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

"The skin 8t tissues of the abdomen… were removed in three large places… The right thigh was denuded in point to the bone… The lower part of the [right] lung was broken and torn away… The Pericardium was open below 8t the heart absent."

These autopsy details come from pages 16 and 18 of the original report and seem to be the only pages from any of the autopsies to have survived. The loss of these reports is truly a calamity. The medical details that would tell us the most about what the killer did to his victim are not as clearly defined in the inquests as they would be in autopsy reports. It was not mentioned in Mary Kelly's inquest that her heart was taken. That was a detail the police, the doctors, and the coroner thought the public didn't need to know.

Mary Kelly's postmortem examination was held at the Shoreditch mortuary and lasted six and a half hours. The most experienced forensic medical men were present: Dr. Thomas Bond of Westminster, Dr. Gordon Brown of the City, a Dr. Duke from Spitalfields, and Dr. George Phillips and an assistant. Accounts say that the men would not complete their examination until every organ had been accounted for. Some reports suggest no organs were missing, but that isn't true. The Ripper took Mary Kelly's heart and possibly portions of her genitals and uterus.

The inquest began and ended on November 11th. Dr. Phillips had barely described the crime scene when Dr. Roderick McDonald, the coroner for Northeast Middlesex, said that it would not be necessary for the doctor to go into any further particulars at that time. The jurors - all of whom had viewed Mary Kelly's remains at the mortuary - could reconvene and hear more later, unless they were prepared to reach a verdict now. They were. They had heard quite enough. "Wilful murder against some person unknown."

Immediately, the press fell silent. It was as if the Ripper case was closed. Scans through days and weeks and months of newspapers after Mary Kelly's inquest and burial reveal few mentions of the Ripper. His letters continued to arrive and they were filed "with the others." They were not printed in respectable newspapers. Any subsequent crimes that might have brought up the question of the Ripper were eventually dismissed as not being the work of the Whitechapel fiend.

In June 1889, dismembered female remains were found in London. They were never identified.

On July 16, 1889, an Unfortunate named Alice McKenzie, known to "be the worse for drink" now and then, went out to the Cambridge Music-hall in the East End and was overheard by a blind boy to ask a man to treat her to a drink. At close to 1:00 A.M., her body was found in Castle Alley, Whitechapel, her throat cut, and her clothing pushed up to display severe mutilation to her abdomen. Dr. Thomas Bond performed her autopsy and wrote, "I am of the opinion that the murder was performed by the same person who committed the former series of Whitechapel murders." The case was never solved. Little public mention was made of the Ripper.

On August 6,1889, an eight-year-old girl named Caroline Winter was murdered in Seaham Harbour on England's northeast coast, not far from Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Her skull was bashed in, her body "bearing other terrible injuries," and she was dumped in a pool of water near a sewer. She was last seen playing with a friend who told police that Caroline was talking to a man with black hair, a black mustache, and dressed in a shabby gray suit. He offered Caroline a shilling to come with him, and she did.

The female torso found in the railway arch off Pinchin Street on September 10th showed no sign of mutilation, except for dismemberment, and there was no evidence her death was caused by a cut throat, even if she had been decapitated. An incision down the front of the torso could not have been the work of the Ripper, according to the official report. "The inner coating of the bowel is hardly touched and the termination of the cut towards the vagina looks almost as if the knife had slipped, and as if this portion of the wound had been accidental. Had this been the work of the previous frenzied murderer we may be tolerably sure that he would have continued his hideous work in the way which he previously adopted." The case was never solved.

On December 13, 1889, at the Middlesbrough docks, also on England's northeast coast, just south of Seaham Harbour, decomposing human remains were found, including a woman's right hand that was missing two joints of the little finger.

"I am trying my hand at disjointing," the Ripper wrote December 4, 1888, "and if can manage it will send you a finger."

On February 13, 1891, a prostitute named Francis Coles was found with her throat cut in Swallow Gardens, Whitechapel. She was approximately twenty-six years old, and "of drunken habits," according to police reports. Dr. George Phillips performed the postmortem examination and was of the opinion that the body wasn't mutilated and he did "not connect this with the series of previous murders." The case was never solved.

A case involving dismembered female body parts found in London in June 1902 was never solved.

Serial killers keep killing. Sickert kept killing. His body count could have been fifteen, twenty, forty before he died peacefully in his bed in Bathampton, January 22, 1942, at the age of 81. After Mary Kelly's butchery, Jack the Ripper faded into a nightmare from the past. He was probably that sexually insane young doctor who was really a barrister and who threw himself into the Thames. He could have been a lunatic barber or a lunatic Jew who was safely locked up in an asylum. He could be dead. What a relief to make such assumptions.

After 1896, it seems the Ripper letters stopped. His name wasn't connected to current crimes anymore, and his case files were sealed for a century. In 1903, James McNeill Whistler died and Walter Sickert gracefully assumed center stage. Their styles and themes were quite different - Whistler didn't paint murdered prostitutes and his work was beginning to be worth a fortune - but Sickert was coming into his own. He was evolving into a cult figure as an artist and a "character." By the time he was an old man, he was the greatest living artist in England. Had he ever confessed to being Jack the Ripper, I don't think anybody would have believed him.

Sickert's fractured pieces and personas seemed to go AWOL in 1899, and he withdrew across the English Channel to live very much like the paupers he terrorized.

"I arise from dreams amp; go in my nightshirt 8c wipe up the floor for fear of the ceilings amp; shift a mattress I have put there 'to catch the drips,' " he wrote to Blanche.

In between killings and spurts of work, he had drifted about, mostly in Dieppe and Venice, his living conditions described by friends as shockingly appalling. He subsisted in filth and chaos. He was a slob and he stank. He was paranoid and told Blanche he believed Ellen and Whistler had conspired to ruin his life. He feared someone might poison him. He became increasingly reclusive, depressed, and morbid.

"Do you suppose we only find anything that is past so touching and interesting because it was further from the grave?" he ponders in a letter.

Psychopathic killers can sink into morbid depression after murderous sprees, and for one who had exercised seemingly perfect control, Sickert may have found himself completely out of control and with nothing left of his life. During his most virile, productive years, he had been on a slaughter binge. He had ignored and avoided his friends. He would disappear from society without warning or reason. He had no caretaker, no home, and was financially destitute. His psychopathic obsession had completely dominated his life. "I am not well - don't know what is the matter with me," he wrote Nan Hudson in 1910. "My nerves are shaken." By the time Sickert was fifty, he had begun to self-destruct like an overloaded circuit without a breaker.