Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper--Case Closed (13 page)

Many of these doss-houses catered to the criminal element, including the Unfortunates who might, on a good night, have pennies for lodging. Perhaps the Unfortunate might persuade a client to take her to bed, which was certainly preferable to sex on the street when one was exhausted, drunk, and hungry. Another breed of lodger was the “gentleman slummer,” who, like thrill-seeking men of every era, would leave his respectable home and family to enter a forbidden world of low-life pub-hopping and music halls and cheap, anonymous sex. Some men from the better parts of the city became addicted to this secret entertainment, and Walter Sickert was one of them.

His best-known artistic leitmotif is an iron bedstead, and on it is a nude prostitute with a man aggressively leaning over her. Sometimes both the man and the nude woman are sitting, but the man is always clothed. It was Sickert’s habit to keep an iron bedstead in any studio he was using at the time, and on it he arranged many a model. Occasionally he posed himself on the bed with a wooden lay figure—mannikin—that supposedly had belonged to one of Sickert’s artistic idols, William Hogarth.

Sickert enjoyed shocking guests he had invited over for tea and cake, and on one occasion, not long after the 1907 slaying of a prostitute in Camden Town, Sickert’s guests arrived at his dimly lit Camden Town studio to discover the lewdly positioned lay figure in bed with Sickert, who was making jests about the recent murder. No one seemed to think much about that display or anything else bizarre that Walter Sickert did. After all, he was Sickert. None of his contemporaries—nor many of the critics and academics who study him today—wondered why he acted out violence and was obsessed with notorious crimes, including those of Jack the Ripper.

Sickert was in a superior and untouchable position if he wanted to get away with murdering Unfortunates. He was of a class that was above suspicion, and he was a genius at becoming any number of different characters in every sense of the word. It would have been easy and exciting for him to disguise himself as either an East End man or a gentleman slummer and voyeuristically prowl the pubs and doss-houses of Whitechapel and its nearby hellholes. He was an artist capable of changing his handwriting and designing taunting letters that are the mark of a brilliant draftsman. But nobody noticed the remarkable nature of these documents until art historian Dr. Anna Gruetzner Robins and paper conservator Anne Kennett examined the originals at the Public Record Office (PRO) in June 2002.

What had always been assumed to be human or animal blood on the Ripper letters turns out to be sticky brown etching ground—or perhaps a mixture of inks that remarkably resembles old blood. These bloody-looking smears, drips, and splotches were applied with an artist’s brush, or are imprints left by fabrics or fingers. Some of the Ripper’s stationery is “vellum” or other paper with watermarks. Apparently the police never noticed feathering brush strokes or types of paper when investigating the Ripper murders. Apparently no one has ever paid any attention to the some thirty different watermarks found on letters thought to be hoaxes written by some illiterate or deranged prankster. Apparently no one has asked whether such a prankster was likely to have possessed drawing pens, colorful inks, lithographic or Chinagraph crayons, etching ground, and artist’s paints and paper.

If any part of Sickert’s anatomy symbolized his entire being, it wasn’t his disfigured penis. It was his eyes. He watched. Watching—spying, stalking with the eyes and the feet—is a dominant trait of psychopathic killers, unlike the disorganized offenders who are given to impulse or messages from outer space or God. Psychopaths watch people. They watch pornography, especially violent pornography. They are very scary voyeurs.

Modern technology has made it possible for them to watch videotapes of themselves raping, torturing, and killing their victims. They relive their horrific crimes over and over again, and masturbate. For some psychopaths, the only way they can reach orgasm is to watch, stalk, fantasize, and replay their last rampages. Ted Bundy, says former FBI profiler Bill Hagmaier, strangled and raped his victim from behind, his excitement mounting as her tongue protruded and her eyes bulged. He reached climax as she reached death.

Then come the fantasies, the reliving, and the violent-erotic tension is unbearable and these killers strike again. The denouement is the dying or dead body. The cooling-off period is the safe haven that allows relief and the reliving of the crime. And the fantasies begin. And the tension builds again. And they find another victim. And they introduce another scene into their script to add more daring and excitement: bondage, torture, mutilation, dismemberment, grotesque displays of the carnage, and cannibalism.

As former FBI Academy instructor and profiler Edward Sulzbach has reminded me over the years, “The actual murder is incidental to the fantasies.” The first time I heard him say this in 1984 I was baffled and didn’t believe him. In my naive way of thinking, I assumed that the big thrill was the kill. I had been a police reporter for the
Charlotte Observer
in North Carolina and was no coward when it came to dashing off to crime scenes. Everything centered on the terrible
event,
I thought. Without the event, there was no story. It shames me now to realize how naive I was. I thought I understood evil, but I didn’t.

I thought I was a veteran investigator of horrors, and I knew nothing. I didn’t understand that psychopaths follow the same human patterns “normal” people do, but the violent psychopath strays off track in ways that would never register on the average person’s navigational system. Many of us have erotic fantasies that are more exciting than the actualization of them, and looking forward to an event often gives us more delight than the experience of it. So it is for violent psychopaths as they anticipate their crimes.

Sulzbach also likes to say, “Never look for unicorns until you run out of ponies.”

Violent crimes are often mundane. A jealous lover kills a rival or partner who has betrayed him or her. A card game turns ugly and someone is shot. A street thug wants cash for drugs and stabs his victim. A drug dealer is gunned down because he sold bad drugs. These are the ponies. Jack the Ripper wasn’t a pony. He was a unicorn. In the 1880s and 1890s, Sickert was far too clever to paint pictures of homicides and entertain his friends by reenacting a real murder that had happened just beyond his door. The behavior that casts suspicion on him now was not apparent in 1888, when he was young and secretive and afraid of getting caught. Only his Ripper letters to the newspapers and the police offered evidence, but they were met with a blind eye, if not utter indifference and perhaps a chuckle or two.

There were two vices Sickert hated, or so he told his acquaintances. One was stealing. The other was alcoholism, which ran in his family. There is no reason to suspect that Sickert drank, at least not to excess, until much later in life. By all accounts, he stayed away from drugs, even for therapeutic purposes. No matter his cracked facets or emotional twists, Sickert was clear-headed and calculating. He had an intense curiosity about anything that might catch his artist’s eye or appear on his radar for violence. There was much to appeal to him on the Thursday night of August 30, 1888, when a brandy warehouse on the London docks caught fire around 9:00 P.M. and illuminated the entire East End.

People came from miles and peered through locked iron gates at an inferno that defied the gallons of water dumped on it by the fire brigades. Unfortunates drifted toward the blaze, both curious and eager to take advantage of an unplanned opportunity for sexual commerce. In the finer parts of London, other entertainment lit up the night as the famous Richard Mansfield thrilled theatergoers with his brilliant performance as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde at the Lyceum. The comedy
Uncles and Aunts
had just opened and had gotten a grand review in
The Times,
and
The Paper Chase
and
The Union Jack
were going full tilt. The plays had begun at 8:15, 8:30, or 9:00, and by the time they ended, the fire on the docks still roared. Warehouses and ships along the Thames were backlit by an orange glow visible for many miles. Whether Sickert was at his home or at one of the theaters or music halls, he was unlikely to miss the drama at South and Spirit quays that was attracting such an excited crowd.

Of course, it is purely speculative to say that Sickert wandered toward the water to watch. He might not have been in London on this night, although there is nothing on record to prove he wasn’t. There are no letters, no documents, no news accounts, no works of art that might so much as hint that Sickert was not in London. Divining what he was doing often means discovering what he wasn’t doing.

Sickert wasn’t interested in people knowing where he was. He was notorious for his lifelong habit of renting at least three secret “studios” at a time. These hovels were scattered about in locations so private and so unexpected and so unpredictable that his wife, colleagues, and friends had no idea where they were. His known studios, which numbered close to twenty during his life, were often slovenly “small rooms” filled with chaos that “inspired” him. Sickert worked alone behind locked doors. It was rare that he would see anyone, and if he did, a visit to these rat holes required a telegram or a special knock. In his older years, he erected tall black gates in front of his door and chained a guard dog to one of the iron bars.

As is true of any good actor, Sickert knew how to make an entrance and an exit. He had a habit of vanishing for days or weeks without telling Ellen or his second or third wives or his acquaintances where he was or why. He might invite friends to dinner and not show up. He would reappear as he pleased, usually no explanation offered. Outings often turned into his missing in action, for he liked to go to the theater and music halls alone and afterward wander during the late night and misty early morning hours.

Sickert’s routes were peculiar and illogical, especially if he was returning home from the theaters and music halls in central London along the Strand. Denys Sutton writes that Sickert often walked north to Hoxton, then retraced his steps to end up in Shoreditch on the western border of Whitechapel. From there he would have to walk west and north to return to 54 Broadhurst Gardens in northwest London, where he lived. According to Sutton, the reason for these strange peregrinations and detours into a dangerous part of East London is that Sickert needed “a long silent tramp to meditate on what he had just seen” in a music hall or theater. The artist pondering. The artist observing a dark, foreboding world and the people who lived in it. The artist who liked his women ugly.

CHAPTER EIGHT

A BIT OF BROKEN LOOKING GLASS

M
ary Ann Nichols was approximately forty-two years old and missing five teeth.

She was five foot two or three and plump, with a fleshy, plain face, brown eyes, and graying dark brown hair. During her marriage to a printer’s machinist named William Nichols, she had given birth to five children, the oldest twenty-one, the youngest eight or nine at the time of her murder.

For the past seven years or so, she and William had been separated because of her drinking and quarrelsome ways. His support of five shillings each week ceased, he later told the police, when he learned she was living the life of a prostitute. Mary Ann had nothing left, not even her children. Years ago she had lost custody of them when her ex-husband informed the courts that she was living in sin with a blacksmith named Drew, who soon enough left her, too. The last time her former husband saw Mary Ann alive was in June of 1886 at the funeral of a son who had burned to death when a paraffin lamp exploded.

During her desolate times, Mary Ann had been an inmate at numerous workhouses, which were huge, dreaded barracks packed with as many as a thousand men and women who had nowhere else to go. The poor despised the workhouses, yet there were always long lines on cold mornings as the penniless waited in hopes of admission into what were called “casual wards.” If the workhouse wasn’t full, and a person was taken in by the porter, he or she was carefully interrogated and searched for money. The discovery of even a penny sent the person back out on the street. Tobacco was confiscated; knives and matches were not allowed. Every inmate was stripped and washed in the same tub of water and dried off with communal towels. They were given workhouse-issue clothing and directed to stinking, rat-infested wards where canvas beds stretched out between poles like hammocks.

Breakfast at 6:00 A.M. might be bread and a gruel called “skilly” made with oatmeal or moldy meat. Then the inmate was put to work, performing the same cruel tasks that had been used to punish criminals for hundreds of years: pounding stones, scrubbing, picking oakum (untwisting old rope to reuse the hemp), or sent to the infirmary or mortuary to clean the sick ward or tend to the dead. It was rumored among inmates that the incurably sick in the infirmary were “polished off” with poison. Dinner was at 8:00 P.M., and the inmates got leftovers from the infirmary’s patients. Filthy fingers attacked mounds of table scraps and stuffed them into ravenous mouths. Sometimes there was suet soup.