Portrait of a Killer

by Patricia Cornwell

  Finding an artist’s paint on a murder victim would have been a significant break in the investigation. Had it been possible in the Victorian era to detect paints adhering to a victim’s blood, the police might not have been so quick to assume Jack the Ripper was a butcher, a lunatic Pole or Russian Jew, or an insane medical student. The presence of residues consistent with cosmetics or adhesives would have raised significant questions as well. Stray knives turning up would have given answers instead of only posing questions.

  A preliminary quick-and-easy chemical test could have determined whether the dried reddish material on the blades was blood instead of rust or some other substance. Precipitin tests that react to antibodies would have determined whether the blood was human, and finally, DNA would either match a victim’s genetic profile or not. It is possible that latent fingerprints could have been found on a knife. It is possible that the killer’s DNA could have been determined had Jack the Ripper cut himself or perspired into the handkerchief he wrapped around a knife handle.

  Hairs could be compared or analyzed for non-nuclear, or mitochondrial, DNA. Tool marks imparted by the weapon to cartilage or bone could have been compared to any weapon recovered. These days, all that could be done would be, but what we can’t account for is how much Sickert would know were he committing his murders now. He was described by acquaintances as having a scientific mind. His paintings and etchings demonstrate considerable technical skill.

  He did some of his drawings in a tradesman’s daybook that had columns for pounds, shillings, and pence. On the backs of other drawings are mathematical scribbles, perhaps from Sickert’s calculating the prices of things. These same sorts of scribbles are on a scrap of lined paper the Ripper wrote a letter on. Apparently he was figuring out the price of coal.

  Sickert’s art was premeditated and so were his crimes. I strongly suspect he would know about today’s forensic science, were he committing his murders now, just as he knew what was available in 1888, which was handwriting comparison, identification by physical features, and “finger marks.” He also would have been keenly aware of sexually transmitted diseases, and it is likely he exposed himself to his victims’ body fluids as little as possible. He may have worn gloves when he killed and then removed his bloody clothing as quickly as he could. He may have worn rubber-soled boots that were quiet on the street and easy to clean. He could have carried changes of clothing, disguises, and weapons in a Gladstone bag. He could have wrapped items in newspaper and string.

  The day after Mary Ann Nichols’s murder, Saturday, September 1st, the Daily Telegraph and the Weekly Dispatch ran stories about the peculiar experience a dairyman claimed to have had at 11:00 P.M. the night before, or within hours of Mary Ann’s murder. The dairyman’s shop was in Little Turner Street, off Commercial Road, and he reported to police that a stranger carrying a shiny black bag came to the door and asked to buy a penny’s worth of milk, which he drank in one gulp.

  He then asked to borrow the dairyman’s shed for a moment, and while the stranger was inside it, the dairyman noticed a flash of white. He went to investigate and caught the stranger covering his trousers with a “pair of white overalls, such as engineers wear.” The stranger next snatched out a white jacket and quickly pulled it over his black cutaway as he said, “It’s a dreadful murder, isn’t it?” He grabbed his black bag and rushed into the street, exclaiming, “I think I have a clue!”

  The dairyman described the stranger as about twenty-eight years old with a ruddy complexion, three days’ growth of beard, dark hair, and large staring eyes, and as having the general appearance of a “clerk” or “student.” The white coveralls and jacket—similar to what an “engineer” wore—were also what Sickert used to cover his clothing when he painted in his studios. Three sets of these white coveralls were donated by his second wife’s family to the Tate Archive.

  The dairyman’s story takes on even more suspicious shadings when added to it is another account of clothing in the news after Elizabeth Stride’s and Catherine Eddows’s murders. The day following their murders, Monday, October 1st, at nine o’clock, a Mr. Chinn, who was the proprietor of Nelson Tavern in Kentish Town, discovered a newspaper-wrapped package behind the door of an outbuilding behind the tavern. He ignored the package until he happened to read about Elizabeth Stride’s murder and realized that the package in his outbuilding matched the description of the one carried by a man who was seen talking to Elizabeth less than half an hour before her death.

  Mr. Chinn went to the police station on Kentish Town Road to report the matter. When a detective arrived at the tavern, the package had been kicked into the roadway and had burst open. Inside was a pair of blood-soaked dark trousers. Hair was found adhering to coagulated bloodstains on the newspaper wrapping. No further description of the hair or newspaper wrapping seems to be known, and the trousers were subsequently carried off by a street person. I suppose the detective had no further use of them and simply left them in the road.

  The description of the man carrying a newspaper-wrapped package whom Police Constable William Smith observed talking to Elizabeth Stride is similar to the description the dairyman gave police: Both men had a dark complexion, were clean shaven—or at least had no full beard—and were approximately twenty-eight years old. The Nelson Tavern in Kentish Town was about two miles east of where Sickert lived in South Hampstead. He did not have a dark or weathered complexion, but it would have been easy enough for him to create one with makeup. He did not have dark hair. But actors wore wigs and dyed their hair.

  It would have been a simple matter to leave wrapped packages or even Gladstone bags in hidden places, and it is doubtful that Sickert would have cared whether the police recovered a pair of bloody trousers. In those days, nothing useful could be learned from them unless they bore some sort of marking that could have been traced back to the owner.

  Facial mutilations can be extremely revealing, and an expert in serial offenders and sex crimes would assign great importance to the mutilation of Catherine Eddows’s face, which, in Chief Inspector Donald Swanson’s words, damaged her “almost beyond identity.” The face is the person. To mutilate it is personal. Often this degree of violence occurs when the victim and assailant are known to each other, but not always. Sickert used to slash paintings to tatters when he decided to destroy his work. On one occasion he instructed his wife Ellen to go out and buy two curved, sharp knives that he said were just like ones she used for pruning.

  This took place in Paris, according to the story Sickert told to writer Osbert Sitwell. Sickert said he needed the knives to help slash Whistler’s paintings. The Master had a habit of being discontented with his work, and when all else failed, he destroyed his art. Burning was one method. Cutting up paintings was another. While Sickert was an apprentice, he probably would have assisted in ripping up canvases, just as he claimed, and perhaps with the very knives he mentioned to Sitwell. Exactly when those knives would have been purchased can’t be determined, but it was most likely between 1885 and 1887 or early 1888. Before 1885, Sickert wasn’t married. In 1888 Whistler was, and his relationship with Sickert was tapering off and would end entirely less than ten years later.

  An artist destroying a painting that he or she has grown to hate is in some measure analogous to a killer destroying the face of a victim. The destruction could be an effort to eradicate an object that causes the artist frustration and rage. Or it could be an attempt to ruin what one can’t possess, whether it is artistic perfection or another human being. If one wants sex and can’t have it, to destroy the object of lust is to make it no longer desirable.

  Night after night, Sickert watched sexually provocative performances at music halls. During much of his career, he would sketch nude female models. He spent time behind locked studio doors, staring, even touching, but never consummating except through a pencil, a brush, a palette knife. If he was capable of sexual desire but completely incapable of gratifying it, his frustration must have been agonizing and enraging.
In the early 1920s, he was painting portraits of a young art student named Ciceley Hey, and one day when he was alone with her in the studio, he sat next to her on the sofa and without warning or explanation, started screaming.

  One of the portraits he painted of her is Death and the Maiden. At some point between the early 1920s and his death in 1942, he gave her Jack the Ripper’s Bedroom. Where the painting had been since its completion in 1908, no one seems to know. Why he gave it to Ciceley Hey is also a mystery, unless one chooses to suppose that he entertained sexually violent fantasies about her. If she thought there was anything peculiar about Sickert’s producing a foreboding piece of work with an equally foreboding title, I am unaware of it.

  Perhaps one reason Sickert liked his models ugly is that he preferred to be around flesh he did not desire. Perhaps murder and mutilation were a powerful cathartic for his frustration and rage, and a way to destroy his desire. This is not to say he lusted after prostitutes. But they represented sex. They represented his immoral grandmother, the Irish dancer, whose fault it may have been—in Sickert’s twisted psyche—that he was born with a severe deformity. One can offer conjectures that may sound reasonable, but they will never comprise the whole truth. Why any person has such a disregard for life that he or she enjoys destroying it is beyond comprehension.

  The theory that each victim’s throat was cut while she was lying on the ground remained the predominant one even after the murders of Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddows. Physicians and police were convinced that based on blood patterns, the women could not have been standing when the killer severed their carotid arteries. Possibly what the doctors were assuming was that arterial bleeding would have spurted a certain distance and at a certain height had the victims been on their feet. There may also have been an assumption that the victims lay down to have sex.

  Prostitutes weren’t likely to lie down on hard pavers or in mud or wet grass, and the doctors were not interpreting blood patterns based on scientific testing. In modern laboratories, blood spatter experts routinely conduct experiments with blood to get a better idea of how it drips, flies, sprays, spurts, and spatters according to the laws of physics. In 1888, no one working the Ripper cases was spending his time researching how far or how high blood arced when an upright person’s carotid artery was cut.

  No one knew about the back-spatter pattern caused by the repeated swinging or stabbing motions of a weapon. It does not appear that the doctors who responded to the death scenes considered that perhaps Jack the Ripper simultaneously cut his victim’s throat and pulled her backward to the ground. Investigators didn’t seem to contemplate the possibility that the Ripper might have assiduously avoided being bloody in public by quickly getting out of his bloody clothes, coveralls, or gloves, and retreating to one of his hovels to clean up.

  Sickert was afraid of diseases. He had a fetish about hygiene and was continually washing his hands. He would immediately wash his hair and face if he accidentally put on another person’s hat. Sickert would have known about germs, infections, and diseases; he would have known that one didn’t have to engage in oral, vaginal, or anal intercourse to contract them. Blood splashed into his face or transferred from his hands to his eyes or mouth or an open wound was enough to cause him a serious problem. Years later, he would go through a time of worry when he thought he had a sexually transmitted disease that turned out to be gout.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  A GREAT JOKE

  At 3:00 A.M., September 30th, Metropolitan Police Constable Alfred Long was patrolling Goulston Street in Whitechapel.

  H Division wasn’t usually his beat, but he had been called in because Jack the Ripper had just murdered two more women. Long walked past several dark buildings occupied by Jews, directing his bull’s-eye lantern into the darkness and listening for any unusual sounds. His bleary light shone into a foreboding passageway leading inside a building and illuminated a piece of dark-stained fabric on the ground. Written above it in white chalk on the black dado of the wall was The Juwes are

  The men That

  Will not

  be Blamed

  for nothing.

  Long picked up the patch of fabric. It was a piece of apron wet with blood, and he immediately searched the staircases of 100-119. He would admit later at Catherine Eddows’s inquest, “I did not make any enquiries of the tenements in the buildings. There were six or seven staircases. I searched every one; found no traces of blood or footmarks.”

  He should have checked all of the tenements. It is possible that whoever dropped the piece of apron might have been heading inside the building. The Ripper might live there. He might be hiding there. Long got out his notebook and copied down the chalk writing on the wall, and he rushed to the Commercial Street Police Station. It was important that he report what he had discovered, and he didn’t have a partner with him. He may have been scared.

  Police Constable Long had passed the same passageway on Goulston Street at 2:20 A.M., and he swore in court that the piece of apron wasn’t there then. He would also testify at the inquest that he couldn’t say that the chalk message on the wall was “very recently written.” Perhaps the ethnic slur had been there for a while and it was simply a coincidence that the bit of bloody apron had been found right below it. The accepted and sensible point of view has always been that the Ripper wrote those bigoted words right after he murdered Catherine Eddows. It wouldn’t make sense for a slur about Jews to have been left for many hours or days in the passageway of a building occupied by Jews.

  The writing on the wall has continued to be the source of great controversy in the Ripper case. The message—presumably dashed off by the Ripper—was in a legible hand, and in the Metropolitan Police files at the Public Record Office, I found two versions of it. Long was fastidious. The copies he made in his notebook are almost identical, suggesting they may closely resemble what he saw in chalk. His facsimiles resemble Sickert’s handwriting. The uppercase T’s appear very similar to ones in the Ripper letter of September 25th. But it is treacherous—and worthless in court—to compare writing that is a “copy,” no matter how carefully it was made.

  People have always been intent on decoding the writing on the wall. Why was “Jews” spelled “Juwes”? Perhaps the writing on the wall was nothing more than a scribble intended to create the very stir it has. The Ripper liked to write. He made sure his presence was known. So did Sickert, and he also had a habit of scrawling notes in chalk on the dark walls of his studios. There is no photograph of the writing on the wall in Catherine Eddows’s case because Charles Warren insisted that it be removed immediately. The sun would rise soon and the Jewish community would see the chalky slur and all hell would break loose.

  What Warren didn’t need was another riot. So he made another foolish decision. As his policemen anxiously waited for the cumbersome wooden camera, they sent word to Warren suggesting that the first line, containing the word “Juwes,” could be scrubbed off and the rest of the writing left to be photographed for handwriting comparison. Absolutely not, Warren fired back. Rub out the writing right now. Day was breaking. People were stirring about. The camera had not arrived and the writing was rubbed out.

  No one doubted that the piece of apron Constable Long found had come from the white apron Catherine was wearing over her clothing. Dr. Gordon Brown said he could not possibly know if the blood on it was human—even if St. Bartholomew’s, the oldest hospital in London with one of the finest medical schools, was right there in the City. Dr. Brown could have submitted the bloody piece of apron to a microscopist. At least he thought to tie both ends of Catherine’s stomach and submit it for chemical analysis in the event narcotics were present. They weren’t. The Ripper wasn’t drugging his victims first to incapacitate them.

  I suspect the question of human blood wasn’t important to Dr. Brown or the police. The cut-out piece of bloody cloth seemed to fit the cut-out section of Catherine’s apron, and proof that the blood was human may not have been an issue if a
suspect went to court. Perhaps not testing the blood was a smart investigative tactic. If the blood had come back as human, one still could not prove it was Catherine’s.

  The police decided that the killer had cut off the bit of apron so he could wipe blood and fecal matter off his hands. For some reason, he hung on to the soiled fabric as he left the City and retraced his steps back toward Whitechapel. He ducked into the entrance of the building on Goulston Street to write the note on the wall, and then thought to discard the piece of soiled apron—perhaps when he rummaged in a pocket for a piece of chalk, which I suppose he just happened to be carrying around with him.

  The bit of bloody apron was not viewed as part of the Ripper’s deliberate game, nor was his visit to Goulston Street seen as part of his ongoing mockery of authority. I wonder why police didn’t ask why the killer was carrying around chalk. Did people of the East End routinely carry chalk or even own it? Perhaps it should have been considered that if the Ripper did bring a stick of chalk with him when he set out that night, he had planned to write the bigoted message—or something like it—on the wall after he committed murder.

  For the Ripper to backtrack from Mitre Square to Goulston Street involved his virtually returning to Elizabeth Stride’s crime scene. Quite likely, this route took him from the Church Passage out of Mitre Square, and to Houndsditch, Gravel Lane, Stoney Lane—and across Petticoat Lane, where Sickert went on his unnerving sojourn in the fog many years later when he carried his Gladstone bag and took Marjorie Lilly and her friend with him. The police were baffled that the murderer would be this bold. There were constables and detectives all over the place. The law enforcement community would have been better served had it spent more energy analyzing the killer’s outrageous backtrack and his piece of chalk instead of getting stuck in the muck of the meaning of “Juwes.”