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

During the Victorian era, the primary means of identifying a person and linking him or her to a crime was a "science" called anthropometry, which was developed in 1879 by French criminologist Alphonse Bertillon. He believed that people could be identified and classified through a detailed description of facial characteristics and a series of eleven body measurements including height, reach, head width, and length of the left foot. Bertillon maintained that skeletons were highly individualized, and anthropometry continued to be used to classify criminals and suspects until the turn of the century.

Anthropometry was not only flawed, it was dangerous. It was contingent on physical attributes that aren't as individualized as believed. This pseudoscience placed far too much emphasis on what a person looked like and seduced the police into consciously or subconsciously accepting as facts the superstitions of yet another pseudoscience - physiognomy, which asserts that criminality, morality, and intellect are reflected in a person's body and face. Thieves are usually "frail," while violent men are usually "strong" and "in good health." All criminals have superior "finger reach," and almost all female offenders are "homely, if not repulsive." Rapists tend to be "blond," and pedophiles often are "delicate" and look "childish."

If people in the twenty-first century have difficulty accepting the fact that a psychopathic killer can be attractive, likeable, and intelligent, imagine the difficulty in the Victorian era, when standard criminology books included long descriptions of anthropometry and physiognomy. Victorian police were programmed to identify suspects by their skeletal structure and facial features and to assume that a certain "look" could be linked to a certain type of behavior.

Walter Sickert would not have been tagged as a suspect during the time of the Ripper murders. The "young and beautiful Sickert" with "his well known charm," as Degas once described him, couldn't possibly be capable of cutting a woman's throat and slashing open her abdomen. I have even heard it suggested in recent years that if an artist such as Sickert had violent proclivities, he would have sublimated them through his creative work and not acted them out.

When the police were looking for Jack the Ripper, a great deal of importance was placed on witness descriptions of men last seen with the victims. Investigative reports reveal that much attention was paid to hair color, complexion, and height, with the police not taking into account that all of these characteristics can be disguised. Height not only varies in an individual depending on posture, hats, and footwear, but can be altered by "trickery." Actors can wear tall hats and special lifts in their shoes. They can stoop and slightly bend the knees under voluminous coats or capes; they can wear caps low over their eyes, making themselves appear to be inches taller or shorter than they are.

Early publications on medical jurisprudence and forensic medicine reveal that much more was known than was actually applied in crime cases. But in 1888, cases continued to be made or lost based on witness descriptions instead of physical evidence. Whether the police knew anything at all about forensic science, there was no practical way to get evidence tested. The Home Office - the department of government that oversees Scotland Yard - did not have forensic laboratories then.

A physician such as Dr. Llewellyn might never have touched a microscope; he might not have known that hair, bone, and blood could be identified as human. Robert Hooke had written about the microscopic properties of hairs, fibers, and even vegetable debris and bee stings more than two hundred years earlier, but to death investigators and the average doctor, microscopy was as rarified as rocket science or astronomy must have seemed.

Dr. Llewellyn attended the London Hospital Medical College and had been a licensed physician for thirteen years. His surgery or medical office was no more than three hundred yards from where Mary Ann Nichols was murdered. He was in private practice. Although the police knew him well enough to request him by name when Mary Ann Nichols's body was discovered, there is no reason to suppose that Llewellyn was a divisional surgeon for Scotland Yard; that is, he was not a physician who offered his services part-time to a particular division, which in this instance was the H Division covering Whitechapel.

The job of a divisional surgeon was to attend to the troops. Free medical care was a benefit of working for the Metropolitan Police, and a police surgeon was to be available when needed to examine prisoners, or to go to the local jail to determine if a citizen was drunk, ill, or suffering from an excess of "animal spirits," which I presume refers to excitement or hysteria. In the late 1880s, the divisional surgeon also responded to death scenes for a fee of one pound one shilling per case; he was paid two pounds two shillings if he performed the autopsy. But by no means was he expected to be well acquainted with the microscope, the nuances of injuries and poisonings, and what the body can reveal after death.

Most likely, Dr. Llewellyn was a local doctor the police felt comfortable calling upon, and it is possible that he had located in Whitechapel for humanitarian reasons. He was a Fellow of the British Gynecological Society, and would have been accustomed to being called upon at all hours of the night. When the police rapped on his door on the cool, overcast early morning of August 31st, he probably got to the scene as quickly as possible. He wasn't trained to do much more than determine that the victim was really dead and offer the police an educated guess as to when death had occurred.

Unless the body was turning green around the abdomen, which would indicate the beginning stages of decomposition, it was traditional in the early days of death investigation to wait at least twenty-four hours before performing the postmortem, on the remote chance that the person might still be alive and "come to" as he or she was being cut open. For centuries, the fear prevailed that one might be mistaken for dead and buried alive. Bizarre stories of people suddenly trying to sit up inside their coffins were in circulation, prompting some who were sufficiently concerned about such a fright to have their grave rigged with a bell attached to a string that ran through the earth to the coffin. Some stories may have been veiled references to cases of necrophilia. In one instance, a woman in her coffin wasn't really dead when a man had sex with her. She was paralyzed, it turned out, but conscious enough to consent to the weakness of the flesh.

Police reports of Mary Ann Nichols's murder leave little doubt that Dr. Llewellyn did not seem particularly interested in a victim's clothing, especially the filthy rags of a prostitute. Clothing was not a source of evidence but identification. Perhaps someone recognized a victim by what he or she was wearing. People did not carry around forms of identification in the late 1800s, unless it was a passport or visa. But that would have been rare. Neither one was required for British citizens to travel to the Continent. A body was unidentified when it was collected off the street and came to the mortuary unless he or she was known by the locals or the police.

I have often wondered how many poor souls went to their graves unidentified or misnamed. It would not have been a difficult task to murder someone and conceal the victim's identity, or to fake one's own death. During the investigations of the Ripper murders, no attempt was made to distinguish human blood from that of birds or fish or mammals. Unless the blood was on the body or near it, or on a weapon at the scene, the police could not say that the blood was related to the crime or came from a horse or a sheep or a cow. In the 1880s, the streets of Whitechapel near slaughterhouses were putrid with blood and entrails, and men walked about with blood on their clothing and hands.