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

In most cases, an ambulance was used to remove a drunk from a public place, but occasionally the cargo was the dead. It must have been quite a chore for a constable to navigate a handcart at night along unlighted, narrow, rutted streets. Such an ambulance is extremely heavy, even without a patient, and is very difficult to turn. Based on the one I found in Metropolitan Police storage, I would guess that the cart weighs several hundred pounds and would have been extremely difficult to pull up the most gentle hill, unless the constable at the handles was strong and had a good grip.

This morbid means of transportation was one that Walter Sickert would have seen had he lingered in the dark and watched his victims being carted away. It must have been thrilling to spy on a constable huffing and straining as Mary Ann Nichols's almost severed head lolled from side to side while the big wheels bounced and her dripping blood speckled the street.

Sickert is known to have drawn, etched, and painted only what he saw. Without exception, this is true. He painted a handcart that is almost identical to the one I saw in police storage. His picture is unsigned, undated, and titled The Hand Cart, Rue Stjean, Dieppe. Some catalogues refer to it as The Basket Shop, and in the painting the view is from the rear of a handcart that has what looks very much like a folded-down tan convertible top. Stacked in front of a shop across the narrow, deserted street are what appear to be large, long baskets, similar to what the French used as stretchers for the dead. A barely visible figure, possibly a man wearing some sort of hat, is walking along a sidewalk, looking over to see what is inside the cart. At his feet is an inexplicable black square shape that might be a piece of luggage, but could be part of the sidewalk, rather much like an open iron sewer trap. In Mary Ann Nichols's murder case, the newspapers reported that the police did not believe the "trap" in the street had been opened, implying that the killer had not escaped through the labyrinth of vaulted brick sewers that ran beneath the Great Metropolis.

A trap is also an opening in stage floors that gives actors quick and easy access to a scene in progress, usually to the surprise and delight of the unsuspecting audience. In most productions of Shakespeare's Hamlet, the ghost enters and exits through the trap. Sickert probably knew far more about stage traps than sewer traps. In 1881, he played the ghost in Henry Irving's Hamlet at the Lyceum Theater. The dark shape at the figure's feet in Sickert's painting could be a theater trap. It could be a sewer trap. Or it could be a detail Sickert created to tease viewers.

Mary Ann Nichols's body was lifted off the street and placed inside a wooden shell that was strapped into the ambulance. Two constables accompanied the body to the mortuary, where it was left in the ambulance outside in the yard. By now, it was after 4:30 A.M., and while the constables waited at the mortuary for Inspector John Spratling, a boy who lived in George Yard Buildings helped the police clean up the crime scene. Pails of water were splashed on the ground, and blood flowed into the gutter, leaving only a trace between the stones.

Police Constable John Phail later testified that as he watched the washing of the pavement he noticed a "mass of congealed" blood about six inches in diameter that had been under the body. It was his observation that contrary to what Dr. Llewellyn had said, there was quite a lot of blood, and it appeared to Phail that it had flowed from the murdered woman's neck under her back and as far down as her waist. Dr. Llewellyn might have noticed the same details had he turned over the body.

Inspector Spratling arrived at the mortuary and impatiently waited in the dark for the keeper to arrive with the keys. By the time Mary Ann Nichols's body was carried inside, it must have been after 5:00 A.M., and she had been dead for at least two hours. Her body, still inside the shell, was placed on a wooden bench that was typical of those used in mortuaries then. Sometimes these benches or tables were acquired secondhand from butchers at the local slaughterhouses. Inspector Spratling pulled up Mary Ann's dress for a closer inspection in the gas lamp's gloom and discovered that her abdomen had been slashed open, exposing the intestines. The next morning, Saturday, September 1st, Dr. Llewellyn performed the autopsy and Wynne Edwin Baxter, the coroner for the South-Eastern Division of Middlesex, opened the inquest into Mary Ann Nichols's death.

Unlike grand jury proceedings in the United States, which are closed to everyone except those subpoenaed, death inquests in Great Britain are open to the public. In an 1854 treatise on the office and duties of coroners, it was noted that while it may be illegal to publish evidence that could prove important in the trial, these facts were routinely published anyway and benefitted the public. Details might serve as a deterrent, and by knowing the facts - especially when there are no suspects - the public becomes part of the investigative team. Someone might read about the case and realize that he or she has helpful information to add.

Whether this reasoning is valid or not, coroners' inquisitions and even ex parte proceedings were usually fair game to journalists in 1888, as long as their reporting was truthful and balanced. As appalling as this may seem to anyone unaccustomed to the publication of evidence and testimony before the actual trial, were it not for Britain's open policy there would be virtually no detailed death investigation records of Jack the Ripper's crimes. With the exception of a few pages here and there, the autopsy reports have not survived. Many of them were lost during World War II, and others may have disappeared in a clerical, or careless, or dishonest Bermuda Triangle.

It is regrettable that so many documents are missing, because much more could be learned if we had access to the original police reports, photographs, memorandums, and whatever else is gone. But I doubt there was a cover-up. There was no "Rippergate" instigated by police authorities and politicians who were trying to shield the public from a shocking truth. Yet the doubters continue to champion their theories: Scotland Yard has always known who the Ripper was but protected him;

Scotland Yard accidentally let him go or tucked him into an asylum and didn't inform the public; the royal family was involved; Scotland Yard didn't care about murdered prostitutes and wanted to hide how little the police did to solve the homicides.

Untrue. No matter how badly the Metropolitan Police may have botched the Ripper investigation, there was no deliberate mendacity or disinformation that I could find. The boring fact is that most of what went wrong was due to sheer ignorance. Jack the Ripper was a modern killer born a hundred years too soon to be caught, and over the decades, records, including the original autopsy report of Mary Ann Nichols, have been lost, misplaced, or spirited away. Some ended up in the hands of collectors. I myself bought an alleged original Ripper letter for $1,500.

I suspect the document is authentic and possibly even written by Sickert. If a Ripper letter was available in 2001 through a search by a rare-documents dealer, then that letter at some point must have disappeared from the case files. How many others disappeared? I was told by officials at Scotland Yard that the overriding reason they finally turned over all Ripper files to the Public Record Office in Kew is that so much had vanished. Police officials feared that eventually there would be nothing left except reference numbers linked to empty folders.

The fact that the Home Office sealed the Ripper case records for a hundred years only increased the suspicion of conspiracy enthusiasts. Maggie Bird, the archivist in Scotland Yard's Records Management Branch, offers a historical perspective on the subject. She explains that in the late nineteenth century it was routine to destroy all police personnel files once the officer turned sixty-one, which accounts for the absence of significant information about the police involved in the Ripper cases. Personnel files on Inspector Frederick Abberline, who headed the investigation, and his supervisor, Chief Inspector Donald Swanson, are gone.