Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper--Case Closed (18 page)

Wynne Baxter was a solicitor and an experienced coroner who would preside over the inquest of Joseph Merrick two years later. Baxter would not tolerate lying in his courtroom or the abuse of proper protocol in a case. He was more than a little irked that inmates had removed Mary Ann Nichols’s clothing. He rigorously questioned the confused, fitful Mann, who steadfastly maintained that the clothing was neither torn nor cut when the body arrived. All he and Hatfield had done was strip the dead woman naked and wash her before the doctor showed up so he wouldn’t have to waste his time doing it.

They then cut and tore clothing to speed things along and make their chore a bit easier. She was wearing a lot of layers, some of them stiff with dried blood, and it is very difficult to pull clothing over the arms and legs of a body that is as rigid as a statue. When Hatfield took the stand, he agreed with everything Mann had said. The two inmates unlocked the mortuary after breakfast. They were by themselves when they cut and tore off the dead woman’s clothing.

They washed her, they were alone with her body, and they had no reason to think there was anything inappropriate about that. Transcripts of their testimonies at the inquest give the impression that the men were frightened and bewildered because they didn’t think they had done anything wrong. They really didn’t understand what the fuss was about. The workhouse mortuary wasn’t supposed to handle police cases, anyway. It was just a whistle-stop for dead inmates on their way to a pauper’s grave.

In Latin,
forensic
means “forum,” or a public place where Roman lawyers and orators presented their cases before judges. Forensic or legal medicine is the medicine of the courts, and in 1888, it hardly existed in practice. The sad truth is, there wasn’t much physical evidence that could have been either utilized or ruined in Mary Ann Nichols’s murder. But not knowing with certainty whether Mary Ann’s clothing was already cut or torn when her body arrived at the mortuary is a significant loss. Whatever the killer did would reveal more about him and his emotions at the time of the murder.

Based on the descriptions of Mary Ann’s body at the scene, I suspect her clothing was disarrayed but not cut or torn off, and it was on the early morning of August 31st when the Ripper advanced to his next level of violence. He shoved up her ulster, woolen petticoats, flannel underclothing, and skirts. He made one jagged, then “three or four” quick slashes downward, and “several” across, almost in the pattern of a grid. A few small stabs to the genitals and he was gone, vanished in the dark.

Without reviewing autopsy diagrams or photographs, it is very difficult to reconstruct injuries and re-create what a killer did and what he might have been feeling. Wounds can be fierce or they can be tentative. They can show hesitation or rage. Three or four shallow incisions on a wrist in addition to the deep one that severed veins tell a different story about a person’s suicide than one decisive cut does.

Psychiatrists interpret mental states and emotional needs through a patient’s demeanor and confessions of feelings and behavior. The physicians of the dead have to make those same interpretations through the braille of injuries old and new and debris on the body and the way the person was dressed and where he or she died. Listening to the dead speak is a unique gift and demands highly specialized training. The language of silence is hard to read, but the dead do not lie. They may be difficult to understand, and we might misinterpret them or fail to find them before their communications have begun to fade. But if they still have something to say, their veracity is unimpeachable. Sometimes they continue to talk long after they have been reduced to bone.

If people have a great deal to drink and get into their cars or into fights, their dead bodies admit it through alcohol levels. If a man was a heroin and cocaine addict, his dead body displays the needle tracks, and the metabolites morphine and benzoylecgonine show up in urine, the vitreous fluid of the eye, and the blood. If one frequently engaged in anal sex or was into genital tattoos and body piercing, or if a woman shaved off her pubic hair because her lover’s fantasy was to have sex with a child—these people speak openly after they are dead. If a teenage boy tried for a more intense orgasm by masturbating while dressed in leather and partially compressing the blood vessels in his neck with a noose—but he didn’t mean to slip off the chair he was standing on and hang himself—he’ll confess. Shame and lies are for those left behind.

It is startling what the dead have to say. I never cease to be amazed and pained. One young man was so determined to end his life that when he shot himself in the chest with his crossbow and didn’t die, he pulled out the arrow and shot himself again. Anger. Desperation. Hopelessness. No turning back. I want to die, but I’ll go ahead and make family vacation plans and write down the details of my funeral so I don’t inconvenience my family. I want to die, but I want to look nice, so I’ll put on makeup and fix my hair and shoot myself in the heart because I don’t want to ruin my face, the wife decides after her husband has run off with a younger woman.

I’ll shoot you in the mouth, bitch, because I’m tired of hearing you nag. I’ll throw your body in the tub and dump acid all over it, you cunt. That’s what you get for screwing around on me. I’ll stab you in the eyes because I’m tired of you staring at me. I’ll drain your blood and drink it because aliens are taking all of mine. I’ll dismember you and boil you piece by piece so I can flush you down the toilet and no one will ever know. Hop on the back of my Harley, you slut, and I’ll take you to a motel and cut you hundreds of times with a razor and scissors and watch you slowly die, because that’s the initiation I gotta do before I can be a member of the gang.

Mary Ann Nichols’s wounds tell us that the Ripper did not want her to struggle or scream, and he was ready for the next step of taking his knife below her throat and destroying her naked body. But he wasn’t a master of this move yet and could go only so far. He did not remove her bowels or organs. His cuts were only so deep. He took no body part with him as a trophy or a talisman that might bring him sexual fantasy and wonder when he was alone in one of his secret rooms. For the first time, I believe, the Ripper had ripped, and he needed to think about that for a while and feel what it was like and if he wanted more.

“I like the work some more blood,” the Ripper wrote October 5th.

“I must have some more,” the Ripper wrote November 2nd.

It was scarcely a week later when Jack the Ripper would publicly call himself by that infernal name. Perhaps it makes sense. Before his murder of Mary Ann Nichols, he had not “ripped” yet. Sickert came up with the stage name “Mr. Nemo” for a reason, and it wasn’t one driven by modesty. Sickert would have picked the name “Jack the Ripper” for a good reason, too. We can only guess what it was.

“Jack” was street slang for sailor or man, and “Ripper” is someone who “rips.” But Walter Sickert was never obvious. I scanned through a dozen dictionaries and encyclopedias dating from 1755 to 1906, checking definitions. Sickert could have come up with the name “Jack the Ripper” by reading Shakespeare. As Helena Sickert said in her memoirs, when she and her brothers were growing up, they were all “Shakespeare mad,” and Sickert was known to quote long passages of Shakespeare. Throughout his life he loved to stand up at dinner parties and deliver Shakespearean soliloquies. The word
Jack
is found in
Coriolanus, The Merchant of Venice,
and
Cymbeline.
Shakespeare doesn’t use the word
ripper
, but there are variations of it in
King John
and
Macbeth.

Definitions of
Jack
include: boots; a diminutive of John used contemptuously to mean a saucy fellow; a footboy who pulls off his master’s boots; a scream; a male; American slang for a stranger; American slang for a jackass; a cunning fellow who can do anything—such as a “Jack of all trades.” Definitions of
Ripper
include: one who rips; one who tears; one who cuts; a fine fellow who dresses well; a good fast horse; a good play or part.

Jack the Ripper was the stranger, the cunning fellow who could do anything. He “hath his belly-full of fighting.” He was a “cock that nobody can match.” He ripped “up the womb of your dear mother England.” Sickert, in the deep crevices of his psyche, might have felt that from his own mother’s womb he had been “ripp’d.” What happened inside his mother’s womb was unjust and not his fault. He would repay.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

SUMMER NIGHT

M
ary Ann Nichols’s eyes were wide open when her body was discovered on the pavement. She stared blindly into the dark, her face a wan yellow in the weak flame of a bull’s-eye lantern.

In Charles Darwin’s
Expression of the Emotions,
wide staring eyes are the accompaniment to “horror,” which Darwin associates with “extreme terror” or the “horrible pain of torture.” It is a centuries-old fallacy that a person dies with the last emotion frozen on his or her face. But symbolically, Mary Ann’s expression seemed to capture the last thing she saw in her life—the dark silhouette of her murderer cutting her up. The fact that the police made note in their reports of her wide, staring eyes may reflect what the men in blue on the street were beginning to feel about the Whitechapel murderer: He was a monster, a phantom who, in Inspector Abberline’s words, did not leave “the slightest clue.”

The image of a woman with her throat slashed and her wide eyes staring up blindly from the pavement would not easily be forgotten by those who saw it. Sickert would not have forgotten it. More than anyone else, he would have remembered her stare as life fled from her. In 1903, if his dates are reliable, he drew a sketch of a woman whose eyes are wide open and staring. She looks dead and has an inexplicable dark line around her throat. The sketch is rather innocuously titled
Two Studies of a Venetian Woman’s Head.
Three years later he followed it with a painting of a nude grotesquely sprawled on an iron bedstead and titled that picture
Nuit d’Été,
or
Summer Night.
One recalls that Mary Ann Nichols was murdered on a summer night. The woman in the sketch and the woman in the painting look alike. Their faces resemble the face of Mary Ann Nichols, based on a photograph taken of her when she was inside her shell at the mortuary and had already been “cleaned up” by workhouse inmates Mann and Hatfield.

Mortuary photographs were made with a big wooden box camera that could shoot only directly ahead. Bodies the police needed to photograph had to be stood up or propped upright against the dead-house wall because the camera could not be pointed down or at an angle. Sometimes the nude dead body was hung on the wall with a hook, nail, or peg at the nape of the neck. A close inspection of the photograph of a later victim, Catherine Eddows, shows her nude body suspended, one foot barely touching the floor.

These grim, degrading photographs were for purposes of identification and were not made public. The only way a person could know what Mary Ann Nichols’s dead body looked like was to have viewed it at the mortuary or at the scene or to have somehow convinced a police investigator to show him or her the photograph. This doesn’t mean Sickert didn’t charm someone from Scotland Yard to do the latter, especially if Sickert was wearing a disguise and using the ruse that he might recognize the victim. In addition to these possibilities, there is one more. In 1899, Alexandre Lacassagne, a professor of forensic medicine at the Lyon medical school, published
Vacher l’Eventreur et les crimes sadiques
(Lyon, A. Storck). In that book there are two photographs of Ripper victims: Mary Kelly at her crime scene and a mortuary photograph (of poor quality) of Catherine Eddows from the knees up, after her autopsy, when her postmortem incision and abdominal and neck injuries would not have been visible because they had been sutured. While it is possible that Sickert might have obtained Lacassagne’s work and seen these two photographs, the book on sadistic crimes does not include photographs of other Ripper victims, such as Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, or Martha Tabran. Nor does it include the most graphic photograph of Catherine Eddows, the one taken before her autopsy, her head lolling back, the gaping and fatal wound to her neck grotesquely displayed.

If Sickert’s sketch of the so-called Venetian woman is indeed a representation of Mary Ann Nichols’s staring dead face, then he might well have been at the scene or somehow got hold of the police reports—unless the detail was in a news story I somehow missed. Even if Sickert had seen Mary Ann at the mortuary, her eyes would have been shut by then, just as they are in her photograph. By the time she was photographed and viewed by those who might identify her and by the inquest jurors, her wounds had been sutured and her body had been covered to the chin to hide the gaping cuts to the throat.

Unfortunately, few morgue photographs of the Ripper’s victims exist, and the ones preserved at the Public Record Office are small and have poor resolution, which worsens with enlargement. Forensic image enhancement helps a little, but not much. Other cases that were not linked to the Ripper at the time—or ever—may not have been photographed at all. If they were, those photographs seem to have vanished. Crime-scene photographs usually weren’t taken unless the victim’s body was indoors. Even then the case had to be unusual for the police to fetch their heavy box camera.