When I travel, especially abroad, my key to the city is often an invitation to visit its violent, sad sights. In Buenos Aires, I was given a proud tour of that city's crime museum, a room of decapitated heads preserved in formalin inside glass boxes. Only the most notorious criminals made it into this gruesome gallery, and they had gotten what was coming to them, I supposed, as they stared back at me with milky eyes. In Salta, in northwestern Argentina, I was shown five-hundred-year-old mummies of Inca children who had been buried alive to please the gods. A few years ago in London, I was given VIP treatment in a plague pit where one could scarcely move in the mud without stepping on human bones.
I worked in the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Richmond, Virginia, for six years, programming computers, compiling statistical analyses, and helping out in the morgue. I scribed for the forensic pathologists, weighed organs, wrote down trajectories and the sizes of wounds, inventoried the prescription drugs of suicide victims who would not take their antidepressants, helped undress fully rigorous people who rigidly resisted our removing their clothes, labeled test tubes, wiped up blood, and saw, touched, smelled, and even tasted death because the stench of it clings to the back of one's throat.
I don't forget the faces of or the smallest details about people who are murdered. I've seen so many. I couldn't possibly count how many, and I wish I could fill a huge room with them before it happened and beg them to lock their doors or install an alarm system - or at least get a dog - or not park there or stay away from drugs. I feel the prick of pain when I envision the dented aerosol can of Brut deodorant in the pocket of the teenaged boy showing off and deciding to stand up in the back of a pickup truck. He didn't notice it was about to drive under a bridge. I still can't comprehend the randomness of the death of the man struck by lightning after he was handed a metal-tipped umbrella as he got off a plane.
My intense curiosity about violence hardened long ago into a suit of clinical armor that is protective but so heavy sometimes I can barely walk after visits with the dead. It seems the dead want my energy and desperately try to suck it out of me as they lie in their own blood on the street or on top of a stainless-steel table. The dead stay dead and I stay drained. Murder is not a mystery, and it is my mission to fight it with my pen.
It would have been a betrayal of what I am and an insult to Scotland Yard and every law enforcer in Christendom for me to be "tired" the day Linda Fairstein said she could arrange a tour.
"That's very kind of Scotland Yard," I told her. "I've never been there."
The next morning, I met with Deputy Assistant Commissioner John Grieve, the most respected investigator in Great Britain, and, as it turned out, an expert in Jack the Ripper's crimes. The fabled Victorian killer interested me mildly. I had never read a Ripper book in my life. I knew nothing about his homicides. I did not know his victims were prostitutes or how they died. I asked a few questions. Perhaps I could use Scotland Yard in my next Scarpetta novel, I thought. If so, I would need to know factual details about the Ripper cases, and perhaps Scarpetta would have new insights to offer about them.
John Grieve offered to take me on a retrospective tour of the Ripper crime scenes - what was left of them after 113 years. I cancelled a trip to Ireland to spend a rainy, freezing morning with the famous Mr. Grieve and Detective Inspector Howard Gosling, walking about Whitechapel and Spitalfields, to Mitre Square, and to Miller's Court where Mary Kelly was flayed to the bone by this serial murderer people call the Ripper.
"Has anyone ever tried to use modern forensic science to solve these crimes?" I asked.
"No," John Grieve said, and he gave me a very short list of very weak suspects. "There's one other interesting chap you might want to check out, as long as you're going to look into it. An artist named Walter Sickert. He painted some murder pictures. In one of them in particular, a clothed man is sitting on the edge of a bed with the body of the nude prostitute he just murdered. It's called The Camden Town Murder. I've always wondered about him."
It wasn't the first time Sickert had been connected with Jack the Ripper's crimes. Most people have always found the notion laughable.
I began to wonder about Sickert when I was flipping through a book of his art. The first plate I landed on was an 1887 painting of the well-known Victorian performer Ada Lundberg at the Marylebone Music Hall. She is supposed to be singing but looks as if she is screaming as the leering, menacing men look on. I am sure there are artistic explanations for all of Sickert's works. But what I see when I look at them is morbidity, violence, and a hatred of women. As I continued to follow Sickert and the Ripper, I began to see unsettling parallels. Some of his paintings bear a chilling resemblance to mortuary and scene photographs of Jack the Ripper's victims.
I noticed murky images of clothed men reflected in mirrors inside gloomy bedrooms where nude women sit on iron bedsteads. I saw impending violence and death. I saw a victim who had no reason to fear the charming, handsome man who had just coaxed her into a place and state of utter vulnerability. I saw a diabolically creative mind, and I saw evil.
I began adding layer after layer of circumstantial evidence to the physical evidence discovered by modern forensic science and expert minds.
All along, forensic scientists and I have hoped for DNA. But it would be a year and more than a hundred tests later before we would begin to see the first shadows of the 75- to 114-year-old genetic evidence that Walter Sickert and Jack the Ripper left when they touched and licked postage stamps and envelope flaps. Cells from the inside of their mouths sloughed off into their saliva and were sealed in adhesive until DNA scientists apprehended the genetic markers with tweezers, sterile water, and cotton swabs.
The best result came from a Ripper letter that yielded a single-donor mitochondrial DNA sequence, specific enough to eliminate 99% of the population as the person who licked and touched the adhesive backing of that stamp. This same DNA sequence profile turned up as a component of another Ripper letter, and two Walter Sickert letters.
Genetic locations from this DNA sequence were found on other Sickert items, such as coveralls he wore when he painted. The DNA in all but the single-donor Ripper stamp is mixed with other genetic sequence profiles from other people. (This is neither surprising nor damning.) The DNA evidence is the oldest ever tested in a criminal case.
This is only the beginning. We aren't finished with our DNA testing and other types of forensic analyses. These could go on for years as the technology advances at an exponential rate.
There is other physical evidence as well. Forensic scientists as well as art, paper, and lettering experts found the following: a Ripper letter written on artists' paper; watermarks on paper used in Ripper letters that match watermarks on paper used by Walter Sickert; Ripper letters written with the waxy-soft crayonlike ground used in lithography; Ripper letters with paint or ink applied with a paintbrush. A microscopic exam revealed that the "dried blood" on Ripper letters is consistent with the oil-and-wax mixtures used in etching ground, and under ultraviolet light it fluoresced milky white, which is also consistent with etching ground. Art experts say that sketches in Ripper letters are professional and are consistent with Walter Sickert's art works and technique.
As an interesting aside, a blood-detection test conducted on the blood-like etching ground smeared and painted on Ripper letters came up as inconclusive - which is very unusual. Two possible explanations are as follows: It could be a reaction to microscopic particles of copper, since in this type of testing copper could cause inconclusive results or a false positive; or it could be the presence of blood mixed with the brown etching ground.