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

I doubt I will ever know whether an amateur sleuth kept this ledger or whether a policeman or a reporter did, but the handwriting is inconsistent with that of Scotland Yard's leading men, such as Abberline, Swanson, and other officers whose reports I have read. The penmanship in the ledger is small and very sloppy, especially for a period when script was consistently well formed, if not elegant. Most police, for example, wrote with a very good and in some instances beautiful hand. In fact, the handwriting in the clippings book reminds me of the rather wild and sometimes completely illegible way Walter Sickert wrote. His handwriting is markedly different from the average Englishman's. Since the precocious Sickert taught himself to read and write, he was not schooled in traditional calligraphy, although his sister Helena says he was capable of a "beautiful hand" when it suited him.

Was the ledger Sickert's? Probably not. I have no idea who kept it, but the Dispatch articles add another dimension to the reportage of the time. The journalist who covered crime for the Dispatch is anonymous - bylines then were as rare as female reporters - but had an excellent eye and a very inquisitive mind. His deductions, questions, and perceptions add new facets to cases such as the murder of Mary Ann Nichols. The Dispatch reported that the police suspected she was the victim of a gang. In London, at that time, roving packs of violent young men preyed upon the weak and poor. These hooligans were vindictive when they attempted to rob an Unfortunate who turned out to have no money.

The police maintained that Mary Ann had not been killed where her body was found, nor had Martha Tabran. The two slain women had been left in the "gutter of the street in the early hours of the morning," and no screams were heard. So they must have been murdered elsewhere, possibly by a gang, and their bodies dumped. The anonymous Dispatch reporter must have asked Dr. Llewellyn if it was possible that the killer had attacked Mary Ann Nichols from the rear and not the front, which would have made the killer right-handed - not left-handed, as Dr. Llewellyn claimed.

If the killer had been standing behind the victim when he cut her throat, the reporter explains, and the deepest wounds were on the left side and trailed off to the right, which was the case, then the killer must have held the knife in his right hand. Dr. Llewellyn made a bad deduction. The reporter made an excellent one. Walter Sickert's dominant hand was his right one. In one of his self-portraits he appears to be holding a paintbrush in his left hand, but it is an optical illusion created by his painting his reflection in a mirror.

Dr. Llewellyn might not have been very interested in a reporter's point of view, but perhaps he should have been. If the Dispatch journalist's beat was crime, he had probably seen more cut throats than Dr. Llewellyn had. Cutting a person's throat was not an uncommon way to murder someone, especially in cases of domestic violence. It was not an unusual way to commit suicide, but people who cut their own throats used straight razors, rarely knives, and they almost never sliced their necks all the way through to the vertebra.

The Royal London Hospital still has its admission and discharge record books for the nineteenth century, and a survey of entries shows die illnesses and injuries typical of the 1880s and 1890s. It must be kept in mind that the patients were presumed alive when they arrived at the hospital, which covered only the East End. Most people who cut their throats, assuming they severed a major blood vessel, would never have made it to a hospital but would have gone straight to the mortuary. They would not be listed in the admission and discharge record books.

Only one of the homicides cited during the period of 1884 to 1890 was eventually considered a possible Ripper case, and that is the murder of Emma Smith, forty-five, of Thrawl Street. On April 2, 1888, she was attacked by what she described as a gang of young men who beat her, almost ripped off an ear, and shoved an object, possibly a stick, up her vagina. She was intoxicated at the time, but she managed to walk home, and friends helped her to the London Hospital, where she was admitted and died two days later of peritonitis.

In Ripperology, there is considerable speculation about when Jack the Ripper began killing and when he stopped. Since his favorite killing field seems to have been the East End, the records of the London Hospital are important, not because the Ripper's dead-at-the-scene victims would be listed in the books, but because patterns of how and why people were hurting themselves and others can be instructive. I was worried that "cut throats" might have been miscalled suicides when they were really murders that might be additional ones committed by the Ripper.

Unfortunately, the hospital records don't include much more detail than the patient's name, age, address, in some cases the occupation, the illness or injury, and if and when he or she was discharged. Another one of my purposes in scanning the London Hospital books was to see if there were any statistical changes in the number and types of violent deaths before, during, and after the so-called Ripper rampage of late 1888. The answer is, not really. But the records reveal something about the period, especially the deplorable conditions of the East End and the prevailing misery and hopelessness of those who lived and died there by unnatural causes.

During some years, poisoning was the favored form of taking one's life, and there were plenty of toxic substances to choose from, all of them easily acquired. Substances that East End men and women used to poison themselves from 1884 to 1890 include oxalic acid, laudanum, opium, hydrochloric acid, belladonna, ammonia carbonate, nitric acid, carbolic acid, lead, alcohol, turpentine, camphorated chloroform, zinc, and strychnine. People also tried to kill themselves by drowning, gunshots, hanging, and jumping out of windows. Some leaps out of upper-story windows were actually accidental deaths when fire engulfed a rooming or common lodging house.

It is impossible to know how many deaths or near-deaths were poorly investigated - or not investigated at all. I also suspect that some deaths thought to be suicides might have been homicides. On September 12, 1886, twenty-three-year-old Esther Goldstein of Mulberry Street, White-chapel, was admitted to the London Hospital as a suicide by cut throat. The basis of this determination is unknown, but it is hard to imagine that she cut her neck through her "thyroid cartilage." A slice through a major blood vessel close to the skin surface is quite sufficient to end one's life, and cutting through the muscles and cartilage of the neck is more typical in homicides because more force is required.

If Esther Goldstein was murdered, that doesn't mean she was a victim of Jack the Ripper, and I doubt she was. It is unlikely that he killed an East End woman or two every now and then. When he started, he made a dramatic entrance and continued his performance for many years. He wanted the world to know about his crimes. But I can't say with certainty when he made his first kill.

In the same year that the Ripper crimes began, in 1888, four other East End women died from cut throats - all supposed to be suicides. When I first went through the musty old pages of the Royal London Hospital record books and noticed the numerous women admitted with cut throats, I anticipated that these deaths might have been Ripper murders assumed to be suicides. But more time and research revealed that cut throats were not unusual in a day when most impoverished people did not have access to guns.

People of the East End were put out of their misery by infections and diseases such as tuberculosis, pleurisy, emphysema, and pneumoconiosis. Men, women, and children were burned and scalded to death by accidents at home and at work.