Portrait Of A Killer: Jack The Ripper - Case Closed by Patricia Cornwell

Author:Patricia Cornwell [Cornwell, Patricia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: thriller

Chapter Sixteen. Stygian Blackness

Five hours after Annie Chapman's body was carried inside the Whitechapel mortuary, Dr. George Phillips arrived and found she had been stripped and washed. Furious, he demanded an explanation.

Robert Mann, the mortuary supervisor who had caused so much trouble in Mary Ann Nichols's case, replied that workhouse authorities had instructed two nurses to undress and clean the body. No police or doctors had witnessed this, and as the angry Dr. Phillips looked around the mortuary, he noticed Annie's clothing piled on the floor in a corner. His earlier admonition that the body was not to be touched by inmates, nurses, or anyone else unless the police instructed otherwise had had little effect on Mann. The inmate had heard all this before.

The mortuary was nothing more than a cramped, filthy, stinking shed with a scarred wooden table darkened by old blood. In the summer it was stuffy and warm, and in the winter it was so cold Mann could barely bend his fingers. What a job his was, Mann must have thought, and maybe the doctor should have been grateful that two nurses had saved him some trouble. Besides, it didn't take a doctor to see what had killed the poor woman. Her head was barely attached to her neck and she had been gutted like a hog hanging in a butcher's shop. Mann didn't pay much attention as Dr. Phillips continued to vent his disgust, complaining that his working conditions were not only unsuitable but also dangerous to his health.

The doctor's point would be made more fully during the inquest. Coroner Wynne Baxter announced to jurors and the press that it was a travesty that there was no proper mortuary in the East End. If any place in the Great Metropolis needed an adequate facility for handling the dead, it was certainly the impoverished East End, where in nearby Wapping, bodies recovered from the Thames had "to be put in boxes" for lack of anywhere else to take them, said Baxter.

There had once been a mortuary in Whitechapel, but it had been destroyed when a new road was put in. For one reason or another, London officials hadn't gotten around to building a new facility to take care of the dead, and the problem wasn't one that would soon be addressed. As we used to say when I worked in the medical examiner's office, "Dead people don't vote or pay taxes." Dead paupers don't lobby politicians for funding. Even though death is the great equalizer, it doesn't make all dead people equal.

Dr. Phillips settled down and began his examination of Annie Chapman's body. By now, it was in full rigor mortis, which would have been slower to form because of the cool temperature. Dr. Phillips's estimation that Annie had been dead two or three hours when her body was found may have been relatively within bounds. He was out of bounds, however, when he concluded that the small amount of food in her stomach and the absence of liquid meant she was sober when she died.

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