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

The theory that each victim's throat was cut while she was lying on the ground remained the predominant one even after the murders of Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddows. Physicians and police were convinced that based on blood patterns, the women could not have been standing when the killer severed their carotid arteries. Possibly what the doctors were assuming was that arterial bleeding would have spurted a certain distance and at a certain height had the victims been on their feet. There may also have been an assumption that the victims lay down to have sex.

Prostitutes weren't likely to lie down on hard pavers or in mud or wet grass, and the doctors were not interpreting blood patterns based on scientific testing. In modern laboratories, blood spatter experts routinely conduct experiments with blood to get a better idea of how it drips, flies, sprays, spurts, and spatters according to the laws of physics. In 1888, no one working the Ripper cases was spending his time researching how far or how high blood arced when an upright person's carotid artery was cut.

No one knew about the back spatter pattern caused by the repeated swinging or stabbing motions of a weapon. It does not appear that the doctors who responded to the death scenes considered that perhaps Jack the Ripper simultaneously cut his victim's throat and pulled her backward to the ground. Investigators didn't seem to contemplate the possibility that the Ripper might have assiduously avoided being bloody in public by quickly getting out of his bloody clothes, coveralls, or gloves, and retreating to one of his hovels to clean up.

Sickert was afraid of diseases. He had a fetish about hygiene and was continually washing his hands. He would immediately wash his hair and face if he accidentally put on another person's hat. Sickert would have known about germs, infections, and diseases; he would have known that one didn't have to engage in oral, vaginal, or anal intercourse to contract them. Blood splashed into his face or transferred from his hands to his eyes or mouth or an open wound was enough to cause him a serious problem. Years later, he would go through a time of worry when he thought he had a sexually transmitted disease that turned out to be gout.

At 3:00 A.M., September 30th, Metropolitan Police Constable Alfred Long was patrolling Goulston Street in Whitechapel. H Division wasn't usually his beat, but he had been called in because jack the Ripper had just murdered two more women. Long walked past several dark buildings occupied by Jews, directing his bull's-eye lantern into the darkness and listening for any unusual sounds. His bleary light shone into a foreboding passageway leading inside a building and illuminated a piece of dark-stained fabric on the ground. Written above it in white chalk on the black dado of the wall was

The Juwes are

The men That

Will not be Blamed

for nothing.

Long picked up the patch of fabric. It was a piece of apron wet with blood, and he immediately searched the staircases of 100-119. He would admit later at Catherine Eddows's inquest, "I did not make any enquiries of the tenements in the buildings. There were six or seven staircases. I searched every one; found no traces of blood or footmarks."

He should have checked all of the tenements. It is possible that whoever dropped the piece of apron might have been heading inside the building. The Ripper might live there. He might be hiding there. Long got out his notebook and copied down the chalk writing on the wall, and he rushed to the Commercial Street Police Station. It was important that he report what he had discovered, and he didn't have a partner with him. He may have been scared.

Police Constable Long had passed the same passageway on Goulston Street at 2:20 A.M., and he swore in court that the piece of apron wasn't there then. He would also testify at the inquest that he couldn't say that the chalk message on the wall was "very recently written." Perhaps the ethnic slur had been there for a while and it was simply a coincidence that the bit of bloody apron had been found right below it. The accepted and sensible point of view has always been that the Ripper wrote those bigoted words right after he murdered Catherine Eddows. It wouldn't make sense for a slur about Jews to have been left for many hours or days in the passageway of a building occupied by Jews.

The writing on the wall has continued to be the source of great controversy in the Ripper case. The message - presumably dashed off by the Ripper - was in a legible hand, and in the Metropolitan Police files at the Public Record Office, I found two versions of it. Long was fastidious. The copies he made in his notebook are almost identical, suggesting they may closely resemble what he saw in chalk. His facsimiles resemble Sickert's handwriting. The uppercase T's appear very similar to ones in the Ripper letter of September 25th. But it is treacherous - and worthless in court - to compare writing that is a "copy," no matter how carefully it was made.

People have always been intent on decoding the writing on the wall. Why was "Jews" spelled "Juwes"? Perhaps the writing on the wall was nothing more than a scribble intended to create the very stir it has. The Ripper liked to write. He made sure his presence was known. So did Sickert, and he also had a habit of scrawling notes in chalk on the dark walls of his studios. There is no photograph of the writing on the wall in Catherine Eddows's case because Charles Warren insisted it was to be removed immediately. The sun would rise soon and the Jewish community would see the chalky slur and all hell would break loose.

What Warren didn't need was another riot. So he made another foolish decision. As his policemen anxiously waited for the cumbersome wooden camera, they sent word to Warren suggesting that the first line, containing the word "Juwes," could be scrubbed off and the rest of the writing left to be photographed for handwriting comparison. Absolutely not, Warren fired back. Rub out the writing right now. Day was breaking. People were stirring about. The camera had not arrived and the writing was rubbed out.

No one doubted that the piece of apron Constable Long found had come from the white apron Catherine was wearing over her clothing. Dr. Gordon Brown said he could not possibly know if the blood on it was human - even if St. Bartholomew's, the oldest hospital in London with one of the finest medical schools, was right there in the City. Dr. Brown could have submitted the bloody piece of apron to a microscopist. At least he thought to tie both ends of Catherine's stomach and submit it for chemical analysis in the event narcotics were present. They weren't. The Ripper wasn't drugging his victims first to incapacitate them.

I suspect the question of human blood wasn't important to Dr. Brown or the police. The cut-out piece of bloody cloth seemed to fit the cut-out section of Catherine's apron, and proof that the blood was human may not have been an issue if a suspect went to court. Perhaps not testing the blood was a smart investigative tactic. If the blood had come back as human, one still could not prove it was Catherine's.

The police decided that the killer had cut off the bit of apron so he could wipe blood and fecal matter off his hands. For some reason, he hung on to the soiled fabric as he left the City and retraced his steps back toward Whitechapel. He ducked into the entrance of the building on Goulston Street to write the note on the wall, and then thought to discard the piece of soiled apron - perhaps when he rummaged in a pocket for a piece of chalk, which I suppose he just happened to be carrying around with him.

The bit of bloody apron was not viewed as part of the Ripper's deliberate game, nor was his visit to Goulston Street seen as part of his ongoing mockery of authority. I wonder why police didn't ask why the killer was carrying around chalk. Did people of the East End routinely carry chalk or even own it? Perhaps it should have been considered that if the Ripper did bring a stick of chalk with him when he set out that night, he had planned to write the bigoted message - or something like it - on the wall after he committed murder.