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

A plausible scenario was suggested by the foreman of the coroner's jury: When John Richardson sat on the steps to trim his boot, the back door was open and blocked his view of Annie's body two feet below where he sat because the door opened to the left, where the body was. Richardson halfway agreed with what the foreman suggested, admitting that since he did not go into the yard, he could not say with certainty that the body wasn't there while he was trimming his boot. He didn't think so. But it was still dark when he stopped by his mother's house, and he was interested in the cellar door and his boot, not the space between the back of the house and the fence.

Elisabeth Long's statements are more problematic. She claimed she saw a woman talking with a man at 5:30 A.M. and was certain the woman was Annie Chapman. If this is true, then Annie was murdered and mutilated at dawn and had been dead less than half an hour when her body was discovered. Elisabeth did not get a good look at the man and told police she would not recognize him if she saw him again. She went on to say that he wore a brown deerstalker and perhaps a dark coat and was a "little" taller than Annie, which would have made him quite short since Annie was only five feet tall. He appeared to be a "foreigner," had a "shabby, genteel" appearance, and was more than forty years old.

This is quite a lot of detail for Elisabeth to have observed as she walked past two strangers in the predawn dark. Prostitutes and their clients were not strangers to the area, and more than likely Elisabeth Long knew to keep to her own business, so she didn't pause to stare. Besides, if she thought the conversation between the man and woman was friendly, then she might not have been inclined to take much notice anyway. The truth is, we don't know the truth. We have no idea how reliable any of these narrators were. It was a cool, misty morning. London was polluted. The sun wasn't up yet. How good was Elisabeth's eyesight? How well did Richardson see? Corrective lenses were luxuries to the poor.

Furthermore, in police investigations it isn't unusual for people to get excited because they witnessed something and are eager to help. Frequently, the more often a witness is interviewed, the more detail he or she suddenly remembers, just as the more times a guilty suspect is interrogated, the more embellished and conflicted the lies become.

There are only a few statements I can make with certainty about Annie Chapman's murder: She was not "suffocated" or strangled into unconsciousness, otherwise she would have had noticeable bruises on her neck; she was still wearing the handkerchief when she was murdered, and had her neck been compressed, the handkerchief most likely would have left an imprint or abrasion; her face may have appeared "swollen" because it was fleshy and puffy. If she died with her mouth open, her tongue may have protruded through the gap caused by her missing front teeth.

Coroner Baxter concluded the inquest with his belief that "we are confronted with a murderer of no ordinary character, [whose crimes are] committed not from jealousy, revenge, or robbery, but from motives less adequate than the many which still disgrace our civilization, mar our progress, and blot the pages of our Christianity." The jury returned the verdict of "Wilful Murder against a person or persons unknown."

Three days later, on Tuesday afternoon, a little girl noticed strange "marks" in the yard behind 25 Hanbury Street, two yards away from where Annie Chapman was killed. The girl immediately found a policeman. The marks were dried blood that formed a trail five or six feet long leading toward the back door of another decaying house overcrowded lodgers. Police concluded that the Ripper left the blood as he passed through or over the fence separating the yards, and that in an attempt •o remove some of the blood from his coat, he had taken it off and knocked it against the back wall of number 25, which would explain a bloody smear and a "sprinkle." Police then found a blood-saturated piece of crumpled paper that they believed the Ripper had used to wipe his hands. Jack the Ripper, the police concluded, had fled the crime scene the same way he had entered it.

This conclusion makes sense. In premeditated crimes, the killer carefully plans the entrance and exit, and someone as calculating and meticulous as Sickert would have familiarized himself with a safe escape. I doubt he left the scene by climbing over the rickety, haphazardly spaced palings that separated the yards. Had he done so, most likely he would have smeared blood on the boards or even broken a few. It would have been more convenient and sensible for Sickert to escape through the side yard that led to the street.

From there he could have woven in and out of doors and passages of "Stygian blackness, into which no lamp shone," as one reporter described the scene, a place "where a murderer might, if possessed of coolness, easily pass unobserved." Along Hanbury Street, doors were unlocked and weathered palings enclosed yards and "waste grounds" where houses had been demolished and constables feared to tread. Even if Sickert had been spotted, if he wasn't acting in a way that aroused suspicion, he would have been simply one more shadowy figure, especially if he had dressed to fit the environment. Actor that he was, he may even have bid a stranger good morning.

Sickert may have wrapped Annie Chapman's flesh and organs in paper or cloth. But there would have been blood drips and smears, and modern forensic investigation would have discovered a trail that was much longer than the five or six feet the little girl found. Today's chemicals and alternate light sources could have detected blood easily, but in 1888, it took the eyes of a child to find the strange "marks" in the yard. No blood tests were done, and it can't be said with certainty that the blood was Annie Chapman's.

Sickert may have been in the habit of watching prostitutes with their clients before moving in for the kill. He may have watched Annie in the past and was aware that she and other prostitutes used the unlocked passages and yards of 29 Hanbury and neighboring tenement houses for "immoral" purposes. He may have been watching her the morning he murdered her. "Peeping" at people dressing or undressing or engaging in sex is consistent in a lust murderer's history. Violent psychopaths are voyeurs. They stalk, watch, fantasize, then rape or kill or both.

Watching a prostitute sexually service a client could have been Sickert's foreplay. He might have approached Annie Chapman immediately after her last customer left. He might have solicited sex from her, gotten her to turn her back to him, and then attacked her. Or he might have appeared out of the dark and grabbed her from behind, jerked back her head by her chin, leaving the bruises on her jaw. The cuts to her throat severed her windpipe, rendering her unable to make a sound. Within seconds he could have had her on the ground and yanked up her clothing to slice open her abdomen. It takes no time or skill to disembowel a person. It doesn't take a forensic pathologist or surgeon to find the uterus, ovaries, and other internal organs.

Much has been made of the Ripper's alleged surgical skills. To cut out a uterus and part of the belly wall including the navel, the upper part of the vagina, and the greater part of the bladder does not require surgical precision, and it would be difficult for even a surgeon to "operate" when frenzied and in the dark. But Dr. Phillips was sure that the killer must have had some knowledge of anatomy or surgical procedures and had used a "small amputating knife or a well ground slaughterman's knife, narrow amp; thin, sharp amp;c blade of six to eight inches in length."

Sickert didn't need exposure to surgery or practice in internal medicine to know a thing or two about the female pelvic organs. The upper end of the vagina is attached to the uterus, and on top of the vagina is the bladder. Assuming the uterus was the trophy Sickert sought, he simply removed it in the dark and took the surrounding tissue with it. This isn't "surgery"; it is expediency, or grab and cut. One can assume he knew the anatomical location of the vagina and that it is close to the uterus. But even if he didn't, there were plenty of surgical books available at the time.