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.
Sickert’s works of art may contain “clues,” but they are about himself and what he felt and did. His art is about what he saw, and 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 was 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.