Patricia Cornwell – Portrait Of A Killer Jack The Ripper

Sir – Just now, perhaps, my own personal experiences of what blood­hounds can do in the way of tracking criminals may be of interest. Here, then, is an incident to which I was an eye witness.

In 1861 or 1862 (my memory does not enable me to give a more exact date), I was in Dieppe when a little boy was found doubled up in a horse-bin with his throat cut from ear to ear. A couple of blood­hounds were at once put on to the scent. Away they dashed after, for a moment or two, sniffing the ground, hundreds of people, including the keeper and myself, following in their wake.

Nor did the highly-trained animals slacken their pace in the least till they had arrived at the other end of town, when they made a dead stop at the door of a low lodging house, and throwing up their noble heads, gave a deep bay. On the place being entered, the culprit – an old woman – was discovered hiding under a bed.

Let me add that the instinct of a bloodhound when properly trained, for tracking by scent is so marvelous that no one can say positively what difficulties in following a trail it cannot surmount.

Faithfully yours,

Williams [sic] Buchanan

11, Burton St., W.C., October 8.

As is true with the Elderly Gentleman’s letter to the editor, the tone does not fit the subject. Mr. Buchanan has the light, cheerful voice of a raconteur as he relays the horrific account of a boy having his throat cut “from ear to ear,” his body stuffed into a “horse-bin.”

A search through newspaper records in Dieppe turned up no mention of a child having his throat cut or being murdered by similar means in the early 1860s. This isn’t necessarily conclusive, because French records from a century ago were poorly kept or lost, or destroyed during two world wars. But if there had been such a murder, the suggestion that Dieppe had at that time trained bloodhounds available “at once” to put on the scent is extremely hard to accept. The huge metropolis of London didn’t have trained bloodhounds available in the 1860s, nor even twenty-eight years later, when Charles Warren had to import the dogs into the city and board them with a veterinary surgeon.

In the eighth century, bloodhounds were known as Flemish hounds and were prized for their ability to track bear and other animals and run them out of safe harbor on hunts. It wasn’t until the sixteenth century that it became common to use these deep-throated, long-eared hounds to track human beings. The depiction of them as vicious canines used to hunt down slaves in America’s southern states is a terrible falsehood. It is not the nature of bloodhounds to be aggressive or to have physical con­tact with their quarry. They don’t have a mean fold in their sad, floppy faces. Slave-hunting hounds were usually foxhounds or a mixture of foxhound and Cuban mastiff trained to drag a person to the ground or attack.

Training bloodhounds to track criminals is so specialized and painstaking that few are available to assist police detectives. Not many of the hounds would have been around in 1861 or 1862, when Buchanan claims, in what sounds like a Grimm’s fairy tale, that bloodhounds tracked the little boy’s murderer straight to the house where an old woman was hiding under a bed.

“Williams” – as The Times printed it – Buchanan was not listed in the 1888 post office directory, but the 1889 register of electors for St. Pan-eras South Parliamentary Borough, District 3 Burton, lists a William Buchanan as a voting resident of a dwelling house at 11 Burton Street. In those days, Burton Street wasn’t considered a dreadful part of the city, but it wasn’t a good one, either. The house let for thirty-eight pounds a year with rooms rented to a number of people of various occupations, including an apprentice, a printer’s warehouseman, a colorman grinder, a cocoa packer, a French polisher, a chair maker, and a laundress.

William Buchanan wasn’t an uncommon name, and no other records could be located to identify him or his occupation. But his letter to the editor shows a literate, creative mind, and he mentions Dieppe, the sea­side resort and artists’ haven where Sickert would have houses and se­cret rooms for almost half of his life. Sickert wasn’t likely to rent these secret rooms in Dieppe, London, or elsewhere under his own name. In the late 1880s, identification wasn’t required. Cash would do. One might wonder how often Sickert used names other than his own, including those that might belong to real people.