Portrait of a Killer

by Patricia Cornwell

  The brightness of the flame could be controlled by turning the chimney. The inner metal tube would rotate and block out as much of the flame as needed, allowing a policeman to flash his lantern and signal another officer out on the street. I suppose that flash is a bit of an exaggeration if one has ever seen a bull’s-eye lantern lit up. I found several rusty but authentic Hiatt & Co., Birmingham, bull’s-eye lanterns that were manufactured in the mid-1800s, precisely the sort used by the police during the Ripper investigation. One night I carried a lantern out to the patio and lit a small fire in the oil pan. The lens turned into a reddish-orange wavering eye. But the convexity of the glass causes the light to vanish when viewed from certain other angles.

  I held my hand in front of the lantern and at a distance of six inches could barely see a trace of my palm. Smoke wisped out the chimney and the cylinder got hot—hot enough, according to police lore, to brew tea. I imagined a poor constable walking his beat and holding such a thing by its two metal handles or clipping the lantern to his leather snake-clasp belt. It’s a wonder he didn’t set himself on fire.

  The typical Victorian may not have had a clue about the inadequacy of bull’s-eye lanterns. Magazines and penny tabloids showed constables shining intense beams into the darkest corners and alleyways while frightened suspects reel back from the blinding glare. Unless these cartoonlike depictions were deliberately exaggerated, they lead me to suspect that most people had never seen a bull’s-eye lantern in use. But that shouldn’t come as a surprise. Police patrolling the safer, less crime-ridden areas of the metropolis would have little or no need to light their lanterns. It was in the forbidden places that the lanterns shone their bloodshot eyes as they blearily probed the constables’ beats, and most Londoners traveling by foot or in horse-drawn cabs did not frequent those parts.

  Walter Sickert was a man of the night and the slums. He would have had good reason to know exactly what a bull’s-eye lantern looked like because it was his habit to wander the forbidden places after his visits to the music halls. During his Camden Town period, when he was producing some of his most blatantly violent works, he used to paint murder scenes in the spooky glow of a bull’s-eye lantern. Fellow artist Marjorie Lilly, who shared his house and one of his studios, observed him doing this 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 the police wore could not keep them warm and dry in bad weather, and when days were warm, a constable’s discomfort must have been palpable. He could not loosen the belt or tunic or take off his military-shaped helmet with its shiny Brunswick star. If the ill-fitting leather boots he had been issued maimed his feet, he could either buy a new pair with his own pay or suffer in silence.

  In 1887, a Metropolitan policeman gave the public a glimpse of what the average constable’s life was like. In an anonymous article in the Police Review and Parade Gossip, he told the story of his wife and their dying four-year-old son having to live in two rooms in a lodging house on Bow Street. Of the policeman’s twenty-four-shillings-a-week salary, ten went to rent. It was a time of great civil unrest, he wrote, and animosity toward the police ran hot.

  With nothing more than a small truncheon tucked into a special pocket of a trouser leg, these officers went out day after day and night after night, “well nigh exhausted with [our] constant contact with passionate wretches who had been made mad with want and cupidity.” Angry citizens screamed vile insults and accused the police of being “against the people and the poor,” read the unsigned article. Other better-off Londoners sometimes waited from four to six hours before calling the police after a robbery or burglary and then publicly complained that the police were unable to bring offenders to justice.

  Policing was not only a thankless job but also an impossible one, with one-sixth of the 15,000-member force out sick, on leave, or suspended on any given day. The supposed ratio of 1 policeman to 450 citizens was misleading. The number of men actually on the street depended on which shift was on duty. Since the 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 (6:00 A.M. to 2:00 P.M.) and late shift (2:00 P.M. to 10:00 P.M.) there were only some 2,000 beat officers working. That is a ratio of 1 policeman to every 4,000 citizens, or 1 policeman to cover every 6 miles of street. In August, the ratio got even worse when as many as 2,000 men took vacation leave.

  During the night shift a constable was expected to walk his beat in ten to fifteen minutes at an average pace of two and a half miles per hour. By the time the Ripper began his crimes, this requirement was no longer enforced, but the habit was deeply ingrained. Criminals, in particular, could tell a constable’s regular leathery walk quite a ways off.

  The greater London area was seven hundred square miles, and even if the police ranks doubled during the early morning hours, the Ripper could have prowled East End passageways, alleys, courtyards, and back streets without seeing a single Brunswick star. If a constable was drawing near, the Ripper was forewarned by the unmistakable walk. After the kill, he could slip into the shadows and wait for the body to be discovered. He could eavesdrop on the excited conversations of witnesses, the doctor, and the police. Jack the Ripper could have seen the moving orange eyes of the bull’s-eye lanterns without any threat of being seen.

  Psychopaths love to watch the drama they script. It is common for serial killers to return to the crime scene or insert themselves in the investigation. A murderer showing up at his victim’s funeral is so common that today’s police often have plainclothes officers clandestinely videotape the mourners. Serial arsonists love to watch their fires burn. Rapists love to work for social services. Ted Bundy worked as a volunteer for a crisis clinic.

  When Robert Chambers strangled Jennifer Levin to death in New York’s Central Park, he sat on a wall across the street from his staged crime scene and waited two hours to watch the body discovered, the police arrive, and the morgue attendants finally zip up the pouch and load it into an ambulance. “He found it amusing,” recalled Linda Fairstein, the prosecutor who sent Chambers to prison.

  Sickert was an entertainer. He was also a violent psychopath. He would have been obsessed with watching the police and doctors examining the bodies at the scenes, and he might have lingered in the dark long enough to see the hand ambulance wheel his victims away. He might have followed at a distance to catch a glimpse of the bodies being locked inside the mortuaries, and he might even have attended the funerals. In the early 1900s he painted a picture of two women gazing out a window, and inexplicably titled the work A Passing Funeral. Several Ripper letters make taunting references to his watching the police at the scene or being present for the victim’s burial.

  “I see them and they cant see me,” the Ripper wrote.

  Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Charles Warren did not care much about crime, and he didn’t know much about it, either. He was an easy target for a psychopath with the brilliance and creativity of Walter Sickert, who would have enjoyed making a fool of Warren and ruining his career. And in the end Warren’s failure to capture the Ripper, among his other blunders, brought about his resignation on November 8, 1888.

  Drawing public attention to the deplorable conditions of the East End and ridding London of Warren may be the only good deeds Jack the Ripper did, even if his motivation was somewhat less than altruistic.

  CHAPTER TEN

  MEDICINE OF THE COURTS

  Dr. Llewellyn testified at the Mary Ann Nichols inquest that she had a slight laceration of the tongue and a bruise on the lower right jaw from the blow of a fist or the “pressure of a thumb.” She had a circular bruise on the left side of her face that may have been from the pressure of a finger.

  Her neck had been cut in two places. One incision was four inches long, beginning an inch below the left jaw, just below the left ear. A second incision also began on the left side, but about an inch lower than the first incision and a littl
e forward of the ear. The second incision was “circular,” Dr. Llewellyn stated. I don’t know what he meant by “circular” unless he was trying to say that the incision was curved instead of straight—or simply that it encircled her neck. It was eight inches long; severed all blood vessels, muscle tissue, and cartilage; and nicked the vertebrae before terminating three inches below her right jaw.

  Dr. Llewellyn’s recital of the injuries to Mary Ann’s abdomen was as unspecific as his other determinations. On the left side were one jagged incision “just about at the lower part of the abdomen” and “three or four” similar cuts that ran in a downward direction on the right side of the abdomen. In addition, there were “several” cuts running across the abdomen and small stabs to her “private parts.” In his conclusion, Dr. Llewellyn said that the abdominal wounds were sufficient to cause death, and he believed they had been inflicted before her throat was cut. He based his conclusion on the lack of blood around her neck at the scene, but he failed to tell the coroner or the jurors that he had neglected to turn over the body. It is possible that he still didn’t know that he had overlooked—or failed to see—a large quantity 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 the killer was “left handed.” The weapon—and there was only one this time, he stated—was a long-bladed, “moderately” sharp knife used with “great violence.” The bruises on her jaw and face, he said, were also consistent with a left-handed assailant, and he theorized that the killer placed his right hand over Mary Ann’s mouth to stop her from screaming as he used his left hand to repeatedly slash her abdomen. In the scenario Dr. Llewellyn describes, the killer was facing Mary Ann when he suddenly attacked her. Either they were standing or the killer already had her on the ground, and he somehow managed to keep her from shrieking and thrashing about as he shoved up her clothes and started cutting through skin and fat, right down to her bowels.

  It makes no sense for a calculating, logical, and intelligent killer like Jack the Ripper to slash open a victim’s abdomen first, leaving her ample opportunity to put up a ferocious struggle as she suffered unimaginable terror, panic, and pain. Had the coroner carefully questioned Dr. Llewellyn about the relevant medical details, a very different reconstruction of Mary Ann Nichols’s murder might have emerged. Maybe the killer did not approach her from the front. Maybe he never said a word to her. Maybe she never saw him.

  A prevailing theory is that Jack the Ripper approached his victims and talked to them before they walked off together to an isolated, dark area where he suddenly and swiftly killed them. For quite some time, I assumed that this was the Ripper’s MO in all cases. As countless other people have done, I envisioned the Ripper using the ruse of wanting to solicit sex to get the woman to go with him. Since sex with prostitutes was often performed while the woman’s back was turned to her client, this seemed like the perfect opportunity for the Ripper to cut her throat before she had any idea what was happening.

  I don’t discount the possibility that this MO might have been the Ripper’s—at least in some of the murders. It really never occurred to me that it might be incorrect in any of them until I had a moment of enlightenment during the Christmas holiday of 2001 when I was in Aspen with my family. I was spending an evening alone in a condo at the base of Ajax Mountain, and as usual, I had several suitcases of research materials with me. I happened to be going through a Sickert art book for what must have been the twentieth time and stopped flipping pages when I got to his celebrated painting Ennui. What a strange thing, I thought, that this particular work of his was considered so extraordinary that Queen Elizabeth, The Queen Mother, bought one of its five versions and hung it in Clarence House. Other versions are privately owned or hang in various prestigious museums, such as the Tate.

  In all five versions of Ennui, a bored older man sits at a table, his cigar lit, a tall glass of what I assume to be beer in front of him. He stares off, deep in thought and completely uninterested in the woman behind him, leaning against a dresser, her head resting on her hand as she gazes unhappily at stuffed doves inside a glass dome. Central to the picture is a painting of a woman, a diva, on the wall behind the bored couple’s heads. Having seen several versions of Ennui, I was aware that the diva in each has a slightly different appearance.

  In three of them, she has what appears to be a thick feather boa thrown around her naked shoulders. But in the late Queen Mother’s version and the one in the Tate there is no feather boa, just some indistinguishable reddish-brown shape that envelops her left shoulder and extends across her upper arm and left breast. It wasn’t until I was feeling ennui myself as I sat in the Aspen condo that I noticed a vertical crescent, rather fleshy-white, above the diva’s left shoulder. The fleshy-white shape has what appears to be a slight bump on the left side that looks very much like an ear.

  Upon closer inspection, the shape becomes a man’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. Under the low magnification of a lens, the half-shadowed face of the man is more apparent, and the woman’s face begins to look like a skull. But at a higher magnification, the painting dissolves into the individual touches of Sickert’s brushes. I went to London and looked at the original painting at the Tate, and I did not change my mind. I sent a transparency of the painting to the Virginia Institute of Forensic Science and Medicine to see if we could get a sharper look through technology.

  Computerized image enhancement detects hundreds of gray shades that the human eye can’t see and makes it possible for a fuzzy photograph or erased writing to become visible or discernible. While forensic image enhancement might work with bank videotapes or bad photographs, it does not work on paintings. All our efforts accomplished with Ennui was to separate Sickert’s brush strokes until we ended up with the reverse of what he was doing when he put the strokes together. I was reminded, as I would be repeatedly in the Ripper case, that forensic science does not and will not ever take the place of human detection, deduction, experience, and common sense—and very hard work.

  Sickert’s Ennui was mentioned in the Ripper investigation long before I gave the matter a thought, but in a very different way from what I have just described. In one version of the painting, the feather-boa-enveloped diva has a white blob on her left shoulder that is slightly reminiscent of one of the stuffed doves under the glass dome on top of the dresser. Some Ripper enthusiasts insist that the “bird” is a “sea gull” and that Sickert cleverly introduced the “gull” into his painting to drop the clue that Jack the Ripper was Sir William Gull, who was Queen Victoria’s surgeon. The advocates of this interpretation usually subscribe 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, and I will state categorically that Jack the Ripper was not Dr. Gull or the Duke of Clarence. In 1888, Dr. Gull was seventy-one years old and had already suffered a stroke. The Duke of Clarence no more used a sharp blade than he was one. Eddy, as he was called, was born two months prematurely after his mother went out to watch her husband play ice hockey and apparently spent too much time being “whirled” about in a sledge. Not feeling well, she was taken back to Frogmore, where there was only a local practitioner to oversee Eddy’s unexpected birth.

  His developmental difficulties probably had less to do with his premature birth than they did with the small royal gene pool that spawned him. Eddy was sweet but obtuse. He was sensitive and gentle but a dismal student. He could barely ride a horse, was unimpressive during his military training, and was far too fond of clothes. The only cure his frustrated father, the Prince of Wales, and his grandmother the Queen could come up with was from time to time to launch Eddy on long voyages to distant lands.

  Rumors about his sexual preferences and indiscretions continue to this day. It may be that he engaged in homosexual activity, as some books claim, but he was
also involved with women. Perhaps Eddy was sexually immature and experimented with both sexes. He would not have been the first member of a royal family to play both sides of the net. Eddy’s emotional attachments were to women, especially to his beautiful, doting mother, who did not seem unduly concerned that he cared more about clothes than the crown.

  On July 12, 1884, Eddy’s frustrated father, the Prince of Wales and future king, wrote to Eddy’s German tutor, “It is with sincere regret that we learn from you that our son dawdles so dreadfully in the morning. . . . He will have to make up the lost time by additional study.” In this unhappy seven-page missive that the father wrote from Marlborough House, he is emphatic—if not desperate—that the son, who was in direct line to the throne, “must put his shoulder to the wheel.”

  Eddy had neither the energy nor the interest to go about preying on prostitutes, and to suggest otherwise is farcical. On the nights of at least three of the murders, he allegedly was not in London or even close by (not that he needs an alibi), and the murders continued after his untimely death on January 14, 1892. Even if the royal family’s surgeon, Dr. Gull, had not been elderly and infirm, he was far too consumed by fussing over the health of Queen Victoria and that of the rather frail Eddy to have had interest or time to run about Whitechapel in a royal carriage at all hours of the night, hacking up prostitutes who were blackmailing Eddy because of his scandalous “secret marriage” to one of them. Or something like that.

  It is true, however, that Eddy had been blackmailed before, as evidenced by two letters he wrote to George Lewis, the formidable barrister who would later represent Whistler in a lawsuit involving Walter Sickert. Eddy wrote to Lewis in 1890 and 1891 because he had gotten himself into a compromising situation with two ladies of low standing, one of them a Miss Richardson. He was trying to disengage himself by paying for the return of letters he imprudently had written to her and another lady friend.