Portrait of a Killer

by Patricia Cornwell

  This is quite a lot of detail for Elisabeth to have observed as she walked past two strangers in the predawn dark. Prostitutes and their clients were not strangers to the area, and more than likely Elisabeth Long knew to keep to her own business, so she didn’t pause to stare. Besides, if she thought the conversation between the man and woman was friendly, then she might not have been inclined to take much notice anyway. The truth is, we don’t know the truth. We have no idea how reliable any of these narrators were. It was a cool, misty morning. London was polluted. The sun wasn’t up yet. How good was Elisabeth’s eyesight? How well did Richardson see? Corrective lenses were luxuries to the poor.

  Furthermore, in police investigations it isn’t unusual for people to get excited because they witnessed something and are eager to help. Frequently, the more often a witness is interviewed, the more detail he or she suddenly remembers, just as the more times a guilty suspect is interrogated, the more embellished and conflicted the lies become.

  There are only a few statements I can make with certainty about Annie Chapman’s murder: She was not “suffocated” or strangled into unconsciousness, otherwise she would have had noticeable bruises on her neck; she was still wearing the handkerchief when she was murdered, and had her neck been compressed, the handkerchief most likely would have left an imprint or abrasion; her face may have appeared “swollen” because it was fleshy and puffy. If she died with her mouth open, her tongue may have protruded through the gap caused by her missing front teeth.

  Coroner Baxter concluded the inquest with his belief that “we are confronted with a murderer of no ordinary character, [whose crimes are] committed not from jealousy, revenge, or robbery, but from motives less adequate than the many which still disgrace our civilization, mar our progress, and blot the pages of our Christianity.” The jury returned the verdict of “Wilful Murder against a person or persons unknown.”

  Three days later, on Tuesday afternoon, a little girl noticed strange “marks” in the yard behind 25 Hanbury Street, two yards away from where Annie Chapman was killed. The girl immediately found a policeman. The marks were dried blood that formed a trail five or six feet long leading toward the back door of another decaying house overcrowded with lodgers. Police concluded that the Ripper left the blood as he passed through or over the fence separating the yards, and that in an attempt to remove some of the blood from his coat, he had taken it off and knocked it against the back wall of number 25, which would explain a bloody smear and a “sprinkle.” Police then found a blood-saturated piece of crumpled paper that they believed the Ripper had used to wipe his hands. Jack the Ripper, the police concluded, had fled the crime scene the same way he had entered it.

  This conclusion makes sense. In premeditated crimes, the killer carefully plans the entrance and exit, and someone as calculating and meticulous as Sickert would have familiarized himself with a safe escape. I doubt he left the scene by climbing over the rickety, haphazardly spaced palings that separated the yards. Had he done so, most likely he would have smeared blood on the boards or even broken a few. It would have been more convenient and sensible for Sickert to escape through the side yard that led to the street.

  From there he could have woven in and out of doors and passages of “Stygian blackness, into which no lamp shone,” as one reporter described the scene, a place “where a murderer might, if possessed of coolness, easily pass unobserved.” Along Hanbury Street, doors were unlocked and weathered palings enclosed yards and “waste grounds” where houses had been demolished and constables feared to tread. Even if Sickert had been spotted, if he wasn’t acting in a way that aroused suspicion, he would have been simply one more shadowy figure, especially if he had dressed to fit the environment. Actor that he was, he may even have bid a stranger good morning.

  Sickert may have wrapped Annie Chapman’s flesh and organs in paper or cloth. But there would have been blood drips and smears, and modern forensic investigation would have discovered a trail that was much longer than the five or six feet the little girl found. Today’s chemicals and alternate light sources could have detected blood easily, but in 1888, it took the eyes of a child to find the strange “marks” in the yard. No blood tests were done, and it can’t be said with certainty that the blood was Annie Chapman’s.

  Sickert may have been in the habit of watching prostitutes with their clients before moving in for the kill. He may have watched Annie in the past and been aware that she and other prostitutes used the unlocked passages and yards of 29 Hanbury and neighboring tenement houses for “immoral” purposes. He may have been watching her the morning he murdered her. “Peeping” at people dressing or undressing or engaging in sex is consistent in a lust murderer’s history. Violent psychopaths are voyeurs. They stalk, watch, fantasize, then rape or kill or both.

  Watching a prostitute sexually service a client could have been Sickert’s foreplay. He might have approached Annie Chapman immediately after her last customer left. He might have solicited sex from her, gotten her to turn her back to him, and then attacked her. Or he might have appeared out of the dark, grabbed her from behind, and jerked back her head by her chin, leaving the bruises on her jaw. The cuts to her throat severed her windpipe, rendering her unable to make a sound. Within seconds he could have had her on the ground and yanked up her clothing to slice open her abdomen. It takes no time or skill to disembowel a person. It doesn’t take a forensic pathologist or surgeon to find the uterus, ovaries, and other internal organs.

  Much has been made of the Ripper’s alleged surgical skills. To cut out a uterus and part of the belly wall including the navel, the upper part of the vagina, and the greater part of the bladder does not require surgical precision, and it would be difficult for even a surgeon to “operate” when frenzied and in the dark. But Dr. Phillips was sure that the killer must have had some knowledge of anatomy or surgical procedures and had used a “small amputating knife or a well ground slaughterman’s knife, narrow & thin, sharp & blade of six to eight inches in length.”

  Sickert didn’t need exposure to surgery or practice in internal medicine to know a thing or two about the female pelvic organs. The upper end of the vagina is attached to the uterus, and on top of the vagina is the bladder. Assuming the uterus was the trophy Sickert sought, he simply removed it in the dark and took the surrounding tissue with it. This isn’t “surgery”; it is expediency, or grab and cut. One can assume he knew the anatomical location of the vagina and that it is close to the uterus. But even if he didn’t, there were plenty of surgical books available at the time.

  As early as 1872, Gray’s Anatomy was already in its sixth edition, and had detailed diagrams of the “organs of digestion” and “female organs of generation.” For one who had suffered permanent, life-altering debilitation from surgeries, Sickert was likely to have an interest in anatomy, especially the anatomy of the female genitalia and reproductive organs. I would expect a man of his curiosity, intelligence, and obsessiveness to have looked at Gray’s or Bell’s Great Operations of Surgery (1821) with its color plates prepared by Thomas Landseer, the brother of the famous Victorian painter of animals Edwin Landseer, whose work Sickert would have known.

  There was Carl Rokitansky’s A Manual of Pathological Anatomy, volumes I-IV (1849-54), George Viner Ellis’s Illustrations of Dissections with life-size color plates (1867), and James Hope’s Principles and Illustrations of Morbid Anatomy, with Its Complete Series of Coloured Lithographic Drawings (1834). Had Sickert any doubts as to the location of the uterus or any other organ, he had a number of ways to educate himself without exposure to the medical profession.

  Because of the dismal state of forensic science and medicine in 1888, there were a number of misunderstandings about blood. The size and shape of blood spatter and drips meant very little to the Victorian investigator, who believed that a fat person had a significantly greater volume of blood than a thin one. Dr. Phillips would have looked at the yard where Annie Chapman’s body was found and focused on whether there
was enough blood to indicate she was murdered in that location or elsewhere. Someone with a severed neck should lose most of his or her blood—approximately seven or eight pints. Quite a lot of blood could have soaked into Annie’s many layers of dark, thick clothing. Arterial blood would have spurted and could have soaked into the earth some distance away from her.

  I suspect the “patches” of closely clustered blood droplets noticed on the wall not far above Annie’s head were back spatter from the knife. Each time the Ripper slashed into her body and drew back the knife to slash again, blood flew off the blade. Since we do not know the number, shape, and size of the blood spatters, we can speculate only that they could not have been caused by arterial bleeding unless Annie was already on the ground while her carotid artery or arteries spurted blood. I suspect she was attacked while she was standing, and the deep cuts to her abdomen were made when she was on her back.

  Her intestines may have been pulled out and tossed aside as the Ripper groped in the dark for her uterus. Trophies or souvenirs bring back memories. They are a catalyst for fantasies. The taking of them is so typical as to be expected in violent psychopathic crimes. Sickert was far too smart to keep any incriminating souvenir where someone could have found it. But he had secret rooms, and I wonder where he got the inspiration for them. Perhaps there was some experience from his childhood that caused him to be drawn to dreadful places. There is a verse in a poem his father wrote that brings his son’s secret rooms to mind:What an uncanny/eerie feeling when I am within your walls,

  those high, naked, pale walls, how terrible they are,

  they remind me of the old-fashioned guard rooms . . .

  Does not one, here and there, pile up

  overcoats and caput, long coats, wintercoats

  and does not one carry all kinds of

  garbage into the room . . .

  In September 1889, the Ripper writes his return address as “Jack the rippers hole.” Sickert could have kept whatever he wanted in his secret places—or “rat holes,” as I call them. It is impossible to know what he did with his “garbage,” the body parts that would begin to decompose and smell unless he chemically preserved them. In one letter the Ripper writes of cutting off a victim’s ear and feeding it to a dog. In another, he mentions frying organs and eating them. Sickert might have been inordinately curious about the female reproductive system that had given birth to his ruined life. He could not study it in the dark. Perhaps he took the organs back to his lair and studied them there.

  After Annie Chapman’s murder, the relatives who had avoided her in life took care of her in death. They made her funeral arrangements, and at seven o’clock on Friday morning, September 14th, a hearse appeared at the Whitechapel mortuary to take her away clandestinely. Her relatives did not form a procession of coaches for fear of drawing attention to Annie’s last journey. She was buried at Manor Park Cemetery, seven miles northeast of where she was slain. The weather had taken a dramatic turn for the better. The temperature was sixty degrees and the sun shone all day.

  During the week following Annie’s death, businessmen in the East End formed a vigilance committee chaired by George Lusk, a local builder and contractor and member of the Metropolitan Board of Works. Lusk’s committee issued the following public statement: “Finding that, in spite of the murders being committed in our midst our police force is inadequate to discover the author or authors of the late atrocities, we the undersigned have formed ourselves into a committee and intend offering a substantial reward to anyone, citizen or otherwise, who shall give such information as will be the means of bringing the murderer or murderers to justice.”

  A Member of Parliament offered to donate £100 to the reward fund, and other citizens were willing to help. Metropolitan Police documents, however, note that the response to the citizens’ request should be that the practice of offering rewards had been abolished some time ago because rewards encouraged people to “discover” misleading evidence or to manufacture evidence, and “give rise to meddling and gossip without end.”

  In the East End, resentment and unruly behavior rose to a new high. People caroused at 29 Hanbury Street, gawking, some of them laughing and joking, while the rest of London fell into a “kind of stupor,” said The Times. The crimes were “beyond the ghastliest efforts of fiction”—even worse than Edgar Allan Poe’s Murders in the Rue Morgue, and “nothing in fact or fiction equals these outrages at once in their horrible nature and in the effect which they have produced upon the popular imagination.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  THE STREETS UNTIL DAWN

  Gatti’s Hungerford Palace of Varieties was one of the most vulgar music halls in London. It was Sickert’s favorite haunt the first eight months of 1888, and he went there several nights a week.

  Built into a 250-foot-wide arch underneath the South Eastern railway near Charing Cross Station, Gatti’s could seat six hundred, but on some nights as many as a thousand rowdy spectators crowded in for hours of drinking, smoking,and sexually charged entertainment. The popular Katie Lawrence shocked polite society by dressing in men’s breeches or a loose, short frock that exposed more female flesh than was deemed decent at the time. Music-hall stars Kate Harvey and Florence Hayes as “The Patriotic Lady” were regulars when Sickert was making his quick sketches in the flickering lights.

  Cleavage and exposed thighs were scandalous, but nobody seemed to worry much about the exploitation of the female child stars prancing about singing the same racy songs as the adults. Girls as young as eight years old dressed in costumes and little frocks and aped sexual awareness that invited pedophilic excitement and became the material for a number of Sickert’s paintings. Art historian Dr. Anna Gruetzner Robins explains that “among decadent writers, painters, and poets, there was something of a cult for the supposed sweetness and innocence of child music-hall performers.” In her book Walter Sickert: Drawings, she provides new insight into Sickert’s artistic interpretations of the female performers he watched night after night and followed from music hall to music hall. His sketches are a glimpse into his psyche and how he lived his life. While he did not mind impetuously giving away a painting, he would not part with the on-the-spot drawings he made on postcards and other small pieces of cheap paper.

  To look at these faint pencil sketches in the collections at the Tate Gallery, the University of Reading, the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, and Leeds City Art Gallery is to slip inside Sickert’s mind and emotions. His hasty artistic strokes capture what he saw as he sat in a music hall, gazing up at the stage. They are snapshots made through the lens of his own fantasies. While other men leered and egged on the half-naked performers, Sickert sketched dismembered female body parts.

  One might argue that these drawings were Sickert’s attempt at improving his technique. Hands, for example, are difficult, and some of the greatest painters had their struggles with hands. But when Sickert was sitting in his box or several rows back from the stage and making sketches on his little bits of paper, he wasn’t perfecting his art. He was drawing a head severed from its neck; arms with no hands; a torso with no arms; plump chopped-off naked thighs; a limbless torso with breasts bulging out of a low-cut costume.

  One might also argue that Sickert was thinking about new ways to reposition the body in a manner that wasn’t stilted or posed. Perhaps he was trying out new methods. He would have seen Degas’s pastel nudes. It could simply be that Sickert was following the lead of his idol, who had moved far beyond the old, static way of using draped models in the studio and was experimenting with more natural human postures and motion. But when Degas drew an arm in isolation, he was practicing technique, and the purpose of that arm was to be used in a painting.

  The female body parts Sickert depicted in his music-hall sketches were rarely if ever used in any of his studies, pastels, etchings, or paintings. His penciled-in limbs and torsos seem to have been drawn simply for the sake of drawing them as he sat in the audience watching the scantily dressed Queenie
Lawrence in her lily-white lingerie or the nine-year-old Little Flossie perform. Sickert did not depict male figures or male body parts in quite the same way. There is nothing about his sketches of males to suggest the subjects are being victimized, except for a pencil drawing titled He Killed His Father in a Fight. In it, a man is hacking to death a figure on a bloody bed.

  Sickert’s female torsos, severed heads, and limbs are images from a violent imagination. One can look at sketches his artist friend Wilson Steer made at the same time and in some of the same music halls and note a marked difference in Steer’s depictions of the human body and facial expressions. He may have drawn a female head, but it does not seem chopped off at the neck. He may have drawn the ankles and feet of a ballerina, but they are obviously alive, poised on toe, the calf muscles bunching. Nothing about Steer’s sketches looks dead. Sickert’s sketched body parts have none of the tension of life but are limp and disconnected.

  Gatti’s and other music halls Sickert visited in 1888, such as the Bedford, were by law supposed to end their performances and sales of liquor no later than half past midnight. If we assume that Sickert stayed until the entertainment ended, he would have been on London’s streets on many early mornings. Then he could wander. Apparently Sickert didn’t require much sleep.

  Artist Marjorie Lilly recalled in her memoir of him that “he only seemed to relax in odd snatches of sleep during the day and was seldom in bed until after midnight, when he might get up again to wander about the streets until dawn.” Lilly, who once shared a studio and a house with Sickert, observed that his habit was to wander after the music-hall performances. This peripatetic behavior, she added, continued throughout his life. Whenever “an idea tormented him” he would “thresh round the streets until dawn, lost in meditation.”