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

As early as 1872, Gray's Anatomy was already in its sixth edition, and had detailed diagrams of the "organs of digestion" and "female organs of generation." For one who had suffered permanent, life-altering debilitation from surgeries, Sickert was likely to have an interest in anatomy, especially the anatomy of the female genitalia and reproductive organs. I would expect a man of his curiosity, intelligence, and obsessiveness to have looked at Gray's or Bell's Great Operations of Surgery (1821) with its color plates prepared by Thomas Landseer, the brother of the famous Victorian painter of animals Edwin Landseer, whose work Sickert would have known.

There was Carl Rokitansky's A Manual of Pathological Anatomy, volumes I-IV (1849-54), George Viner Ellis's Illustrations of Dissections with life-size color plates (1867), and James Hope's Principles and Illustrations of Morbid Anatomy, with its Complete Series of Coloured Lithographic Drawings (1834). Had Sickert any doubts as to the location of the uterus or any other organ, he had a number of ways to educate himself without exposure to the medical profession.

Because of the dismal state of forensic science and medicine in 1888, there were a number of misunderstandings about blood. The size and shape of blood spatter and drips meant very little to the Victorian investigator, who believed that a fat person had a significantly greater volume of blood than a thin one. Dr. Phillips would have looked at the yard where Annie Chapman's body was found and focused on whether there was enough blood to indicate she was murdered in that location or elsewhere. Someone with a severed neck should lose most of his or her blood - approximately seven or eight pints. Quite a lot of blood could have soaked into Annie's many layers of dark, thick clothing. Arterial blood would have spurted and could have soaked into the earth some distance away from her.

I suspect the "patches" of closely clustered blood droplets noticed on the wall not far above Annie's head were back spatter from the knife. Each time the Ripper slashed into her body and drew back the knife to slash again, blood flew off the blade. Since we do not know the number, shape, and size of the blood spatters, we can speculate only that they could not have been caused by arterial bleeding unless Annie was already ' on the ground while her carotid artery or arteries spurted blood. I suspect she was attacked while she was standing, and the deep cuts to her abdomen were made when she was on her back.

Her intestines may have been pulled out and tossed aside as the Ripper groped in the dark for her uterus. Trophies or souvenirs bring back memories. They are a catalyst for fantasies. The taking of them is so typical as to be expected in violent psychopathic crimes. Sickert was far too smart to keep any incriminating souvenir where someone could have found it. But he had secret rooms, and I wonder where he got the inspiration for them. Perhaps there was some experience from his childhood that caused him to be drawn to dreadful places. There is a verse in a poem his father wrote that brings his son's secret rooms to mind:

What an uncanny/eerie feeling when I am within your walls, those high, naked, pale walls, how terrible they are, they remind me of the old-fashioned guard rooms… Does not one, here and there, pile up overcoats and caput, long coats, wintercoats and does not one carry all kinds of garbage into the room…

In September 1889, the Ripper writes his return address as "Jack the rippers hole." Sickert could have kept whatever he wanted in his secret places - or "rat holes," as I call them. It is impossible to know what he did with his "garbage," the body parts that would begin to decompose and smell unless he chemically preserved them. In one letter the Ripper writes of cutting off a victim's ear and feeding it to a dog. In another, he mentions frying organs and eating them. Sickert might have been inordinately curious about the female reproductive system that had given birth to his ruined life. He could not study it in the dark. Perhaps he took the organs back to his lair and studied them there.

After Annie Chapman's murder, the relatives who had avoided her in life took care of her in death. They made her funeral arrangements, and at seven o'clock on Friday morning, September 14th, a hearse appeared at the Whitechapel mortuary to take her away clandestinely. Her relatives did not form a procession of coaches for fear of drawing attention to Annie's last journey. She was buried at Manor Park Cemetery, seven miles northeast of where she was slain. The weather had taken a dramatic turn for the better. The temperature was sixty degrees and the sun shone all day.

During the week following Annie's death, businessmen in the East End formed a vigilance committee chaired by George Lusk, a local builder and contractor and member of the Metropolitan Board of Works. Lusk's committee issued the following public statement: "Finding that, in spite of the murders being committed in our midst our police force is inadequate to discover the author or authors of the late atrocities, we the undersigned have formed ourselves into a committee and intend offering a substantial reward to anyone, citizen or otherwise, who shall give such information as will be the means of bringing the murderer or murderers to justice."

A Member of Parliament offered to donate?100 to the reward fund, and other citizens were willing to help. Metropolitan Police documents dated August 31st and those of September 4th note that the response to the citizens' request should be that the practice of offering rewards had been abolished some time ago because rewards encouraged people to "discover" misleading evidence or to manufacture evidence, and "give rise to meddling and gossip without end."

In the East End, resentment and unruly behavior rose to a new high. People caroused at 29 Hanbury Street, gawking, some of them laughing and joking, while the rest of London fell into a "kind of stupor," said The Times. The crimes were "beyond the ghastliest efforts of fiction" - even worse than Edgar Allan Poe's Murders in the Rue Morgue, and "nothing in fact or fiction equals these outrages at once in their horrible nature and in the effect which they have produced upon the popular imagination."

Gatti's Hungerford Palace of Varieties was one of the most vulgar music halls in London. It was Sickert's favorite haunt the first eight months of 1888, and he went there several nights a week.

Built into a 250-foot-wide arch underneath the South Eastern railway near Charing Cross Station, Gatti's could seat six hundred, but on some nights as many as a thousand rowdy spectators crowded in for hours of drinking, smoking, and sexually charged entertainment. The popular Katie Lawrence shocked polite society by dressing in men's breeches or a loose, short frock that exposed more female flesh than was deemed decent at the time. Music-hall stars Kate Harvey and Florence Hayes as "The Patriotic Lady" were regulars when Sickert was making his quick sketches in the flickering lights.

Cleavage and exposed thighs were scandalous, but nobody seemed to worry much about the exploitation of the female child stars prancing about singing the same racy songs as the adults. Girls as young as eight years old dressed in costumes and little frocks and aped sexual awareness that invited pedophilic excitement and became the material for a number of Sickert's paintings. Art historian Dr. Robins explains that "among decadent writers, painters, and poets, there was something of a cult for the supposed sweetness and innocence of child music-hall performers." In her book Walter Sickert: Drawings, she provides new insight into Sickert's artistic interpretations of the female performers he watched night after night and followed from music hall to music hall. His sketches are a glimpse into his psyche and how he lived his life. While he did not mind impetuously giving away a painting, he would not part with the on-the-spot drawings he made on postcards and other small pieces of cheap paper.