Less information is available about Elizabeth Stride. Although Plimmer dismisses the story of the sinking of the Princess Alice and its effects on her family, he does indicate that, during her marriage to John Stride, “she helped raise three children.”5 It was not the seven or nine of her usual stories, and apparently none of the three offspring mentioned were involved in any sort of disaster, ship-related or otherwise, but the wording itself is curious. The fact that she “helped raise” instead of simply “raised” indicates that there was another person involved in the upbringing of these children, and that these children were possibly not her own. If they had been, she would have done more than help raise them—Elizabeth would have birthed them and been expected to be the main caregiver. There is no indication as to whose children they might have been: John’s from a previous marriage? A friend’s? Does Plimmer suppose that Elizabeth had family in London? Whoever these children are, they disappear from the narrative as soon as they surface. Her death, for whatever reason, does not seem to effect them in any way.
Unlike Mary Nichols, when Elizabeth engages in violent arguments with her on-again, off-again boyfriend Michael Kidney there is no indication as to whether this violence was directed at him, her, or went in both directions. There is also no suggestion that these outbursts were drunken instead of sober or what the subject of these arguments may have entailed. Elizabeth is a known prostitute and thus might be assumed to be able to support herself without Kidney’s help, but she still presumably kept returning to him despite these violent arguments. Plimmer gives little enough information about the couple, so readers are left with a lack of information from which to make such judgments.
Unlike the other women, Catharine Eddowes is first introduced as a corpse. While the figures of Mary, Annie, and Elizabeth were introduced with descriptions and brief biographies, Catharine is first described as “an alarming and terrifying sight”6 encountered by a police officer walking his usual beat. She is a body before she is a woman, although her narrative rivals Annie’s as far as Plimmer is concerned.
Orphaned at a young age, passed between relatives, and running off with a much older man, “Eddowes experienced most of the hardships of life in Victorian England during her early years.”7 Perhaps Plimmer does not have to limit her hardships to merely her early years, since Catharine never seemed to be able to reach any level of comfort. Although she found a second common-law husband after leaving the father of her children and the couple remained together for years, neither seems to have had steady work. She would often pawn items in an attempt to make money for survival, and Plimmer also says that she worked to sell trinkets and things on the street during the day. Apparently the prostitution at night was either supplemental to this income when the couple needed more money, or prostitution alone was not enough to support them. In contrast to Annie’s solitary double bed, Catharine and John Kelly’s failure to maintain a steady income seems puzzling. Perhaps she is simply not as young and beautiful as those who were better off, either Annie in her lodging house or Mary Jane Kelly and her rented room.
Mary Jane is, of course, “a different kind of prostitute”8 than the others, not just in age and looks but apparently also bearing and education. While Plimmer does not discuss whether Michael Kidney and John Kelly were aware that Elizabeth and Catharine were prostitutes, he declares that it seems obvious that Mary Jane kept her prostitution from Joe Barnett. Although the pair had been living together, perhaps Barnett had been engaged in more continual labor that would have allowed Mary Jane to know when to expect him home and therefore limit her hours of operation. This situation might also raise questions about the character of Kidney and Kelly, or perhaps their practicality. If they knew about their lovers’ means of making money, they might have accepted it as a fact of their situation or perhaps encouraged it as a means of income. If Barnett did not know how Mary Jane earned her money, it might have been a statement of his personality and morals, or perhaps of her own cunning. If Barnett did not know how she earned money, then perhaps he did not know that she earned any at all, and she was free to spend it as she wished.
If she did earn money, however, there is the question of what she did with it. When Barnett moved out of their small room Mary Jane was already behind in rent and was, on the last night of her life, “fairly desperate”9 to earn some. She knew that her landlord would send someone to collect as least a portion of what was owed, and indeed her body was found because of this very situation. If Mary Jane Kelly, young and attractive, could not earn money when Mary Nichols found two customers in one day and Annie Chapman routinely paid for a double bed, what reason is there for this discrepancy? If she were indeed a prostitute and accustomed to walking the streets, perhaps during the day when Barnett would have been at work, why would she have encountered such difficulties during the last months of her life? These are questions that Plimmer does not think to address.
Plimmer does acknowledge that, in a modern murder investigation, the police would offer victim support to the friends and family of the dead woman. He does not indicate whether this support would be offered to her lover immediately or only after he had been determined not guilty—Plimmer suspects that Elizabeth may have been murdered by boyfriend Michael Kidney—but he does acknowledge that loved ones, even estranged loved ones, may be in need of such a service. Most Ripper narratives end their concern for the relatives after the inquest and the funeral, where all loved ones’ reactions are scrutinized for signs of guilt and then generally dismissed. In the quest for discovering the identity of the Ripper, interest in the women and their families ends there as the investigation moves on.
Before his final contribution of the fictionalized interview with the killer, Plimmer reviews the facts of the case with victim profiles. These are apparently geared more toward the Behavioral Science Unit’s approach to murder, with the focus being on what these profiles can tell us about the identity of the man who murdered the women and not on the subjects of the profiles themselves. As much as the Victorian era may be chastised for being cold in the face of death, accounts such as these victim profiles strip these women to the bare facts of their bodies’ existence.
Chasing the Ripper with Forensics and Fame
In 2002, Patricia Cornwell presented the first Jack the Ripper book to make use of modern DNA extraction technology in order to support her argument that artist Walter Sickert was Jack the Ripper. Her book Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper Case Closed came at great personal expense, since Cornwell not only paid for analysis of DNA evidence on a small sample of Ripper letters but also purchased a number of paintings by the artist to analyze. What the book does not emphasize is how many Ripper theorists do not believe that the killer himself wrote any of the letters—and thus did not lick the envelopes or the stamps—or how the analysis actually involved mitochondrial DNA. While mDNA is much more likely to have survived the passing decades, what Cornwell was able to conclude is that Sickert was not excluded from the population that might have licked the areas she tested. This is a topic that Cornwell does feel the need to address in the 2017 updated and expanded text, Ripper: The Secret Life of Walter Sickert.
Before becoming a best-selling novelist, especially known for her series centered on medical examiner Kay Scarpetta, Cornwell worked in the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in West Virginia. Although not a medical examiner herself, through both her fiction and nonfiction works Cornwell became known for her representations of the lives of medical examiners and their use of forensic science. The combination of her reputation for forensic writing, the fact that Cornwell spent so much of her own money, and her identity as one of the few female authors to tackle the subject helped with the popularity of Portrait of a Killer, even in the face of controversy from those who had already been studying the crimes. In short, no matter how much money Cornwell pours into her research or how passionately she argues her case, there is still no proof that any of the evidence she tested would have been touched—much less licked—b
y the real murderer.
Cornwell, like previous authors, focuses her narrative on proving the identity of the killer and not on the women themselves, a direction that has been magnified through book reviews and counter-arguments that followed publication. Although she does indeed devote the majority of her text to Sickert’s biography and proof of his alternate identity, Cornwell does take the time to set the scene, giving details about life in the East End for women who lacked the support of family or husbands. Like others before her, Cornwell describes the condition of the local doss houses, but she also explains the process by which the mortuary photographs were taken. These photographs—the most well-known and widely circulated of the murdered women—were the result of a heavy camera, fixed in position, that meant the women’s bodies had to be propped up against or hung from a wall.10 Although Cornwell’s description of the process is matter-of-fact, she is clearly presenting readers with a facet of the proceedings that is not commonly published and thus may serve to present readers with a moment of reflection. Not all of the indignities done to their bodies were performed by the Ripper.
At other times, however, her manner of blunt presentation detracts from the humanity of her subjects. When discussing the differences between nineteenth century and modern approaches to murder scenes, Cornwell is more likely to use language expected from the fields of medicine and forensics. She declares that “[t]he most important piece of evidence in any homicide is the body,”11 reducing the women to mere evidence after the Ripper has turned them from living women to inanimate bodies in the eyes of those called upon to handle the case. These women’s bodies are not only objects but also evidence, with the purpose of directing others to the identity of the killer. Not only did they need men in life to protect them from walking the streets, but their deaths are also entangled with—and directed toward—a man.
So much of these women’s lives is oriented toward others. Mary Ann Nichols is described as having “nothing left, not even her children,”12 positioning her as a mother and former wife. Annie Chapman’s husband left her “nothing but two children who wanted nothing to do with her.”13 Catherine Eddowes is “a drunken, immoral woman who belonged in the dustbin … and a disgrace to her children”14 as well. Only Elizabeth Stride and Mary Kelly escape the fate of having failed children as well as spouses and other family members. Then, after death, each is confronted with a new failure: a failure not only to protect herself and stay alive, but also to allow the expects who had full access to their bodies to identify their killer.
It is interesting that, when Cornwell observes that “a woman [at the time] had no legal grounds to leave her husband unless he was unfaithful and cruel or deserted her,”15 she is referring to Sickert’s wife at the time of the murders. Her concern is for Ellen Sickert, who may or may not have known that her husband was not only murdering multiple women but also writing myriad letters to newspapers and the police about his deeds. Certainly a woman who discovered this sort of secret about the man she married would deserve sympathy and should have been able to extract herself from that marriage without social condemnation. But what about those murdered women, four of whom had seen a marriage dissolve? Only Mary Kelly, in the biography she related to “her man, Joseph Barnett,”16 was widowed and then forced to fend for herself. Mary Ann, Annie, Liz, and Catherine had all seen the end of a marriage—likely common-law in Catherine’s case—and the loss of the security and support provided by that husband, but presumably none of these women was married to a serial killer.
These women drank and lied about their pasts and may themselves have been the troublesome spouse in previous relationships. It is possible that Catherine was not a prostitute, since Cornwell presents her and Kelly as cobbling together a living from other temporary positions, but her discussion of alcoholism and the late-nineteenth century approach to it comes after the narrative of Catherine’s death. Even if Catherine had not put herself at risk by walking the street as a prostitute, available for any man who had the money, she still made the unwise decision of drinking too much and putting herself in danger by not being in full control of her faculties. Although Cornwell does not say this outright, she does mention in passing that the Ripper “murdered them because it was easy.”17 Murdering women of the East End was easy because they were likely to be prostitutes, likely to be drunk, and unlikely to cause much of a stir if they were missed. Clearly these women had already been rejected by their husband and children, and whatever men they had taken up with since would have been East Enders themselves and hardly respectable.
There is, however, one moment of stark contrast in which Cornwell once again presents readers with a scenario that is unusual for the Ripper narrative. It is common to assert that any and all mutilations to their bodies took places after their throats were slit, and that in itself was likely after they had been choked to unconsciousness. Readers are free to engage in this scrutiny of the women’s corpses and other evidence because they have been reassured that the women did not suffer. Cornwell, however, takes a moment to discuss the murder of Mary Jane Kelly and argues that “[s]he may have felt the cuts as the loss of blood quickly caused her to shiver. Her teeth might have begun to chatter, but not for long as she grew faint, went into shock, and died. She may have drowned as blood gushing out of her carotid artery was inhaled through the cut in her windpipe and filled her lungs.”18 Cornwell does not give her readers a Mary Kelly whose death was instantaneous and painless. This Mary Kelly suffered, and her suffering will not be ignored.
Readers are presented with the usual photograph of Mary Kelly’s body as it was found the next day, as well as the litany of her injuries. There has always been a question of how quickly the Ripper worked, debated using timelines of when policemen walked their beats and when the women’s bodies were discovered, and now readers are confronted with some uncomfortable questions: how long was Mary Kelly conscious of what was happening to her? And how many of those injuries could have been inflicted in that amount of time?
The usual means of presenting the murdered body as evidence involves a time skip between the last known sighting of the woman in question and the discovery of her body. Somehow, between these two points in the timeline and perhaps around the estimated time of death given by the doctor called to the scene, the woman transitioned from a living, breathing person—rejected by her family, a disgrace to her children, an alcoholic and a prostitute—to a corpse and hopeful source of evidence. The transition from life to death is glossed over and, when the coroner’s report is dutifully provided, the injuries described are presumed to have been inflicted on a dead body and not one still clinging to life.
Cornwell’s description of Mary Kelly’s death is visceral and uncomfortable. It confronts readers with the idea of shivering not because of the temperature in the room, but because of massive blood loss, as well as the thought of drowning in blood. This blood, of course, would not have been inhaled through Mary Kelly’s mouth, but from the slash in her throat since her windpipe was no longer connected—a graphic image indeed. Cornwell is simply presenting her readers with medical commentary not much different from the litany provided in the coroners’ reports, except for the fact that the coroners are clearly describing a body where the life is already absent. The coroners came upon these women already as bodies and already dead, while Cornwell takes this moment to confront the very end of Mary Kelly’s life and fill in that time skip between last known living sighting and discovery of the body. In this moment Mary Kelly is confronted as a living, breathing human being—although not for long.
With her background in a medical examiner’s office and her history of writing a best-selling series about a medical examiner, it is perhaps not surprising that Cornwell remains largely within the usual expectations of a Ripper narrative. Much of this language and the approach gained popularity in the 1980s, not only with the century mark of the murders but also with the emergence of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit and the new specific language for discussing seri
al murder, the killers, and the victims. It is even possible that Cornwell, as one of the few women to write on the subject, consciously made the effort to avoid too many deviations from the standard approach to the subject of the Ripper and his identity. The traditional Ripper narrative has always been more matter-of-fact and distanced, referencing the murdered women exactly as Cornwell describes: as evidence and nothing more. Their importance to the mystery is solely in what clues they can provide.
Despite this, Cornwell does manage to insert some comments that veer away from the usual and by now expected representation, the most obvious being her observation about Mary Kelly’s death. Even then the language itself is medical and distanced, presenting a visceral subject almost dispassionately while at the same time grabbing readers in a way few Ripper authors even attempt. Even if the bodies Cornwell examines are currently lifeless, they are not simply objects that were never alive and thus cannot be dead. They are women’s bodies, of women whose lives were taken from them.
In a section added for the 2017 revision and expansion, Cornwell remarks that it is “appalling”19 that so many of these people put themselves in a position where their powers of observation were limited, either by the fact that they were drunk, they were in areas that were not well lit, or they were not wearing any corrective lenses that they needed but were unable to afford. This is a regular sentiment concerning murder victims and a common way of not only indicating how the victims could have prevented their own deaths, but also how readers might be able to protect themselves. The difference in this case, however, is that Cornwell is not discussing the murdered women. She is listing all of the reasons she does not put her faith in the testimony of eyewitnesses.
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