Patricia Cornwell – Portrait Of A Killer Jack The Ripper

I remember a case from years ago when police arrived at the scene to discover a body as stiff as an ironing board propped against an armchair. The people in the house didn’t want anyone to know the man had died in bed during the middle of the night, so they tried to move him to a chair. Rigor mortis replied, “Lie.” In another instance from my early days of working in the medical examiner’s office, the fully dressed body of a man came into the morgue accompanied by the story that he had been found dead on the floor. Livor mortis replied, “Lie.” The blood had set­tled to his lower body, and on his buttocks was the perfect shape of the toi­let seat he was still sitting on hours after his heart went into arrhythmia.

To determine time of death from any single postmortem artifact is like diagnosing a disease from one symptom. Time of death is a sym­phony of many details, and one plays on another. Rigor mortis is has­tened along by the victim’s muscle mass, the temperature of the air, the loss of blood, and even the activity preceding death. The nude body of a thin woman who has hemorrhaged to death outside in fifty-degree weather will cool faster and stiffen more slowly than the same woman clothed in a warm room and dead from strangulation.

Ambient temperature, body size, clothing, location, cause of death, and many more postmortem minutiae can be naughty little talebearers that fool even an expert and completely confuse him or her as to what really happened. Livor mortis – especially in Dr. Llewellyn’s day – can be mistaken for fresh bruises. An object pressing against the body, such as part of an overturned chair wedged beneath the victim’s wrist, will leave a pale area – or blanching – in the shape of that object. If this is misin­terpreted as “pressure marks,” then a case of nonviolent death can sud­denly turn criminal.

There is no telling how much was hopelessly garbled in the Ripper murders and what evidence might have been lost, but one can be sure that the killer left traces of his identity and daily life. They would have ad­hered to the blood on the body and the ground. He also carried away evidence such as hairs, fibers, and his victim’s blood. In 1888, it wasn’t standard practice for police or doctors to look for hairs, fibers, or other minuscule amounts of evidence that might have required microscopic examination. Fingerprints were called “finger marks” and simply meant that a human being had touched an object such as a glass windowpane. Even if a patent (visible) fingerprint with well-defined ridge detail was discovered, it didn’t matter. It wouldn’t be until 1901 that Scotland Yard would establish its first Central Finger Print Bureau.

Five years earlier, in 1896, two patent fingerprints in red ink were left on a Ripper letter the police received October 14th. The letter is written in red ink, and the red ink fingerprints appear to have been made by the first and second fingers of the left hand. The ridge detail is good enough for comparison. Perhaps the prints were left deliberately – Sickert was the sort to know the latest criminal investigative technology, and leaving prints would be another “ha ha.”

Police would not have linked them to him. Police never noticed the prints, as far as I can tell, and some sixty years after his death, it is still unlikely a comparison between those prints and Sickert’s will ever be made. At present, we don’t have his prints. They were burned up when he was cremated. The best I have been able to do so far is to find a barely visible print left in ink on the back of one of his copper etching plates. The print has yet to reveal sufficient ridge detail for a match, and one has to consider the possibility that the print wasn’t left by Sickert but by a printer.

Fingerprints were known about long before the Ripper began his mur­ders. Ridge detail on human finger pads gives us a better grip and is unique to every individual, including identical twins. It is believed that the Chinese used fingerprints some three thousand years ago to “sign” legal documents, but whether this was ceremonial or for purposes of identification is unknown. In India, fingerprints were used as a means of “signing contracts” as early as 1870. Seven years later, an American microscopist published a journal article suggesting that fingerprints should be used for identification, and this was echoed in 1880 by a Scottish physician working in a hospital in Japan. But as is true with every major scientific breakthrough – including DNA – fingerprints weren’t instantly understood, immediately utilized, or readily accepted in court.

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