Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper--Case Closed (48 page)

Various biographers explain that the reason the couple separated on September 29th is that on this day Sickert admitted to Ellen that he wasn’t faithful to her and never had been. If so, it would appear that his affairs—assuming he had more than the two mentioned in the divorce decree—were with “unknown” women. Nothing I have read would indicate that he was amorous toward women or given to inappropriate touching or invitations—even if he did use vulgar language. Fellow artist Nina Hamnett, a notorious bohemian who rarely turned down liquor or sex, writes in her autobiography that Sickert would walk her home when she was drunk; she stayed with him in France. The kiss-and-tell Nina says not a word about Sickert ever so much as flirting with her.

Ellen may really have believed Sickert was a womanizer, or her claims may have been something of a red herring if the humiliating truth was that they never consummated their marriage. In the late nineteenth century, a woman had no legal grounds to leave her husband unless he was unfaithful and cruel or deserted her. She and Sickert agreed to these claims. He did not fight her. One would assume she knew about his damaged penis, but it is possible the brotherly and sisterly couple never undressed around each other or attempted sex.

During their divorce proceedings, Ellen wrote that Sickert promised if she would “give him one more chance he [would] be a different man, that I am the only person he has ever really cared for—that he has no longer those relations with [unknown].” Ellen’s lawyer, she wrote, felt certain Sickert was “sincere—but that taking into consideration his previous life—& judging as far as he could of his character from his face & manner he does not believe he is capable of keeping any resolve that he made, and his deliberate advice to me is to go on with the divorce.

“I am dreadfully upset & have hardly done anything but cry ever since,” Ellen wrote Janie. “I see how far from dead is my affection for him.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

THE DARKEST NIGHT IN THE DAY

S
ickert’s roles changed like the light and shadow he painted on his canvases.

A shape should not have lines because nature doesn’t, and forms reveal themselves in tones, shades, and the way light holds them. Sickert’s life had no lines or boundaries, and his shape changed with every tilt and touch of his enigmatic moods and hidden purposes.

Those who knew him as well as those he brushed past only now and then accepted that
being Sickert
meant being the “chameleon,” the “poseur.” He was Sickert in the loud checked coat walking all hours through London’s foreboding alleyways and streets. He was Sickert the farmer or country squire or tramp or bespectacled masher in the bowler hat or dandy in black tie or the eccentric wearing bedroom slippers to meet the train. He was Jack the Ripper with a cap pulled low over his eyes and a red scarf around his neck, working in the gloom of a studio illuminated by the feeble glow from a bull’s-eye lantern.

Victorian writer and critic Clive Bell’s relationship with Sickert was one of mutual love-hate, and Bell quipped that on any given day Sickert might be John Bull, Voltaire, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Pope, a cook, a dandy, a swell, a bookmaker, a solicitor. Bell believed that Sickert wasn’t the scholar he was reputed to be and appeared to “know a great deal more than he did,” even if he was the greatest British painter since Constable, Bell observed. But one “could never feel sure that their Sickert was Sickert’s Sickert, or that Sickert’s Sickert corresponded with any ultimate reality.” He was a man of “no standards,” and in Bell’s words, Sickert did not feel “possessively and affectionately about anything which was not part of himself.”

Ellen was part of Sickert’s self. He had use for her. He could not see her as a separate human being because all people and all things were extensions of Sickert. She was still in Ireland with Janie when Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddows were murdered and when George Lusk, the head of the East End Vigilance Committee, received half of a human kidney by post on October 16th. Almost two weeks later, the curator of the pathology museum of the London Hospital, Dr. Thomas Openshaw, received the letter written on A Pirie & Sons watermarked paper and signed “Jack the ripper.”

“Old boss you was rite it was the left kidny . . . i wil be on the job soon and will send you another bit of innerds.”

The kidney was suspected of being Catherine Eddows’s, and probably was unless the Ripper managed to get half of a human kidney from somewhere else. The organ was anatomically preserved at the Royal London Hospital until it became so disintegrated that the hospital disposed of it in the 1950s—about the time Watson and Crick discovered the double helix structure of DNA.

In centuries past, bodies and body parts were preserved in “spirits” or alcoholic beverages such as wine. Some hospitals during the Ripper’s time used glycerine. When a person of high status died aboard ship and required a proper burial, the only way to preserve the body was in mead or whatever spirits were handy. If John Smith, the founding father of Virginia, had died during his voyage to the New World, most likely he would have been returned to London pickled in a keg.

Police reports indicate that the kidney sent to George Lusk was almost two weeks old if it came from Eddows’s body, and had been preserved in “spirits,” probably wine. Mr. Lusk did not seem horrified or in a frantic hurry to get the kidney to the police. When he received the ghastly gift with a letter that has not survived, he didn’t “think much about it.” The Victorians were not accustomed to psychopathic killers who took body parts and enclosed them in taunting letters to the authorities.

At first, it was suggested that the kidney was from a dog, but Lusk and the police wisely sought other opinions. The kidney was a hoax, the police agreed as the marinated organ in its box made the rounds. Medical experts, such as pathologist Dr. Openshaw, believed the kidney was human—although it was a stretch to conclude it was from a “female” who had “Bright’s disease.” The kidney was turned over to Dr. Openshaw’s care at the London Hospital. Had the kidney survived another few decades to be tested, and were Catherine Eddows exhumed for her DNA, there could have been a match. In court that would have hurt Walter Sickert quite a lot—were he still alive to be prosecuted—since the A Pirie & Sons watermark is on his stationery and also on the letter Jack the Ripper wrote to Dr. Openshaw, the stamps on the envelopes of the two letters have a DNA sequence in common, and the Ripper letter is confessional.

If Ellen was keeping up with the news at home, she would have known about the kidney. She would have known about the double murder that happened within a week of her leaving for Ireland. She may have heard of “human bones” wrapped in a parcel in a Peckham gutter, or the parcel containing a decomposing female arm found in the garden of a school for the blind on Lambeth Road, or the boiled leg that turned out to be from a bear.

Ellen should have known about the torso recovered from the foundation of the new Scotland Yard building. The headless, limbless dead woman was transported to the mortuary on Millbank Street, and she had little to say to Dr. Neville or the police, and they could not seem to agree about the arm found in Pimlico on September 11th. It was from the torso, of this Dr. Neville was certain, but its hand was rough, the fingernails unkempt—like those of a woman whose life was hard. When Dr. Thomas Bond was brought in to assist in the examination, he said that the hand was soft with well-shaped nails. The hand would have been dirty, possibly abraded, and the fingernails would have been caked with mud when the arm was found in the muck of low tide. Perhaps when it was cleaned up, it took on a higher social status.

In one report, the dismembered woman had a dark complexion. In another report, she had light skin. Her hair was dark brown, she was twenty-six years old, and five foot seven or eight, the doctor stated. The darkness of her skin could have been due to the discoloration of decomposition. In advanced stages, the skin turns dark greenish-black. Based on the condition of her remains, it may have been just as difficult to determine if her skin was fair.

Discrepancies in descriptions can cause serious problems in identifying the dead. Of course, forensic facial reconstructions—or the sculpting of the face based on the underlying architecture of the bone (assuming the head is found)—were not done in the nineteenth century, but a case some decades ago in Virginia makes my point. An unidentified man’s face was reconstructed by using green clay to rebuild his features over his skull. His hair color was based on the racial characteristics of his skeleton, which were those of an African-American, and his orbits were fitted with artificial eyes.

A woman responded to a black-and-white photograph of the facial reconstruction in the newspaper, and appeared at the morgue to see if the missing person might be her son. She took one look at the facial reconstruction and told the medical examiner, “No, that’s not him. His face wasn’t green.” As it turned out, the unidentified murdered young man was the woman’s son. (These days, when forensic facial reconstructions or sculptures are done on the unidentified dead, the clay is dyed to approximate the person’s color based on race.)

The estimate offered by both Dr. Neville and by Dr. Thomas Bond, that the torso was that of a woman about five foot seven or eight, could have been wrong, and the height they assigned to what was left of the victim could have precluded quite a number of people from coming forward to see if the remains were those of a relative or someone they knew. In that era, five foot seven or eight was quite tall for a woman. Were the doctors’ estimate off by as little as two or three inches, it could have been enough to cause the torso never to be identified—and it never was.

I believe the doctors did the best they could, based on what they had to work with. They could not have known about forensic anthropology. The doctors would not have known about today’s standard anthropological criteria used to place an individual into age categories, such as
infant
or
15 to 17
or
45-plus.
They may not have known much about epiphyses or growth centers of bone, nor could they have seen them since neither the torso nor recovered limbs were defleshed by boiling them in water. Growth centers are attachments, such as those that connect the ribs to the sternum, and when one is young these attachments are flexible cartilage. With age, they calcify.

In 1888, there were no calibrations and algorithms. There were no late-twentieth-century gadgets such as the single-photon absorptiometer or scintillation detectors to estimate height based on the length of the humerus, radius, ulna, femur, tibia, and fibula—the long bones of the arms and legs. The changes in density or mineral concentrations of bones are age-dependent. For example, a decrease in bone density usually correlates with an older age.

It could not accurately be claimed that the dismembered woman was exactly twenty-six years old, although it could have been said that her remains appeared to be those of a post-pubescent female who probably was in her late teens or twenties, and that she had dark-brown hair in her axillae, or armpits. The estimate that the woman had died five weeks earlier was also a guess. Doctors simply did not have the scientific means to judge time of death by decomposition. They knew nothing about entomology—the interpretation of insect development as a marker for time of death—and maggots teemed over the torso when it was found in the recesses of the new Scotland Yard building’s foundation.

The autopsy revealed pale, bloodless organs that indicated hemorrhage and would have been consistent with the woman’s throat having been cut before she was dismembered. At her inquest, Dr. Thomas Bond testified that the remains were those of a “well nourished” woman with “breasts that were large and prominent” and who at some point had suffered from severe pleurisy in one lung. Her uterus was missing, and her pelvis and legs had been sawn off at the fourth lumbar. The arms had been removed at the shoulder joints by several oblique cuts, and she had been decapitated by several incisions below the larynx. Dr. Bond said that the torso had been skillfully wrapped, and the flesh bore “clearly defined marks” where it had been bound with string. These marks left by string are noteworthy. Experiments conducted in the early and mid-nineteenth century revealed that ligature marks are not formed on bodies that have been dead for a while, indicating that the string was tied around the dismembered woman either while she was alive, or more likely, not long—perhaps only hours—after her death.

The severing of the pelvis from the torso is quite unusual in dismemberments, but neither the doctors nor the police seemed to have given this detail much thought, or even offered opinions about it. No other body parts of the woman turned up, except what was believed to be her left leg, which had been severed just below the knee. The partial limb had been buried several yards from where the torso had been found. Dr. Bond described the foot and leg as “exquisitely molded.” The foot was well cared for, the toenails neatly trimmed. There were no corns or bunions that might indicate that the victim had been a “poor woman.”