Portrait of a Killer

by Patricia Cornwell

  “Old boss you was rite it was the left kidny . . . i wil be on the job soon and will send you another bit of innerds.”

  The kidney was suspected of being Catherine Eddows’s, and probably was unless the Ripper managed to get half of a human kidney from somewhere else. The organ was anatomically preserved at the Royal London Hospital until it became so disintegrated that the hospital disposed of it in the 1950s—about the time Watson and Crick discovered the double helix structure of DNA.

  In centuries past, bodies and body parts were preserved in “spirits” or alcoholic beverages such as wine. Some hospitals during the Ripper’s time used glycerine. When a person of high status died aboard ship and required a proper burial, the only way to preserve the body was in mead or whatever spirits were handy. If John Smith, the founding father of Virginia, had died during his voyage to the New World, most likely he would have been returned to London pickled in a keg.

  Police reports indicate that the kidney sent to George Lusk was almost two weeks old if it came from Eddows’s body, and had been preserved in “spirits,” probably wine. Mr. Lusk did not seem horrified or in a frantic hurry to get the kidney to the police. When he received the ghastly gift with a letter that has not survived, he didn’t “think much about it.” The Victorians were not accustomed to psychopathic killers who took body parts and enclosed them in taunting letters to the authorities.

  At first, it was suggested that the kidney was from a dog, but Lusk and the police wisely sought other opinions. The kidney was a hoax, the police agreed as the marinated organ in its box made the rounds. Medical experts, such as pathologist Dr. Openshaw, believed the kidney was human—although it was a stretch to conclude it was from a “female” who had “Bright’s disease.” The kidney was turned over to Dr. Openshaw’s care at the London Hospital. Had the kidney survived another few decades to be tested, and were Catherine Eddows exhumed for her DNA, there could have been a match. In court that would have hurt Walter Sickert quite a lot—were he still alive to be prosecuted—since the A Pirie & Sons watermark is on his stationery and also on the letter Jack the Ripper wrote to Dr. Openshaw, the stamps on the envelopes of the two letters have a DNA sequence in common, and the Ripper letter is confessional.

  If Ellen was keeping up with the news at home, she would have known about the kidney. She would have known about the double murder that happened within a week of her leaving for Ireland. She may have heard of “human bones” wrapped in a parcel in a Peckham gutter, or the parcel containing a decomposing female arm found in the garden of a school for the blind on Lambeth Road, or the boiled leg that turned out to be from a bear.

  Ellen should have known about the torso recovered from the foundation of the new Scotland Yard building. The headless, limbless dead woman was transported to the mortuary on Millbank Street, and she had little to say to Dr. Neville or the police, and they could not seem to agree about the arm found in Pimlico on September 11th. It was from the torso, of this Dr. Neville was certain, but its hand was rough, the fingernails unkempt—like those of a woman whose life was hard. When Dr. Thomas Bond was brought in to assist in the examination, he said that the hand was soft with well-shaped nails. The hand would have been dirty, possibly abraded, and the fingernails would have been caked with mud when the arm was found in the muck of low tide. Perhaps when it was cleaned up, it took on a higher social status.

  In one report, the dismembered woman had a dark complexion. In another report, she had light skin. Her hair was dark brown, she was twenty-six years old, and five foot seven or eight, the doctor stated. The darkness of her skin could have been due to the discoloration of decomposition. In advanced stages, the skin turns dark greenish-black. Based on the condition of her remains, it may have been just as difficult to determine if her skin was fair.

  Discrepancies in descriptions can cause serious problems in identifying the dead. Of course, forensic facial reconstructions—or the sculpting of the face based on the underlying architecture of the bone (assuming the head is found)—were not done in the nineteenth century, but a case some decades ago in Virginia makes my point. An unidentified man’s face was reconstructed by using green clay to rebuild his features over his skull. His hair color was based on the racial characteristics of his skeleton, which were those of an African-American, and his orbits were fitted with artificial eyes.

  A woman responded to a black-and-white photograph of the facial reconstruction in the newspaper, and appeared at the morgue to see if the missing person might be her son. She took one look at the facial reconstruction and told the medical examiner, “No, that’s not him. His face wasn’t green.” As it turned out, the unidentified murdered young man was the woman’s son. (These days, when forensic facial reconstructions or sculptures are done on the unidentified dead, the clay is dyed to approximate the person’s color based on race.)

  The estimate offered by both Dr. Neville and by Dr. Thomas Bond, that the torso was that of a woman about five foot seven or eight, could have been wrong, and the height they assigned to what was left of the victim could have precluded quite a number of people from coming forward to see if the remains were those of a relative or someone they knew. In that era, five foot seven or eight was quite tall for a woman. Were the doctors’ estimate off by as little as two or three inches, it could have been enough to cause the torso never to be identified—and it never was.

  I believe the doctors did the best they could, based on what they had to work with. They could not have known about forensic anthropology. The doctors would not have known about today’s standard anthropological criteria used to place an individual into age categories, such as infant or 15 to 17 or 45-plus. They may not have known much about epiphyses or growth centers of bone, nor could they have seen them since neither the torso nor recovered limbs were defleshed by boiling them in water. Growth centers are attachments, such as those that connect the ribs to the sternum, and when one is young these attachments are flexible cartilage. With age, they calcify.

  In 1888, there were no calibrations and algorithms. There were no late-twentieth-century gadgets such as the single-photon absorptiometer or scintillation detectors to estimate height based on the length of the humerus, radius, ulna, femur, tibia, and fibula—the long bones of the arms and legs. The changes in density or mineral concentrations of bones are age-dependent. For example, a decrease in bone density usually correlates with an older age.

  It could not accurately be claimed that the dismembered woman was exactly twenty-six years old, although it could have been said that her remains appeared to be those of a post-pubescent female who probably was in her late teens or twenties, and that she had dark-brown hair in her axillae, or armpits. The estimate that the woman had died five weeks earlier was also a guess. Doctors simply did not have the scientific means to judge time of death by decomposition. They knew nothing about entomology—the interpretation of insect development as a marker for time of death—and maggots teemed over the torso when it was found in the recesses of the new Scotland Yard building’s foundation.

  The autopsy revealed pale, bloodless organs that indicated hemorrhage and would have been consistent with the woman’s throat having been cut before she was dismembered. At her inquest, Dr. Thomas Bond testified that the remains were those of a “well nourished” woman with “breasts that were large and prominent” and who at some point had suffered from severe pleurisy in one lung. Her uterus was missing, and her pelvis and legs had been sawn off at the fourth lumbar. The arms had been removed at the shoulder joints by several oblique cuts, and she had been decapitated by several incisions below the larynx. Dr. Bond said that the torso had been skillfully wrapped, and the flesh bore “clearly defined marks” where it had been bound with string. These marks left by string are noteworthy. Experiments conducted in the early and mid-nineteenth century revealed that ligature marks are not formed on bodies that have been dead for a while, indicating that the string was tied around the dismembered woman either while she was alive, or
more likely, not long—perhaps only hours—after her death.

  The severing of the pelvis from the torso is quite unusual in dismemberments, but neither the doctors nor the police seemed to have given this detail much thought, or even offered opinions about it. No other body parts of the woman turned up, except what was believed to be her left leg, which had been severed just below the knee. The partial limb had been buried several yards from where the torso had been found. Dr. Bond described the foot and leg as “exquisitely molded.” The foot was well cared for, the toenails neatly trimmed. There were no corns or bunions that might indicate that the victim had been a “poor woman.”

  Police and physicians were of the opinion that the dismemberment was an attempt to conceal the victim’s identity. This conclusion is inconsistent with the killer severing the pelvis at the fourth lumbar and at the hip joints—or essentially removing the victim’s sexual organs and genitalia. One might wonder if there is a similarity between such a mutilation and what the Ripper did when he slashed open the abdomen of his victim and took her uterus and part of her vagina.

  When the torso was found on the site of Scotland Yard’s new headquarters, it was bound in old cloth and “a lot of old string of different sorts tied all around in each direction,” said Frederick Wildore, the carpenter who noticed a mysterious shape at six o’clock in the morning on October 2nd, when he reached inside a dark recess of the foundation, looking for his basket of tools. He dragged out the bundle and cut open the string and for a moment did not know what he was looking at. “I thought it was old bacon or something like that,” he said at the inquest. The foundation was a labyrinth of recesses and trenches, and to hide the bundle there could not have been done unless the person knew his way, Wildore claimed. It was “always as dark as the darkest night in the day.”

  Adhering to the remains were bits of newspapers that were fragments from an old Daily Chronicle, and a blood-saturated six-inch-long, four-inch-wide section of the August 24, 1888, edition of the Echo, a daily paper that cost a halfpenny. Sickert was a news addict. A photograph of him in later life shows a studio that is a landfill of newspapers. The Echo was a liberal publication that published numerous articles about Sickert throughout his life. In the August 24, 1888, edition, on page 4, is the “Notes & Queries” section with its instructions that all queries and answers must be written on postcards, and one is to refer to the query he is answering by using the number of that query as assigned by the newspaper. Advertising in disguise, the Echo warns, “is inadmissible.”

  Of eighteen “Answers” on August 24, 1888, five of them were signed “W.S.” They are as follows:Answer One (3580): OSTEND.—I would not advise “W. B.” to choose Ostend for a fortnight’s holiday; he will be tired of it in two days. It is a show place for dresses, &c., and very expensive. The country around is flat and uninteresting; besides, the roads are all paved with granite. To an English tourist I can recommend the “Yellow House” or “Maison Jaune,” which is kept by an Englishman, close by the railway station or steamboat pier; also the Hotel du Nord. Both are reasonable, but avoid grand hotels. The sands are lovely. No knowledge of French is required.—W.S.

  (Ostend was a seaport and resort in Belgium accessible from Dover, and a place Sickert had visited.)

  Answer Two (3686): POPULAR OPERAS.—The popularity of Trovatore is naturally due to the sweetness of the music and the taking airs. It is not generally accepted as a “high class” music—indeed, I have frequently heard “professional” musicians call it not music at all. For myself, I prefer it to any other opera, except Don Juan.—W.S.

  Answer Three (3612): PASSPORTS.—I am afraid “An Unfortunate Pole” will have to confine his attention to those countries where no passports are required of which latter there are plenty, and are, besides more pleasant to travel in. I once met a countryman of his who traveled with a borrowed passport; he was caught at it and sent to quod [street slang for prison], where he remained some time.—W.S.

  Answer Four (3623): CHANGE OF NAME.—All “Jones” has to do is to take a paint brush, obliterate “Jones” and substitute “Brown.” Of course this will not relieve him from any liabilities as “Jones.” He will simply be “Jones” trading under the name of “Brown.”—W.S.

  Answer Five (3627): LETTERS OF NATURALISATION. —In order to obtain these, a foreigner must have resided either five consecutive years, or at least five within the last eight years, in the United Kingdom ; and he must also make a declaration that he intends to reside permanently therein. Strict proofs of this will be required from four British-born householders. —W.S.

  To offer answers by using the original query number implies the writer was familiar with the Echo and was probably an avid reader of it. To send in five answers is compulsive and in keeping with Sickert’s prolific writing and the stunning number of Ripper letters received by the police and press. Newsprint is a leitmotif that shows up repeatedly in Sickert’s life and in the Ripper’s game playing. A Ripper letter to a police magistrate is written in an exquisite calligraphy on a section of the Star newspaper, dated December 4th. The torn-out section of paper includes the notice of an etching exhibition, and on the back of the paper is a sub-headline, “Nobody’s Child.”

  Walter Sickert was never sure who he was or where he was from. He was “No Englishman,” to quote the signatory of another Ripper letter. His stage name was “Mr. Nemo” (or “Mr. Nobody”), and in a telegram the Ripper sent to the police (no date, but possibly the late fall of 1888) the Ripper crosses out “Mr. Nobody” as the sender and writes in “Jack the ripper” instead. Sickert wasn’t French but considered himself a French painter. He once wrote that he intended to become a French citizen—which he never did. In another letter he states that in his heart he will always be German.

  Most Ripper letters mailed October 20, 1888, through November 10th were postmarked London, and it is a certainty that Sickert was in London prior to October 22nd to attend an early showing of the “First Pastel Exhibition” that opened at the Grosvenor Gallery. In letters that Sickert wrote to Blanche, references to the New English Art Club’s election of new members indicate that Sickert was based in London or at least was in England during the autumn, and most likely into November and possibly until the end of the year.

  When Ellen returned home to 54 Broadhurst Gardens at the end of October, she came down with a terrible case of the flu that lingered and sapped her health well into November. I could find no record of her spending time with her husband or whether she knew where he was from one day to the next. I don’t know if she was frightened by the violent atrocities happening a mere six miles from her home, but it is hard to imagine she wasn’t. The metropolis was terrorized, but the worst was yet to come.

  Mary Kelly was twenty-four years old and very pretty with a fresh complexion, dark hair, and youthful figure. She was better educated than the other Unfortunates who trolled the area where she lived at 26 Dorset Street. The house was rented by John McCarthy, who owned a chandler’s shop and let out all the rooms at 26 Dorset to the very poor. Mary’s ground-floor room, number 13, was twelve feet square and separated from another room by a partition that was flush against her wooden bedstead. Her door and two large windows opened onto Miller’s Court, and some time ago—she wasn’t sure when—she had lost her key.

  This hadn’t caused a huge problem. Not so long ago, she had a bit too much to drink and got into a row with her man, Joseph Barnett, a coal porter. She couldn’t remember, but she must have broken a windowpane then. She and Barnett would reach through the jagged hole in the glass to release the spring lock of the door. They never bothered repairing the glass or replacing the key, and probably didn’t think either was a wise expenditure of what little money they had.

  Mary Kelly and Joseph Barnett’s last big row was ten days earlier. They exchanged blows, the cause of the fight being a woman named Maria Harvey. Mary had begun sleeping with her on Monday and Tuesday nights, and Barnett wouldn’t put up with it. He moved out, leavin
g Mary to somehow pay off the £1 9s. owed in rent. Barnett and Mary patched up their relationship a bit, and he dropped by occasionally and gave her a little money.

  Maria Harvey last saw Mary the Thursday afternoon of November 8th, when Maria visited Mary in her room. Maria was a laundress and asked if it would be all right to leave some dirty laundry: two men’s shirts, a little boy’s shirt, a black overcoat, a black crêpe bonnet with black satin strings, a pawn ticket for a gray shawl, and a little girl’s white petticoat. She promised to retrieve the garments later, and was still in the room when Barnett showed up unexpectedly for a visit.

  “Well, Mary Jane,” Maria said on her way out, “I shall not see you this evening again.” She would never see Mary again.

  Mary Kelly was born in Limerick, the daughter of John Kelly, an Irish iron worker. Mary had six brothers who lived at home, a brother in the Army, and a sister who worked in the markets. The family had moved to Caernarvonshire, Wales, when Mary was young, and at sixteen she married a collier named Davis. Two or three years later, he was killed in an explosion, and Mary left for Cardiff to live with a cousin. It was at this time that she began to drift into drink and prostitution, and for eight months she was in an infirmary to be treated for venereal disease.

  She moved to England in 1884, and continued to have no trouble attracting business. I’ve found no photographs that show what she looked like, except after the Ripper completely destroyed her body. But contemporary sketches depict her as a very handsome woman with the hourglass figure coveted in that era. Her dress and manner were a remnant of a better world than the wretched one she tried to forget through alcohol.