Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper - Case Closed

by Patricia Cornwell

  At the same time this brief exchange was taking place, a Mr. and Mrs. Mahoney of George Yard Buildings passed the landing where Martha’s body was later found and heard nothing of note and saw no sign of anyone. Martha had not been murdered yet. Perhaps she was nearby in the shadows, waiting for the constable to resume his patrol so she could resume business with the soldier. Perhaps the soldier had nothing to do with Martha at all and is simply a source of confusion. Whatever the truth, it is evident that Police Constable Barrett’s attention was piqued by a soldier alone in the street at 2:00 A.M. outside George Yard Buildings, and whether he questioned this soldier or not, the soldier felt compelled to offer an explanation as to why he was there.

  The identities of that soldier and any other soldiers associated with Pearly Poll and Martha the night of August 6th and early morning of the 7th remain unknown. Pearly Poll, Barrett, and other witnesses who had noticed Martha on the street were never able to positively identify any soldiers in the guard room at the Tower of London or in Wellington Barracks. Every man who seemed even remotely familiar had a believable alibi. A search through the belongings of soldiers produced no evidence, including blood. Martha Tabran’s killer would have been bloody.

  Chief Inspector Donald Swanson of Scotland Yard’s Criminal Investigation Department (CID) acknowledged in his special report that there was no reason to think that Martha Tabran had been with anybody but the soldier she had walked off with before midnight, although it was possible, due to the “lapse of time,” that she might have been with another client. She might have been with several. The puzzle of the “private” seen with Martha at 11:45 and the “private” seen by P.C. Barrett at 2:00 A.M. nagged at Scotland Yard because he was seen so close to when and where Martha was murdered. Maybe he did it. Maybe he really was a soldier.

  Or maybe he was a killer disguised as a soldier. What a brilliant bit of trickery that would have been. There were plenty of soldiers out on bank holiday night, and cruising for prostitutes was not an uncommon activity among military men. It may seem a stretch to consider that Jack the Ripper might have donned a soldier’s uniform and pasted on a fake mustache to commit his first murder, but this would not be the last time a mysterious man in uniform would be connected with a murder in London’s East End.

  Walter Sickert was familiar with uniforms. Later, during World War I when he was painting battle scenes, he would admit to being especially “enchanted” by French ones. “I have got my Belgian uniforms today,” he wrote in 1914. “The artillery man’s forage cap with a little gold tassel is the sauciest thing in the world.” As a boy, Sickert frequently sketched men in uniforms and armor. As Mr. Nemo, the actor, his most critically acclaimed performance was in 1880, when he played a French soldier in Shakespeare’s Henry V. In 1887, Sickert completed a painting he titled It All Comes from Sticking to a Soldier—the painting that depicts music-hall performer Ada Lundberg singing as she is surrounded by leering men.

  Sickert’s interest in things military never waned throughout his life, and it was his habit to ask the Red Cross for the uniforms of soldiers who were disabled or dying. His motive, he said, was to outfit models for his military sketches and paintings. At one time, an acquaintance recalled, Sickert’s studio was piled with uniforms and rifles.

  “I am doing a portrait of a dear dead man, a Colonel,” he wrote. He asked a friend to help him “borrow some uniforms from Belgians in hospital. One has a kind of distaste for using misfortunes to further one’s own ends.” He didn’t really. He admitted more than once to his “purely selfish practice of life.” As he himself said, “I live entirely for my work—or as some people put it, for myself.”

  It is surprising that the possibility of a Ripper who wore disguises hasn’t been emphasized more or explored as a likely scenario, one that would surely help explain why he seemed to vanish without a trace after his crimes. A Ripper using disguises would also explain the variety of descriptions witnesses gave of the men supposedly last seen with the victims. The use of disguises by violent offenders is not uncommon. Men who dressed as police, soldiers, maintenance workers, deliverymen, servicemen, paramedics, and even clowns have been convicted of violent serial crimes, including sexual homicides. A disguise is a simple and effective way to gain access and lure the victim without resistance or suspicion, and to get away with robbery, rape, or murder. Disguises allow the perpetrator to return to the scene of the crime and watch the investigative drama or to attend the victim’s funeral.

  A psychopath intent on murder uses any means to con a victim out of life. Eliciting trust before the kill is part of the psychopath’s script, and this requires acting, whether the person has ever stepped foot on a stage or not. When one has seen a psychopath’s victims, alive or dead, it is hard to call such an offender a person. To begin to understand Jack the Ripper one must understand psychopaths, and to understand is not necessarily to accept. What these people do is foreign to every fantasy and feeling most of us have ever experienced. All people have the capacity for evil, but psychopaths are not like all of us.

  The psychiatric community defines psychopathy as an antisocial behavioral disorder, more dominant in males than females and statistically five times more likely to occur in the male offspring of a father suffering from the disorder. Symptoms of psychopathy, according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, include stealing, lying, substance abuse, financial irresponsibility, an inability to deal with boredom, cruelty, running away from home, promiscuity, fighting, and lack of remorse.

  Psychopaths are uniquely different from one another in very much the same way that individuals differ from one another. A psychopath might be promiscuous and lie but be financially responsible. A psychopath might fight and be promiscuous but not steal, might torture animals but not abuse alcohol or drugs, might torture people and not animals. A psychopath might commit multiple murders but not be promiscuous. The combinations of antisocial behaviors are countless, but the most distinctive and profound characteristic of all psychopaths is that they do not feel remorse. They have no concept of guilt. They do not have a conscience.

  I had heard and read about a vicious killer named John Royster months before I actually saw him in person during his murder trial in New York City in the winter of 1997. I was shocked by how polite and gentle he seemed. His pleasant looks, neat clothes, slight build, and the braces on his teeth jolted me as his handcuffs were removed and he was seated at his defense counsel’s table. Had I met Royster in Central Park and seen him flash his silver smile at me as I jogged by, I would not have felt the slightest breath of fear.

  From June 4 through June 11, 1996, John Royster destroyed the lives of four women by grabbing them from behind, throwing them to the ground, and repeatedly smashing their heads against pavement, concrete, and cobblestone until he thought they were dead. He was cool and calculating enough to put down his knapsack and take off his coat before each assault. As his victims lay bleeding on the ground, battered beyond recognition, he raped them if he could. Then he calmly gathered up his belongings and left the scene. Bashing a woman’s head to mush was sexually exciting to him, and he admitted to the police that he felt no remorse.

  In the late 1880s, this sort of antisocial behavioral disorder—an insipid phrase—was diagnosed as “moral insanity,” which ironically is a defense that recently has been tried in court. In his 1893 book on criminology, Arthur MacDonald defined what we would call a psychopath as a “pure murderer.” These people are “honest,” MacDonald writes, because they are not thieves “by nature” and many are “chaste in character.” But all are “unconscious” of feeling “any repulsion” over their violent acts. As a rule, pure murderers begin to show “traces of a murderous tendency” when they are children.

  Psychopaths can be male or female, child or adult. They are not always violent but they are always dangerous, because they have no respect for rules and no regard for any life but their own. Psychopaths have an x-factor unfamiliar if not incomprehen
sible to most of us, and at this writing no one is certain whether this x-factor is genetic, pathological (due to a head injury, for example), or caused by a spiritual depravity beyond our limited understanding. Ongoing research into the criminal brain is beginning to suggest that a psychopath’s gray matter is not necessarily normal. In the general prison population of murderers, it has been shown that more than 80% of them were abused as children, and 50% of these offenders have frontal lobe abnormalities.

  The frontal lobe is the master control for civilized human behavior and is located, as its name implies, in the frontal part of the brain. Lesions, such as tumors or damage from a head injury, can turn a well-behaved person into a stranger with poor self-control and aggressive or violent tendencies. In the mid-1900s, severe antisocial behavior was remedied by the notorious prefrontal lobotomy, a procedure accomplished by surgery or by hammering an ice pick through the roof of an eye orbit to shear the wiring that connects the frontal part of the brain to the rest of it.

  The psychopathic brain, however, cannot be wholly accounted for by traumatic childhoods and brain lesions. Studies using PET scans (positron emission tomography), which show images of the living brain at work, reveal that there is noticeably less neural activity in a psychopath’s frontal lobe than there is in a “normal” person’s. This suggests that the inhibitions and constraints that keep most of us from engaging in violent acts or giving in to murderous impulses do not register in the frontal lobe of the psychopathic brain. Thoughts and situations that would give most of us pause, cause distress or fear, and inhibit cruel, violent, or illegal impulses don’t register in the psychopath’s frontal lobe. That it is wrong to steal, rape, assault, lie, or do anything else that degrades, cheats, and dehumanizes others does not compute with the psychopath.

  As much as 25% of the criminal population and as much as 4% of the entire population is psychopathic. The World Health Organization (WHO) now classifies “dissocial personality disorder” or antisocial personality disorder or sociopathy as a disease. Call it what you will, but psychopaths do not exhibit normal human feelings and are a small percentage of the population who are responsible for a large percentage of crime. These people are extraordinarily cunning and lead double lives. Those closest to them usually have no idea that behind the charming mask there is a monster who does not reveal himself until—as the Ripper did—right before he attacks.

  Psychopaths are incapable of love. When they show what appears to be regret, sadness, or sorrow, these expressions are manipulative and originate from their own needs and not out of any genuine consideration for another creature. Psychopaths are often attractive, charismatic, and above average in intelligence. While they are given to impulse, they are organized in the planning and execution of their crimes. There is no cure. They cannot be rehabilitated or “preserved from criminal misadventure,” as Francis Galton, the father of fingerprint classification, wrote in 1883.

  A psychopath often stalks his victims before contact, all the while engaging in violent fantasies. Psychopaths may go through dry runs to practice their modus operandi (MO) as they meticulously plan their actions in a manner that will ensure success and evasion. Rehearsals can go on for years before the violent opening night, but no amount of practice or attention to strategy can guarantee that the performance will be flawless. Mistakes happen, especially on opening night, and when Jack the Ripper committed his first murder, he made an amateurish mistake.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  BY SOME PERSON UNKNOWN

  When Martha Tabran took her killer to the dark first-floor landing at 37 George Yard Buildings, he relinquished control to her and inadvertently introduced the risk that something could go wrong with his plan.

  Her turf may not have been the killing ground he had in mind. Maybe something else happened that he did not anticipate, such as an insult, a taunt. Prostitutes, especially intoxicated old veterans, were not the sort to be sensitive, and all Martha had to do was reach between his legs and say, “Where is it, love?” Sickert used the term “impotent fury” in a letter. More than a century after the event, I can’t re-create what actually happened in that pitch-black, fetid stairwell, but the killer got enraged. He lost control.

  To stab someone thirty-nine times is overkill, and a frenzied overkill is usually prompted by an event or a word that sets off the killer in an unanticipated way. This observation neither suggests nor assumes that Martha’s killer did not premeditate murder and fully intend to commit one, whether it was Martha Tabran’s or whoever else happened to come along that night or early morning. When he accompanied Martha to the stairwell, he intended to stab her to death. He brought a strong, sharp knife or dagger to the scene, and he left with it. He may have been disguised as a soldier. He knew how to come and go undetected and to be careful about leaving obvious evidence—a lost button, a cap, a pencil. The two most personal forms of homicide are stabbing and strangulation. Both require the assailant to have physical contact with the victim. Shootings are less personal. Bashing in a person’s head, especially from behind, is less personal.

  Stabbing someone dozens of times is very personal. When cases like that come into the morgue, the police and the medical examiner routinely assume that the victim and assailant knew each other. It is unlikely that Martha knew her killer, but she elicited a very personal reaction from him when she did or said something that didn’t follow his script. She may have resisted him. Martha was known for having fits and being quite difficult when she was drunk, and she had been drinking rum and ale earlier with Pearly Poll. Residents of George Yard Buildings later stated that they heard “nothing” at the early hour of Martha’s death, but their testimony doesn’t count for much when one considers the exhausted, inebriated condition of impoverished people who were accustomed to drunken behavior, scuffles, and violent domestic fights. It was best not to get involved. One could get hurt or in trouble with the police.

  At 3:30 A.M., an hour and a half after Police Constable Barrett spotted the loitering soldier outside George Yard Buildings, a resident named Alfred Crow was returning home from work. He was a cab driver, and bank holidays were always busy and kept him out late. He must have been tired. He may even have unwound with a few pints after dropping off his last fare. As he passed the first-floor landing, he noticed “something” on the ground that might have been a body, but he didn’t examine it and went to bed. The creed of the East End, as Victorian economist and social reformer Beatrice Webb put it, was don’t “meddle” with the neighbors. Crow later explained in his testimony at the inquest that it was not uncommon to see drunks unconscious in the East End. No doubt he saw them all the time.

  It seems no one realized that the “something” on the landing was a dead body until 4:50 A.M., when a waterside laborer named John S. Reeves was heading out of the building and noticed a woman lying on her back in a pool of blood. Her clothes were disarrayed, as if she had been in a struggle, Reeves recalled, but he saw no footprints on the staircase, nor did he find a knife or any other type of weapon. He said he did not touch the body but immediately located Police Constable Barrett, who sent for Dr. T. R. Killeen. The time of the doctor’s arrival wasn’t given, but when he looked at the body, the lighting could not have been good.

  He deduced at the scene that the victim, whose identity would remain unknown for days, had been dead for approximately three hours. She was “36 years old,” the doctor divined, and “very well nourished,” meaning she was overweight. This detail is significant, because virtually all of the Ripper’s victims, including other murdered women the police discounted as having been slain by him, were either very thin or fat. With rare exceptions, they were in their late thirties or early forties.

  Walter Sickert preferred female studio models obese or emaciated, and the lower their social class and the uglier they were, the better. This is evident from his frequent references to women as “skeletal” or “the thinnest of the thin like a little eel” and in the big women with wide hips and grotesquely pendulous
breasts that he repeatedly depicts in his art. Other people could have the “chorus girls,” Sickert once wrote, but leave him the “hags.”

  He did not have any artistic interest in females who had attractive bodies. He often remarked that any woman who wasn’t too fat or too thin was boring, and in a letter he wrote to his American friends Ethel Sands and Nan Hudson, he voiced delight over his latest models and how “thrilled” he was by the “sumptuous poverty of their class.” He loved their “every day dirty, old, worn clothes.” He added in another letter that were he twenty, he “wouldn’t look at any woman under 40.”

  Martha Tabran was short, overweight, homely, and middle-aged. When she was murdered, she was wearing a green skirt, a brown petticoat, a long black jacket, a black bonnet, and sidespring boots—“all old,” according to the police. Martha would have been suited to Sickert’s taste, but victimology is an indicator, not a science. Although victims of serial murder often share some trait that is significant to the killer, this does not imply that a violent psychopath is unbending in what sort of person he targets. Why Jack the Ripper focused on Martha Tabran instead of some other prostitute of similar description can’t be known, unless the explanation is as pedestrian as opportunity.