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

"As you can see I have done another good thing for Whitechapel," the Ripper wrote November 12, 1888.

The position of Emily Dimmock's dead body was described as "natural." The doctor who arrived at the scene said he believed that she was asleep when she was killed. She was face-down, her left arm bent at an angle and across her back, the hand bloody. Her right arm was extended in front of her and on the pillow. In fact, her position was not natural or comfortable. Most people do not sleep or even lie down with one of their arms bent at a right angle behind their backs. There was not sufficient space between the headboard and the wall for the killer to attack her from behind. She needed to be face-down, and her unnatural position on the bed can be explained if the killer straddled her as he pulled back her head with his left hand and cut her throat with his right.

Blood on her left hand suggests she grabbed the hemorrhaging left side of her neck, and her assailant may have wrenched her left arm behind her, perhaps pinning it with a knee to keep her from struggling. He had cut her throat to the spine and she could make no sound. He had slashed her neck from left to right, as a right-handed assailant would. He had so little room to work that his violent sweep of the knife cut the bed ticking and nicked Emily's right elbow. She was on her face, her left carotid squirting her syphilitic blood into the bed and not all over him.

The police did not discover a bloody nightgown at the scene. Absent that garment, it might be presumed that Emily was nude when she was murdered - or that her killer took a bloody gown as a trophy. A former client who had slept with Emily three times claimed that on those occasions she wore a nightdress and did not have "curlers" in her hair. If she had sex the night of September 11th, especially if she was intoxicated, it is possible that she fell asleep in the nude. Or she may have been with another "client" - her killer - who had her undress and turn over, as if he wanted anal sex or intercourse from the rear. After he cut a six-inch gash in her throat, her killer threw the bedcovers over her. All of this seems to deviate from Sickert's violent modus operandi, with the exception that apparently there was no sign of "connection."

After twenty years, Sickert's patterns, fantasies, needs, and energy would have evolved. Very little is known about his activities after he began spending most of his time in France and Italy during the 1890s. So far, documentation that might reveal unsolved murders with striking similarities to Sickert's crimes doesn't exist or has yet to surface in other countries. I found references to only two cases in France, not in police records but in newspapers. The murders are so unspecific and unverified. I hesitate to mention them: It was reported that in early 1889, at Pont-a-Mousson, a widow named Madame Francois was found slain, her head nearly severed from her body. About the same time and in the same area, another woman was found with her head nearly severed from he-body. The doctor who conducted both postmortem examinations concluded that the murderer was very skillful with a knife.

Around 1906, Sickert returned to England and settled in Camden Town. He resumed painting music halls - such as the Mogul Tavern (by now called the Old Middlesex Music Hall, on Drury Lane, less than two miles from where he lived in Camden Town). Sickert went out almost every night and was always in his stall at 8:00 P.M. sharp, he wrote in a letter to Jacques-Emile Blanche. Presumably, Sickert stayed until the performances ended at half past midnight.

During his late-night journeys home, it is very possible he could have seen Emily Dimmock out on the streets, perhaps heading to her rooming house with a client. Had Sickert gathered intelligence on her, he could easily have known her patterns, and that she was a notorious prostitute and a walking plague. Periodically she was an outpatient at Lock Hospital on Harrow Road, and most recently had been treated at University College Hospital. When her venereal disease was fulminating, she had eruptions on her face, and she had a few of these at the time of her death. This should have indicated to a street-smart man that she was dangerous to his health.

Sickert would have been foolish to have exposed himself to her body fluids, because by 1907 more was known about contagious diseases. Exposure to blood could be just as dangerous as intercourse, and it would not have been possible for Sickert to disembowel or take organs without subjecting himself to great risk. I believe he would have been shrewd enough to avoid re-creating the twenty-year-old Ripper scare, especially when he was about to begin his most intense period of violent art and produce works that he would not have dared to etch or paint or display in 1888 or 1889. Emily Dimmock's murder was staged to appear to have been motivated by robbery.

Bertram Shaw arrived home from the train station on the morning of September 12th, and discovered that his mother was already there. She was waiting in the hallway because Emily did not answer the door and she could not get into her son's rooms. Shaw tried the outer door and was baffled to find it locked. He wondered if Emily might have gone out to meet his mother at the train station and the two women had missed each other. He was getting increasingly uneasy, and asked the landlady, Mrs. Stocks, for a key. Shaw unlocked the outer door and found the double doors locked as well. He broke in and flung back the covers from Emily's naked body on the blood-soaked bed.

Drawers had been pulled out of the dresser, the contents rummaged through and scattered on the floor. Emily's scrapbook was open on a chair, and some postcards had been removed from it. The windows and shutters in the bedroom were closed, the windows in the sitting room closed, the shutters slightly open. Shaw ran for the police. Some twenty-five minutes later, Constable Thomas Killion arrived and determined by touching Emily's cold shoulder that she had been dead for hours. He immediately sent for police divisional surgeon Dr. John Thompson, who arrived at the scene around 1:00 P.M. and concluded - based on the coldness of the body and the advanced stage of rigor mortis - that Emily had been dead seven or eight hours.

This would have placed her time of death at 6:00 or 7:00 A.M., which is not likely. The morning was thick with fog, but the sun rose at 5:30. The killer would have been brazen to the point of stupidity had he left Emily's house after the sun was up, no matter how gray and muggy the weather, and by six or seven o'clock, people were stirring, many on their way to work.

Under ordinary conditions, it requires six to twelve hours for a body to be fully rigorous, and cold temperatures can retard this process. Emily's body was under bedclothes that the killer had flung over her, and the windows and doors were shut. Her bedroom would not have been frigid, but on the early morning she died, the low was 47 degrees Fahrenheit. What is not known is how stiff she was, or how advanced her rigor mortis might have been by the time Dr. Thompson began to examine her at some point after 1:00 P.M. She could have been in full rigor mortis - dead a good ten or twelve hours. This would suggest she could have been murdered between midnight and 4:00 A.M.

Dr. Thompson said at the scene that Emily's throat had been cut cleanly with a very sharp instrument. The police found nothing except one of Shaw's straight razors in plain view on top of a dresser, and it would be difficult to use a straight razor to cut forcefully through muscle and cartilage without the blade folding backward and perhaps severely wounding the perpetrator. A bloody petticoat in the handwash basin had soaked up all of the water, indicating the killer had cleaned himself off before he left. He was careful not to touch anything with bloody hands, the police remarked at the inquest.