Read Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper--Case Closed for Free Online Page A

acclaimed performance was in 1880, when he played a French soldier in Shakespeare’s Henry V. In 1887, Sickert completed a painting he titled It All Comes from Sticking to a Soldier —the painting that depicts music-hall performer Ada Lundberg singing as she is surrounded by leering men.
    Sickert’s interest in things military never waned throughout his life, and it was his habit to ask the Red Cross for the uniforms of soldiers who were disabled or dying. His motive, he said, was to outfit models for his military sketches and paintings. At one time, an acquaintance recalled, Sickert’s studio was piled with uniforms and rifles.
    “I am doing a portrait of a dear dead man, a Colonel,” he wrote. He asked a friend to help him “borrow some uniforms from Belgians in hospital. One has a kind of distaste for using misfortunes to further one’s own ends.” He didn’t really. He admitted more than once to his “purely selfish practice of life.” As he himself said, “I live entirely for my work—or as some people put it, for myself.”
    It is surprising that the possibility of a Ripper who wore disguises hasn’t been emphasized more or explored as a likely scenario, one that would surely help explain why he seemed to vanish without a trace after his crimes. A Ripper using disguises would also explain the variety of descriptions witnesses gave of the men supposedly last seen with the victims. The use of disguises by violent offenders is not uncommon. Men who dressed as police, soldiers, maintenance workers, deliverymen, servicemen, paramedics, and even clowns have been convicted of violent serial crimes, including sexual homicides. A disguise is a simple and effective way to gain access and lure the victim without resistance or suspicion, and to get away with robbery, rape, or murder. Disguises allow the perpetrator to return to the scene of the crime and watch the investigative drama or to attend the victim’s funeral.
    A psychopath intent on murder uses any means to con a victim out of life. Eliciting trust before the kill is part of the psychopath’s script, and this requires acting, whether the person has ever stepped foot on a stage or not. When one has seen a psychopath’s victims, alive or dead, it is hard to call such an offender a person. To begin to understand Jack the Ripper one must understand psychopaths, and to understand is not necessarily to accept. What these people do is foreign to every fantasy and feeling most of us have ever experienced. All people have the capacity for evil, but psychopaths are not like all of us.
    The psychiatric community defines psychopathy as an antisocial behavioral disorder, more dominant in males than females and statistically five times more likely to occur in the male offspring of a father suffering from the disorder. Symptoms of psychopathy, according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, include stealing, lying, substance abuse, financial irresponsibility, an inability to deal with boredom, cruelty, running away from home, promiscuity, fighting, and lack of remorse.
    Psychopaths are uniquely different from one another in very much the same way that individuals differ from one another. A psychopath might be promiscuous and lie but be financially responsible. A psychopath might fight and be promiscuous but not steal, might torture animals but not abuse alcohol or drugs, might torture people and not animals. A psychopath might commit multiple murders but not be promiscuous. The combinations of antisocial behaviors are countless, but the most distinctive and profound characteristic of all psychopaths is that they do not feel remorse. They have no concept of guilt. They do not have a conscience.
    I had heard and read about a vicious killer named John Royster months before I actually saw him in person during his murder trial in New York City in the winter of 1997. I was shocked by how polite and gentle he seemed. His pleasant looks, neat clothes,