What Alice Knew by Paula Marantz Cohen

morning of September 30. Throat cut. That’s all.” He gave a dry laugh, as though struck by the irony of referring in such a way to a cut throat. “It might not seem to fit the pattern,” he continued, “since there are no other mutilations, but it’s clear that the murderer was interrupted in his work. Note the state and disposition of the body.” He turned to the photograph taken in the morgue and pointed to where the victim’s dress was ripped but not torn off the body, and then shifted to the photograph at the scene, where the body was shown slumped, face forward, suggesting it had been pushed down in haste. “What also supports this hypothesis, of course, is that the Eddowes’s murder occurred less than an hour and a half later. Frustration at the earlier interruption would also account for the level of brutality here.” He displayed the photograph of Eddowes on a slab in the morgue, which had been taken before the stitching up of the wounds. The head was twisted to the side, almost severed from the trunk; great flaps of skin were exposed on the face; and the abdomen was a thicket of standing flesh. The killer had carved up that area of the body with frenzied completeness.
    Abberline droned out the details. “Throat cut, extreme and symmetrical cutting of the abdomen and the face, uterus and kidney taken away, left ear partially severed—something new there, suggesting that our murderer may have in mind additional variations to come.” He had spoken without emotion, but a sigh escaped him at the prospect of what those variations might be. He quickly resumed his professional tone and moved on to conclude, “There are marked similarities in the pattern of cutting in Nichols, Chapman, Stride, and Eddowes, not to mention affinities in their age and occupation. They were all in their late thirties and early forties, all prostitutes. All were in dire physical condition, not necessarily underfed, but unhealthy. Our man likes to prey on weakness.”
    “Did the murderer commit on them acts of a…sexual nature?” asked William carefully. He was prone to prudery, despite his medical training, and had noted that his European colleagues were less tentative on this score.
    Indeed, Abberline responded bluntly, “No. The women were found in suggestive positions, legs exposed and spread, but there was no indication of sexual intercourse, neither in vaginal tearing nor in the presence of the expected fluids.”
    “What you describe seems to suggest a desire to possess and penetrate these women, but apparently not in the sexual sense.”
    Abberline nodded. “Possibly a case of severed or maimed organs on the part of the killer.”
    “Perhaps,” mused William, “but my sense is that he would not commit these acts unless some additional expressive route were inhibited or blocked. The form of the killings is indicative of more than sexual frustration. Or sexual frustration instigated by something else.”
    He gazed down at the photograph of Catherine Eddowes, with its grotesque flaps of skin, and thought of the stitched image he had seen in the morgue. Somehow the photograph was even more disturbing than the actual body. It was not a sharp image, yet the graininess contributed to the horror of its effect. He was reminded of the mourning photograph taken of his son Hermie before the burial, a carefully staged shot of his little boy tucked into bed, just as he might have been after he had been kissed good night. That picture, meant to be a beautiful keepsake, had given William terrible dreams, and his Alice had finally hidden it, for fear that it would precipitate another breakdown.
    A photograph was a kind of haunting, he concluded, a representation of a reality not literally present. And the photograph of a dead person was a double sort of haunting. As for these murdered women, their photographs were also testimony of their society’s neglect and abuse. Strangers would look at them years, perhaps even decades, hence