Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper--Case Closed (17 page)

Computerized image enhancement detects hundreds of gray shades that the human eye can’t see and makes it possible for a fuzzy photograph or erased writing to become visible or discernible. While forensic image enhancement might work with bank videotapes or bad photographs, it does not work on paintings. All our efforts accomplished with
Ennui
was to separate Sickert’s brush strokes until we ended up with the reverse of what he was doing when he put the strokes together. I was reminded, as I would be repeatedly in the Ripper case, that forensic science does not and will not ever take the place of human detection, deduction, experience, and common sense—and very hard work.

Sickert’s
Ennui
was mentioned in the Ripper investigation long before I gave the matter a thought, but in a very different way from what I have just described. In one version of the painting, the feather-boa-enveloped diva has a white blob on her left shoulder that is slightly reminiscent of one of the stuffed doves under the glass dome on top of the dresser. Some Ripper enthusiasts insist that the “bird” is a “sea gull” and that Sickert cleverly introduced the “gull” into his painting to drop the clue that Jack the Ripper was Sir William Gull, who was Queen Victoria’s surgeon. The advocates of this interpretation usually subscribe to the so-called royal conspiracy that implicates Dr. Gull and the Duke of Clarence in five Ripper murders.

The theory was advanced in the 1970s, and I will state categorically that Jack the Ripper was not Dr. Gull or the Duke of Clarence. In 1888, Dr. Gull was seventy-one years old and had already suffered a stroke. The Duke of Clarence no more used a sharp blade than he was one. Eddy, as he was called, was born two months prematurely after his mother went out to watch her husband play ice hockey and apparently spent too much time being “whirled” about in a sledge. Not feeling well, she was taken back to Frogmore, where there was only a local practitioner to oversee Eddy’s unexpected birth.

His developmental difficulties probably had less to do with his premature birth than they did with the small royal gene pool that spawned him. Eddy was sweet but obtuse. He was sensitive and gentle but a dismal student. He could barely ride a horse, was unimpressive during his military training, and was far too fond of clothes. The only cure his frustrated father, the Prince of Wales, and his grandmother the Queen could come up with was from time to time to launch Eddy on long voyages to distant lands.

Rumors about his sexual preferences and indiscretions continue to this day. It may be that he engaged in homosexual activity, as some books claim, but he was also involved with women. Perhaps Eddy was sexually immature and experimented with both sexes. He would not have been the first member of a royal family to play both sides of the net. Eddy’s emotional attachments were to women, especially to his beautiful, doting mother, who did not seem unduly concerned that he cared more about clothes than the crown.

On July 12, 1884, Eddy’s frustrated father, the Prince of Wales and future king, wrote to Eddy’s German tutor, “It is with sincere regret that we learn from you that our son dawdles so dreadfully in the morning. . . . He will have to make up the lost time by additional study.” In this unhappy seven-page missive that the father wrote from Marlborough House, he is emphatic—if not desperate—that the son, who was in direct line to the throne, “must put his shoulder to the wheel.”

Eddy had neither the energy nor the interest to go about preying on prostitutes, and to suggest otherwise is farcical. On the nights of at least three of the murders, he allegedly was not in London or even close by (not that he needs an alibi), and the murders continued after his untimely death on January 14, 1892. Even if the royal family’s surgeon, Dr. Gull, had not been elderly and infirm, he was far too consumed by fussing over the health of Queen Victoria and that of the rather frail Eddy to have had interest or time to run about Whitechapel in a royal carriage at all hours of the night, hacking up prostitutes who were blackmailing Eddy because of his scandalous “secret marriage” to one of them. Or something like that.

It is true, however, that Eddy had been blackmailed before, as evidenced by two letters he wrote to George Lewis, the formidable barrister who would later represent Whistler in a lawsuit involving Walter Sickert. Eddy wrote to Lewis in 1890 and 1891 because he had gotten himself into a compromising situation with two ladies of low standing, one of them a Miss Richardson. He was trying to disengage himself by paying for the return of letters he imprudently had written to her and another lady friend.

“I am very pleased to hear you are able to settle with Miss Richardson,” Eddy wrote Lewis in November of 1890, “although £200 is rather expensive for letters.” He goes on to say he heard from Miss Richardson “the other day” and that she was demanding yet another £100. Eddy promises he will “do all I can to get back” the letters he wrote to “the other lady,” as well.

Two months later, Eddy writes, in “November” [crossed out] “December,” 1891 from his “Cavelry [sic] Barracks” and sends Lewis a gift “in acknowledgement for the kindness you showed me the other day in getting me out of that trouble I was foolish enough to get into.” But apparently “the other lady” wasn’t so easily appeased because Eddy tells Lewis he had to send a friend to see her “and ask her to give up the two or three letters I had written to her . . . you may be certain that I shall be careful in the future not to get into any more trouble of the sort.”

Whatever was in the letters the Duke of Clarence wrote to Miss Richardson and “the other lady” isn’t known, but one might infer that he acted in a manner bound to cause the royal family trouble. He was well aware that news of his involvement with the sorts of women who would blackmail him would not have been well received by the public and certainly not by his grandmother. What this attempted extortion does show is that Eddy’s inclination in such situations was not to have the offending parties murdered and mutilated, but to pay them off.

Although my intention in this work is not to focus on who the Ripper was not, I should mention James Maybrick, a cotton merchant who supposedly wrote the notorious Ripper Diary that came to light in 1992 (and has since been proven to be a fraud). Maybrick was not Jack the Ripper. Among other reasons for my conclusion, his alleged motive for committing the Ripper murders makes no sense and is based on incorrect chronology.

Maybrick was an arsenic addict who lived in Liverpool, and long before 1888 he was visiting his chemist as often as five times a day to obtain his potentially lethal doses. By the spring of 1888, Maybrick was experiencing headaches and numbness of his limbs from his abuse of arsenic and other poisonous drugs, such as strychnine. I find it ridiculous to suppose that any man whose judgment was clouded and whose physical health was compromised by such a severe and chronic drug addiction could have committed the Ripper crimes and so successfully evaded detection. More to the point, Maybrick’s supposed motive for traveling to London and killing prostitutes was that his wife, Florence—or Florie, as she preferred to be called—was having an affair, making her a whore in her husband’s eyes. Out of revenge, he supposedly set out to savage whores in Whitechapel.

While doing this research, I acquired a stash of original letters from Florie to the Chief Justice of England, Sir Charles Russell, and numerous other communications between lawyers and politicians and her mother, Baroness Caroline de Roques, that were written while Florie was imprisoned after being found guilty and sentenced to death for the murder of her husband with arsenic in April of 1889. What these papers reveal casts great doubt on James Maybrick’s alleged motive for committing the Whitechapel murders. Maybrick did not discover his wife’s affair with young cotton broker Alfred Brierly until December 1888—or after the Ripper’s notorious rampage in London’s East End. It wasn’t until May 1889 that Florie’s affair became blatant, perhaps to punish Maybrick for cruelty and his own adultery. Her conviction raised a huge hue and cry on both sides of the Atlantic. Levels of arsenic in her dead husband’s blood would certainly be expected. Perhaps the outrageous miscarriage of justice in Florie Maybrick’s case was best summed up in a letter that a seventy-year-old physician named James Adams wrote to Lord Charles Russell on March 24, 1891: “I never heard such an unfair trial and unjust verdict in the whole course of my experience.” The overwhelming consensus was that at worst, Florie should have been tried for attempted murder.

In an articulate, elegant letter Florie wrote to Lord Russell on May 29, 1895, after six years of imprisonment, solitary confinement, and failing health, she says, “. . . I have met with so many disappointments at the hands of Her Majesty’s representatives, that I feel almost too disheartened to make any further efforts for my relief. Were it not for the sake of my dear children & my mother, whose health is failing so greatly under the strain of deferred hope, I should not presume to recall myself to your memory . . . As a prisoner, I am powerless to help myself or my cause.” Queen Victoria rarely showed compassion toward prisoners but in this case she eventually yielded to public pressure and spared Florie’s life, sentencing her to fifteen years’ imprisonment. Florie Maybrick was released in 1904, changed her name, moved to America (where she had been born), became a housekeeper, and died a recluse.

One has to wonder if the fraudulent Ripper Diary, which at first was believed to be James Maybrick’s authentic confession, would ever have come into existence had it not been for the international outrage created by Florie Maybrick’s conviction for a crime she did not commit. Otherwise, why would anyone in the late twentieth century have ever heard of James Maybrick or cared enough to counterfeit a diary claiming to have been written by him?

Florie Maybrick’s tragic story is far more important than her husband’s subsequent notoriety. Florie’s travesty of a trial (which was called outrageous and a farce and was presided over by a mentally incompetent judge) and the prejudice against any woman who was immoral clearly demonstrate the mindset of Victorian London. Had the Ripper’s crimes not been so brutal, so recurrent, and so sensationalized by his written taunts to police and the press, it is possible the murders of East End Unfortunates would not have created much of a stir at the time.

But Walter Sickert was not the sort to allow his clever, gory crimes to go unnoticed, at least not in the beginning, when he created the role of Jack the Ripper. Long after the Ripper’s crimes ceased to be a reality to the public and the police, Sickert continued his diabolical teases, but much more subtly.

Sickert’s long life was rife with hints. His works contain “clues” about what he felt and did, about what he saw, and about the way all of it was filtered through an imagination that was sometimes childlike and at other times savage. The point of view in most of his works indicates that he watched people from behind. He could see them, but they could not see him. He could see his victims, but they could not see him. He would have watched Mary Ann Nichols for a while before he struck. He would have determined her degree of drunkenness and worked out his best approach.

He may have drifted up to her in the dark and showed her a coin and given her a line before going around behind her. Or he may have come out of the damp dark and suddenly been on her. Her injuries, if they were accurately described, are consistent with her killer yoking her and jerking her head back as he slashed his knife across her exposed throat. She may have bitten her tongue, explaining the abrasion Dr. Llewellyn found. If she tried to twist away, that could explain why the first incision was incomplete and basically a failed attempt. The bruising of her jaw and face may have come about as her killer tightened his restraint of her and cut her throat a second time, this incision so violent that in one stroke he almost decapitated her.

His position behind her would have prevented him from being splashed by the arterial blood that would have spurted out of her severed left carotid artery. Few murderers would choose to have blood spattering their faces, especially the blood of a victim who probably had diseases—at the very least, sexually transmitted ones. When Mary Ann was on her back, her killer moved to the lower part of her body and shoved up her clothes. She could not scream. She may have made no sound except the wet choking rushes and gurgles of air and blood sucking in and out of her severed windpipe. She may have aspirated her own blood and drowned in it as virtually all of her blood bled out from her body. All of this takes minutes.

Coroners’ reports, including Dr. Llewellyn’s, tend to assure us that the person “died instantly.” There is no such thing. One might be disabled instantly by a gunshot wound to the head, but it takes minutes for someone to bleed to death, suffocate, drown, or cease all bodily functions due to a stroke or cardiac arrest. It is possible that Mary Ann was still conscious and aware of what was happening when her murderer began cutting up her abdomen. She may have been barely alive when he left her body in the courtyard.

Robert Mann was the Whitechapel Workhouse inmate in charge of the mortuary the morning her body was brought in. During the inquest inquiry of September 17th, Mann testified that at some point after 4:00 A.M., the police arrived at the workhouse and ordered him out of bed. They said there was a body parked outside the mortuary and to hurry along, so he accompanied them to the ambulance parked in the yard. They carried the body inside the mortuary, and Inspector Spratling and Dr. Llewellyn appeared briefly to take a look. Then the police left, and Mann recalled that it must have been around 5:00 A.M. when he locked the mortuary door and went to breakfast.

An hour or so later, Mann and another inmate named James Hatfield returned to the mortuary and began to undress the body without police or anyone else present. Mann swore to Coroner Baxter that no one had instructed him not to touch the body, and he was sure the police weren’t present. You’re absolutely certain of that? He was, well, maybe not. He could be mistaken. He couldn’t remember. If the police said they were there, then maybe they were. Mann got increasingly confused during his testimony, and “was subject to fits . . . his statements hardly reliable,”
The Times
reported.