Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper--Case Closed (27 page)

These characteristics—measurements and spacing of the wire the paper was formed on—are the paper’s Y profile, and matching Y profiles mean the paper came from the same batch. Bower says it is not unusual for an individual to have stationery that comes from many batches, and that even when the paper is ordered from the stationer, there could be different batches mixed in, although the watermarks and embossing or engraving are the same. The discrepancies in the Sickert and Ripper letters pertain to their measurements.

For example, the “Dear Openshaw” letter with the A Pirie watermark is from the same batch as a November 22nd A Pirie Ripper letter mailed from London, but not from the same batch as another November 22nd A Pirie letter the Ripper leads us to believe (through the date and place he wrote on the letter) he mailed from Manchester. Clearly, the Ripper had a mixture of A Pirie batches when he wrote these November 22nd letters, unless one wishes to make the case that there were two different individuals who just happened to write Ripper letters on A Pirie & Sons paper of the same type and color, allegedly on November 22nd.

Differences in measurements can, in some instances, be attributed to conservation. When paper is heated by applying a protective membrane, for example, the paper shrinks slightly. More probable is that the differences in measurements can be explained by reorders from the stationer. During the late 1880s, personalized stationery was usually ordered in a quire, or twenty-four sheets, including unprinted second sheets. A reorder of the same personalized stationery on the same type of paper with the same watermark could quite easily come from a different batch. Or perhaps the stationer used a different standard size, such as Post Quarto, which was approximately 7 by 9 inches, or Commercial Note, which was 8 by 5 inches, or Octavo Note, which was nominally 7 by 4½ inches.

An example of a discrepancy in paper size is a Ripper letter with a Joynson Superfine watermark that was sent to the City of London Police. The torn half of the folded stationery measures 6
inches by 9
inches. Another Ripper letter on the same type of paper with the same watermark was sent to the Metropolitan Police and that stationery is Commercial Note, or 8 by 5 inches. A Sickert letter written on Monckton’s Superfine that we examined in Glasgow measures 7⅛ inches by 9 inches, while a Ripper letter sent to the City of London Police on the same type of paper with a matching Monckton’s Superfine watermark measures 7⅛ inches by 8
inches. Most likely, this suggests that in these cases the Monckton’s Superfine stationery is from different batches, but this by no means indicates that it was from different Ripper letter-writers.

I point out these different paper batches only because a defense attorney would. In fact, paper of the same type and watermark but from different batches doesn’t necessarily mean a setback in a case and, as Bower pointed out, having studied other artists’ paper, he “would expect to find variations like this.”

But Bower also discovered paper in Ripper letters that do not have variations, and because they also have no watermarks, these letters were not really noticed by anyone else. Two Ripper letters written to the Metropolitan Police and one Ripper letter written to the City of London Police are on matching very cheap pale blue paper—and for three letters to come from the same batch of paper strongly indicates that the same person wrote them, just as matching watermarks, especially three different types of matching watermarks, are hard to dismiss.

Almost impossible to dismiss are discoveries Bower made after the initial publication of this book. Dr. Anna Gruetzner Robins discovered a small number of Sickert letters at the Getty Research Institute in Santa Monica, California, and I went to see them. I made measurements of the stationery, described watermarks and the paper, and sent the information to Bower. He was excited enough about what he saw to travel from London to the Getty Institute and examine the original letters.

His amazing discovery is this: Three Sickert letters written on his mother’s stationery and two Ripper letters come from a batch of twenty-four sheets of stationery with the watermark Gurney Ivory Laid.

Bower explained that the manufacturer of Gurney Ivory Laid “made relatively small runs of papers such as stationery, the sheets roughly guillotined to size and then folded and divided into quires of twenty-four sheets. Each individual quire of paper was then given a final trim in a hand-fed guillotine. Every guillotining would produce very slightly different trims. The match between the short edge cuts of the four identified sheets shows they came from the same quire of paper . . . [or] group of 24 sheets.”

Some months later, Bower discovered a third Sickert letter in the British Library, written (circa 1890) to a woman named Miss E. Case who had invited Sickert and his wife, Ellen, to a social gathering. Sickert replies in a note on Gurney Ivory Laid paper that Ellen is “still in the country,” and adds, “I am never able to get out during daylight.” Again, the sheet of stationery is from the same batch as the two other Sickert letters on Gurney Ivory Laid paper and the two Ripper letters on Gurney Ivory Laid paper.

As Bower’s paper investigation continued, he came up with more evidence that constitutes more proof that Sickert wrote numerous Ripper letters.

Four letters catalogued in the “Whitechapel Murders” file at the Corporation of London Records Office were written on Joynson Superfine paper and signed “Nemo.” The dates are October 8, 1888; October 16, 1888; January 29, 1889; and February 16, 1889. The first time I saw these letters I was suspicious of them because Sickert’s stage name was Mr. Nemo, and after months of research I had come to believe that Jack the Ripper didn’t always sign his letters with his various versions of the Ripper name (the Ripper, Jack the Ripper, Saucy Jack, and so on). In some letters, the signature seems to depend on the contents and intended recipient. A number of letters not signed “Jack the Ripper”—most written to the City of London Police—are supposed to seem helpful to the investigation, but reek of mockery and attempts to manipulate police into following through with suggestions while, no doubt, the Ripper watches from backstage and laughs.

The following list provides a brief summary of the new evidence about definite and probable matches in paper that Sickert and Ripper letters are written on, according to Peter Bower:

• Two Nemo letters that probably match a letter Sickert wrote on Joynson Superfine stationery to art dealer D. C. Thompson (circa 1890; Getty Research Institute)

• One Nemo letter that definitely matches two other letters Sickert wrote on Joynson Superfine to D. C. Thompson (Getty Research Institute)

• One Nemo letter that definitely matches a letter on Joynson Superfine that Sickert wrote to his friend William Rothenstein (Harvard)

• One music-hall drawing on paper with a partial Brookleigh Fine watermark (1888; Walker Art Gallery) that probably matches two Ripper letters (Public Record Office)

• One Sickert letter with the Monckton’s N.B. watermark (Sickert Archives) that probably matches a Ripper letter (Corporation of London Records Office)

• The letter with the watermark Gurney Ivory Laid that Sickert wrote to a Miss E. Case (circa 1890; British Library) that definitely matches a Ripper letter (the Corporation of London Records Office)

To say that a match is “probable” is expert-witness talk. As is true with other expert witnesses who testify in court, Bower is basically claiming for the record that one finding is
consistent
with another, which really means the findings are close enough for the jury to take these
consistencies
very seriously. Bower’s paper matches, probable or definite, should be taken very seriously.

Trade directories of the time list some nearly 1,200 different watermarks in use in the late 1880s, with some papermakers producing over a hundred different varieties. When you consider this vast number of differently watermarked papers that were available in London, for the same small group of papers—Gurney Ivory Laid, Joynson Superfine, Monckton’s Superfine, A Pirie & Sons, and Brookleigh Fine, at least two of which came from the same small supplier, Lepard & Smiths—to occur over and over again in both Sickert and Ripper letters is more than coincidence. Just one manufacturer, Bower explains, might have had as many as one hundred different watermark designs available to stationers. “People choose what they know and like,” he adds, and when one considers a watermark match or probable match between two identical watermarks from the same batch, and then finds two or three other identical watermarks from the same batch, and then finds yet other identical watermarks from the same batch, the statistical probability of the letters coming from a single source becomes extremely compelling.

On October 4, 1888 (four days before the first “Nemo” letter was written to the City of London Police and in the midst of much publicity about Elizabeth Stride’s ongoing inquest),
The Times
published a letter to the editor that was dated October 2nd and signed “Nemo.” In it the writer described “mutilations, cutting off the nose and ears, ripping up the body, and cutting out certain organs—the heart, & c.—. . .” It is curious that Nemo mentioned the removal of a heart in this letter to the editor. As far as we know, the Ripper had yet to take the heart from any of his victims. But when Mary Kelly’s mutilated body was discovered on November 9th, her heart was missing.

In the Nemo letter to
The Times,
the writer continued:

Unless caught red-handed, such a man in ordinary life would be harmless enough, polite, not to say obsequious, in his manners, and about the last a British policeman would suspect.

But when the villain is primed with his opium, or bang, or gin, and inspired with his lust for slaughter and blood, he would destroy his defenceless victim with the ferocity and cunning of the tiger; and past impunity and success would only have rendered him the more daring and restless.

Your obedient servant

October 2

NEMO

Other unusual signatories in the some fifty letters at the Corporation of London Records Office are suspiciously reminiscent of those of some PRO Ripper letters: “Justitia,” “Revelation,” “Ripper,” “Nemesis,” “A Thinker,” “May-bee,” “A friend,” “an accessary,” and “one that has had his eyes opened.” Quite a number of these fifty letters were written in October 1888 and also include both art and comments similar to those found in the Jack the Ripper letters at the PRO. For example, in a PRO letter to the editor of the Daily News Office, October 1, 1888, the Ripper says, “I’ve got someone to write this for me.” In an undated letter at the Corporation of London Records Office, the anonymous sender says, “I’ve got someone to write this for me.”

Other “Whitechapel Murder” letters in the Corporation of London Records Office include a postcard dated October 3rd, with the anonymous sender using many of the same threats, words, and phrases found in Ripper letters at the PRO: “send you my victims ears”; “It amuses me that you think I am mad”; “Just a card to let you know”; “I will write to you again soon”; and “My bloody ink is running out.” On October 6, 1888, “Anonymous” offers a suggestion that the killer might be keeping “the victims
silent
by pressure on certain nerves in the neck,” and adds that an additional benefit to subduing the victim is that the killer can “preserve his own person and clothing comparatively unstained.” In October 1888, an anonymous letter written in red ink uses the terms “spanky ass” and “Saucy Jacky” and promises to “send next ears I clip to Charly Warren.”