Hanbury, and the front and back doors werealways kept unlocked, as was the passage door that opened onto theenclosed yard at the rear of the house. It would have been easy foranyone to unlatch the gate and walk into the yard, which is whatAnnie Chapman must have done just before she was murdered. At 5:55A.M., John Davis, a porter who lived in the rooming house, headedout to market and had the distinct misfortune of discovering AnnieChapman's body in the yard between the house and the fence, veryclose to where Richardson had been sitting on the stone steps aboutan hour earlier mending his boot.
She was on her back, her left hand on her leftbreast, her right arm by her side, her legs bent. Her disarrayedclothing was pulled up to her knees, and her throat was cut sodeeply that her head was barely attached to her body. AnnieChapman's killer had slashed open her abdomen and removed herbowels and a flap of her belly. They were in a puddle of blood onthe ground above her left shoulder, an arrangement that may or maynot be symbolic.
Quite likely, the placement of the body organsand tissue was utilitarian - to get them out of the Ripper's way.It would become apparent that he was after the kidneys, uterus, andvagin*, but one can't dismiss the supposition that he also intendedto shock people. He succeeded. John Davis fled upstairs to his roomand drank a glass of brandy. Then he frantically rushed inside hisworkshop for a tarpaulin to drape over the body and ran to find thenearest police constable.
Moments later, Inspector Joseph Chandler of theCommercial Street police station arrived. When he saw what he wasdealing with, he sent for Dr. George Phillips, a divisionalsurgeon. A crowd was gathering and voices cried out, "Another womanhas been murdered!" With little more than a glance, Dr. Phillipsdetermined that the victim's throat had been cut before her"stomach" was mutilated, and that she had been dead about twohours. He noted that her face seemed swollen and that her tonguewas protruding between her front teeth. She had been strangled todeath, Dr. Phillips said - or at least rendered unconscious beforethe killer cut her throat. Rigor mortis was just beginning to setin, 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 sizeof 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, acomb, and a piece of bloody torn envelope with the Sussex Regimentcoat of arms on it and a London postmark with the date August20,1888. Nearby were two pills. Her cheap metal rings were missing,and an abrasion on her finger indicated that they had been forciblyremoved. Later, on an undated, unsigned postcard believed to havebeen sent by the Ripper to the City Police, the writer skillfullydrew a cartoon figure with a cut throat. He wrote "poor annie" andclaimed to have her rings "in my possession."
None of Annie's clothing was torn, her bootswere on, and her black coat was still buttoned and hooked. The neckof the coat inside and out was stained with blood. Dr. Phillipsalso pointed out drops of blood on her stockings and her leftsleeve. It was not mentioned in the newspaper or police reports,but Dr. Phillips must have scooped up her intestines and other bodytissues and placed them back inside her abdominal cavity beforecovering her body with sacking. Police helped place her into thesame shell that had cradled Mary Ann Nichols's body until the daybefore, when she had finally been taken away to be buried. Policetransported Annie Chapman's body by hand ambulance to theWhitechapel mortuary.
It was daylight now. Hundreds of excited peoplewere hurrying to the enclosed yard at 29 Hanbury. Neighbors oneither side of the rooming house began charging admission to stepinside for a better view of the bloodstained area where Annie hadbeen slain.
HAVE YOU SEEN THE "DEVIL"
If not Pay one Penny & Walk inside
wrote Jack the Ripper on October 10.
On the same postcard, the Ripper added, "I amwaiting every evening for the coppers at Hampstead heath," asprawling parkland famous for its healing springs, its bathingponds, and its longtime appeal to writers, poets, and painters,including Dickens, Shelley, Pope, Keats, and Constable. On bankholidays, as many as 100,000 people had been known to visit therolling farmlands and dense copses. Walter Sickert's home in SouthHampstead was no more than a twenty-minute walk away from HampsteadHeath.
Alleged Ripper letters not only drop hints -such as the "Have You Seen The 'Devil'" postcard, which could be anallusion to East End residents charging money for peeks at theRipper's crime scenes - but also reveal an emerging geographicalprofile. Many of the locations mentioned - some of them repeatedly- are places and areas that were well known to Walter Sickert: theBedford Music Hall in Camden Town, which he painted many times; hishome at 54 Broadhurst Gardens; and theatrical, artistic, andcommercial parts of London that Sickert would have frequented.
Postmarks and mentions of locations in closeproximity to the Bedford Music Hall include Hampstead Road, King'sCross, Tottenham Court. Somers Town, Albany Street, St. PancrasChurch.
Those that are in close proximity to 54Broadhurst Gardens include Kilburn, Palmerston Road (mere blocksfrom his house), Princess Road, Kentish Town, Alma Street, FinchleyRoad (which runs off Broadhurst Gardens).
Postmarks and locations in close proximity totheaters, music halls, art galleries, and places of possiblebusiness or personal interest to Sicken include Piccadilly Circus,Haymarket, Charing Cross, Battersea (near Whistler's studio),Regent Street North, Mayfair, Paddington (where Paddington Stationis located), York Street (near Paddington), Islington (where St.Mark's Hospital is located), Worcester (a favorite place forpainters), Greenwich, Gipsy Hill (near the Crystal Palace), PortmanSquare (not far from the Fine Art Society, and also the location ofthe Heinz Gallery collection of architectural drawings), ConduitStreet (close to the Fine Art Society, and during the Victorian erathe site of the 19th Century Art Society and the Royal Institute ofBritish Architects).
Sickert's sketches are remarkably detailed, hispencil recording what his eyes were seeing so that he could laterpaint the picture. His mathematical formula of "squaring up"paintings, or using a geometrical formula for enlarging hisdrawings without losing dimension and perspective, reveals anorganized and scientific mind. Sickert painted many intricatebuildings during his career, especially unusually detailedpaintings of churches in Dieppe and Venice. One might suppose hewould have been interested in architecture and perhaps visited theHeinz Gallery, which had the largest collection of architecturaldrawings in the world.
Sickert's first career was acting, which he isbelieved to have begun in 1879. In one of the earliest existingSickert letters, one he wrote in 1880 to historian and biographerT. E. Pemberton, he described playing an "old man" in Henry V whileon tour in Birmingham. "It is the part I like best of all," hewrote. Despite recycled stories that Sickert gave up acting becausehis true ambition was to be a painter, letters collected by DenysSutton reveal a different story. "Walter was anxious to take up astage career," one letter said. But, wrote another Sickertacquaintance, "He was not very successful so he took uppainting."
In his early twenties, Sickert was still anactor and touring with Henry Irving's company. He was acquaintedwith the famous architect Edward W. Godwin, a theater enthusiast,costume designer, and good friend of Whistler's. Godwin lived withEllen Terry during Sickert's early acting days and had builtWhistler'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 geographicaldetails such as these were connected in Sickert's psyche whenRipper letters were mailed or purportedly written from the Londonlocations cited, I can speculate that these areas of the metropolisat least would have been familiar to him. They were not likelyplaces for "homicidal lunatics" or East End "low life paupers" tohave spent much time.
While it is true that many of the Ripperletters were mailed in the East End, it is also true that many ofthem were not. But Sickert spent a fair amount of time in the EastEnd and probably knew that run-down pan of London better than thepolice did. The orders of the day did not allow Metropolitan Policeconstables to enter pubs or mingle with the neighbors. Beat policewere supposed to stay on their beats, and to enter lodging housesor pubs without cause or simply to stray from one's measured walksaround assigned blocks was to invite reprimand or suspension.Sickert, however, could mingle as he pleased. No place wasoff-limits to him.
The police seemed to suffer from East Endmyopia. No matter how much the Ripper tried to inveigle them intoinvestigating other locales or likely haunts, he was mostlyignored. There appears to be no record that the police thoroughlyinvestigated the postmarks or locations of Ripper letters notmailed from the East End or thought twice about other letters thatwere allegedly written or mailed from other cities in GreatBritain. Not all envelopes have survived, and without a postmarkone has only the location that the Ripper wrote on his letter. Thatmay or may not have been where he really was at the time.
According to the postmarks, the allegedlocations of the Ripper at various times, or where he claimed to begoing, 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), andPhiladelphia (U.S.A.).
A number of these locations seem extremelyunlikely, especially Portugal and the United States. As far asanyone seems to know, Walter Sickert never visited either country.Other letters and their alleged dates make it almost impossible tobelieve that, for example, he could have mailed or written lettersin 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, whenevidence is cold and witnesses are dead - is whether letters reallywere written on a given date and where they were written from. Onlypostmarks and eyewitnesses could swear to that.
Of course not all the Ripper letters werewritten by Sickert, but he could disguise his handwriting in waysan average person could not, and no records have yet turned up toprove he wasn't in a given city on a given day. The month ofOctober 1888 was a busy letter-writing period for the Ripper. Someeighty letters written that month still exist, and it would makesense for the killer to be on the run after multiple, closelyspaced murders. As the Ripper himself wrote in several letters,Whitechapel was getting too hot for him and he was seeking peaceand quiet in distant ports.
We know from modern cases that serial killerstend to move around. Some virtually live in their cars. Octoberwould have been a convenient time for Sickert to disappear fromLondon. His wife, Ellen, was part of a Liberal delegation that washolding meetings in Ireland to support Home Rule and Free Trade.She was away from England almost the entire month of October. Ifshe and Sickert had any contact at all during this separation, noletters or telegrams to each other seem to have survived.
Sickert loved to write letters and sometimesapologized to friends for writing them so often. He habituallywrote letters to newspapers. He had such a knack for stirring upnews that letters by him and articles about him amounted to as manyas six hundred in one year. It is daunting to go through Sickert'sarchives at Islington Public Libraries and look at his severalreams of clippings. He began gathering them himself around the turnof the century, and then used clipping services to keep up with hisseemingly endless publicity. Yet throughout his life, he was knownas a man who refused to give interviews. He managed to create themyth that he was "shy" and hated publicity.
Sickert's obsession with writing letters to theeditor became an embarrassment to some newspapers. Editors squirmedwhen they got yet another Sickert letter about art or the aestheticquality of telephone poles or why all Englishmen should wear kiltsor the disadvantages of chlorinated water. Most editors did notwish to insult the well-known artist by ignoring him or relegatinghis prose to a small, inconspicuous space.
From January 25 through May 25, 1924, Sickertdelivered a series of lectures and articles that were published inthe Southport Visiter, in South-port, north of Liverpool, on thecoast. Although these articles came to more than 130,000 words,that wasn't enough. On May 6th, 12th, 15th, 19th, and 22nd, Sickertwrote or telegraphed W. H. Stephenson of the Visiter: "I wonder ifthe Visiter could bear one more article at once.... If so youshould have it at once" and "delighted writing" and "please askprinter to express early six copies" and "Do let me send you justone more article" and "if you hear of any provincial paper thatwould care to carry series over the summer let me know."
Throughout Sickert's life, his literaryprolificacy was astonishing. His clippings book at Islington PublicLibraries contains more than 12,000 news items about him andletters he wrote to editors in Great Britain alone, most of themwritten between 1911 and the late 1930s. He published some fourhundred lectures and articles, and I believe these known writingsdo not represent the entirety of his literary output. Sickert was acompulsive writer who enjoyed persuading, manipulating, andimpressing people with his words. He craved an audience. He cravedseeing his name in print. It would have been in character for himto have written a startling number of the Ripper letters, includingsome of those mailed from all over the map.
He may have written far more of them than somedocument examiners would be inclined to believe, because one makesa mistake to judge Walter Sickert by the usualhandwriting-comparison standards. He was a multitalented artistwith an amazing memory. He was multilingual. He was a voraciousreader and skilled mimic. There were a number of books ongraphology available at the time, and the handwriting in manyRipper letters is similar to examples of writing styles thatVictorian graphologists associated with various occupations andpersonalities. Sickert could have opened any number of graphologybooks and imitated the styles he found there. For graphologists tostudy Ripper letters must have struck Sickert as most amusing.
Using chemicals and highly sensitiveinstruments to analyze inks, paints, and paper is scientific.Handwriting comparison is not. It is an investigative tool that canbe powerful and convincing, especially in detecting forgeries. Butif a suspect is adept in disguising his handwriting, comparison canbe frustrating or impossible. The police investigating the Rippercases were so eager to pinpoint similarity in handwriting that theydid not explore the possibility that the killer might use manydifferent styles. Other leads, such as cities the Ripper mentionedand postmarks on envelopes, were not pursued. Had they been, it mayhave been discovered that most of the distant cities shared pointsin common, including theaters and racecourses. Many of theselocations would appear on a map of Sickert's travels.
Let's start with Manchester. There were atleast three reasons for Sicken: to visit that city and be quitefamiliar with it. His wife's family, the Cobdens, owned property inManchester. Sickert's sister, Helena, lived in Manchester. Sickerthad friends as well as professional connections in Manchester.Several Ripper letters mention Manchester. One of them that theRipper claims to have written from Manchester on November 22, 1888,has a partial A Pirie & Sons watermark. Another letter theRipper claims to have written from East London, also on November22nd, has a partial A Pirie & Sons watermark. The stationeryWalter and Ellen Sickert began using after they were married onJune 10, 1885, has the A Pirie & Sons watermark.
Dr. Paul Ferrara, director of the VirginiaInstitute of Forensic Science and Medicine, made the firstwatermark connection when we were examining original Ripper andSickert letters in London and Glasgow. Transparencies of theletters and their watermarks were submitted to the Institute, andwhen the Ripper partial watermark and a Sickert complete watermarkwere scanned into a forensic image-enhancement computer andsuperimposed on the video screen, they matched identically.
In September 2001, the Virginia Institute ofForensic Science and Medicine received permission from the Britishgovernment to conduct nondestructive forensic testing on theoriginal Ripper letters at the Public Record Office in Kew. Dr.Ferrara, DNA analyst Lisa Schiermeier, forensic image enhancementexpert Chuck Pruitt, and others traveled to London, and we examinedthe Ripper letters. Some of what seemed the most promisingenvelopes - ones that still had flaps and stamps intact - weremoistened and painstakingly peeled back for swabbing. Photographswere taken and handwriting was compared.
From London, we went on to other archivalcollections and examined paper, and took DNA samples from theletters, envelopes, and stamps of Walter Richard Sickert; his firstwife, Ellen Cobden Sickert; James Mc-Neill Whistler; and so-calledRipper suspect Montague John Druitt. Some of these tests wereexclusionary. Obviously, neither Ellen Sickert nor Whistler hasever been a suspect, but Walter Sickert worked in Whistler'sstudio. He mailed letters for him and was in close physical contactwith the Master and his belongings. It is possible that Whistler'sDNA - and certainly Ellen's DNA - could have contaminated Sickertevidence.
We swabbed Whistler envelopes and stamps at theUniversity of Glasgow, where his massive archival collection iskept. We swabbed envelopes and stamps at the West Sussex RecordOffice, 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 wasthe letter he wrote in 1876 while he was a student at OxfordUniversity. The DNA results from the envelope's flap and stamp arecontaminated, but will be retested.
Other documents yet to be tested are twoenvelopes I believe were addressed and sealed by the Duke ofClarence, and an envelope of Queen Victoria's physician, Dr.William Gull. I do not believe that Druitt or any of theseso-called suspects had a thing to do with murder and mutilation,and I would like to clear their names if I can. DNA testing willcontinue until all practical means are exhausted. The importanceextends 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 fordecades. But there is no statute of limitations on homicide, andthe Ripper's victims deserve justice. And whatever we can learnthat furthers our knowledge of forensic science and medicine isworth the trouble and expense. I was not optimistic we would set aDNA match, but I was surprised and quite crestfallen when the firstround of testing turned up not a single sign of human life in allfifty-five samples. I decided to try again, this time swabbingdifferent areas of the same envelopes and stamps.
Still, we came up with nothing. There are anumber of possible explanations for these disappointing results:The one-billionth of a gram of cells in human saliva that wouldhave been deposited on a stamp or envelope flap did not survive theyears; heat used to laminate the Ripper letters for conservationdestroyed the nuclear DNA; suboptimal storage for a hundred yearscaused degradation and destruction of the DNA; or perhaps theadhesives were the culprit.
The "glutinous wash," as adhesives were calledin the mid-nineteenth century, was derived from plant extracts,such as the bark of the acacia tree. During the Victorian era, thepostal system underwent an industrial revolution, with the firstPenny Black stamp mailed on May 2, 1840, from Bath. The envelopefolding machine was patented in 1845. Many people did not want tolick envelopes or stamps for "sanitary" reasons, and used a sponge.To add to the scientific odds against us when we swabbed envelopesand stamps, we could not possibly know who had licked theirenvelopes and who had not. The last genetic option left for us wasto try a third round of testing, this time for mitochondrialDNA.
When one reads about DNA tests used in moderncriminal or paternity cases, what is usually being referred to isthe nuclear DNA that is located in virtually every cell in the bodyand passed down from both parents. Mitochondrial DNA is foundoutside the nucleus of the cell. Think of an egg: The nuclear DNAis found in the yolk, so to speak, and the mitochondrial DNA wouldbe found in the egg white. Mitochondrial DNA is passed down onlyfrom the mother. While the mitochondrial region of a cell containsthousands more "copies" of DNA than the nucleus does, mitochondrialDNA testing is very complex and expensive, and the results can belimited because the DNA is passed down from only one parent.
The extracts of all fifty-five DNA samples weresent to The Bode Technology Group, an internationally respectedprivate DNA laboratory, best known for assisting the Armed ForcesInstitute of Pathology (AFIP) in using mitochondrial DNA todetermine the identity of America's Vietnam War Unknown Soldier.More recently, Bode has been using mitochondrial DNA to identifyvictims of the 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. Theexamination of our samples took months, and while I was back inLondon's Public Record Office with art and paper experts. Dr. PaulFerrara telephoned to tell me that Bode had finished the testingand had gotten mitochondrial DNA on almost every sample. Most ofthe genetic profiles were a mishmash of individuals. But six of thesamples had the same mitochondrial DNA sequence profile componentfound on the Openshaw envelope.
"Markers" are locations. Markers in theRipper/Sickert tests are where the base positions of DNA arelocated on the D loop sequence of the mitochondrial DNA - which isabout as easy for most people to envision as it is for me tounderstand the mathematical equation for relativity, E = me2. Animposing challenge for DNA experts is to help the hoi polloiunderstand what DNA is and what test results mean. Posters showingmatching fingerprints create a flurry of nods and "oh yes, I getit" looks from jurors. But the analysis of human blood - beyond itsscreaming fresh red or its old dark dried presence on clothing andweapons and at crime scenes - has always induced catatonia andpinpoint pupils in panicky eyes.
ABO blood-group typing was antenna-tanglingenough. DNA blows mental transformers, and the hackneyedexplanation that a DNA "fingerprint" or profile looks like a barcode 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 thatcan be scanned in a laboratory and come up as me. So I often useanalogies, because I confess that without them I don't alwayscomprehend the abstractions of science and medicine, even though Iwrite about them for a living.
The swabbed samples in the Jack the Ripper casecan be imagined as fifty-five sheets of white paper that arecluttered with thousands of different combinations of numbers. Mostof the sheets of paper have smears, and illegible numbers, andmixtures of numbers that indicate they came from many differentpeople. However, two sheets of paper each have a sequence ofnumbers that came from a single donor - or only one person: Onesheet is James McNeill Whistler, and the other is a partial postagestamp on the back of a letter the Ripper wrote to Dr. ThomasOpenshaw, the curator of the London Hospital Museum.
The Whistler sequence has nothing in commonwith any Ripper letter or any other non-Whistler item tested. Butthe Openshaw sequence is found in five other samples. These fivesamples are not single-donor, as far as we can tell at this point,and show a mixture of other base positions or "locations" in themitochondrial region. This could mean that the sample wascontaminated by the DNA of other people. A drawback in our testingis that the ever-elusive Walter Sickert has yet to offer us his DNAprofile. 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 RichardSickert in a laboratory. But we may have found pieces of him.
The clean single-donor sequence recovered fromthe partial stamp on the back of the Openshaw envelope is our bestbasis of comparison. Its sequence is the three markers, 16294 - 73- 263, or the locations of DNA base positions in the mitochondrialregions - rather much as A7, G10, D12, and so on indicate places ona map. The five samples that have this same 16294 - 73 - 263single-donor Openshaw sequence are the front stamp from theOpenshaw envelope; an Ellen Sickert envelope; an envelope from aWalter Sickert letter; a stamp from a Walter Sickert envelope; anda Ripper envelope with a stain that tests positive for blood, butwhich may be too degraded to determine if it is human.
The results from the Ellen Sickert letter couldbe explained if she moistened the envelope and stamp with the samesponge her husband, Walter, used - assuming either one of them useda sponge. Or Sickert might have touched or licked the adhesive onthe flap or stamp, perhaps because he mailed the letter forher.
Other samples contained one or two markersfound in the single-donor Openshaw sequence. For example, a set ofwhite coveralls that Sickert wore while painting had a mixture ofmarkers that included 73 and 263. What is startling about thisresult is that there was a result. The coveralls are about eightyyears old and had been washed, ironed, and starched before theywere donated to the Tate Archive. I saw no point in swabbing aroundthe collar, the cuffs, the crotch, and the armpits, but we did itanyway.
The Openshaw letter that yielded themitochondrial DNA results was written on A Pirie &; Sonsstationery. The letter is postmarked October 29, 1888, mailed inLondon, 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 co*cked up
One reason I believe this letter is genuine isthat it is so blatantly contrived. The bad handwriting looksdisguised and is jarringly inconsistent with the handwriting ofsomeone with access to pen and ink and fine-quality watermarkedstationery. The address on the envelope is literate, the spellingperfect, which is vastly different from the overblown illiteracy ofthe letter with its inconsistent misspellings, such as "kidny" and-Kidney," "wil" and "will," "of" and "o." Steward P. Evans andKeith Skinner point out in their extremely helpful book jack theRipper: Letters from Hell that the postscript in the Dr. Openshawletter 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 co*ck'd up!
An allusion to a Cornish folktale makes nosense if we are supposed to believe this Openshaw letter waswritten by an uneducated homicidal maniac who ripped a kidney froma victim and sent it off in the mail.
Walter Sickert visited Cornwall as a boy. Hepainted in Cornwall when he was Whistler's apprentice. Sickert knewCornwall and the Cornish people. He was well read and was familiarwith folk tunes and music-hall songs. It is unlikely that a poor,uneducated person from London spent time in Cornwall or sat aroundin the slums reading Cornish folktales.
One could argue - and should - that the absenceof a reliable known reference source, in this instance WalterSickert's DNA, suggests we are assuming without conclusivescientific evidence that the single-donor sequence from theOpenshaw letter was deposited by Walter Sickert, alias Jack theRipper. We can't assume any such thing.
Although statistically the single-donorsequence excludes 99% of the population, in Dr. Ferrara's words,"The matching sequences might be a coincidence. They might not be acoincidence." At best, we have a "cautious indicator" that theSickert and Ripper mitochondrial DNA sequences may have come fromthe same person.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
A PAINTED LETTER
Walter Sickert was a forensic scientist's worstadversary. He was like a twister tearing through a lab.
He created investigative chaos with hisbaffling varieties of papers, pens, paints, postmarks, anddisguised handwritings, and by his constant moving about withoutleaving a trail through diaries, calendars, or dates on most of hisletters and work. His knockout punch to forensic science was todecide to be cremated. When a body is burned at 1,800 degreesFahrenheit, that's the end of DNA. If Sickert left behind samplesblood or hair that we could be certain were his, we have yet tofind them.
Not even a pedigree of Sickert's DNA can beattempted because that would require a sample from his children orsiblings. Sickert had no children. His sister had no children. Asfar as anyone can tell, none of his four brothers had children. Toexhume Sickert's mother, father, or siblings on the remote chancethat their mitochondrial DNA might have something in common withwhat Bode laboratories miraculously managed to conjure up from thegenetic fragments of past lives we gave them would be ridiculousand unthinkable.
The Ripper case is not one to be conclusivelysolved by DNA or fingerprints, and in a way, this is good. Societyhas come to expect the wizardry of forensic science to solve allcrimes, but without the human element of deductive skills,teamwork, very hard investigation, and smart prosecution, evidencemeans nothing. Had we gotten an irrefutable DNA match of a Sickertand a Ripper letter, any sharp defense attorney would say thatSickert's writing a letter doesn't prove he murdered anyone.Perhaps he simply composed a number of Ripper letters because hehad a wacky, warped sense of humor. A good prosecutor would counterthat if Sickert wrote even one of those Ripper letters, he was introuble, because the letters are confessional. In them, the Ripperclaims to have murdered and mutilated people he calls by name, andhe threatens to kill government officials and police.
The watermarks add yet another layer. To date,three Ripper letters and eight Sickert letters have the A Pirie& Sons watermark. It seems that from 1885 to 1887, theSickerts' 54 Broadhurst Gardens stationery was A Pirie, and wasfolded at the middle like a greeting card. The front of the foldwas bordered in pale blue, the embossed address also pale blue. TheA Pirie & Sons watermark is centered on the crease. In thethree Ripper letters, the stationery was torn along the crease andonly half of the A Pirie & Sons watermark remains.
Unless Jack the Ripper was incredibly stupid,he would have removed the side of folded stationery that wasembossed with the address. This is not to say that criminalshaven't been known to make numbskull oversights, such as leaving adriver's license at a crime scene or writing a "stick-up" note on adeposit slip that includes the bank robber's address and SocialSecurity number. But Jack the Ripper did not make fatal errors, orhe would have been caught at the time of his crimes.
Jack the Ripper was also arrogant and did notbelieve he would ever be caught. Sickert must not have been worriedabout the partial watermarks on the Ripper letters he wrote.Perhaps this was another "catch me if you can" taunt. The A Pirie& Sons watermarks we found on Sickert stationery include awatermarked date of manufacturing, and the three partial dates onthe Ripper letters with the A Pirie & Sons watermark are 18 and18 and 87. The 87, obviously, is 1887.
Repeated trips to archives turned up othermatching watermarks that must not have worried Sickert, either.Letters Sickert wrote to Jacques-Emile Blanche in 1887 are onstationery with the address embossed in black, and a JoynsonSuperfine watermark. A search through the Blanche-Sickertcorrespondence in the Institut Bibliotheque de L'Institut de Francein Paris shows that during the late summer and fall of 1888 and inthe spring of 1889, Sickert was still using Joynson Superfine paperwith the return address of 54 Broadhurst Gardens either embossedwith no color or in bright red with a red border.
Letters Ellen wrote to Blanche as late as 1893with a 10 Glebe Place, Chelsea, return address are on stationerythat also has the Joynson Superfine watermark. In the Whistlercollection at Glasgow, there are seven Sickert letters with theJoynson Superfine watermarks, and it would appear that Sickert wasusing this stationery about the same time he was using A Pirie& Sons.
In the Sir William Rothenstein collection atHarvard University's Department of Manuscripts, I found two otherSickert letters with the Joynson Superfine watermark. Rothensteinwas an artist and a writer, and a trusted enough friend ofSickert's that the latter felt comfortable asking him to lie underoath. During the late 1890s, Sickert had become friendly with aMadame Villain, a fishwife in Dieppe he referred to as "Titine."Although there was no evidence he committed adultery with her, shedid supply him room and board and a space in her small home that heused as a studio. Whatever the nature of their relationship, itwould have been used against him in court had he contested Ellen'sdivorce suit, which he did not. "If subpoenaed," he wrote toRothenstein in 1899, during the divorce, "you might truly remain asyou are in ignorance of Titine's very name. You might say I alwayscall her 'Madame.' "
Both Joynson Superfine watermarked letters thatSickert wrote to Rothenstein are undated. One of them - oddly,written in German and Italian - is on stationery that must havebelonged to Sickert's mother because the return address is hers. Asecond Joynson Superfine watermarked letter to Rothenstein, whichincludes mathematical scribbles and a cartoonish face and the word"ugh," has a return address of 10 Glebe Place, Chelsea, which isthe same return address on Ellen Sickert's 1893 letter to Blanche.There is a Ripper letter at the PRO with a part Joynson mark. Itwould appear that Sickert used Joynson Superfine watermarked paperfrom the late 1880s through the late 1890s. I have found no letterswith this watermark that date from after his divorce in 1899, whenhe moved to continental Europe.
Four letters catalogued in "The WhitechapelMurders" file at the Corporation of London Records Office werewritten on Joynson Superfine paper: October 8, 1888; October 16,1888; January 29, 1889; and February 16,1889. Two of these lettersare signed "Nemo." Three other letters with no watermarks are alsosigned "Nemo." On October 4, 1888 (four days before the first"Nemo" letter was written to the City of London Police), The Timespublished a letter to the editor that was signed "Nemo." In it thewriter described "mutilations, cutting off the nose and ears,ripping up the body, and cutting out certain organs - the heart,& c. -..." The writer continued:
My theory would be that some man of his classhas been hocussed and then robbed of his savings (often large), or,as he considers, been in some way greatly injured by a prostitute -perhaps one of the earlier victims; and then has been led by furyand revenge to take the lives of as many of the same class as hecan...
Unless caught red-handed, such a man inordinary life would be harmless enough, polite, not to sayobsequious, in his manners, and about the last a British policemanwould suspect.
But when the villain is primed with his opium,or bang, or gin, and inspired with his lust for slaughter andblood, he would destroy his defenceless victim with the ferocityand cunning of the tiger; and past impunity and success would onlyhave rendered him the more daring and restless.
Your obedient servant October 2 NEMO
I have already mentioned that Sickert's stagename when he was an actor was "Mr. Nemo."
Other unusual signatories in the some fiftyletters at the Corporation of London Records Office aresuspiciously reminiscent of those of some PRO Ripper letters:"Justitia," "Revelation," "Ripper," "Nemesis," "A Thinker,""May-bee," "A friend," "an accessary," and "one that has had hiseyes opened." Quite a number of these fifty letters were written inOctober 1888 and also include both art and comments similar tothose found in the Jack the Ripper letters at the PRO. For example,in a PRO letter to the Editor of the Daily News Office, October 1,1888, the Ripper says, "I've got someone to write this for me." Inan undated letter at the Corporation of London Records Office, theanonymous sender says, "I've got someone to write this for me."
Other "Whitechapel Murder" letters in theCorporation of London Records Office include a postcard datedOctober 3rd, with the anonymous sender using many of the samethreats, words, and phrases found in Ripper letters at the PRO:"send you my victims ears"; "It amuses me that you think I am mad";"Just a card to let you know"; "I will write to you again soon";and "My bloody ink is running out." On October 6,1888, "Anonymous"offers a suggestion that the killer might be keeping "the victimssilent by pressure on certain nerves in the neck," and adds that anadditional benefit to subduing the victim is that the killer can"preserve his own person and clothing comparatively unstained." InOctober 1888, an anonymous letter written in red ink uses the terms"spanky ass" and "Saucy Jacky" and promises to "send next ears Iclip to Charly Warren."
An undated letter includes a bit of newspaperattached by a rusty paperclip. When my co-worker, Irene Shulgin,removed the clipping and turned it over, she found the phrase"author of works of art." In a letter dated October 7, 1888, thewriter signs his name "hom*o Sum," Latin for "I am a man." OnOctober 9, 1888, an anonymous writer takes offense, once again, atbeing thought of as a lunatic: "Don't you rest content on thelunacy fad." Other anonymous letters offer tips to the police,encouraging officers to disguise themselves as women and wear"chain armour" or "light steel collars" under their clothes. Ananonymous letter of October 20, 1888, claims the "motive for thecrimes is hatred and spite against the authorities of Scotland Yardone of whom is marked as a victim."
In a July 1889 letter a writer signs his letter"Qui Vir," Latin for "Which Man." In a letter Sickert wrote toWhistler in 1897, he rather sarcastically refers to his former"impish master" as "Ecce hom*o," or "behold the man." In the "QuiVir" letter, which is at the Corporation of London Records Office,the writer suggests that the killer is "able to choose a time to dothe murder 8c get back to his hiding place." On September 11,1889,an anonymous writer teases police by saying he always travels in"third class Cerage" and "I ware black wiskers all over my face."Approximately twenty percent of these Corporation of London RecordsOffice letters have watermarks, including, as I mentioned, theJoynson Superfine. I also found a Monckton's Superfine watermark ona letter signed "one of the public." A letter Sickert wrote toWhistler in the mid to late 1880s also has a Monckton's Superfinewatermark.
Certainly, I wouldn't dare claim that theseletters were written by Sickert or even Jack the Ripper, but theanonymous communications fit the profile of a violent psychopathwho taunts police and tries to insert him-or herself into theinvestigation. Watermarks and language aside, the problem ofhandwriting remains. The amazing variety found in the Ripperletters has been a source of hot debate. Many people, includingforensic documents examiners, have argued that it is not possiblefor one person to write in so many hands.
This is not necessarily true, says paperhistorian and forensic paper analyst Peter Bower, one of the mostrespected paper experts in the world, and perhaps best known forhis work on the papers used by artists as various as Michelangelo,J.M.W. Turner, Constable, and others - as well as for determiningthat the notorious Jack the Ripper diary was a fraud. Bower hasassisted in our examination of the Ripper/Sickert letters. He sayshe has seen "good calligraphers" who can write in an incrediblenumber of different hands, but "it takes extraordinary skill." Hiswife, Sally Bower, is a much respected letterer, or person whodesigns and draws lettering. Although she is not a handwritingexpert, she has a different perspective because she is an expert inhow a person forms the letters strung together in words. When shelooked through Ripper letters with her husband, she immediatelyconnected a number of letters through quirks and how the hand madethe writing. I have no doubt that Sickert had an amazing ability towrite in many different hands, but his disguised writings arebecoming less concealing as the investigation progresses.
Peter Bower's vast knowledge of paper obviouslyincludes watermarks; his opinion of those we have found is that APirie 8t Sons and Joynson Superfine "would not have been thecommonest paper." But the watermarks were not necessarily uncommonin the late nineteenth century. Monckton's Superfine was a rarerwatermark and Monckton's also manufactured artists' drawing andwatercolor paper.
Matching watermarks do not necessarily mean thepaper was from the same batch, and almost none of the Sickertletters or Sickert/Ripper letters are from the same batch, saysPeter Bower, who spent days going through Sickert and Ripperarchives and measuring the paper using a 3 Ox lens to study themeasurements, fiber content, and distances between chain lines.When paper is manufactured by machine, as A Pirie and Joynson andMonckton's were, the paper comes from one batch, meaning it is fromthe same roll. Another batch with the same watermark and a fibercontent that is relatively the same may have slight differences inmeasurements of the sheets of paper due to the speed of drying orthe way the machine cut it.
These characteristics - measurements andspacing between the wire the paper was formed on - are the paper'sY profile, and matching Y profiles mean the paper came from thesame batch. Bower says it is not unusual for an individual to havestationery that comes from many batches, and that even when thepaper is ordered from the stationer, there could be differentbatches mixed in, although the watermarks and embossing orengraving are the same. The discrepancies in the Sickert and Ripperletters pertain to their measurements. For example, the "DearOpenshaw" letter with the A Pirie watermark is from the same batchas the November 22nd A Pirie Ripper letter mailed from London, butnot from the same batch as the other November 22nd A Pirie lettersupposedly mailed from Manchester. Clearly, the Ripper had amixture of A Pirie batches when he wrote these November 22ndletters, unless one wishes to make the case that there were twodifferent individuals who just happened to write Ripper letters onA Pirie 8c Sons paper of the same type and color on November22nd.
Differences in measurements can, in someinstances, be attributed to conservation. When paper is heated byapplying a protective membrane, for example, the paper shrinksslightly. More probable is that the differences in measurements canbe explained by reorders from the stationer. During the late 1880s,personalized stationery was usually ordered in a quire, ortwenty-four sheets, including unprinted second sheets. A reorder ofthe same personalized stationery on the same type of paper with thesame watermark could quite easily come from a different batch. Orperhaps the stationer used a different standard size, such as Postquarto, which was approximately seven by nine inches, or CommercialNote, which was eight by five inches, or Octavo Note, which wasnominally seven by four-and-a-half inches.
An example of a discrepancy in paper size is aRipper letter with a Joynson Superfine watermark that was sent tothe City of London Police. The torn half of the folded stationerymeasures 6% inches by 9%o inches. Another Ripper letter on the sametype of paper with the same watermark was sent to the MetropolitanPolice and that stationery is Commercial Note, or eight by fiveinches. A Sickert letter written on Monckton's Superfine that weexamined in Glasgow measures seven and one-eighth inches by nineinches, while a Ripper letter sent to the City of London Police onthe same type of paper with a matching Monckton's Superfinewatermark measures seven and one-eighth inches by eight andnine-tenths. Most likely, this suggests the Monckton's Superfinestationery is from different batches, but this by no meansindicates it was from different Ripper letter-writers.
I point out these different paper batches onlybecause a defense attorney would. In fact, paper of the same typeand watermark but from different batches doesn't necessarily mean asetback in a case and, as Bower pointed out, having studied otherartists' paper, he "would expect to find variations like this."Bower also discovered paper in Ripper letters that did not havevariations, and because they also had no watermarks, these letterswere not really noticed by anyone else. Two Ripper letters writtento the Metropolitan Police and one Ripper letter written to theCity of London Police are on matching very cheap pale blue paper -and for three letters to come from the same batch of paper stronglyindicates that the same person wrote them, just as matchingwatermarks, especially three different types of matchingwatermarks, are hard to dismiss as coincidence.
Our discovery of "matching" watermarks has beena source of great excitement for all of us working the Ripper case,but I must admit that a not-so-good watermark moment came early inthe investigation. The head of conservation at the Public RecordOffice, Mario Aleppo, contacted me and said his staff had foundnumerous other A Pirie & Sons watermarks and I might want tohave a look. I immediately returned to London and discovered to myhorror that the A Pirie & Sons watermarks were not on Ripperletters but on the stationery the Metropolitan Police were using atthe time. I was shocked. For a moment, I was completely unnervedand thought my life might disintegrate right before my eyes. Therehas always been a theory that Jack the Ripper was a cop.
The A Pirie & Sons watermark on theMetropolitan Police stationery is the only othernon-Sickert/Ripper-related A Pirie watermark I have found during myresearch, but I am happy to report that the watermark on theMetropolitan Police stationery is quite different from the one onthe Ripper and the Sickert letters. The police stationery watermarkhas no date and includes the words LD and Register. The paper is ofa different quality and color. It is eight by eleven inches and notgreeting-card size. Besides the difference in the wording anddesign of the watermarks, the police paper is wove and theSickert/Ripper paper is laid.
The firm Alexander Pirie 8c Sons, Ltd., got itsstart in the paper-making business in 1770 in Aberdeen, and itsrapid growth and respected reputation resulted in the acquisitionof cotton mills, plants, and factories in London, Glasgow, Dublin,Paris, New York, St. Petersburg, and Bucharest. A Pirie didn'tbecome a separate company until 1864, and from this information onemight presume that there was no A Pirie &c Sons watermark priorto that date. However, existing records in Aberdeen do not indicateexactly when A Pirie began using its name on watermarks. A Piriebecame a limited-liability company in 1882, merged with anotherfirm in 1922, and went out of business at some point in the1950s.
The records of A Pirie 8c Sons are preserved ina strong room at the Stoneywood Mills in Aberdeen. Keenly aware ofmy limitations as a paper-manufacturing or stationery expert, Iasked antiquarian books and documents researcher Joe Jameson if hewould go to Aberdeen and look through thousands of A Pirie records.For two cold, rainy days, he dug through boxes and was able toascertain migraine-producing details about lime waste, rag boiling,paper machines, how many tons of soda were ordered, sedimentremoved from river water, shareholders, sketches of trademarks,types of paper manufactured - just about anything one might want toknow about how paper was made from the late 1700s until the1950s.
Over the better part of a century, tons ofAlexander Pirie & Sons paper were shipped to London and otherparts of the world. This prestigious company was proprietary anddid not hesitate to sue if another manufacturer tried to delude thepublic into thinking its paper was made by A Pirie & Sons. Theobvious question in this case is exactly what I asked Peter Bower:How common was the A Pirie watermark found on the three Ripper andeight Sickert letters?
After a thorough search of the company records,I can only say with certainty that while the paper may not beuncommon, as Bower said, it might be somewhat uncommon as personalstationery. It seems that A Pirie paper was used primarily for theprinting of bankers' and other business ledgers, businessstationery, and nonwatermarked printing and lithographic printingpaper. I have no idea which stationery shop the Sickerts used whenWalter or Ellen ordered the blue-bordered stationery printed on APirie & Sons paper. The shop may not have been in London, andits records may no longer exist. I also can't say how unique theirparticular watermark was, but it isn't to be found in an A Pirie& Sons list of fifty-six trademark designs that were in theAberdeen records.
But there is a very good chance I didn't seetheir watermark in the examples I found because the Aberdeenrecords might be incomplete. I do know that in the only A Pirie& Sons catalogue I managed to get hold of, the list of theirproducts for 1900 shows twenty-three designs, and the watermark ofinterest is not among them.
Walter Sickert knew about watermarks. He knewabout paper. It is hard to imagine him writing Ripper letters andnot being aware of the watermark. It is hard to imagine thatSickert wouldn't have been aware of the type of paper he was using,including good paper such as Monckton's Superfine and art paper. Hemay have used his A Pirie & Sons and Joynson Superfine personalstationery because he assumed that even if the police did noticethe partial watermarks on the torn paper, they probably would nothave linked a Ripper letter to the charming gentleman-artist WalterSickert, who was not a suspect at the time. One does have towonder, however, what might have happened had the police publishedthe partial watermarks and printed them on posters.
Probably nothing. If Sickert's friends - orEllen - recognized a partial watermark, they weren't likely to linkWalter Sickert with Jack the Ripper. What surprises me most is thatI cannot find any evidence that the police noticed the watermarks,and they should have. More than ten percent of the 211 Ripperletters at the Public Record Office (PRO) have watermarks orpartial ones. Not all watermarked paper is expensive, but it alsoisn't associated with the street-slang-talking paupers who policeand the press believed were writing most of the Ripper letters.
Sickert was a magpie with paper. He did notwaste it. If he was out of paper, he would paste together remnantsof whatever he could find and send a note scrawled on a paperpatchwork quilt. In several letters to Whistler, Sickert jotted,"No paper in the house," especially if he was approaching theMaster about needing money.
"Excuse paper cannot afford to Buy any dearBoss," the Ripper wrote on November 15, 1888.
Sickert made sketches on a variety of papers,from coarse brown toilet paper to vellum. Paying attention to typesof paper and watermarks in criminal and civil investigationscertainly was not new technology in 1888. Why no policeman ordetective observed what many of the Jack the Ripper letters werewritten on or with is baffling and inexcusable. Someone should havenoticed that the "ink" was actually paint, and "pens" were reallypaintbrushes or drawing pens with large nibs. Microscopy, infraredspectrophotometry, pyrolysis-gas chromatography, mass spectrometry,x-ray fluorescence, and neutron activation analysis were notrequired to figure out that much.
One explanation for these oversights is thatuntil now police and others dismissed the letters as hoaxes.Photocopies and photographs aren't the best means of seeing thedelicate feathering of brushes, or the beautiful purple, blue, red,burgundy, orange, sienna, and sepia colors used to write words andmake splashes and strokes on these letters from so-calledilliterates and lunatics. It takes an art expert's eye to detectthat smears thought to be blood are really etching ground, and ifDr. Ferrara had not used an Omnichrome alternate light source and avariety of different filters, we would not have been able to coaxeradicated writing out from under its cover of heavy black ink.
In one letter, the Ripper gives the policefill-in-the-blanks for his "name" and "address," but as a "Ha Ha"he blots out the "information" with dark black rectangles andcoffin shapes. Under the black ink the Omnichrome revealed ha andthe barely legible and partial signature Ripper, This sort ofdiabolical teasing is typical of someone who believes that anything"hidden" will puzzle the hell out of the police. Another bit ofRipper fun was to take an envelope and glue a strip of paper on thefront of it, implying that the envelope was recycled and theoriginal recipient's name is under the strip.
Dr. Ferrara performed long, delicate surgery tolift that strip. There was nothing under it. But the Ripper'smean-spirited, mocking teases failed to bring him the satisfactionhe craved. There is no sign, for example, that anyone cared whatwas under that strip before Dr. Ferrara removed it 114 years afterthe Ripper sent the "joke" in the mail. There is no hint that thepolice tried to figure out what was hidden under the shapes inheavy black ink.
It is easy to forget that in 1888 WalterSickert wasn't on investigators' minds and that Scotland Yard didnot have access to the likes of Peter and Sally Bower, arthistorian and Sickert expert Dr. Anna Gruetzner Robins, paperconservator Anne Kennett, and curator of the Sickert archives VadaHart. It has required intellectual sleuths such as these todiscover that many of the Ripper letters contain telltale signs ofSickert's handwriting, and that in some cases, a single letter waswritten and drawn in several colors or mediums and with at leasttwo different writing instruments, including colored pencils,lithographic crayons, and paintbrushes.
