Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper--Case Closed (6 page)

A psychopath often stalks his victims before contact, all the while engaging in violent fantasies. Psychopaths may go through dry runs to practice their modus operandi (MO) as they meticulously plan their actions in a manner that will ensure success and evasion. Rehearsals can go on for years before the violent opening night, but no amount of practice or attention to strategy can guarantee that the performance will be flawless. Mistakes happen, especially on opening night, and when Jack the Ripper committed his first murder, he made an amateurish mistake.

CHAPTER FOUR

BY SOME PERSON UNKNOWN

W
hen Martha Tabran took her killer to the dark first-floor landing at 37 George Yard Buildings, he relinquished control to her and inadvertently introduced the risk that something could go wrong with his plan.

Her turf may not have been the killing ground he had in mind. Maybe something else happened that he did not anticipate, such as an insult, a taunt. Prostitutes, especially intoxicated old veterans, were not the sort to be sensitive, and all Martha had to do was reach between his legs and say, “Where is it, love?” Sickert used the term “impotent fury” in a letter. More than a century after the event, I can’t re-create what actually happened in that pitch-black, fetid stairwell, but the killer got enraged. He lost control.

To stab someone thirty-nine times is overkill, and a frenzied overkill is usually prompted by an event or a word that sets off the killer in an unanticipated way. This observation neither suggests nor assumes that Martha’s killer did not premeditate murder and fully intend to commit one, whether it was Martha Tabran’s or whoever else happened to come along that night or early morning. When he accompanied Martha to the stairwell, he intended to stab her to death. He brought a strong, sharp knife or dagger to the scene, and he left with it. He may have been disguised as a soldier. He knew how to come and go undetected and to be careful about leaving obvious evidence—a lost button, a cap, a pencil. The two most personal forms of homicide are stabbing and strangulation. Both require the assailant to have physical contact with the victim. Shootings are less personal. Bashing in a person’s head, especially from behind, is less personal.

Stabbing someone dozens of times is very personal. When cases like that come into the morgue, the police and the medical examiner routinely assume that the victim and assailant knew each other. It is unlikely that Martha knew her killer, but she elicited a very personal reaction from him when she did or said something that didn’t follow his script. She may have resisted him. Martha was known for having fits and being quite difficult when she was drunk, and she had been drinking rum and ale earlier with Pearly Poll. Residents of George Yard Buildings later stated that they heard “nothing” at the early hour of Martha’s death, but their testimony doesn’t count for much when one considers the exhausted, inebriated condition of impoverished people who were accustomed to drunken behavior, scuffles, and violent domestic fights. It was best not to get involved. One could get hurt or in trouble with the police.

At 3:30 A.M., an hour and a half after Police Constable Barrett spotted the loitering soldier outside George Yard Buildings, a resident named Alfred Crow was returning home from work. He was a cab driver, and bank holidays were always busy and kept him out late. He must have been tired. He may even have unwound with a few pints after dropping off his last fare. As he passed the first-floor landing, he noticed “something” on the ground that might have been a body, but he didn’t examine it and went to bed. The creed of the East End, as Victorian economist and social reformer Beatrice Webb put it, was don’t “meddle” with the neighbors. Crow later explained in his testimony at the inquest that it was not uncommon to see drunks unconscious in the East End. No doubt he saw them all the time.

It seems no one realized that the “something” on the landing was a dead body until 4:50 A.M., when a waterside laborer named John S. Reeves was heading out of the building and noticed a woman lying on her back in a pool of blood. Her clothes were disarrayed, as if she had been in a struggle, Reeves recalled, but he saw no footprints on the staircase, nor did he find a knife or any other type of weapon. He said he did not touch the body but immediately located Police Constable Barrett, who sent for Dr. T. R. Killeen. The time of the doctor’s arrival wasn’t given, but when he looked at the body, the lighting could not have been good.

He deduced at the scene that the victim, whose identity would remain unknown for days, had been dead for approximately three hours. She was “36 years old,” the doctor divined, and “very well nourished,” meaning she was overweight. This detail is significant, because virtually all of the Ripper’s victims, including other murdered women the police discounted as having been slain by him, were either very thin or fat. With rare exceptions, they were in their late thirties or early forties.

Walter Sickert preferred female studio models obese or emaciated, and the lower their social class and the uglier they were, the better. This is evident from his frequent references to women as “skeletal” or “the thinnest of the thin like a little eel” and in the big women with wide hips and grotesquely pendulous breasts that he repeatedly depicts in his art. Other people could have the “chorus girls,” Sickert once wrote, but leave him the “hags.”

He did not have any artistic interest in females who had attractive bodies. He often remarked that any woman who wasn’t too fat or too thin was boring, and in a letter he wrote to his American friends Ethel Sands and Nan Hudson, he voiced delight over his latest models and how “thrilled” he was by the “sumptuous poverty of their class.” He loved their “every day dirty, old, worn clothes.” He added in another letter that were he twenty, he “wouldn’t look at any woman under 40.”

Martha Tabran was short, overweight, homely, and middle-aged. When she was murdered, she was wearing a green skirt, a brown petticoat, a long black jacket, a black bonnet, and sidespring boots—“all old,” according to the police. Martha would have been suited to Sickert’s taste, but victimology is an indicator, not a science. Although victims of serial murder often share some trait that is significant to the killer, this does not imply that a violent psychopath is unbending in what sort of person he targets. Why Jack the Ripper focused on Martha Tabran instead of some other prostitute of similar description can’t be known, unless the explanation is as pedestrian as opportunity.

Whatever his reason, he should have learned a valuable lesson from his frenzied murder of Martha Tabran: To lose control and stab a victim thirty-nine times was to cause a bloody mess. Even if he didn’t track blood on the landing or elsewhere—assuming witnesses were accurate in their description of the crime scene—he would have had blood on his hands, his clothes, and the tops of his boots or shoes, making evasion more difficult. And for an educated man like Sickert, who knew that diseases were not caused by miasma but by germs, finding himself spattered and soaked with a prostitute’s blood was likely to have been disgusting.

Martha Tabran’s cause of death should have been exsanguination due to multiple stab wounds. There was no suitable mortuary in the East End, and Dr. Killeen performed the postmortem examination at a nearby dead house or shed. He attributed a single wound to the heart as “sufficient to cause death.” A stab wound to the heart that does not nick or sever an artery can certainly cause death if it is not treated immediately by surgery in a trauma unit. But people have been known to survive after being stabbed in the heart with knives, ice picks, and other instruments. What causes the heart to stop pumping is not the wound, but the leakage of blood that fills the pericardium or sac that surrounds the heart.

Knowing whether Martha’s pericardial sac was filled with blood would not only assuage a medical curiosity, it might also give a hint as to how long she survived as she bled from other stab wounds. Every detail helps the dead speak, and Dr. Killeen’s descriptions tell us so little that we don’t know if the weapon was double- or single-edged. We don’t know what the angle of trajectory was, which would help position the killer in relation to Martha at the time of each injury. Was she standing or lying down? Were any of the wounds large or irregular, which would be consistent with the weapon twisting as it was withdrawn because the victim was still moving? Did the weapon have a guard—often mistakenly called a hilt (swords have hilts)? Knife guards leave contusions—bruises—or abrasions on the skin.

Reconstructing how a victim died and determining the type of weapon used begin to paint a portrait of the killer. Details hint at his intent, emotions, activity, fantasies, and even his occupation or profession. The height of the killer can also be conjectured. Martha was five foot three. If the killer was taller than she and the two of them were standing when he began stabbing her, then one would expect her initial wounds to be high up on her body and angled down. If both of them were standing, it would have been difficult for him to stab her in the stomach and genitals, unless he was very short. Most likely, those injuries would have been inflicted when she was on the ground.

Dr. Killeen assumed the killer was very strong. Adrenaline and rage are terrifically energizing and can produce a great deal of strength. But the Ripper didn’t need superhuman strength. If his weapon was pointed, strong, and sharp, he didn’t need much power to penetrate skin, organs, and even bone. Dr. Killeen also mistakenly assumed that a wound penetrating the sternum or “chest bone” could not have been inflicted by a “knife.” He jumped from that conclusion to his next one: that two weapons were involved, possibly a “dagger” and a “knife,” leading to an early theory that the killer might be ambidextrous.

Even if he was, the image of a man simultaneously stabbing Martha with a dagger in one hand and a knife in the other in darkness is bizarre and absurd, and chances are good he would have stabbed himself a few times. What is known of the medical evidence does not point to an ambidextrous assault. Martha’s left lung was penetrated in five places. The heart, which is on the left side of the body, was stabbed once. A right-handed person is more likely to inflict injuries to the left side of the body if the victim is facing him.

A penetration of the sternum does not merit the emphasis Dr. Killeen gave it. A sharp-pointed knife can penetrate bone, including the skull. In a case that occurred in Germany decades before the Ripper began his spree, a man murdered his wife by stabbing her through the sternum, and later confided to the forensic examiner that the “table knife” penetrated the bone as easily as if it were “butter.” The edges of the wound indicated that the table knife cleanly penetrated the bone once and went through the right lung, the pericardium, and the aorta.

Dr. Killeen’s belief that two weapons were used in Martha Tabran’s murder was buttressed by a difference in the size of the stab wounds. However, this discrepancy can be accounted for if the blade was wider at the guard than it was at the tip. Stab wounds can be different widths depending on their depth, the twisting of the blade, and the elasticity of the tissue or the part of the body being penetrated. It is hard to ascertain what Dr. Killeen meant by a knife or a dagger, but a knife usually refers to a single-edged blade while a dagger is narrow and double-edged and has a pointed tip. The terms
knife
and
dagger
are often used as synonyms, as are the terms
revolver
and
pistol.

As I was researching the Ripper cases, I explored the types of cutting instruments that might have been available to him. The variety and availability is bewildering, if not depressing. British travelers to Asia returned home with all sorts of souvenirs, some better suited than others for stabbing or cutting. The Indian
pesh kabz
is a fine example of a weapon that could leave wounds of several different widths, depending on their depth. The strong steel blade of this “dagger,” as it was called, could create an array of wounds that would perplex any medical examiner, even now.

The curved blade is almost an inch and a half wide at the ivory handle, and becomes double-edged two-thirds of the way up when it begins to taper off to a point as thin as a needle. The one I bought from an antiques dealer was made in 1830 and (including its sheath) would easily fit in one’s waistband, boot, or deep coat pocket—or up a sleeve. The curved blade of the Oriental dagger called a
djambia
(circa 1840) would also leave wounds of different widths, although the entire blade is double-edged.

The Victorians enjoyed an abundance of beautiful weapons that were made for killing human beings and were cavalierly collected during travels abroad or bought for a bargain at bazaars. In one day, I discovered the following Victorian weapons at a London antiques fair and at the homes of two antiques dealers in Sussex: daggers, kukris, a dagger stick disguised to look like a polished tree branch, daggers disguised to look like canes, tiny six-shot revolvers designed to fit neatly into a gentleman’s vest pocket or a lady’s purse, “cut throat razors,” Bowie-type knives, swords, rifles, and beautifully decorated truncheons, including a “Life Preserver” that is weighted with lead. When Jack the Ripper cruised for weapons, he was blessed with an embarrassment of riches.