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

Police reports indicate that the kidney sent to George Lusk was almost two weeks old if it came from Eddows's body, and had been preserved in "spirits," probably wine. Mr. Lusk did not seem horrified or in a frantic hurry to get the kidney to the police. When he received the ghastly gift with a letter that has not survived, he didn't "think much about it." The Victorians were not accustomed to psychopathic killers who took body parts and enclosed them in taunting letters to the authorities.

At first, it was suggested that the kidney was from a dog, but Lusk and the police wisely sought other opinions. The kidney was a hoax, the police agreed as the marinated organ in its box made the rounds. Medical experts, such as pathologist Dr. Openshaw, believed the kidney was human - although it was a stretch to conclude it was from a "female" who had "Bright's disease." The kidney was turned over to Dr. Openshaw's care at the London Hospital. Had the kidney survived another few decades to be tested, and were Catherine Eddows exhumed for her DNA, there could have been a match. In court that would have hurt Walter Sickert quite a lot - were he still alive to be prosecuted - since the A Pirie amp; Sons watermark is on his stationery and also on the letter Jack the Ripper wrote to Dr. Openshaw, the stamps on the envelopes of the two letters have a DNA sequence in common, and the Ripper letter is confessional.

If Ellen was keeping up with the news at home, she would have known about the kidney. She would have known about the double murder that happened within a week of her leaving for Ireland. She may have heard of "human bones" wrapped in a parcel in a Peckham gutter, or the parcel containing a decomposing female arm found in the garden of a school for the blind in Lambeth Road, or the boiled leg that turned out to be from a bear.

Ellen should have known about the torso recovered from the foundation of the new Scotland Yard building. The headless, limbless dead woman was transported to the mortuary on Millbank Street, and she had little to say to Dr. Neville or the police, and they could not seem to agree about the arm found in Pimlico on October 11th. It was from the torso, of this Dr. Neville was certain, but its hand was rough, the fingernails unkempt - like those of a woman whose life was hard. When Dr. Thomas Bond was brought in to assist in the examination, he said that the hand was soft with well-shaped nails. The hand would have been dirty, possibly abraded, and the fingernails would have been caked with mud when the arm was found in the muck of low tide. Perhaps when it was cleaned up, it took on a higher social status.

In one report, the dismembered woman had a dark complexion. In another report, she had light skin. Her hair was dark brown, she was twenty-six years old, and five foot seven or eight, the doctor stated. The darkness of her skin could have been due to the discoloration of decomposition. In advanced stages, the skin turns dark greenish-black. Based on the condition of her remains, it may have been just as difficult to determine if her skin was fair.

Discrepancies in descriptions can cause serious problems in identifying the dead. Of course, forensic facial reconstructions - or the sculpting of the face based on the underlying architecture of the bone (assuming the head is found) - were not done in the nineteenth century, but a case some decades ago in Virginia makes my point. An unidentified man's face was reconstructed by using green clay to rebuild his features over his skull. His hair color was based on the racial characteristics of his skeleton, which were those of an African-American, and his orbits were fitted with artificial eyes.

A woman responded to a black-and-white photograph of the facial reconstruction in the newspaper, and appeared at the morgue to see if the missing person might be her son. She took one look at the facial reconstruction and told the medical examiner, "No, that's not him. His face wasn't green." As it turned out, the unidentified murdered young man was the woman's son. (These days, when forensic facial reconstructions or sculptures are done on the unidentified dead, the clay is dyed to approximate the person's color based on race.)

The estimate offered by both Dr. Neville and by Dr. Thomas Bond, that the torso was that of a woman about five foot seven or eight, could have been wrong, and the height they assigned to what was left of the victim could have precluded quite a number of people from coming forward to see if the remains were those of a relative or someone they knew. In that era, five foot seven or eight was quite tall for a woman. Were the doctors' estimate off by as little as two or three inches, it could have been enough to cause the torso never to be identified - and it never was.

I believe the doctors did the best they could, based on what they had to work with. They could not have known about forensic anthropology. The doctors would not have known about today's standard anthropological criteria used to place an individual into age categories, such as infant or 15 to 17 or 45-plus. They may not have known much about epiphyses or growth centers of bone, nor could they have seen them since neither the torso nor recovered limbs were defleshed by boiling them in water. Growth centers are attachments, such as those that connect the ribs to the sternum, and when one is young these attachments are flexible cartilage. With age, they calcify.

In 1888, there were no calibrations and algorithms. There were no late-twentieth-century gadgets such the Single Photon Absorptiometer or scintillation detectors to estimate height based on the length of the humerus, radius, ulna, femur, tibia, and fibula - the long bones of the arms and legs. The changes in density or mineral concentrations of bones are age-dependent. For example, a decrease in bone density usually correlates with an older age.

It could not accurately be claimed that the dismembered woman was exactly twenty-six years old, although it could have been said that her remains appeared to be those of a post-prepubescent female who probably was in her late teens or twenties, and that she had dark brown hair in her axillae, or armpits. The estimate that the woman had died five weeks earlier was also a guess. Doctors simply did not have the scientific means to judge time of death by decomposition. They knew nothing about entomology - the interpretation of insect development as a marker for time of death - and maggots teemed over the torso when it was found in the recesses of the new Scotland Yard building's foundation.

The autopsy revealed pale, bloodless organs that indicated hemorrhage and would have been consistent with the woman's throat having been cut before she was dismembered. At her inquest, Dr. Thomas Bond testified that the remains were those of a "well nourished" woman with "breasts that were large and prominent" and who at some point had suffered from severe pleurisy in one lung. Her uterus was missing, and her pelvis and legs had been sawn off at the fourth lumbar. The arms had been removed at the shoulder joints by several oblique cuts, and she had been decapitated by several incisions below the larynx. Dr. Bond said that the torso had been skillfully wrapped, and the flesh bore "clearly defined marks" where it had been bound with string. These marks left by string are noteworthy. Experiments conducted in the early- and mid-nineteenth century revealed that ligature marks are not formed on bodies that have been dead for a while, indicating that the string was tied around the dismembered woman either while she was alive, or more likely, not long - perhaps only hours - after her death.

The severing of the pelvis from the torso is quite unusual in dismemberments, but neither the doctors nor the police seemed to have given this detail much thought, or even offered opinions about it. No other body parts of the woman turned up, except what was believed to be her left leg, which had been severed just below the knee. The partial limb had been buried several yards from where the torso had been found. Dr. Bond described the foot and leg as "exquisitely molded." The foot was well cared for, the toenails neatly trimmed. There were no corns or bunions that might indicate that the victim had been a "poor woman."