Portrait of a Killer by Patricia Cornwell

Author:Patricia Cornwell
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: Mystery, Non-fiction, Horror, Biography, History
ISBN: 9781101204443
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2002-11-01T00:00:00+00:00

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.

After Annie Chapman’s murder, the relatives who had avoided her in life took care of her in death. They made her funeral arrangements, and at seven o’clock on Friday morning, September 14th, a hearse appeared at the Whitechapel mortuary to take her away clandestinely. Her relatives did not form a procession of coaches for fear of drawing attention to Annie’s last journey. She was buried at Manor Park Cemetery, seven miles northeast of where she was slain. The weather had taken a dramatic turn for the better. The temperature was sixty degrees and the sun shone all day.

During the week following Annie’s death, businessmen in the East End formed a vigilance committee chaired by George Lusk, a local builder and contractor and member of the Metropolitan Board of Works. Lusk’s committee issued the following public statement: “Finding that, in spite of the murders being committed in our midst our police force is inadequate to discover the author or authors of the late atrocities, we the undersigned have formed ourselves into a committee and intend offering a substantial reward to anyone, citizen or otherwise, who shall give such information as will be the means of bringing the murderer or murderers to justice.”

A Member of Parliament offered to donate £100 to the reward fund, and other citizens were willing to help. Metropolitan Police documents, however, note that the response to the citizens’ request should be that the practice of offering rewards had been abolished some time ago because rewards encouraged people to “discover” misleading evidence or to manufacture evidence, and “give rise to meddling and gossip without end.”

In the East End, resentment and unruly behavior rose to a new high. People caroused at 29 Hanbury Street, gawking, some of them laughing and joking, while the rest of London fell into a “kind of stupor,” said The Times. The crimes were “beyond the ghastliest efforts of fiction”—even worse than Edgar Allan Poe’s Murders in the Rue Morgue, and “nothing in fact or fiction equals these outrages at once in their horrible nature and in the effect which they have produced upon the popular imagination.”

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