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

Starvation killed, as did cholera, whooping cough, and cancer. Parents and their children, weakened by malnutrition and surrounded by filth and vermin, did not have immune systems that could fight off non-lethal illnesses. Colds and flu became bronchitis and pneumonia and death. Many infants weren't long for the world of the East End, and the people who lived and suffered there hated the London Hospital and avoided it if they could. To go there was to get worse. To let a doctor touch them was to die. Often this was true. An abscessed toe requiring amputation could lead to osteomyelitis - a bone infection - and death. A cut requiring sutures could lead to a staph infection - and death.

A sampling of hospital admissions for alleged suicides shows that in 1884, five men tried to kill themselves by cutting their throats, while four women cut their throats and two slit their wrists. In 1885, five women are listed as suicides or attempted suicides by poisoning and one by drowning. Eight men slashed their throats, one used a gun, and another a noose. In 1886, five women attempted suicide by cutting their throats. Twelve women and seven men tried to poison themselves, and another twelve men cut their throats or stabbed or shot themselves.

It simply isn't possible to sort out who really committed suicide and who might have been murdered. If the individual was a person of the dustbin in the East End, and the death or attempted death was witnessed, then police tended to accept what witnesses said. When a woman's abusive, drunk husband hurled two lit oil lamps at her, setting her on fire, she told police in her dying breath that it was entirely her fault. Her husband wasn't charged. Her death was listed as an accident.

Unless a case was obvious, there was no certainty that the manner or even cause of death would be accurate. If a woman's throat was cut indoors and the weapon was nearby, the police assumed she had killed herself. Such assumptions, including those made by the well-meaning Dr. Llewellyn, not only sent police down a false trail - if they bothered following up at all - but bad diagnoses and determinations of injury and death could destroy a case in court. Forensic medicine was not sophisticated in Dr. Llewellyn's day, and this rather than carelessness is the most likely explanation for his hasty, baseless conclusions.

Had he examined the pavement after Mary Ann's body was picked up and loaded into the ambulance, he would have noticed the blood and the blood clot that Constable Phail observed. Dr. Llewellyn might have noticed blood or a bloody fluid trickling into the gutter. Visibility was bad, so maybe he should have thought to wipe up some of this fluid to determine first whether it was blood, and second whether the serum was separating from the blood as it does during coagulation, which would have offered another clue about time of death.

Although taking the ambient temperature at the crime scene and the temperature of the body wasn't standard in death investigation, Dr. Llewellyn should have noted the stage of rigor mortis or stiffness, which occurs when the body no longer produces the adenosine triphosphate (ATP) needed for muscles to contract. Dr. Llewellyn should have checked for livor mortis, which occurs when the blood no longer circulates and accumulates in certain parts of the body due to gravity. In a hanging, for example, the lower body will turn purplish-red if the victim has been suspended by his or her neck for as little as half an hour. Livor mortis becomes fixed after about eight hours. Not only could livor mortis have suggested the time of Mary Ann Nichols's death, it could have told Dr. Llewellyn if her body had been moved at some point after her murder.

I remember a case from years ago when police arrived at the scene to discover a body as stiff as an ironing board propped against an armchair. The people in the house didn't want anyone to know the man had died in bed during the middle of the night, so they tried to move him to a chair. Rigor mortis replied, "Lie." In another instance from my early days of working in the medical examiner's office, the fully dressed body of a man came into the morgue accompanied by the story that he had been found dead on the floor. Livor mortis replied, "Lie." The blood had settled to his lower body, and on his buttocks was the perfect shape of the toilet seat he was still sitting on hours after his heart went into arrhythmia.

To determine time of death from any single postmortem artifact is like diagnosing a disease from one symptom. Time of death is a symphony of many details, and one plays on another. Rigor mortis is hastened along by the victim's muscle mass, the temperature of the air, the loss of blood, and even the activity preceding death. The nude body of a thin woman who has hemorrhaged to death outside in fifty-degree weather will cool faster and stiffen more slowly than the same woman clothed in a warm room and dead from strangulation.

Ambient temperature, body size, clothing, location, cause of death, and many more postmortem minutiae can be naughty little talebearers that fool even an expert and completely confuse him or her as to what really happened. Livor mortis - especially in Dr. Llewellyn's day - can be mistaken for fresh bruises. An object pressing against the body, such as part of an overturned chair wedged beneath the victim's wrist, will leave a pale area - or blanching - in the shape of that object. If this is misinterpreted as "pressure marks," then a case of nonviolent death can suddenly turn criminal.

There is no telling how much was hopelessly garbled in the Ripper murders and what evidence might have been lost, but one can be sure that the killer left traces of his identity and daily life. They would have adhered to the blood on the body and the ground. He also carried away evidence such as hairs, fibers, and his victim's blood. In 1888, it wasn't standard practice for police or doctors to look for hairs, fibers, or other minuscule amounts of evidence that might have required microscopic examination. Fingerprints were called "finger marks" and simply meant that a human being had touched an object such as a glass windowpane. Even if a patent (visible) fingerprint with well-defined ridge detail was discovered, it didn't matter. It wouldn't be until 1901 that Scotland Yard would establish its first Central Finger Print Bureau.

Five years earlier, in 1896, two patent fingerprints in red ink were left on a Ripper letter the police received October 14th. The letter is written in red ink, and the red ink fingerprints appear to have been made by the first and second fingers of the left hand. The ridge detail is good enough for comparison. Perhaps the prints were left deliberately - Sickert was the sort to know the latest criminal investigative technology, and leaving prints would be another "ha ha."

Police would not have linked them to him. Police never noticed the prints, as far as I can tell, and some sixty years after his death, it is still unlikely a comparison between those prints and Sickert's will ever be made. At present, we don't have his prints. They were burned up when he was cremated. The best I have been able to do so far is to find a barely visible print left in ink on the back of one of his copper etching plates. The print has yet to reveal sufficient ridge detail for a match, and one has to consider the possibility that the print wasn't left by Sickert but by a printer.

Fingerprints were known about long before the Ripper began his murders. Ridge detail on human finger pads gives us a better grip and is unique to every individual, including identical twins. It is believed that the Chinese used fingerprints some three thousand years ago to "sign" legal documents, but whether this was ceremonial or for purposes of identification is unknown. In India, fingerprints were used as a means of "signing contracts" as early as 1870. Seven years later, an American microscopist published a journal article suggesting that fingerprints should be used for identification, and this was echoed in 1880 by a Scottish physician working in a hospital in Japan. But as is true with every major scientific breakthrough - including DNA - fingerprints weren't instantly understood, immediately utilized, or readily accepted in court.