Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper--Case Closed (20 page)

CHAPTER TWELVE

THE YOUNG AND BEAUTIFUL

P
eople of the East End were put out of their misery by infections and diseases such as tuberculosis, pleurisy, emphysema, and pneumoconiosis. Men, women, and children were burned and scalded to death by accidents at home and at work.

Starvation killed, as did cholera, whooping cough, and cancer. Parents and their children, weakened by malnutrition and surrounded by filth and vermin, did not have immune systems that could fight off nonlethal illnesses. Colds and flu became bronchitis and pneumonia and death. Many infants weren’t long for the world of the East End, and the people who lived and suffered there hated the London Hospital and avoided it if they could. To go there was to get worse. To let a doctor touch them was to die. Often this was true. An abscessed toe requiring amputation could lead to osteomyelitis—a bone infection—and death. A cut requiring sutures could lead to a staph infection—and death.

A sampling of hospital admissions for alleged suicides shows that in 1884, five men tried to kill themselves by cutting their throats, while four women cut their throats and two slit their wrists. In 1885, five women are listed as suicides or attempted suicides by poisoning and one by drowning. Eight men slashed their throats, one used a gun, and another a noose. In 1886, five women attempted suicide by cutting their throats. Twelve women and seven men tried to poison themselves, and another twelve men cut their throats or stabbed or shot themselves.

It simply isn’t possible to sort out who really committed suicide and who might have been murdered. If the individual was a person of the dustbin in the East End, and the death or attempted death was witnessed, then police tended to accept what witnesses said. When a woman’s abusive, drunk husband hurled two lit oil lamps at her, setting her on fire, she told police in her dying breath that it was entirely her fault. Her husband wasn’t charged. Her death was listed as an accident.

Unless a case was obvious, there was no certainty that the manner or even cause of death would be accurate. If a woman’s throat was cut indoors and the weapon was nearby, the police assumed she had killed herself. Such assumptions, including those made by the well-meaning Dr. Llewellyn, not only sent police down a false trail—if they bothered following up at all—but bad diagnoses and determinations of injury and death could destroy a case in court. Forensic medicine was not sophisticated in Dr. Llewellyn’s day, and this, rather than carelessness, is the most likely explanation for his hasty, baseless conclusions.

Had he examined the pavement after Mary Ann’s body was picked up and loaded into the ambulance, he would have noticed the blood and the blood clot that Constable Phail observed. Dr. Llewellyn might have noticed blood or a bloody fluid trickling into the gutter. Visibility was bad, so maybe he should have thought to wipe up some of this fluid to determine first whether it was blood, and second whether the serum was separating from the blood as it does during coagulation, which would have offered another clue about time of death.

Although taking the ambient temperature at the crime scene and the temperature of the body wasn’t standard in death investigation, Dr. Llewellyn should have noted the stage of rigor mortis or stiffness, which occurs when the body no longer produces the adenosine triphosphate (ATP) needed for muscles to contract. Dr. Llewellyn should have checked for livor mortis, which occurs when the blood no longer circulates and accumulates in certain parts of the body due to gravity. In a hanging, for example, the lower body will turn purplish-red if the victim has been suspended by his or her neck for as little as half an hour. Livor mortis becomes fixed after about eight hours. Not only could livor mortis have suggested the time of Mary Ann Nichols’s death, it could have told Dr. Llewellyn if her body had been moved at some point after her murder.

I remember a case from years ago when police arrived at the scene to discover a body as stiff as an ironing board propped against an armchair. The people in the house didn’t want anyone to know the man had died in bed during the middle of the night, so they tried to move him to a chair. Rigor mortis replied, “Lie.” In another instance from my early days of working in the medical examiner’s office, the fully dressed body of a man came into the morgue accompanied by the story that he had been found dead on the floor. Livor mortis replied, “Lie.” The blood had settled to his lower body, and on his buttocks was the perfect shape of the toilet seat he was still sitting on hours after his heart went into arrhythmia.

To determine time of death from any single postmortem artifact is like diagnosing a disease from one symptom. Time of death is a symphony of many details, and one plays on another. Rigor mortis is hastened along by the victim’s muscle mass, the temperature of the air, the loss of blood, and even the activity preceding death. The nude body of a thin woman who has hemorrhaged to death outside in fifty-degree weather will cool faster and stiffen more slowly than the same woman clothed in a warm room and dead from strangulation.

Ambient temperature, body size, clothing, location, cause of death, and many more postmortem minutiae can be naughty little talebearers that fool even an expert and completely confuse him or her as to what really happened. Livor mortis—especially in Dr. Llewellyn’s day—can be mistaken for fresh bruises. An object pressing against the body, such as part of an overturned chair wedged beneath the victim’s wrist, will leave a pale area—or blanching—in the shape of that object. If this is misinterpreted as “pressure marks,” then a case of nonviolent death can suddenly turn criminal.

There is no telling how much was hopelessly garbled in the Ripper murders and what evidence might have been lost, but one can be sure that the killer left traces of his identity and daily life. They would have adhered to the blood on the body and the ground. He also carried away evidence such as hairs, fibers, and his victim’s blood. In 1888, it wasn’t standard practice for police or doctors to look for hairs, fibers, or other minuscule amounts of evidence that might have required microscopic examination. Fingerprints were called “finger marks” and simply meant that a human being had touched an object such as a glass windowpane. Even if a patent (visible) fingerprint with well-defined ridge detail was discovered, it didn’t matter. It wouldn’t be until 1901 that Scotland Yard would establish its first Central Finger Print Bureau.

Five years earlier, in 1896, two patent fingerprints in red ink were left on a Ripper letter the police received October 14th. The letter is written in red ink, and the red ink fingerprints appear to have been made by the first and second fingers of the left hand. The ridge detail is good enough for comparison. Perhaps the prints were left deliberately—Sickert was the sort to know the latest criminal investigative technology, and leaving prints would be another “ha ha.”

Police would not have linked them to him. Police never noticed the prints, as far as I can tell, and some sixty years after his death, it is still unlikely that a comparison between those prints and Sickert’s will ever be made. At present, we don’t seem to have his fingerprints, although it is hard for me to believe he didn’t leave a print or prints in paint or ink on any of his works. To date, I have used a nondestructive Crime Scene Scope on dozens of paintings from my own collection, to no avail. The best I have been able to do is to find a barely visible print left in ink on the back of one of his copper etching plates. The print has yet to reveal sufficient ridge detail for a match, and one has to consider the possibility that the print wasn’t left by Sickert but by a printer.

In addition, a partial print (possibly left in ink) has been recovered from a Sickert etching at the British Museum and also one from the Tate Archive, and we are still in the process of using forensic image enhancement to sharpen any possible identifying characteristics to compare with those left on at least two Ripper letters. (It should be noted that each of an individual’s ten fingerprints is different and unique, meaning, for example, that a left thumbprint found on a Ripper letter would have to be compared to Sickert’s left thumbprint.)

Fingerprints were known about long before the Ripper began his murders. Ridge detail on human finger pads gives us a better grip and is unique to every individual, including identical twins. It is believed that the Chinese used fingerprints some 3,000 years ago to “sign” legal documents, but whether this was ceremonial or for purposes of identification is unknown. In India, fingerprints were used as a means of “signing contracts” as early as 1870. Seven years later, an American microscopist published a journal article suggesting that fingerprints should be used for identification, and this was echoed in 1880 by a Scottish physician working in a hospital in Japan. But as is true with every major scientific breakthrough—including DNA—fingerprints weren’t instantly understood, immediately utilized, or readily accepted in court.

During the Victorian era, the primary means of identifying a person and linking him or her to a crime was a “science” called anthropometry, which was developed in 1879 by French criminologist Alphonse Bertillon. He believed that people could be identified and classified through a detailed description of facial characteristics and a series of eleven body measurements including height, reach, head width, and length of the left foot. Bertillon maintained that skeletons were highly individualized, and anthropometry continued to be used to classify criminals and suspects until the turn of the century.

Anthropometry was not only flawed, it was dangerous. It was contingent on physical attributes that aren’t as individualized as believed. This pseudoscience placed far too much emphasis on what a person looked like and seduced the police into consciously or subconsciously accepting as facts the superstitions of yet another pseudoscience—physiognomy, which asserts that criminality, morality, and intellect are reflected in a person’s body and face. Thieves are usually “frail,” while violent men are usually “strong” and “in good health.” All criminals have superior “finger reach,” and almost all female offenders are “homely, if not repulsive.” Rapists tend to be “blond,” and pedophiles often are “delicate” and look “childish.”

If people in the twenty-first century have difficulty accepting the fact that a psychopathic killer can be attractive, likeable, and intelligent, imagine the difficulty in the Victorian era, when standard criminology books included long descriptions of anthropometry and physiognomy. Victorian police were programmed to identify suspects by their skeletal structure and facial features and to assume that a certain “look” could be linked to a certain type of behavior.

Walter Sickert would not have been tagged as a suspect during the time of the Ripper murders. The “young and beautiful Sickert” with “his well known charm,” as Degas once described him, couldn’t possibly be capable of cutting a woman’s throat and slashing open her abdomen. I have even heard it suggested in recent years that if an artist such as Sickert had violent proclivities, he would have sublimated them through his creative work and not acted them out.

When the police were looking for Jack the Ripper, a great deal of importance was placed on witness descriptions of men last seen with the victims. Investigative reports reveal that much attention was paid to hair color, complexion, and height, with the police not taking into account that all of these characteristics can be disguised. Height not only varies in an individual depending on posture, hats, and footwear, but can be altered by “trickery.” Actors can wear tall hats and special lifts in their shoes. They can stoop and slightly bend the knees under voluminous coats or capes; they can wear caps low over their eyes, making themselves appear to be inches taller or shorter than they are.

Early publications on medical jurisprudence and forensic medicine reveal that much more was known than was actually applied in crime cases. But in 1888, cases continued to be made or lost based on witness descriptions instead of physical evidence. Whether the police knew anything at all about forensic science or not, there was no practical way to get evidence tested. The Home Office—the department of government that oversees Scotland Yard—did not have forensic laboratories then.

A physician such as Dr. Llewellyn might never have touched a microscope; he might not have known that hair, bone, and blood could be identified as human. Robert Hooke had written about the microscopic properties of hairs, fibers, and even vegetable debris and bee stings more than two hundred years earlier, but to death investigators and the average doctor, microscopy was as rarified as rocket science or astronomy must have seemed.

Dr. Llewellyn attended the London Hospital Medical College and had been a licensed physician for thirteen years. His surgery or medical office was no more than three hundred yards from where Mary Ann Nichols was murdered. He was in private practice. Although the police knew him well enough to request him by name when Mary Ann Nichols’s body was discovered, there is no reason to suppose that Llewellyn was a divisional surgeon for Scotland Yard; that is, he was not a physician who offered his services part-time to a particular division, which in this instance was the H Division covering Whitechapel.

The job of a divisional surgeon was to attend to the troops. Free medical care was a benefit of working for the Metropolitan Police, and a police surgeon was to be available when needed to examine prisoners, or to go to the local jail to determine if a citizen was drunk, ill, or suffering from an excess of “animal spirits,” which I presume refers to excitement or hysteria. In the late 1880s, the divisional surgeon also responded to death scenes for a fee of £1 1s. per case; he was paid £2 2s. if he performed the autopsy. But by no means was he expected to be well acquainted with the microscope, the nuances of injuries and poisonings, and what the body can reveal after death.

Most likely, Dr. Llewellyn was a local doctor the police felt comfortable calling upon, and it is possible that he had located in Whitechapel for humanitarian reasons. He was a Fellow of the British Gynecological Society, and would have been accustomed to being called upon at all hours of the night. When the police rapped on his door on the cool, overcast early morning of August 31st, he probably got to the scene as quickly as possible. He wasn’t trained to do much more than determine that the victim was really dead and offer the police an educated guess as to when death had occurred.