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

Without reviewing autopsy diagrams or photographs, it is very difficult to reconstruct injuries and re-create what a killer did and what he might have been feeling. Wounds can be fierce or they can be tentative. They can show hesitation or rage. Three or four shallow incisions on a wrist in addition to the deep one that severed veins tell a different story about a person's suicide than one decisive cut does.

Psychiatrists interpret mental states and emotional needs through a patient's demeanor and confessions of feelings and behavior. The physicians of the dead have to make those same interpretations through the braille of injuries old and new and debris on the body and the way the person was dressed and where he or she died. Listening to the dead speak is a unique gift and demands highly specialized training. The language of silence is hard to read, but the dead do not lie. They may be difficult to understand, and we might misinterpret them or fail to find them before their communications have begun to fade. But if they still have something to say, their veracity is unimpeachable. Sometimes they continue to talk long after they have been reduced to bone.

If people have a great deal to drink and get into their cars or into fights, their dead bodies admit it through alcohol levels. If a man was a heroin and cocaine addict, his dead body displays the needle tracks, and the metabolites morphine and benzoylecgonine show up in urine, the vitreous fluid of the eye, and the blood. If one frequently engaged in anal sex or was into genital tattoos and body piercing, or if a woman shaved off her pubic hair because her lover's fantasy was to have sex with a child - these people speak openly after they are dead. If a teenage boy tried for a more intense orgasm by masturbating while dressed in leather and partially compressing the blood vessels in his neck with a noose - but he didn't mean to slip off the chair he was standing on and hang himself - he'll confess. Shame and lies are for those left behind.

It is startling what the dead have to say. I never cease to be amazed and pained. One young man was so determined to end his life that when he shot himself in the chest with his crossbow and didn't die, he pulled out the arrow and shot himself again. Anger. Desperation. Hopelessness. No turning back. I want to die, but I'll go ahead and make family vacation plans and write down the details of my funeral so I don't inconvenience my family. I want to die, but I want to look nice, so I'll put on makeup and fix my hair and shoot myself in the heart because I don't want to ruin my face, the wife decides after her husband has run off with a younger woman.

I'll shoot you in the mouth, bitch, because I'm tired of hearing you nag. I'll throw your body in the tub and dump acid all over it, you cunt. That's what you get for screwing around on me. I'll stab you in the eyes because I'm tired of you staring at me. I'll drain your blood and drink it because aliens are taking all of mine. I'll dismember you and boil you piece by piece so I can flush you down the toilet and no one will ever know. Hop on the back of my Harley, you slut, and I'll take you to a motel and cut you hundreds of times with a razor and scissors and watch you slowly die, because that's the initiation I gotta do before I can be a member of the gang.

Mary Ann Nichols's wounds tell us that the Ripper did not want her to struggle or scream, and he was ready for the next step of taking his knife below her throat and destroying her naked body. But he wasn't a master of this move yet and could go only so far. He did not remove her bowels or organs. His cuts were only so deep. He took no body part with him as a trophy or a talisman that might bring him sexual fantasy and wonder when he was alone in one of his secret rooms. For the first time, I believe, the Ripper had ripped, and he needed to think about that for a while and feel what it was like and if he wanted more.

"I like the work some more blood," the Ripper wrote October 5th.

"I must have some more," the Ripper wrote November 2nd.

It was scarcely a week later when Jack the Ripper would publicly call himself by that infernal name. Perhaps it makes sense. Before his murder of Mary Ann Nichols, he had not "ripped" yet. Sickert came up with the stage name "Mr. Nemo" for a reason, and it wasn't one driven by modesty. Sickert would have picked the name "Jack the Ripper" for a good reason, too. We can only guess what it was.

"Jack" was street slang for sailor or man, and "Ripper" is someone who "rips." But Walter Sickert was never obvious. I scanned through a dozen dictionaries and encyclopedias dating from 1755 to 1906, checking definitions. Sickert could have come up with the name "Jack the Ripper" by reading Shakespeare. As Helena Sickert said in her memoirs, when she and her brothers were growing up, they were all "Shakespeare mad," and Sickert was known to quote long passages of Shakespeare as an actor. Throughout his life he loved to stand up at dinner parties and deliver Shakespearean soliloquies. The word "Jack" is found in Coriolanus, The Merchant of Venice, and Cymbeline. Shakespeare doesn't use the word "ripper," but there are variations of it in King John and Macbeth.

Definitions of "Jack" include: boots; a diminutive of John used contemptuously to mean a saucy fellow; a footboy who pulls off his master's boots; a scream; a male; American slang for a stranger; American slang for a jackass; a cunning fellow who can do anything - such as a "Jack of all trades." Definitions of "Ripper" include: one who rips; one who tears; one who cuts; a fine fellow who dresses well; a good fast horse; a good play or part.

Jack the Ripper was the stranger, the cunning fellow who could do anything. He "hath his belly-full of fighting." He was a "cock that nobody can match." He ripped "up the womb of your dear mother England." Sickert, in the deep crevices of his psyche, might have felt that from his own mother's womb he had been "ripp'd." What happened inside his mother's womb was unjust and not his fault. He would repay.

Mary Ann Nichols's eyes were wide open when her body was discovered on the pavement. She stared blindly into the dark, her face a wan yellow in the weak flame of a bull's-eye lantern.

In Charles Darwin's Expression of the Emotions, wide staring eyes are the accompaniment to "horror," which Darwin associates with "extreme terror" or the "horrible pain of torture." It is a centuries-old fallacy that a person dies with the last emotion frozen on his or her face. But symbolically, Mary Ann's expression seemed to capture the last thing she saw in her life - the dark silhouette of her murderer cutting her up. The fact that the police made note in their reports of her wide, staring eyes may reflect what the men in blue on the street were beginning to feel about the Whitechapel murderer: He was a monster, a phantom who, in Inspector Abberline's words, did not leave "the slightest clue."

The image of a woman with her throat slashed and her wide eyes staring up blindly from the pavement would not easily be forgotten by those who saw it. Sickert would not have forgotten it. More than anyone else, he would have remembered her stare as life fled from her. In 1903, if his dates are reliable, he drew a sketch of a woman whose eyes are wide open and staring. She looks dead and has an inexplicable dark line around her throat. The sketch is rather innocuously titled Two Studies of a Venetian Woman's Head. Three years later he followed it with a painting of a nude grotesquely sprawled on an iron bedstead and titled that picture Nuit d'Ete, or Summer Night. One recalls that Mary Ann Nichols was murdered on a summer night. The woman in the sketch and the woman in the painting look alike. Their faces resemble the face of Mary Ann Nichols, based on a photograph taken of her when she was inside her shell at the mortuary and had already been "cleaned up" by workhouse inmates Mann and Hatfield.