Portrait of a Killer

by Patricia Cornwell

  “I am very pleased to hear you are able to settle with Miss Richardson,” Eddy wrote Lewis in November of 1890, “although £200 is rather expensive for letters.” He goes on to say he heard from Miss Richardson “the other day” and that she was demanding yet another £100. Eddy promises he will “do all I can to get 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 you showed me the other day in getting me out of that trouble I was foolish enough to get into.” But apparently “the other lady” wasn’t so easily appeased because Eddy tells Lewis he had to send a friend to see her “and ask her to give up the two or three letters I had written to her . . . you may be certain that I shall be careful in the future not to get into any more trouble of the sort.”

  Whatever was in the letters the Duke of Clarence wrote to Miss Richardson and “the other lady” isn’t known, but one might infer that he acted in a manner bound to cause the royal family trouble. He was well aware that news of his involvement with the sorts of women who would blackmail him would not have been well received by the public and certainly not by his grandmother. What this attempted extortion does show is that Eddy’s inclination in such situations was not to have the offending parties murdered and mutilated, but to pay them off.

  Although my intention in this work is not to focus on who the Ripper was not, I should mention James Maybrick, a cotton merchant who supposedly wrote the notorious Ripper Diary that came to light in 1992 (and has since been proven to be a fraud). Maybrick was not Jack the Ripper. Among other reasons for my conclusion, his alleged motive for committing the Ripper murders makes no sense and is based on incorrect chronology.

  Maybrick was an arsenic addict who lived in Liverpool, and long before 1888 he was visiting his chemist as often as five times a day to obtain his potentially lethal doses. By the spring of 1888, Maybrick was experiencing headaches and numbness of his limbs from his abuse of arsenic and other poisonous drugs, such as strychnine. I find it ridiculous to suppose that any man whose judgment was clouded and whose physical health was compromised by such a severe and chronic drug addiction could have committed the Ripper crimes and so successfully evaded detection. More to the point, Maybrick’s supposed motive for traveling to London and killing prostitutes was that his wife, Florence—or Florie, as she preferred to be called—was having an affair, making her a whore in her husband’s eyes. Out of revenge, he supposedly set out to savage whores in Whitechapel.

  While doing this research, I acquired a stash of original letters from Florie to the Chief Justice of England, Sir Charles Russell, and numerous other communications between lawyers and politicians and her mother, Baroness Caroline de Roques, that were written while Florie was imprisoned after being found guilty and sentenced to death for the murder of her husband with arsenic in April of 1889. What these papers reveal casts great doubt on James Maybrick’s alleged motive for committing the Whitechapel murders. Maybrick did not discover his wife’s affair with young cotton broker Alfred Brierly until December 1888—or after the Ripper’s notorious rampage in London’s East End. It wasn’t until May 1889 that Florie’s affair became blatant, perhaps to punish Maybrick for cruelty and his own adultery. Her conviction raised a huge hue and cry on both sides of the Atlantic. Levels of arsenic in her dead husband’s blood would certainly be expected. Perhaps the outrageous miscarriage of justice in Florie Maybrick’s case was best summed up in a letter that a seventy-year-old physician named James Adams wrote to Lord Charles Russell on March 24, 1891: “I never heard such an unfair trial and unjust verdict in the whole course of my experience.” The overwhelming consensus was that at worst, Florie should have been tried for attempted murder.

  In an articulate, elegant letter Florie wrote to Lord Russell on May 29, 1895, after six years of imprisonment, solitary confinement, and failing health, she says, “. . . I have met with so many disappointments at the hands of Her Majesty’s representatives, that I feel almost too disheartened to make any further efforts for my relief. Were it not for the sake of my dear children & my mother, whose health is failing so greatly under the strain of deferred hope, I should not presume to recall myself to your memory . . . As a prisoner, I am powerless to help myself or my cause.” Queen Victoria rarely showed compassion toward prisoners but in this case she eventually yielded to public pressure and spared Florie’s life, sentencing her to fifteen years’ imprisonment. Florie Maybrick was released in 1904, changed her name, moved to America (where she had been born), became a housekeeper, and died a recluse.

  One has to wonder if the fraudulent Ripper Diary, which at first was believed to be James Maybrick’s authentic confession, would ever have come into existence had it not been for the international outrage created by Florie Maybrick’s conviction for a crime she did not commit. Otherwise, why would anyone in the late twentieth century have ever heard of James Maybrick or cared enough to counterfeit a diary claiming to have been written by him?

  Florie Maybrick’s tragic story is far more important than her husband’s subsequent notoriety. Florie’s travesty of a trial (which was called outrageous and a farce and was presided over by a mentally incompetent judge) and the prejudice against any woman who was immoral clearly demonstrate the mindset of Victorian London. Had the Ripper’s crimes not been so brutal, so recurrent, and so sensationalized by his written taunts to police and the press, it is possible the murders of East End Unfortunates would not have created much of a stir at the time.

  But Walter Sickert was not the sort to allow his clever, gory crimes to go unnoticed, at least not in the beginning, when he created the role of Jack the Ripper. Long after the Ripper’s crimes ceased to be a reality to the public and the police, Sickert continued his diabolical teases, but much more subtly.

  Sickert’s long life was rife with hints. His works contain “clues” about what he felt and did, about what he saw, and about the way all of it was filtered through an imagination that was sometimes childlike and at other times savage. The point of view in most of his works indicates that he watched people from behind. He could see them, but they could not see him. He could see his victims, but they could not see him. He would have watched Mary Ann Nichols for a while before he struck. He would have determined her degree of drunkenness and worked out his best approach.

  He may have drifted up to her in the dark and showed her a coin and given her a line before going around behind her. Or he may have come out of the damp dark and suddenly been on her. Her injuries, if they were accurately described, are consistent with her killer yoking her and jerking her head back as he slashed his knife across her exposed throat. She may have bitten her tongue, explaining the abrasion Dr. Llewellyn found. If she tried to twist away, that could explain why the first incision was incomplete and basically a failed attempt. The bruising of her jaw and face may have come about as her killer tightened his restraint of her and cut her throat a second time, this incision so violent that in one stroke he almost decapitated her.

  His position behind her would have prevented him from being splashed by the arterial blood that would have spurted out of her severed left carotid artery. Few murderers would choose to have blood spattering their faces, especially the blood of a victim who probably had diseases—at the very least, sexually transmitted ones. When Mary Ann was on her back, her killer moved to the lower part of her body and shoved up her clothes. She could not scream. She may have made no sound except the wet choking rushes and gurgles of air and blood sucking in and out of her severed windpipe. She may have aspirated her own blood and drowned in it as virtually all of her blood bled out from her body. All of this takes minutes.

  Coroners’ reports, including Dr. Llewellyn’s, tend to assure us that the person “died instantly.” There is no such thing. One might be disabled instantly by a gunshot wound to the head, but it takes minutes for someone to ble
ed to death, suffocate, drown, or cease all bodily functions due to a stroke or cardiac arrest. It is possible that Mary Ann was still conscious and aware of what was happening when her murderer began cutting up her abdomen. She may have been barely alive when he left her body in the courtyard.

  Robert Mann was the Whitechapel Workhouse inmate in charge of the mortuary the morning her body was brought in. During the inquest inquiry of September 17th, Mann testified that at some point after 4:00 A.M., the police arrived at the workhouse and ordered him out of bed. They said there was a body parked outside the mortuary and to hurry along, so he accompanied them to the ambulance parked in the yard. They carried the body inside the mortuary, and Inspector Spratling and Dr. Llewellyn appeared briefly to take a look. Then the police left, and Mann recalled that it must have been around 5:00 A.M. when he locked the mortuary door and went to breakfast.

  An hour or so later, Mann and another inmate named James Hatfield returned to the mortuary and began to undress the body without police or anyone else present. Mann swore to Coroner Baxter that no one had instructed him not to touch the body, and he was sure the police weren’t present. You’re absolutely certain of that? He was, well, maybe not. He could be mistaken. He couldn’t remember. If the police said they were there, then maybe they were. Mann got increasingly confused during his testimony, and “was subject to fits . . . his statements hardly reliable,” The Times reported.

  Wynne Baxter was a solicitor and an experienced coroner who would preside over the inquest of Joseph Merrick two years later. Baxter would not tolerate lying in his courtroom or the abuse of proper protocol in a case. He was more than a little irked that inmates had removed Mary Ann Nichols’s clothing. He rigorously questioned the confused, fitful Mann, who steadfastly maintained that the clothing was neither torn nor cut when the body arrived. All he and Hatfield had done was strip the dead woman naked and wash her before the doctor showed up so he wouldn’t have to waste his time doing it.

  They then cut and tore clothing to speed things along and make their chore a bit easier. She was wearing a lot of layers, some of them stiff with dried blood, and it is very difficult to pull clothing over the arms and legs of a body that is as rigid as a statue. When Hatfield took the stand, he agreed with everything Mann had said. The two inmates unlocked the mortuary after breakfast. They were by themselves when they cut and tore off the dead woman’s clothing.

  They washed her, they were alone with her body, and they had no reason to think there was anything inappropriate about that. Transcripts of their testimonies at the inquest give the impression that the men were frightened and bewildered because they didn’t think they had done anything wrong. They really didn’t understand what the fuss was about. The workhouse mortuary wasn’t supposed to handle police cases, anyway. It was just a whistle-stop for dead inmates on their way to a pauper’s grave.

  In Latin, forensic means “forum,” or a public place where Roman lawyers and orators presented their cases before judges. Forensic or legal medicine is the medicine of the courts, and in 1888, it hardly existed in practice. The sad truth is, there wasn’t much physical evidence that could have been either utilized or ruined in Mary Ann Nichols’s murder. But not knowing with certainty whether Mary Ann’s clothing was already cut or torn when her body arrived at the mortuary is a significant loss. Whatever the killer did would reveal more about him and his emotions at the time of the murder.

  Based on the descriptions of Mary Ann’s body at the scene, I suspect her clothing was disarrayed but not cut or torn off, and it was on the early morning of August 31st when the Ripper advanced to his next level of violence. He shoved up her ulster, woolen petticoats, flannel underclothing, and skirts. He made one jagged, then “three or four” quick slashes downward, and “several” across, almost in the pattern of a grid. A few small stabs to the genitals and he was gone, vanished in the dark.

  Without reviewing autopsy diagrams or photographs, it is very difficult to reconstruct injuries and re-create what a killer did and what he might have been feeling. Wounds can be fierce or they can be tentative. They can show hesitation or rage. Three or four shallow incisions on a wrist in addition to the deep one that severed veins tell a different story about a person’s suicide than one decisive cut does.

  Psychiatrists interpret mental states and emotional needs through a patient’s demeanor and confessions of feelings and behavior. The physicians of the dead have to make those same interpretations through the braille of injuries old and new and debris on the body and the way the person was dressed and where he or she died. Listening to the dead speak is a unique gift and demands highly specialized training. The language of silence is hard to read, but the dead do not lie. They may be difficult to understand, and we might misinterpret them or fail to find them before their communications have begun to fade. But if they still have something to say, their veracity is unimpeachable. Sometimes they continue to talk long after they have been reduced to bone.

  If people have a great deal to drink and get into their cars or into fights, their dead bodies admit it through alcohol levels. If a man was a heroin and cocaine addict, his dead body displays the needle tracks, and the metabolites morphine and benzoylecgonine show up in urine, the vitreous fluid of the eye, and the blood. If one frequently engaged in anal sex or was into genital tattoos and body piercing, or if a woman shaved off her pubic hair because her lover’s fantasy was to have sex with a child—these people speak openly after they are dead. If a teenage boy tried for a more intense orgasm by masturbating while dressed in leather and partially compressing the blood vessels in his neck with a noose—but he didn’t mean to slip off the chair he was standing on and hang himself—he’ll confess. Shame and lies are for those left behind.

  It is startling what the dead have to say. I never cease to be amazed and pained. One young man was so determined to end his life that when he shot himself in the chest with his crossbow and didn’t die, he pulled out the arrow and shot himself again. Anger. Desperation. Hopelessness. No turning back. I want to die, but I’ll go ahead and make family vacation plans and write down the details of my funeral so I don’t inconvenience my family. I want to die, but I want to look nice, so I’ll put on makeup and fix my hair and shoot myself in the heart because I don’t want to ruin my face, the wife decides after her husband has run off with a younger woman.

  I’ll shoot you in the mouth, bitch, because I’m tired of hearing you nag. I’ll throw your body in the tub and dump acid all over it, you cunt. That’s what you get for screwing around on me. I’ll stab you in the eyes because I’m tired of you staring at me. I’ll drain your blood and drink it because aliens are taking all of mine. I’ll dismember you and boil you piece by piece so I can flush you down the toilet and no one will ever know. Hop on the back of my Harley, you slut, and I’ll take you to a motel and cut you hundreds of times with a razor and scissors and watch you slowly die, because that’s the initiation I gotta do before I can be a member of the gang.

  Mary Ann Nichols’s wounds tell us that the Ripper did not want her to struggle or scream, and he was ready for the next step of taking his knife below her throat and destroying her naked body. But he wasn’t a master of this move yet and could go only so far. He did not remove her bowels or organs. His cuts were only so deep. He took no body part with him as a trophy or a talisman that might bring him sexual fantasy and wonder when he was alone in one of his secret rooms. For the first time, I believe, the Ripper had ripped, and he needed to think about that for a while and feel what it was like and if he wanted more.

  “I like the work some more blood,” the Ripper wrote October 5th.

  “I must have some more,” the Ripper wrote November 2nd.

  It was scarcely a week later when Jack the Ripper would publicly call himself by that infernal name. Perhaps it makes sense. Before his murder of Mary Ann Nichols, he had not “ripped” yet. Sickert came up with the stage name “Mr. Nemo” for a reason, and it wasn’t one driven by modesty. Sicke
rt would have picked the name “Jack the Ripper” for a good reason, too. We can only guess what it was.

  “Jack” was street slang for sailor or man, and “Ripper” is someone who “rips.” But Walter Sickert was never obvious. I scanned through a dozen dictionaries and encyclopedias dating from 1755 to 1906, checking definitions. Sickert could have come up with the name “Jack the Ripper” by reading Shakespeare. As Helena Sickert said in her memoirs, when she and her brothers were growing up, they were all “Shakespeare mad,” and Sickert was known to quote long passages of Shakespeare. Throughout his life he loved to stand up at dinner parties and deliver Shakespearean soliloquies. The word Jack is found in Coriolanus, The Merchant of Venice, and Cymbeline. Shakespeare doesn’t use the word ripper, but there are variations of it in King John and Macbeth.

  Definitions of Jack include: boots; a diminutive of John used contemptuously to mean a saucy fellow; a footboy who pulls off his master’s boots; a scream; a male; American slang for a stranger; American slang for a jackass; a cunning fellow who can do anything—such as a “Jack of all trades.” Definitions of Ripper include: one who rips; one who tears; one who cuts; a fine fellow who dresses well; a good fast horse; a good play or part.

  Jack the Ripper was the stranger, the cunning fellow who could do anything. He “hath his belly-full of fighting.” He was a “cock that nobody can match.” He ripped “up the womb of your dear mother England.” Sickert, in the deep crevices of his psyche, 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 not his fault. He would repay.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  SUMMER NIGHT

  Mary Ann Nichols’s eyes were wide open when her body was discovered on the pavement. She stared blindly into the dark, her face a wan yellow in the weak flame of a bull’s-eye lantern.