As early as 1872, Gray’s Anatomy was already in its sixth edition, and had detailed diagrams of the “organs of digestion” and “female organs of generation.” For one who had suffered permanent, life-altering debilitation from surgeries, Sickert was likely to have an interest in anatomy, especially the anatomy of the female genitalia and reproductive organs. I would expect a man of his curiosity, intelligence, and obsessiveness to have looked at Gray’s or Bell’s Great Operations of Surgery (1821) with its color plates prepared by Thomas Landseer, the brother of the famous Victorian painter of animals Edwin Landseer, whose work Sickert would have known.
There was Carl Rokitansky’s A Manual of Pathological Anatomy, volumes I-IV (1849-54), George Viner Ellis’s Illustrations of Dissections with life-size color plates (1867), and James Hope’s Principles and Illustrations of Morbid Anatomy, with its Complete Series of Coloured Lithographic Drawings (1834). Had Sickert any doubts as to the location of the uterus or any other organ, he had a number of ways to educate himself without exposure to the medical profession.
Because of the dismal state of forensic science and medicine in 1888, there were a number of misunderstandings about blood. The size and shape of blood spatter and drips meant very little to the Victorian investigator, who believed that a fat person had a significantly greater volume of blood than a thin one. Dr. Phillips would have looked at the yard where Annie Chapman’s body was found and focused on whether there was enough blood to indicate she was murdered in that location or elsewhere. Someone with a severed neck should lose most of his or her blood – approximately seven or eight pints. Quite a lot of blood could have soaked into Annie’s many layers of dark, thick clothing. Arterial blood would have spurted and could have soaked into the earth some distance away from her.
I suspect the “patches” of closely clustered blood droplets noticed on the wall not far above Annie’s head were back spatter from the knife. Each time the Ripper slashed into her body and drew back the knife to slash again, blood flew off the blade. Since we do not know the number, shape, and size of the blood spatters, we can speculate only that they could not have been caused by arterial bleeding unless Annie was already ‘ on the ground while her carotid artery or arteries spurted blood. I suspect she was attacked while she was standing, and the deep cuts to her abdomen were made when she was on her back.
Her intestines may have been pulled out and tossed aside as the Ripper groped in the dark for her uterus. Trophies or souvenirs bring back memories. They are a catalyst for fantasies. The taking of them is so typical as to be expected in violent psychopathic crimes. Sickert was far too smart to keep any incriminating souvenir where someone could have found it. But he had secret rooms, and I wonder where he got the inspiration for them. Perhaps there was some experience from his childhood that caused him to be drawn to dreadful places. There is a verse in a poem his father wrote that brings his son’s secret rooms to mind:
What an uncanny/eerie feeling when I am within your walls, those high, naked, pale walls, how terrible they are, they remind me of the old-fashioned guard rooms… Does not one, here and there, pile up overcoats and caput, long coats, wintercoats and does not one carry all kinds of garbage into the room…
In September 1889, the Ripper writes his return address as “Jack the rippers hole.” Sickert could have kept whatever he wanted in his secret places – or “rat holes,” as I call them. It is impossible to know what he did with his “garbage,” the body parts that would begin to decompose and smell unless he chemically preserved them. In one letter the Ripper writes of cutting off a victim’s ear and feeding it to a dog. In another, he mentions frying organs and eating them. Sickert might have been inordinately curious about the female reproductive system that had given birth to his ruined life. He could not study it in the dark. Perhaps he took the organs back to his lair and studied them there.