Patricia Cornwell – Portrait Of A Killer Jack The Ripper

Wynne Baxter was a solicitor and an experienced coroner who would preside over the inquest of Joseph Merrick two years later. Baxter would not tolerate lying in his courtroom or the abuse of proper protocol in a case. He was more than a little irked that inmates had removed Mary Ann Nichols’s clothing. He rigorously questioned the confused, fitful Mann, who steadfastly maintained that the clothing was neither torn nor cut when the body arrived. All he and Hatfield had done was strip the dead woman naked and wash her before the doctor showed up so he wouldn’t have to waste his time doing it.

They cut and tore clothing to speed things along and make their chore a bit easier. She was wearing a lot of layers, some of them stiff with dried blood, and it is very difficult to pull clothing over the arms and legs of a body that is as rigid as a statue. When Hatfield took the stand, he agreed with everything Mann had said. The two inmates unlocked the mortuary after breakfast. They were by themselves when they cut and tore off the dead woman’s clothing.

They washed her, they were alone with her body, and they had no rea­son to think there was anything inappropriate about that. Transcripts of their testimonies at the inquest give the impression that the men were frightened and bewildered because they didn’t think they had done any­thing wrong. They really didn’t understand what the fuss was about. The workhouse mortuary wasn’t supposed to handle police cases, any­way. It was just a whistle-stop for dead inmates on their way to a pau­per’s grave.

In Latin, forensic means “forum,” or a public place where Roman lawyers and orators presented their cases before judges. Forensic or legal medicine is the medicine of the courts, and in 1888, it hardly existed in practice. The sad truth is, there wasn’t much physical evidence that could have been either utilized or ruined in Mary Ann Nichols’s murder. But not knowing with certainty whether Mary Ann’s clothing was already cut or torn when her body arrived at the mortuary is a significant loss. What­ever the killer did would reveal more about him and his emotions at the time of the murder.

Based on the descriptions of Mary Ann’s body at the scene, I suspect her clothing was disarrayed but not cut or torn off, and it was on the early morning of August 31st when the Ripper advanced to his next level of violence. He shoved up her ulster, woolen petticoats, flannel under­clothing, and skirts. He made one jagged, then “three or four” quick slashes downward, and “several” across, almost in the pattern of a grid. A few small stabs to the genitals and he was gone, vanished in the dark.

Without reviewing autopsy diagrams or photographs, it is very diffi­cult to reconstruct injuries and re-create what a killer did and what he might have been feeling. Wounds can be fierce or they can be tentative. They can show hesitation or rage. Three or four shallow incisions on a wrist in addition to the deep one that severed veins tell a different story about a person’s suicide than one decisive cut does.

Psychiatrists interpret mental states and emotional needs through a pa­tient’s demeanor and confessions of feelings and behavior. The physicians of the dead have to make those same interpretations through the braille of injuries old and new and debris on the body and the way the person was dressed and where he or she died. Listening to the dead speak is a unique gift and demands highly specialized training. The language of si­lence is hard to read, but the dead do not lie. They may be difficult to understand, and we might misinterpret them or fail to find them before their communications have begun to fade. But if they still have something to say, their veracity is unimpeachable. Sometimes they continue to talk long after they have been reduced to bone.

If people have a great deal to drink and get into their cars or into fights, their dead bodies admit it through alcohol levels. If a man was a heroin and cocaine addict, his dead body displays the needle tracks, and the metabolites morphine and benzoylecgonine show up in urine, the vit­reous fluid of the eye, and the blood. If one frequently engaged in anal sex or was into genital tattoos and body piercing, or if a woman shaved off her pubic hair because her lover’s fantasy was to have sex with a child – these people speak openly after they are dead. If a teenage boy tried for a more intense orgasm by masturbating while dressed in leather and partially compressing the blood vessels in his neck with a noose – but he didn’t mean to slip off the chair he was standing on and hang him­self – he’ll confess. Shame and lies are for those left behind.