Patricia Cornwell – Portrait Of A Killer Jack The Ripper

Night after night, Sickert watched sexually provocative performances at music halls. During much of his career, he would sketch nude female models. He spent time behind locked studio doors, staring, even touch­ing, but never consummating except through a pencil, a brush, a palette knife. If he was capable of sexual desire but completely incapable of gratifying it, his frustration must have been agonizing and enraging. In the early 1920s, he was painting portraits of a young art student named Ciceley Hey, and one day when he was alone with her in the studio, he sat next to her on the sofa and without warning or explanation, started screaming.

One of the portraits he painted of her is Death and the Maiden. At some point between the early 1920s and his death in 1942, he gave her Jack the Ripper’s Bedroom. Where the painting had been since its com­pletion in 1908, no one seems to know. Why he gave it to Ciceley Hey is also a mystery, unless one chooses to suppose that he entertained sex­ually violent fantasies about her. If she thought there was anything pe­culiar about Sickert’s producing a foreboding piece of work with an equally foreboding title, I am unaware of it.

Perhaps one reason Sickert liked his models ugly is that he preferred to be around flesh he did not desire. Perhaps murder and mutilation were a powerful cathartic for his frustration and rage, and a way to de­stroy his desire. This is not to say he lusted after prostitutes. But they rep­resented sex. They represented his immoral grandmother, the Irish dancer, whose fault it may have been – in Sickert’s twisted psyche – that he was born with a severe deformity. One can offer conjectures that may sound reasonable, but they will never comprise the whole truth. Why any per­son has such a disregard for life that he or she enjoys destroying it is be­yond comprehension.

The theory that each victim’s throat was cut while she was lying on the ground remained the predominant one even after the murders of Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddows. Physicians and police were con­vinced that based on blood patterns, the women could not have been standing when the killer severed their carotid arteries. Possibly what the doctors were assuming was that arterial bleeding would have spurted a certain distance and at a certain height had the victims been on their feet. There may also have been an assumption that the victims lay down to have sex.

Prostitutes weren’t likely to lie down on hard pavers or in mud or wet grass, and the doctors were not interpreting blood patterns based on sci­entific testing. In modern laboratories, blood spatter experts routinely conduct experiments with blood to get a better idea of how it drips, flies, sprays, spurts, and spatters according to the laws of physics. In 1888, no one working the Ripper cases was spending his time researching how far or how high blood arced when an upright person’s carotid artery was cut.

No one knew about the back spatter pattern caused by the repeated swinging or stabbing motions of a weapon. It does not appear that the doctors who responded to the death scenes considered that perhaps Jack the Ripper simultaneously cut his victim’s throat and pulled her back­ward to the ground. Investigators didn’t seem to contemplate the possi­bility that the Ripper might have assiduously avoided being bloody in public by quickly getting out of his bloody clothes, coveralls, or gloves, and retreating to one of his hovels to clean up.

Sickert was afraid of diseases. He had a fetish about hygiene and was continually washing his hands. He would immediately wash his hair and face if he accidentally put on another person’s hat. Sickert would have known about germs, infections, and diseases; he would have known that one didn’t have to engage in oral, vaginal, or anal intercourse to contract them. Blood splashed into his face or transferred from his hands to his eyes or mouth or an open wound was enough to cause him a serious problem. Years later, he would go through a time of worry when he thought he had a sexually transmitted disease that turned out to be gout.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163

Leave a Reply 0

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *