Portrait of a Killer by Patricia Cornwell Read Free Book Online Page B

women with wide hips and grotesquely pendulous breasts that he repeatedly depicts in his art. Other people could have the “chorus girls,” Sickert once wrote, but leave him the “hags.”
    He did not have any artistic interest in females who had attractive bodies. He often remarked that any woman who wasn’t too fat or too thin was boring, and in a letter he wrote to his American friends Ethel Sands and Nan Hudson, he voiced delight over his latest models and how “thrilled” he was by the “sumptuous poverty of their class.” He loved their “every day dirty, old, worn clothes.” He added in another letter that were he twenty, he “wouldn’t look at any woman under 40.”
    Martha Tabran was short, overweight, homely, and middle-aged. When she was murdered, she was wearing a green skirt, a brown petticoat, a long black jacket, a black bonnet, and sidespring boots—“all old,” according to the police. Martha would have been suited to Sickert’s taste, but victimology is an indicator, not a science. Although victims of serial murder often share some trait that is significant to the killer, this does not imply that a violent psychopath is unbending in what sort of person he targets. Why Jack the Ripper focused on Martha Tabran instead of some other prostitute of similar description can’t be known, unless the explanation is as pedestrian as opportunity.
    Whatever his reason, he should have learned a valuable lesson from his frenzied murder of Martha Tabran: To lose control and stab a victim thirty-nine times was to cause a bloody mess. Even if he didn’t track blood on the landing or elsewhere—assuming witnesses were accurate in their description of the crime scene—he would have had blood on his hands, his clothes, and the tops of his boots or shoes, making evasion more difficult. And for an educated man like Sickert, who knew that diseases were not caused by miasma but by germs, finding himself spattered and soaked with a prostitute’s blood was likely to have been disgusting.
    Martha Tabran’s cause of death should have been exsanguination due to multiple stab wounds. There was no suitable mortuary in the East End, and Dr. Killeen performed the postmortem examination at a nearby dead house or shed. He attributed a single wound to the heart as “sufficient to cause death.” A stab wound to the heart that does not nick or sever an artery can certainly cause death if it is not treated immediately by surgery in a trauma unit. But people have been known to survive after being stabbed in the heart with knives, ice picks, and other instruments. What causes the heart to stop pumping is not the wound, but the leakage of blood that fills the pericardium or sac that surrounds the heart.
    Knowing whether Martha’s pericardial sac was filled with blood would not only assuage a medical curiosity, it might also give a hint as to how long she survived as she bled from other stab wounds. Every detail helps the dead speak, and Dr. Killeen’s descriptions tell us so little that we don’t know if the weapon was double- or single-edged. We don’t know what the angle of trajectory was, which would help position the killer in relation to Martha at the time of each injury. Was she standing or lying down? Were any of the wounds large or irregular, which would be consistent with the weapon twisting as it was withdrawn because the victim was still moving? Did the weapon have a guard—often mistakenly called a hilt (swords have hilts)? Knife guards leave contusions—bruises—or abrasions on the skin.
    Reconstructing how a victim died and determining the type of weapon used begin to paint a portrait of the killer. Details hint at his intent, emotions, activity, fantasies, and even his occupation or profession. The height of the killer can also be conjectured. Martha was five foot three. If the killer was taller than she and