Portrait of a Killer

by Patricia Cornwell

  In Charles Darwin’s Expression of the Emotions, wide staring eyes are the accompaniment to “horror,” which Darwin associates with “extreme terror” or the “horrible pain of torture.” It is a centuries-old fallacy that a person dies with the last emotion frozen on his or her face. But symbolically, Mary Ann’s expression seemed to capture the last thing she saw in her life—the dark silhouette of her murderer cutting her up. The fact that the police made note in their reports of her wide, staring eyes may reflect what the men in blue on the street were beginning to feel about the Whitechapel murderer: He was a monster, a phantom who, in Inspector Abberline’s words, did not leave “the slightest clue.”

  The image of a woman with her throat slashed and her wide eyes staring up blindly from the pavement would not easily be forgotten by those who saw it. Sickert would not have forgotten it. More than anyone else, he would have remembered her stare as life fled from her. In 1903, if his dates are reliable, he drew a sketch of a woman whose eyes are wide open and staring. She looks dead and has an inexplicable dark line around her throat. The sketch is rather innocuously titled Two Studies of a Venetian Woman’s Head. Three years later he followed it with a painting of a nude grotesquely sprawled on an iron bedstead and titled that picture Nuit d’Été, or Summer Night. One recalls that Mary Ann Nichols was murdered on a summer night. The woman in the sketch and the woman in the painting look alike. Their faces resemble the face of Mary Ann Nichols, based on a photograph taken of her when she was inside her shell at the mortuary and had already been “cleaned up” by workhouse inmates Mann and Hatfield.

  Mortuary photographs were made with a big wooden box camera that could shoot only directly ahead. Bodies the police needed to photograph had to be stood up or propped upright against the dead-house wall because the camera could not be pointed down or at an angle. Sometimes the nude dead body was hung on the wall with a hook, nail, or peg at the nape of the neck. A close inspection of the photograph of a later victim, Catherine Eddows, shows her nude body suspended, one foot barely touching the floor.

  These grim, degrading photographs were for purposes of identification and were not made public. The only way a person could know what Mary Ann Nichols’s dead body looked like was to have viewed it at the mortuary or at the scene or to have somehow convinced a police investigator to show him or her the photograph. This doesn’t mean Sickert didn’t charm someone from Scotland Yard to do the latter, especially if Sickert was wearing a disguise and using the ruse that he might recognize the victim. In addition to these possibilities, there is one more. In 1899, Alexandre Lacassagne, a professor of forensic medicine at the Lyon medical school, published Vacher l’Eventreur et les crimes sadiques (Lyon, A. Storck). In that book there are two photographs of Ripper victims: Mary Kelly at her crime scene and a mortuary photograph (of poor quality) of Catherine Eddows from the knees up, after her autopsy, when her postmortem incision and abdominal and neck injuries would not have been visible because they had been sutured. While it is possible that Sickert might have obtained Lacassagne’s work and seen these two photographs, the book on sadistic crimes does not include photographs of other Ripper victims, such as Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, or Martha Tabran. Nor does it include the most graphic photograph of Catherine Eddows, the one taken before her autopsy, her head lolling back, the gaping and fatal wound to her neck grotesquely displayed.

  If Sickert’s sketch of the so-called Venetian woman is indeed a representation of Mary Ann Nichols’s staring dead face, then he might well have been at the scene or somehow got hold of the police reports—unless the detail was in a news story I somehow missed. Even if Sickert had seen Mary Ann at the mortuary, her eyes would have been shut by then, just as they are in her photograph. By the time she was photographed and viewed by those who might identify her and by the inquest jurors, her wounds had been sutured and her body had been covered to the chin to hide the gaping cuts to the throat.

  Unfortunately, few morgue photographs of the Ripper’s victims exist, and the ones preserved at the Public Record Office are small and have poor resolution, which worsens with enlargement. Forensic image enhancement helps a little, but not much. Other cases that were not linked to the Ripper at the time—or ever—may not have been photographed at all. If they were, those photographs seem to have vanished. Crime-scene photographs usually weren’t taken unless the victim’s body was indoors. Even then the case had to be unusual for the police to fetch their heavy box camera.

  In today’s forensic cases, bodies are photographed multiple times and from many angles with a variety of photographic equipment, but during the Ripper’s violent spree, it was rare to call for a camera. It would have been even rarer for a mortuary or a dead house to be equipped with one. Technology had not advanced enough for photographs to be taken at night. These limitations mean that there is only a scant visual record of Jack the Ripper’s crimes, unless one browses through a Walter Sickert art book or takes a look at his “murder” pictures and nudes that hang in fine museums and private collections. Artistic and scholarly analysis aside, most of Sickert’s sprawling nudes look mutilated and dead.

  Many of the nudes and other female subjects have bare necks with black lines around them, as if to suggest a cut throat or decapitation. Some dark areas around a figure’s throat are intended to be shadows and shading, but the dark, solid, black lines I refer to are puzzling. They are not jewelry, so if Sickert drew and painted what he saw, what are these lines? The mystery grows with a picture titled Patrol, dated 1921—a painting of a policewoman with bulging eyes and an open-neck tunic that reveals a solid, black line around her throat.

  What is known about Patrol is vague. Sickert most likely painted it from a photograph of a policewoman, possibly Dorothy Peto of the Birmingham police. Apparently, she acquired the painting and moved to London, where she signed on with the Metropolitan Police, to which she eventually donated the life-size Sickert portrait of herself. The intimation of at least one Metropolitan Police archivist is that the painting may be valuable, but it is disliked, especially by women. When I saw Patrol, it was hanging behind a locked door and chained to a wall. No one seems quite sure what to do with it. I suppose it’s another Ripper “ha ha”—albeit an accidental one—that Scotland Yard owns a painting by the most notorious murderer the Yard never caught.

  Patrol isn’t exactly a tribute to women or policing, nor would it appear that Sickert intended it to be anything other than another one of his subtle, scary fantasies. The frightened expression on the policewoman’s face belies the power of her profession, and in typical Sickert fashion, the painting has the patina of morbidity and of something very bad about to happen. The wooden-framed 74¼-by-46¼-inch canvas Patrol is a dark mirror in the bright galleries of the art world, and references to it and reproductions of it are not easily found.

  Certain of his paintings do seem as secret as Sickert’s many hidden rooms, but the decision to keep them under cover may not have been made solely by their owners. Sickert himself had a great deal to say about which of his works were to be exhibited. Even if he gave a painting to a friend—as is the case with Jack the Ripper’s Bedroom—he could have asked the person to lend it to various exhibitions, or keep it private. Some of his work was probably part of his catch-me-if-you-can fun. He was brazen enough to paint or draw Ripperish scenes, but not always reckless enough to exhibit them. And these unseemly works continue to surface, now that the search is on.

  Most recently, an uncatalogued Sickert sketch was discovered that seems to be a flashback to his music-hall days in 1888. Sickert made the sketch in 1920, and it depicts a bearded male figure talking to a prostitute. The man’s back is partially to us, but we get the impression that his penis is exposed and that he is holding a knife in his right hand. At the bottom of the sketch is what appears to be a disemboweled woman whose arms have been dismembered—as if Sickert is showing the before and after of one of his kills. Art historian Dr. Robins believes the sketch went unnoticed because, in th
e past, the notion of looking for this sort of violence in Sickert’s works was not foremost on the minds of people such as herself, and archival curators, and Sickert experts.

  But when one works hard and begins to know what to look for, the unusual turns up, including news stories. Most people interested in news accounts of Jack the Ripper’s murders rely on facsimiles from public records or microfilm. When I began this investigation, I chose The Times as the newspaper of record and was fortunate to find copies of the originals for 1888-91. In that era, newsprint had such a high cotton fiber content that The Times papers I own could be ironed, sewn together, and bound, good as new.

  I have continued to be surprised by the number of news publications that have survived for more than a hundred years and are still supple enough for one to turn their pages without fear. Having begun my career as a journalist, I know full well that there are many stories to a story and that without looking at as many bits and pieces of reportage as I can find I can’t begin to approach the whole truth. Ripper journalism in the major papers of the day is not scarce, but what is often overlooked are the quiet witnesses of lesser-known publications, such as the Weekly Dispatch.

  One day, my dealer at an antiquarian bookshop in Chelsea, London, called to tell me he had found at auction a ledger book filled with, quite possibly, every Weekly Dispatch article written about the Ripper murders and others that might be related. The clippings, rather sloppily cut out and crookedly pasted into the ledger, were dated from August 12, 1888, through September 29, 1889. The story of the book continues to mystify me. Dozens of pages throughout the ledger were slashed out with a razor, enormously piquing my curiosity about their contents. Alongside the clippings are fascinating annotations written either in blue and black ink or with gray, blue, and purple pencils. Who went to all this trouble and why? Where has the ledger been for more than a century?

  The annotations themselves suggest that most likely they were written by someone quite familiar with the crimes and most interested in how they were being worked by the police. When I first acquired the ledger, I fantasized that it might have been kept by Jack the Ripper himself. It seems that whoever cut out the clippings was focused on reports of what the police knew, and he agrees or disagrees with them in his notes. Some details are crossed out as inaccurate. Comments such as “Yes! Believe me” or “unsatisfactory” or “unsatisfactory—very” or “important. Find the woman”—and most peculiar of all, “7 women 4 men”—are scribbled next to certain details in the articles. Sentences are underlined, especially if they relate to descriptions witnesses gave of men the victims were last seen with.

  I doubt I will ever know whether an amateur sleuth kept this ledger or whether a policeman or a reporter did, but the handwriting is inconsistent with that of Scotland Yard’s leading men, such as Abberline, Swanson, and other officers whose reports I have read. The penmanship in the ledger is small and very sloppy, especially for a period when script was consistently well formed, if not elegant. Most police, for example, wrote with a very good and in some instances beautiful hand. In fact, the handwriting in the clippings book reminds me of the rather wild and sometimes completely illegible way Walter Sickert wrote. His handwriting is markedly different from the average Englishman’s. Since the precocious Sickert taught himself to read and write, he was not schooled in traditional calligraphy, although his sister Helena says he was capable of a “beautiful hand” when it suited him.

  Was the ledger Sickert’s? Probably not. I have no idea who kept it, but the Dispatch articles add another dimension to the reportage of the time. The journalist who covered crime for the Dispatch is anonymous—bylines then were as rare as female reporters—but had an excellent eye and a very inquisitive mind. His deductions, questions, and perceptions add new facets to cases such as the murder of Mary Ann Nichols. The Dispatch reported that the police suspected she was the victim of a gang. In London, at that time, roving packs of violent young men preyed upon the weak and poor. These hooligans were vindictive when they attempted to rob an Unfortunate who turned out to have no money.

  The police maintained that Mary Ann had not been killed where her body was found, nor had Martha Tabran. The two slain women had been left in the “gutter of the street in the early hours of the morning,” and no screams were heard. So they must have been murdered elsewhere, possibly by a gang, and their bodies dumped. The anonymous Dispatch reporter must have asked Dr. Llewellyn if it was possible that the killer had attacked Mary Ann Nichols from the rear and not the front, which would have made the killer right-handed—not left-handed, as Dr. Llewellyn claimed.

  If the killer had been standing behind the victim when he cut her throat, the reporter explains, and the deepest 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 his right hand. Dr. Llewellyn made a bad deduction. The reporter made an excellent one. Walter Sickert’s dominant hand was his right one. In one of his self-portraits he appears to be holding a paintbrush in his left hand, but it is an optical illusion created by his painting his reflection in a mirror.

  Dr. Llewellyn might not have been very interested in a reporter’s point of view, but perhaps he should have been. If the Dispatch journalist’s beat was crime, he had probably seen more cut throats than Dr. Llewellyn had. Cutting a person’s throat was not an uncommon way to murder someone, especially in cases of domestic violence. It was not an unusual way to commit suicide, but people who cut their own throats used straight razors, rarely knives, and they almost never sliced their necks all the way through to the vertebra.

  The Royal London Hospital still has its admission and discharge record books for the nineteenth century, and a survey of entries shows the illnesses and injuries typical of the 1880s and 1890s. It must be kept in mind that the patients were presumed alive when they arrived at the hospital, which covered only the East End. Most people who cut their throats, assuming they severed a major blood vessel, would never have made it to a hospital but would have gone straight to the mortuary. They would not be listed in the admission and discharge record books.

  Only one of the homicides cited during the period of 1884 to 1890 was eventually considered a possible Ripper case, and that is the murder of Emma Smith, forty-five, of Thrawl Street. On April 2, 1888, she was attacked by what she described as a gang of young men who beat her, almost ripped off an ear, and shoved an object, possibly a stick, up her vagina. She was intoxicated at the time, but she managed to walk home, and friends helped her to the London Hospital, where she was admitted and died two days later of peritonitis.

  In Ripperology, there is considerable speculation about when Jack the Ripper began killing and when he stopped. Since his favorite killing field seems to have been the East End, the records of the London Hospital are important, not because the Ripper’s dead-at-the-scene victims would be listed in the books, but because patterns of how and why people were hurting themselves and others can be instructive. I was worried that “cut throats” might have been miscalled suicides when they were really murders that might be additional ones committed by the Ripper.

  Unfortunately, the hospital records don’t include much more detail than the patient’s name, age, address, in some cases the occupation, the illness or injury, and if and when he or she was discharged. Another one of my purposes in scanning the London Hospital books was to see if there were any statistical changes 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 the prevailing misery and hopelessness of those who lived and died there by unnatural causes.

  During some years, poisoning was the favored form of taking one’s life, and there were plenty of toxic substances to choose from, all of them easily acquired. Substances that East End men and women used to poison themselves from 1884 to 1890 include oxalic acid, laudanum, opium, hydrochlori
c 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-story windows were actually accidental deaths when fire engulfed a rooming or common lodging house.

  It is impossible to know how many deaths or neardeaths were poorly investigated—or not investigated at all. I also suspect that some deaths thought to be suicides might have been homicides. On September 12, 1886, twenty-three-year-old Esther Goldstein of Mulberry Street, Whitechapel, was admitted to the London Hospital as a suicide by cut throat. The basis of this determination is unknown, but it is hard to imagine that she cut her neck through her “thyroid cartilage.” A slice through a major blood vessel close to the skin surface is quite sufficient to end one’s life, and cutting through the muscles and cartilage of the neck is more typical in homicides because more force is required.

  If Esther Goldstein was murdered, that doesn’t mean she was a victim of Jack the Ripper, and I doubt she was. It is unlikely that he killed an East End woman or two every now and then. When he started, he made a dramatic entrance and continued his performance for many years. He wanted the world to know about his crimes. But I can’t say with certainty when he made his first kill.

  In the same year that the Ripper crimes began, in 1888, four other East End women died from cut throats—all supposed to be suicides. When I first went through the musty old pages of the Royal London Hospital record books and noticed the numerous women admitted with cut throats, I anticipated that these deaths might have been Ripper murders assumed to be suicides. But more time and research revealed that cut throats were not unusual in a day when most impoverished people did not have access to guns.