Patricia Cornwell – Portrait Of A Killer Jack The Ripper

This conclusion makes sense. In premeditated crimes, the killer care­fully plans the entrance and exit, and someone as calculating and metic­ulous as Sickert would have familiarized himself with a safe escape. I doubt he left the scene by climbing over the rickety, haphazardly spaced palings that separated the yards. Had he done so, most likely he would have smeared blood on the boards or even broken a few. It would have been more convenient and sensible for Sickert to escape through the side yard that led to the street.

From there he could have woven in and out of doors and passages of “Stygian blackness, into which no lamp shone,” as one reporter de­scribed the scene, a place “where a murderer might, if possessed of cool­ness, easily pass unobserved.” Along Hanbury Street, doors were unlocked and weathered palings enclosed yards and “waste grounds” where houses had been demolished and constables feared to tread. Even if Sickert had been spotted, if he wasn’t acting in a way that aroused sus­picion, he would have been simply one more shadowy figure, especially if he had dressed to fit the environment. Actor that he was, he may even have bid a stranger good morning.

Sickert may have wrapped Annie Chapman’s flesh and organs in paper or cloth. But there would have been blood drips and smears, and mod­ern forensic investigation would have discovered a trail that was much longer than the five or six feet the little girl found. Today’s chemicals and alternate light sources could have detected blood easily, but in 1888, it took the eyes of a child to find the strange “marks” in the yard. No blood tests were done, and it can’t be said with certainty that the blood was Annie Chapman’s.

Sickert may have been in the habit of watching prostitutes with their clients before moving in for the kill. He may have watched Annie in the past and was aware that she and other prostitutes used the unlocked pas­sages and yards of 29 Hanbury and neighboring tenement houses for “immoral” purposes. He may have been watching her the morning he murdered her. “Peeping” at people dressing or undressing or engaging in sex is consistent in a lust murderer’s history. Violent psychopaths are voyeurs. They stalk, watch, fantasize, then rape or kill or both.

Watching a prostitute sexually service a client could have been Sickert’s foreplay. He might have approached Annie Chapman immediately after her last customer left. He might have solicited sex from her, gotten her to turn her back to him, and then attacked her. Or he might have ap­peared out of the dark and grabbed her from behind, jerked back her head by her chin, leaving the bruises on her jaw. The cuts to her throat severed her windpipe, rendering her unable to make a sound. Within sec­onds he could have had her on the ground and yanked up her clothing to slice open her abdomen. It takes no time or skill to disembowel a per­son. It doesn’t take a forensic pathologist or surgeon to find the uterus, ovaries, and other internal organs.

Much has been made of the Ripper’s alleged surgical skills. To cut out a uterus and part of the belly wall including the navel, the upper part of the vagina, and the greater part of the bladder does not require surgical precision, and it would be difficult for even a surgeon to “operate” when frenzied and in the dark. But Dr. Phillips was sure that the killer must have had some knowledge of anatomy or surgical procedures and had used a “small amputating knife or a well ground slaughterman’s knife, narrow & thin, sharp &c blade of six to eight inches in length.”

Sickert didn’t need exposure to surgery or practice in internal medi­cine to know a thing or two about the female pelvic organs. The upper end of the vagina is attached to the uterus, and on top of the vagina is the bladder. Assuming the uterus was the trophy Sickert sought, he sim­ply removed it in the dark and took the surrounding tissue with it. This isn’t “surgery”; it is expediency, or grab and cut. One can assume he knew the anatomical location of the vagina and that it is close to the uterus. But even if he didn’t, there were plenty of surgical books avail­able at the time.

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