During the Victorian era, the primary means of identifying a person and linking him or her to a crime was a “science” called anthropometry, which was developed in 1879 by French criminologist Alphonse Bertillon. He believed that people could be identified and classified through a detailed description of facial characteristics and a series of eleven body measurements including height, reach, head width, and length of the left foot. Bertillon maintained that skeletons were highly individualized, and anthropometry continued to be used to classify criminals and suspects until the turn of the century.
Anthropometry was not only flawed, it was dangerous. It was contingent on physical attributes that aren’t as individualized as believed. This pseudoscience placed far too much emphasis on what a person looked like and seduced the police into consciously or subconsciously accepting as facts the superstitions of yet another pseudoscience – physiognomy, which asserts that criminality, morality, and intellect are reflected in a person’s body and face. Thieves are usually “frail,” while violent men are usually “strong” and “in good health.” All criminals have superior “finger reach,” and almost all female offenders are “homely, if not repulsive.” Rapists tend to be “blond,” and pedophiles often are “delicate” and look “childish.”
If people in the twenty-first century have difficulty accepting the fact that a psychopathic killer can be attractive, likeable, and intelligent, imagine the difficulty in the Victorian era, when standard criminology books included long descriptions of anthropometry and physiognomy. Victorian police were programmed to identify suspects by their skeletal structure and facial features and to assume that a certain “look” could be linked to a certain type of behavior.
Walter Sickert would not have been tagged as a suspect during the time of the Ripper murders. The “young and beautiful Sickert” with “his well known charm,” as Degas once described him, couldn’t possibly be capable of cutting a woman’s throat and slashing open her abdomen. I have even heard it suggested in recent years that if an artist such as Sickert had violent proclivities, he would have sublimated them through his creative work and not acted them out.
When the police were looking for Jack the Ripper, a great deal of importance was placed on witness descriptions of men last seen with the victims. Investigative reports reveal that much attention was paid to hair color, complexion, and height, with the police not taking into account that all of these characteristics can be disguised. Height not only varies in an individual depending on posture, hats, and footwear, but can be altered by “trickery.” Actors can wear tall hats and special lifts in their shoes. They can stoop and slightly bend the knees under voluminous coats or capes; they can wear caps low over their eyes, making themselves appear to be inches taller or shorter than they are.
Early publications on medical jurisprudence and forensic medicine reveal that much more was known than was actually applied in crime cases. But in 1888, cases continued to be made or lost based on witness descriptions instead of physical evidence. Whether the police knew anything at all about forensic science, there was no practical way to get evidence tested. The Home Office – the department of government that oversees Scotland Yard – did not have forensic laboratories then.
A physician such as Dr. Llewellyn might never have touched a microscope; he might not have known that hair, bone, and blood could be identified as human. Robert Hooke had written about the microscopic properties of hairs, fibers, and even vegetable debris and bee stings more than two hundred years earlier, but to death investigators and the average doctor, microscopy was as rarified as rocket science or astronomy must have seemed.
Dr. Llewellyn attended the London Hospital Medical College and had been a licensed physician for thirteen years. His surgery or medical office was no more than three hundred yards from where Mary Ann Nichols was murdered. He was in private practice. Although the police knew him well enough to request him by name when Mary Ann Nichols’s body was discovered, there is no reason to suppose that Llewellyn was a divisional surgeon for Scotland Yard; that is, he was not a physician who offered his services part-time to a particular division, which in this instance was the H Division covering Whitechapel.