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

In 1887, a Metropolitan policeman gave the public a glimpse of what the average constable's life was like. In an anonymous article in the Police Review and Parade Gossip, he told the story of his wife and their dying four-year-old son having to live in two rooms in a lodging house on Bow Street. Of the policeman's twenty-four-shillings-a-week salary, ten went to rent. It was a time of great civil unrest, he wrote, and animosity toward the police ran hot.

With nothing more than a small truncheon tucked into a special pocket of a trouser leg, these officers went out day after day and night after night, "well nigh exhausted with [our] constant contact with passionate wretches who had been made mad with want and cupidity." Angry citizens screamed vile insults and accused the police of being "against the people and the poor," read the unsigned article. Other better-off Londoners sometimes waited from four to six hours before calling the police after a robbery or burglary and then publicly complained that the police were unable to bring offenders to justice.

Policing was not only a thankless job but also an impossible one, with one sixth of the 15,000-member force out sick, on leave, or suspended on any given day. The supposed ratio of one policeman to 450 citizens was misleading. The number of men actually on the street depended on which shift was on duty. Since the number of policemen on duty always doubled during night shift (10:00 P.M. to 6:00 A.M.), this meant that during day shift (6:00 A.M. to 2:00 P.M.) and late shift (2:00 P.M. to 10:00 P.M.) there were only some 2,000 beat officers working. That is a ratio of one policeman to every 4,000 citizens, or one policeman to cover every six miles of street. In August, the ratio got even worse when as many as 2,000 men took vacation leave.

During the night shift a constable was expected to walk his beat in 10 to 15 minutes at an average pace of two and a half miles per hour. By the time the Ripper began his crimes, this requirement was no longer enforced, but the habit was deeply ingrained. Criminals, in particular, could tell a constable's regular leathery walk quite a ways off.

The greater London area was seven hundred square miles, and even if the police ranks doubled during the early morning hours, the Ripper could have prowled East End passageways, alleys, courtyards, and back streets without seeing a single Brunswick star. If a constable was drawing near, the Ripper was forewarned by the unmistakable walk. After the kill, he could slip into the shadows and wait for the body to be discovered. He could eavesdrop on the excited conversations of witnesses, the doctor, and the police. Jack the Ripper could have seen the moving orange eyes of the bull's-eye lanterns without any threat of being seen.

Psychopaths love to watch the drama they script. It is common for serial killers to return to the crime scene or insert themselves in the investigation. A murderer showing up at his victim's funeral is so common that today's police often have plainclothes officers clandestinely videotape the mourners. Serial arsonists love to watch their fires burn. Rapists love to work for social services. Ted Bundy worked as a volunteer for a crisis clinic.

When Robert Chambers strangled Jennifer Levin to death in New York's Central Park, he sat on a wall across the street from his staged crime scene and waited two hours to watch the body discovered, the police arrive, and the morgue attendants finally zip up the pouch and load it into an ambulance. "He found it amusing," recalled Linda Fairstein, the prosecutor who sent Chambers to prison.

Sickert was an entertainer. He was also a violent psychopath. He would have been obsessed with watching the police and doctors examining the bodies at the scenes, and he might have lingered in the dark long enough to see the hand ambulance wheel his victims away. He might have followed at a distance to catch a glimpse of the bodies being locked inside the mortuaries, and he might even have attended the funerals. In the early 1900s he painted a picture of two women gazing out a window, and inexplicably titled the work A Passing Funeral. Several Ripper letters make taunting references to his watching the police at the scene or being present for the victim's burial.

"I see them and they cant see me," the Ripper wrote.

Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Charles Warren did not care much about crime, and he didn't know much about it, either. He was an easy target for a psychopath with the brilliance and creativity of Walter Sickert, who would have enjoyed making a fool of Warren and ruining his career. And in the end Warren's failure to capture the Ripper, among his other blunders, brought about his resignation on November 8,1888.

Drawing public attention to the deplorable conditions of the East End and ridding London of Warren may be the only good deeds Jack the Ripper did, even if his motivation was somewhat less than altruistic.

Dr. Llewellyn testified at the Mary Ann Nichols inquest that she had a slight laceration of the tongue and a bruise on the lower right jaw from the blow of a fist or the "pressure of a thumb." She had a circular bruise on the left side of her face that may have been from the pressure of a finger.

Her neck had been cut in two places. One incision was four inches long, beginning an inch below the left jaw, just below the left ear. A second incision also began on the left side, but about an inch lower than the first incision and a little forward of the ear. The second incision was "circular," Dr. Llewellyn stated. I don't know what he meant by "circular" unless he was trying to say that the incision was curved instead of straight - or simply that it encircled her neck. It was eight inches long, severed all blood vessels, muscle tissue, and cartilage, and nicked the vertebrae before terminating three inches below her right jaw.

Dr. Llewellyn's recital of the injuries to Mary Ann's abdomen was as unspecific as his other determinations. On the left side were one jagged incision "just about at the lower part of the abdomen" and "three or four" similar cuts that ran in a downward direction on the right side of the abdomen. In addition, there were "several" cuts running across the abdomen and small stabs to her "private parts." In his conclusion, Dr. Llewellyn said that the abdominal wounds were sufficient to cause death, and he believed they had been inflicted before her throat was cut. He based his conclusion on the lack of blood around her neck at the scene, but he failed to tell the coroner or the jurors that he had neglected to turn over the body. It is possible that he still didn't know that he had overlooked - or failed to see - a large quantity of blood and a six-inch clot.

All injuries were from left to right, Dr. Llewellyn testified, and this led him to the conclusion that the killer was "left handed." The weapon - and there was only one this time, he stated - was a long-bladed, "moderately" sharp knife used with "great violence." The bruises on her jaw and face, he said, were also consistent with a left-handed assailant, and he theorized that the killer placed his right hand over Mary Ann's mouth to stop her from screaming as he used his left hand to repeatedly slash her abdomen. In the scenario Dr. Llewellyn describes, the killer was facing Mary Ann when he suddenly attacked her. Either they were standing or the killer already had her on the ground, and he somehow managed to keep her from shrieking and thrashing about as he shoved up her clothes and started cutting through skin, fat, right down to her bowels.

It makes no sense for a calculating, logical, and intelligent killer like Jack the Ripper to slash open a victim's abdomen first, leaving her ample opportunity to put up a ferocious struggle as she suffered unimaginable terror, panic, and pain. Had the coroner carefully questioned Dr. Llewellyn about the relevant medical details, a very different reconstruction of Mary Ann Nichols's murder might have emerged. Maybe the killer did not approach her from the front. Maybe he never said a word to her. Maybe she never saw him.