Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper--Case Closed (29 page)

There had once been a mortuary in Whitechapel, but it had been destroyed when a new road was put in. For one reason or another, London officials hadn’t gotten around to building a new facility to take care of the dead, and the problem wasn’t one that would soon be addressed. As we used to say when I worked in the medical examiner’s office, “Dead people don’t vote or pay taxes.” Dead paupers don’t lobby politicians for funding. Even though death is the great equalizer, it doesn’t make all dead people equal.

Dr. Phillips settled down and began his examination of Annie Chapman’s body. By now, it was in full rigor mortis, which would have been slower to form because of the cool temperature. Dr. Phillips’s estimation that Annie had been dead two or three hours when her body was found may have been relatively within bounds. He was out of bounds, however, when he concluded that the small amount of food in her stomach and the absence of liquid meant she was sober when she died.

Body fluids such as blood, urine, and the vitreous humor of the eye were not routinely tested for alcohol or drugs. Had they been, the doctor would most likely have found that Annie was still under the influence of alcohol when she was murdered. The more impaired she was, the better for her killer.

The cuts to Annie’s neck were on the “left side of the spine” and were parallel and separated by approximately half an inch. The killer had attempted to separate the bones of the neck, suggesting he had tried to decapitate her. Since the cuts were deepest on the left side and trailed off to the right, he was probably right-handed, assuming he attacked her from behind. Annie’s lungs and brain showed signs of advanced disease, and despite her obesity, she was malnourished.

At her inquest, Dr. Phillips gave his assessment of the sequence of events causing Annie Chapman’s death: Her breathing was interfered with, and then her heart stopped due to blood loss. Death, he said, was the result of “syncope,” or a dramatic drop in blood pressure. Had Virginia’s chief medical examiner, Dr. Marcella Fierro, been present at the inquest, I can just imagine what she would have said. A drop in blood pressure was a mechanism, not the cause, of Annie Chapman’s death. Blood pressure drops when anyone is dying, and there is no blood pressure when the person is dead.

Breathing stops, the heart stops, digestion stops, brain waves go flat when a person dies. Saying a person died of cardiac or respiratory arrest or syncope is like saying a person’s blindness is due to his not being able to see. What Dr. Phillips should have told the jury was that the cause of death was exsanguination due to cutting injuries of the neck. I have never understood the logic of a doctor filling in a death certificate with cardiac or respiratory arrest as the cause of death no matter if the poor person was shot, stabbed, beaten, drowned, run over by a car, or hit by a train.

During Annie Chapman’s inquest, a juror interrupted Dr. Phillips to ask if he had taken a photograph of Annie’s eyes, in the event her retinas might have captured the image of her killer. Dr. Phillips said he had not. He abruptly concluded his testimony by telling Coroner Baxter that the details given were sufficient to account for the victim’s death and to go into further detail would “only be painful to the feelings of the jury and the public.” Of course, Dr. Phillips added, “I bow to your decision.”

Baxter was not of the same opinion. “However painful it may be,” he replied, “it is necessary in the interests of justice” that the details of Annie Chapman’s murder be given. Dr. Phillips countered, “When I come to speak of the wounds on the lower part of the body I must again repeat my opinion that it is highly injudicious to make the results of my examination public. These details are fit only for yourself, sir, and the jury, but to make them public would simply be disgusting.” Coroner Baxter asked all ladies and boys to leave the crowded room. He added that he had “never before heard of any evidence requested being kept back.”

Dr. Phillips did not waver in his demurral, and he repeatedly requested that the coroner spare the public any further details. The doctor’s requests were denied, and he was given no choice but to reveal all he knew about the mutilation of Annie Chapman’s body and the organs and tissue the killer had taken. He testified that had he been the murderer, he could not possibly have inflicted such injuries upon the victim in less than fifteen minutes. Had he, as a surgeon, inflicted such damage with deliberation and skill, he estimated that it would have taken “the better part of an hour.”

The more details Dr. Phillips was forced to divulge, the farther off track he stepped. Not only did he reemphasize the illogical assertion that Mary Ann Nichols’s abdomen had been slashed before her throat was, but he went on to say that the motive for Annie Chapman’s murder was the taking of the “body parts.” He added that the killer must possess anatomical knowledge and was possibly associated with a profession that exposed him to dissection or surgery.

The suggestion of using bloodhounds came up, and Dr. Phillips pointed out that this might not be helpful since the blood belonged to the victim and not the killer. It did not occur to him—and perhaps to no one else at the inquest—that bloodhounds aren’t called bloodhounds because they are capable of picking up only the scent of blood.

The conflicting witness statements were not resolved during the inquest and never have been. If Annie was murdered as late as 5:30 A.M., as witness statements to the police would lead one to believe, then according to that day’s weather report, she was attacked shortly before the sun began to rise. It would be incredibly risky to grab a victim in a populated area, cut her throat, and disembowel her just before sunrise, especially on a market day when people would be out early.

A plausible scenario was suggested by the foreman of the coroner’s jury: When John Richardson sat on the steps to trim his boot, the back door was open and blocked his view of Annie’s body two feet below where he sat because the door opened to the left, where the body was. Richardson halfway agreed with what the foreman suggested, admitting that since he did not go into the yard, he could not say with certainty that the body wasn’t there while he was trimming his boot. He didn’t think so. But it was still dark when he stopped by his mother’s house, and he was interested in the cellar door and his boot, not the space between the back of the house and the fence.

Elisabeth Long’s statements are more problematic. She claimed she saw a woman talking with a man at 5:30 A.M. and was certain the woman was Annie Chapman. If this is true, then Annie was murdered and mutilated at dawn and had been dead less than half an hour when her body was discovered. Elisabeth did not get a good look at the man and told police she would not recognize him if she saw him again. She went on to say that he wore a brown deerstalker and perhaps a dark coat and was a “little” taller than Annie, which would have made him quite short since Annie was only five feet tall. He appeared to be a “foreigner,” had a “shabby, genteel” appearance, and was more than forty years old.

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.