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

Mortuary photographs were made with a big wooden box camera that could shoot only directly ahead. Bodies the police needed to photograph had to be stood up or propped upright against the dead-house wall because the camera could not be pointed down or at an angle. Sometimes the nude dead body was hung on the wall with a hook, nail, or peg at the nape of the neck. A close inspection of the photograph of a later victim, Catherine Eddows, shows her nude body suspended, one foot barely touching the floor.

These grim, degrading photographs were for purposes of identification and were not made public. The only way a person could know what Mary Ann Nichols's dead body looked like was to have viewed it at the mortuary or at the scene. If Sickert's sketch of the so-called Venetian woman is indeed a Representation of Mary Ann Nichols's staring dead face, then he might well have been at the scene or somehow got hold of the police reports - unless the detail was in a news story I somehow missed. Even if Sickert had seen Mary Ann at the mortuary, her eyes would have been shut by then, just as they are in her photograph. By the time she was photographed and viewed by those who might identify her and by the inquest jurors, her wounds had been sutured, and her body had been covered to the chin to hide the gaping cuts to the throat.

Unfortunately, few morgue photographs of the Ripper's victims exist, and the ones preserved at the Public\ Record Office are small and have poor resolution, which worsens with enlargement. Forensic image enhancement helps a little, but not much. Other cases that were not linked to the Ripper at the time - or ever - may not have been photographed at all. If they were, those photographs seem to have vanished. Crime-scene photographs usually weren't taken unless the victim's body was indoors. Even then the case had to be unusual for the police to fetch their heavy box camera.

In today's forensic cases, bodies are photographed multiple times and from many angles with a variety of photographic equipment, but during the Ripper's violent spree, it was rare to call for a camera. It would have been even rarer for a mortuary or a dead house to be equipped with one. Technology had not advanced enough for photographs to be taken at night. These limitations mean that there is only a scant visual record of Jack the Ripper's crimes, unless one browses through a Walter Sickert art book or takes a look at his "murder" pictures and nudes that hang in fine museums and private collections. Artistic and scholarly analysis aside, most of Sickert's sprawling nudes look mutilated and dead.

Many of the nudes and other female subjects have bare necks with black lines around them, as if to suggest a cut throat or decapitation. Some dark areas around a figure's throat are intended to be shadows and shading, but the dark, solid, black lines I refer to are puzzling. They are not jewelry, so if Sickert drew and painted what he saw, what are these lines? The mystery grows with a picture titled Patrol, dated 1921 - a painting of a policewoman with bulging eyes and an open-neck tunic that reveals a solid, black line around her throat.

What is known about Patrol is vague. Sickert most likely painted it from a photograph of a policewoman, possibly Dorothy Peto of the Birmingham police. Apparently, she acquired the painting and moved to London, where she signed on with the Metropolitan Police, to which she eventually donated the life-size Sickert portrait of herself. The intimation of at least one Metropolitan Police archivist is that the painting may be Taluable, but it is disliked, especially by women. When I saw Patrol, it was hanging behind a locked door and chained to a wall. No one seems quite sure what to do with it. I suppose it's another Ripper "ha ha" - albeit an accidental one - that Scotland Yard owns a painting by the most notorious murderer the Yard never caught.

Patrol isn't exactly a tribute to women or policing, nor would it appear that Sickert intended it to be anything other than another one of his subtle, scary fantasies. The frightened expression on the policewoman's face belies the power of her profession, and in typical Sickert fashion, the painting has the patina of morbidity and of something very bad about to happen. The wooden-framed 741A-by-461/4-inch canvas Patrol is a dark mirror in the bright galleries of the art world, and references to it and reproductions of it are not easily found.

Certain of his paintings do seem as secret as Sickert's many hidden rooms, but the decision to keep them under cover may not have been made solely by their owners. Sickert himself had a great deal to say about which of his works were to be exhibited. Even if he gave a painting to a friend - as is the case with Jack the Ripper's Bedroom - he could have asked the person to lend it to various exhibitions, or keep it private. Some of his work was probably part of his catch-me-if-you-can fun. He was brazen enough to paint or draw Ripperish scenes, but not always reckless enough to exhibit them. And these unseemly works continue to surface, now that the search is on.

Most recently, an uncatalogued Sickert sketch was discovered that seems to be a flashback to his music-hall days in 1888. Sickert made the sketch in 1920, and it depicts a bearded male figure talking to a prostitute. The man's back is partially to us, but we get the impression that his penis is exposed and that he is holding a knife in his right hand. At the bottom of the sketch is what appears to be a disemboweled woman whose arms have been dismembered - as if Sickert is showing the before and after of one of his kills. Art historian Dr. Robins believes the sketch went unnoticed because, in the past, the notion of looking for this sort of violence in Sickert's works was not foremost on the minds of people such as herself, and archival curators, and Sickert experts.

But when one works hard and begins to know what to look for, the unusual turns up, including news stories. Most people interested in news accounts of Jack the Ripper's murders rely on facsimiles from public records or microfilm. When I began this investigation, I chose The Times as the newspaper of record and was fortunate to find copies of the originals for 1888- 91. In that era, newsprint had such a high cotton fiber content that The Times papers I own could be ironed, sewn together, and bound, good as new.

I have continued to be surprised by the number of news publications that have survived for over a hundred years and are still supple enough for one to turn their pages without fear. Having begun my career as a journalist, I know full well that there are many stories to a story and that without looking at as many bits and pieces of reportage as I can find I can't begin to approach the whole truth. Ripper journalism in the major papers of the day is not scarce, but what is often overlooked are the quiet witnesses of lesser-known publications, such as the Sunday Dispatch.

One day, my dealer at an antiquarian bookshop in Chelsea, London, called to tell me he had found at auction a ledger book filled with, quite possibly, every Sunday Dispatch article written about the Ripper murders and others that might be related. The clippings, rather sloppily cut out and crookedly pasted into the ledger, were dated from August 12, 1888, through September 29, 1889. The story of the book continues to mystify me. Dozens of pages throughout the ledger were slashed out with a razor, enormously piquing my curiosity about their contents. Alongside the clippings are fascinating annotations written either in blue and black ink or with gray, blue, and purple pencils. Who went to all this trouble and why? Where has the ledger been for more than a century?

The annotations themselves suggest that most likely they were written by someone quite familiar with the crimes and most interested in how they were being worked by the police. When I first acquired the ledger, I fantasized that it might have been kept by Jack the Ripper himself. It seems that whoever cut out the clippings was focused on reports of what the police knew, and he agrees or disagrees with them in his notes. Some details are crossed out as inaccurate. Comments such as "Yes! Believe me" or "unsatisfactory" or "unsatisfactory - very" or "important. Find the woman" - and most peculiar of all, "7 women 4 men" - are scribbled next to certain details in the articles. Sentences are underlined, especially if they relate to descriptions witnesses gave of men the victims were last seen with.