Patricia Cornwell - Portrait Of A Killer - Jack The Ripper - Case Closed

Modern technology has made it possible for them to watch videotapes of themselves raping, torturing, and killing their victims. They relive their horrific crimes over and over again, and masturbate. For some psychopaths, the only way they can reach orgasm is to watch, stalk, fantasize, and replay their last rampages. Ted Bundy, says former FBI profiler Bill Hagmaier, strangled and raped his victims from behind, his excitement mounting as her tongue protruded and her eyes bulged. He reached climax as she reached death.

Then come the fantasies, the reliving, and the violent-erotic tension is unbearable and these killers strike again. The denouement is the dying or dead body. The cooling-off period is the safe haven that allows relief and the reliving of the crime. And the fantasies begin. And the tension builds again. And they find another victim. And they introduce another scene into their script to add more daring and excitement: bondage, torture, mutilation, dismemberment, grotesque displays of the carnage, and cannibalism.

As former FBI Academy instructor and profiler Edward Sulzbach has reminded me over the years, "The actual murder is incidental to the fantasies." The first time I heard him say this in 1984 I was baffled and didn't believe him. In my naive way of thinking I assumed that the big thrill was the kill. I had been a police reporter for the Charlotte Observer in North Carolina and was no coward when it came to dashing off to crime scenes. Everything centered on the terrible event, I thought. Without the event, there was no story. It shames me now to realize how naive I was. I thought I understood evil, but I didn't.

I thought I was a veteran investigator of horrors, and I knew nothing.

I didn't understand that psychopaths follow the same human patterns "normal" people do, but the violent psychopath strays off track in ways that would never register on the average person's navigational system. Many of us have erotic fantasies that are more exciting than the actualization of them, and looking forward to an event often gives us more delight than the experience of it. So it is for violent psychopaths as they anticipate their crimes.

Sulzbach also likes to say, "Never look for unicorns until you run out of ponies."

Violent crimes are often mundane. A jealous lover kills a rival or partner who has betrayed him or her. A card game turns ugly and someone is shot. A street thug wants cash for drugs and stabs his victim. A drug dealer is gunned down because he sold bad drugs. These are the ponies. Jack the Ripper wasn't a pony. He was a unicorn. In the 1880s and 1890s, Sickert was far too clever to paint pictures of homicides and entertain his friends by reenacting a real murder that had happened just beyond his door. The behavior that casts suspicion on him now was not apparent in 1888, when he was young and secretive and afraid of getting caught. Only his Ripper letters to the newspapers and the police offered evidence, but they were met with a blind eye, if not utter indifference and perhaps a chuckle or two.

There were two vices Sickert hated, or so he told his acquaintances. One was stealing. The other was alcoholism, which ran in his family. There is no reason to suspect that Sickert drank, at least not to excess until much later in life. By all accounts, he stayed away from drugs, even for therapeutic purposes. No matter his cracked facets or emotional twists, Sickert was clear-headed and calculating. He had an intense curiosity about anything that might catch his artist's eye or appear on his radar for violence. There was much to appeal to him on the Thursday night of August 30, 1888, when a brandy warehouse on the London docks caught fire around 9:00 P.M. and illuminated the entire East End.

People came from miles and peered through locked iron gates at an inferno that defied the gallons of water dumped on it by the fire brigades. Unfortunates drifted toward the blaze, both curious and eager to take advantage of an unplanned opportunity for sexual commerce. In the finer parts of London, other entertainment lit up the night as the famous Richard Mansfield thrilled theatergoers with his brilliant performance as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde at the Lyceum. The comedy Uncles and Aunts had just opened and had gotten a grand review in The Times, and The Paper Chase and The Union Jack were going full tilt. The plays had begun at 8:15, 8:30, or 9:00, and by the time they ended, the fire on the docks still roared. Warehouses and ships along the Thames were backlit by an orange glow visible for many miles. Whether Sickert was at his home or at one of the theaters or music halls, he was unlikely to miss the drama at South and Spirit quays that was attracting such an excited crowd.

Of course, it is purely speculative to say that Sickert wandered toward the water to watch. He might not have been in London on this night, although there is nothing on record to prove he wasn't. There are no letters, no documents, no news accounts, no works of art that might so much as hint that Sickert was not in London. Divining what he was doing often means discovering what he wasn't doing.

Sickert wasn't interested in people knowing where he was. He was notorious for his lifelong habit of renting at least three secret "studios" at a time. These hovels were scattered about in locations so private and so unexpected and so unpredictable that his wife, colleagues, and friends had no idea where they were. His known studios, which numbered close to twenty during his life, were often slovenly "small rooms" filled with chaos that "inspired" him. Sickert worked alone behind locked doors. It was rare that he would see anyone, and if he did, a visit to these rat holes required a telegram or a special knock. In his older years, he erected tall black gates in front of his door and chained a guard dog to one of the iron bars.

As is true of any good actor, Sickert knew how to make an entrance and an exit. He had a habit of vanishing for days or weeks without telling Ellen or his second or third wives or his acquaintances where he was or why. He might invite friends to dinner and not show up. He would reappear as he pleased, usually no explanation offered. Outings often turned into his missing in action, for he liked to go to the theater and music halls alone and afterward wander during the late night and misty early morning hours.

Sickert's routes were peculiar and illogical, especially if he was returning home from the theaters and music halls in central London along the Strand. Denys Sutton writes that Sickert often walked north to Hoxton, then retraced his steps to end up in Shoreditch on the western border of Whitechapel. From there he would have to walk west and north to return to 54 Broadhurst Gardens in northwest London, where he lived. According to Sutton, the reason for these strange peregrinations and detours into a dangerous part of East London is that Sickert needed "a long silent tramp to meditate on what he had just seen" in a music hall or theater. The artist pondering. The artist observing a dark, foreboding world and the people who lived in it. The artist who liked his women ugly.

Mary Ann Nichols was approximately forty-two years old and missing five teeth.

She was five foot two or three and plump, with a fleshy, plain face, brown eyes, and graying dark brown hair. During her marriage to a printer's machinist named William Nichols, she had given birth to five children, the oldest twenty-one, the youngest eight or nine at the time of her murder.

For the past seven years or so, she and William had been separated because of her drinking and quarrelsome ways. His support of five shillings each week ceased, he later told the police, when he learned she was living the life of a prostitute. Mary Ann had nothing left, not even her children. Years ago she had lost custody of them when her ex-husband informed the courts that she was living in sin with a blacksmith named Drew, who soon enough left her, too. The last time her former husband saw Mary Ann alive was in June of 1886 at the funeral of a son who had burned to death when a paraffin lamp exploded.