Chapter 44
IN CORNWALL WE STAYED AT THE B&B HILL’S HOTEL, THE ORIGINAL Lizard Guest House nearby and now a pub. Joan Hill was a descendant of the family that had owned the Lizard, and she’d inherited its many guestbooks, never bothering to look at them.
“It sounded like a hurricane all night from my windows,” I wrote in my journal.
When my guests and I flew out of Cornwall, landing in London at Gatwick Airport, we were told that our passports hadn’t been checked.
I gave a detailed description of the uniformed man who had done it after we’d landed in Cornwall.
I was told adamantly that there was no one at Newquay Airport who fit that description.
As I continued my research, I’d meet with John Grieve periodically, usually in Whitechapel at an Indian restaurant. He would review my latest portfolio as I pieced together the case. We’d have discussions the same way partners in an active homicide investigation would.
One day he said, “You know, Patricia, you’ll be hated for this.”
I wasn’t prepared for the vitriol inspired by my first book, Portrait of a Killer (2002), or my second one, Ripper: The Secret Life of Walter Sickert (2017).
Critics swear that Sickert was in France the entire fall and early winter of 1888.
But it’s not true. He was in London at Collins’s music hall on September 28, October 5, and October 8.
I suspect if more of these music hall sketches were found, there would be other dates placing him in London that fall and early winter.
When I began bringing forensic scientists to the U.K.
in 2001, they swabbed envelopes from Sickert, his associates, alleged suspects, and the Jack the Ripper letters.
But we were dealing with over a century of contamination.
The nuclear DNA tests came back with nothing.
We had more luck with mitochondrial DNA, and the test results didn’t exclude Sickert as being the Ripper.
But that’s as much as can be said. Recent DNA analysis claims the Polish barber Aaron Kosminski was the Ripper. That’s not true either.
I don’t trust the DNA testing that was done, and by far I’m not the only one. U.K. geneticist Adam Rutherford said in a March 18, 2019, interview with Forbes Daily that the analysis is “terrible science.” DNA expert Turi King has said the same thing.
In the summer of 2002, I traveled to Boston for research at Harvard’s Houghton Library. Their Department of Manuscripts had correspondence between Sickert and painters William Rothenstein, Jacques-émile Blanche, and others.
Sickert’s archivist Vada Hart had flown from London to help me review the documents. She was one of the few people I knew who could decipher his handwriting. After we were done, Vada wondered if I would take her to the “Witch City,” as Salem, Massachusetts, is called.
She’d like to see it before heading back across the pond, fascinated by the witch trials that began in the winter of 1692.
Two hundred men, women, and children were accused.
Twenty-five of them were executed. It was a brutally hot and humid day as Vada, Irene, and I toured Salem, ducking in and out of shops and museums while chatting with psychics.
I was fascinated to learn more about witches and magic. Those of the craft were nothing like my childhood drawings of pointy-chinned women in peaked hats flying on brooms across the moon.
“A witch is a wise person who studies the elements of the universe,” Salem mystic Lori Bruno explained. “Spells are like prayers.”
I told her about my work on Jack the Ripper, and she advised that Walter Sickert is a very dark entity, and evil never dies.
Lori is a channeler of the unseen, and we would become close friends.
While having breakfast at Salem’s Hawthorne Inn with Vada and Irene, I was reading the newspaper when I came across an article that would send me on another investigation.
A forty-four-year-old former beauty queen named Pam Kinamore had been murdered several weeks earlier in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
She owned the Comforts and Joys antique shop in Denham Springs, and on Friday, July 12, she couldn’t find her keys.
While closing for the day, she mentioned that they had vanished.
The missing keys included one to her home on Briarwood Place in Baton Rouge.
She returned there after work, her husband and son out for the evening.
I’ve always wondered how she got in. Perhaps there was a spare key somewhere, and the killer was watching.
At 11:45 p.m. when her husband pulled into the driveway, Pam’s car was there but she was nowhere to be found.
Spots of blood were on the carpet in the master bedroom, and some of the furniture was in disarray.
The bathtub was filled with cold water, votive candles around it.
By all appearances Pam was undressed and about to unwind when violently abducted.
Four days later, her badly decomposed nude body was found in the woods south of the Whiskey Bay exit on Interstate 10.
She’d been raped, strangled, beaten, and stabbed.
Prior to her murder, there had been at least five others in the Baton Rouge area in recent years, the victims brutalized in their homes. One was twenty-two-year-old Charlotte Murray Pace, who’d just gotten her master’s degree in business from Louisiana State University (LSU).
On May 31, 2002, she’d returned home for lunch.
She was sitting in her living room eating a ham sandwich and drinking a Pepsi when the killer entered her apartment.
Fighting him from one room to the next, she was raped, beaten, and stabbed more than eighty times.
East Baton Rouge Coroner Louis Cataldie later told me that it looked like her apartment “had been spray-painted red.”
Five months earlier, another LSU student, twenty-two-year-old Geralyn DeSoto, was stabbed to death.
Four months before that on September 24, 2001, Gina Wilson Green had been raped and strangled near LSU.
As I was reading about this during my visit to Salem, I commented to Irene and Vada that there was a serial killer on the loose in Baton Rouge.
Whoever was doing this was going to continue and be very hard to catch.
It seemed strange that as I was winding up my Jack the Ripper investigation, another similar monster was on a rampage in Louisiana.
I suggested to ABC’s Primetime Live’s star anchor Diane Sawyer that we should cover the ongoing murders in Louisiana.
Maybe bringing attention to them would help the investigation.
As I waited for the Ripper book to be published, I began visiting Baton Rouge, sometimes piloting a helicopter there.
I got to know the families of Pam Kinamore and Charlotte Murray Pace.
When their mothers and sisters first met me, they were hopeful, saying, “Doctor Scarpetta has come to help us.” If only that were true, I thought. If only I really were her.
“I’m afraid you’ll have to settle for me,” I replied.
Coroner Louis Cataldie and his death investigator wife, DeAnn, showed me the crime scenes, sharing the gruesome details.
The murders continued even as I was investigating them.
On November 21, 2002, twenty-three-year-old Trineisha Dene Colomb was abducted while visiting her mother’s grave in the Gran Coteau Cemetery.
She died from blunt force trauma, her body found in the woods by hunters.
On March 3, 2003, twenty-six-year-old Carrie Lynn Yoder was abducted from her LSU apartment.
She was raped, beaten, and strangled, her body thrown off a bridge and found floating in Whiskey Bay.
Louis Cataldie was the coroner in all the cases.
He said it was miraculous that he was able to recover DNA from Carrie Yoder’s decomposing body.
But the police had no suspect for comparison.
As was true in Richmond’s Southside Strangler cases and the Ripper serial murders, the public was in a panic.
Nobody had a clue who was doing this, and it was suggested it might be someone connected to LSU.
Perhaps he was on the faculty or had some other job there.
Mr. Nobody, as I’d called the killer in Postmortem. The monster could be anyone.
These sexually violent psychopaths don’t look like what they do.
They might be handsome like Walter Sickert, Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, Richard Ramirez.
Often, they are likable, even charismatic, and those close to them have no idea about their secret lives of murder, rape, fetishism, torture, necrophilia, cannibalism.
Such a killer could be the person you sit next to at work.
He might be a neighbor or a volunteer in a crisis intervention center as Bundy was.
Often these violent offenders are married, and those who live with them have no idea.
Or maybe, as I believe was true with Sickert, the wives are in denial or outright cover for them.