Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper--Case Closed (28 page)

An undated letter includes a bit of newspaper attached by a rusty paper clip. When my co-worker, Irene Shulgin, removed the clipping and turned it over, she found the phrase “author of works of art.” In a letter dated October 7, 1888, the writer signs his name “Homo Sum,” Latin for “I am a man.” On October 9, 1888, an anonymous writer takes offense, once again, at being thought of as a lunatic: “Don’t you rest content on the lunacy fad.” Other anonymous letters offer tips to the police, encouraging officers to disguise themselves as women and wear “chain armour” or “light steel collars” under their clothes. An anonymous letter of October 20, 1888, claims that the “motive for the crimes is hatred and spite against the authorities of Scotland Yard one of whom is marked as a victim.”

In a July 1889 letter, a writer signs his letter “Qui Vir,” Latin for “Which Man.” In a letter Sickert wrote to Whistler in 1897, he rather sarcastically refers to his former “impish master” as “Ecce homo,” or “behold the man.” In the “Qui Vir” letter, which is at the Corporation of London Records Office, the writer suggests that the killer is “able to choose a time to do the
murder
& get
back to his hiding
place.” On September 11, 1889, an anonymous writer teases police by saying he always travels in “third class Cerage” and “I ware black wiskers all over my face.” Approximately 20% of these Corporation of London Records Office letters have watermarks, including, as I mentioned, the Joynson Superfine and the Monckton’s Superfine watermark (signed “one of the public”). A letter Sickert wrote to Whistler in the mid- to late-1880s also has a Monckton’s Superfine watermark.

Certainly, I wouldn’t dare claim that all of the anonymous letters in the Corporation of London Records Office were written by Sickert (Jack the Ripper), but the communications fit the profile of a violent psychopath who taunts police and tries to insert himself or herself into the investigation. Watermarks and language aside, the problem of handwriting remains. The amazing variety found in the Ripper letters has been a source of hot debate. Many people, including forensic documents examiners, have argued that it is not possible for one person to write in so many hands.

This is not necessarily true, according to Peter Bower. He says he has seen “good calligraphers” who can write in an incredible number of different hands, but “it takes extraordinary skill.” His wife, Sally Bower, is a much respected letterer, or person who designs and draws lettering. Although she is not a handwriting expert, she has a different perspective because she is an expert in how a person forms the letters strung together in words. When she looked through Ripper letters with her husband, she immediately connected a number of letters through quirks and how the hand made the writing. I have no doubt that Sickert had an amazing ability to write in many different hands.

In a letter he wrote to artist Sir William Eden, Sickert crossed through a paragraph that mentions a woman named Janon who couldn’t read Sickert’s handwriting. “I have written again in a
copperplate
hand,” Sickert wrote to Eden. Certainly Sickert the artist was capable of a variety of styles of writing, including writing backward, as is evident on a number of his etchings. When prints of an etching are pulled from the press, the images are reversed, meaning the artist’s name (if etched on the copperplate) will also be reversed. In many of Sickert’s etchings, it is unmistakable that he engraved his name backward on the plate, his signature, in some cases (but not all) in cursive and different from his normal signature.

Sickert didn’t need to write backward for his penmanship to vary. Typical of his many personas and disguises, his handwriting in his correspondence is inconsistent and at times unrecognizable, including his signature. It is no wonder the Ripper confounded so many handwriting experts. In some instances, Sickert’s T’s, S’s, and W’s are formed in such different ways that one may not believe the same person wrote them. However, the more one studies the original Ripper letters, the more one begins to notice both similarities in Ripper and Sickert handwritings, and also consistent dissimilarities.

Sickert did not fear that the police would notice or question the artwork in his taunting, violent, and obscene letters, or subtle similarities in disguised handwriting. Or perhaps he assumed that even if a shrewd investigator like Abberline zeroed in on the uniqueness of some of the letters, the path would never lead northwest to 54 Broadhurst Gardens. After all, the police were “idiots.” Most people were stupid and boring, and Sickert often said as much. “I think the future, my Billy, is ours.
No one
else has
any
intelligence at all!” he wrote Rothenstein (circa late 1890s).

Few people on the planet were as brilliant, clever, cunning, or fascinating as Walter Sickert, not even Whistler or Oscar Wilde, neither of whom he enjoyed competing with at dinners and other gatherings. Sickert just might not show up if he wasn’t going to be the center of attention. He didn’t hesitate to admit that he was a “snob” and divided the world into two classes of people: those who interested him and those who did not. As is typical of psychopaths, Sickert believed that no investigator was his match, and as is also true of these remorseless, scary people, his delusional thinking lured him into leaving far more incriminating clues along his trails than he probably ever imagined.

The distant locations associated with a number of Ripper letters only added to the supposition that most of the letters were hoaxes. Police had no reason to believe that this East End murderer might be in one city one day and in another the next. No one seemed interested in considering that perhaps the Ripper really did move around and that perhaps there might be a link between these cities.

Many of the cities mentioned in the Ripper letters were on Henry Irving’s theater company’s schedule, which was published in the newspapers daily. Every spring and fall, Irving’s company toured major theater cities such as Glasgow, Edinburgh, Manchester, Liverpool, Bradford, Leeds, Nottingham, Newcastle, and Plymouth, to name a few. Often Ellen Terry made the grueling journeys. “I shall be in a railway train from Newcastle to Leeds,” she dismally reports in a letter written during one of these tours, and one can almost feel her exhaustion.

Most of these cities also had major racecourses, and several Ripper letters mention horse racing and give the police a few lucky betting tips. Sickert painted pictures of horse racing and was quite knowledgeable about the sport. In the March 19, 1914,
New Age
literary journal, he published an article he titled “A Stone Ginger,” which was racing slang for “an absolute certainty,” and he tossed in a few other bits of racing slang for good measure: “welsher” and “racecourse thief” and “sporting touts.” Racecourses would have been a venue where Sickert could disappear into the crowd, especially if he was wearing one of his disguises and the race was in a city where he wasn’t likely to encounter anybody he knew. At the races, prostitutes were plentiful.

Horse racing, gambling in casinos, and boxing were interests of Sickert’s, although very little has been written about them in the books and articles I have seen. When the Ripper uses the phrase
Give up the sponge
in a letter that art experts believe Sickert wrote, is this a peek into Sickert’s personality or simply his thoughtless use of a cliché? Is there any meaning to be found in the murky self-portrait that Sickert painted in 1908 that features him in a studio standing behind a plaster cast of Venus, her limbs raggedly severed? Is there any significance in the reference in another Ripper letter to “Bangor Street,” considering that such an address doesn’t exist in London, but Bangor is the home of a racecourse in Wales?

While I have no evidence that Sickert bet on horse races, I don’t have any fact to say he didn’t. Gambling may have been a secret addiction. Certainly that would help explain how he managed to go through money so quickly. By the time he and the parsimonious Ellen divorced, she was financially crippled and would never recover. Sickert’s organized brain seemed to fail him when it came to finances. He thought nothing of hiring a cab and leaving it sitting all day. He gave away armfuls of paintings—sometimes to strangers—or let the canvases rot in his studios. He never earned much, but he had access to Ellen’s money—even after their divorce—and then to the money of other women who took care of him, including his next two wives.

Sickert was generous to his brother Bernhard, who was a failed artist. He rented numerous rooms at a time, bought painting supplies, read multiple newspapers daily, must have had quite a wardrobe for his many disguises, was a devotee of the theaters and music halls, and traveled. But most of what he bought and rented was shabby and cheap, and he wasn’t likely to go for the best seats in the house or travel first class. I don’t know how much he gave away, but after their divorce, Ellen wrote, “To give him money is like giving it to a child to light a fire with.”

She believed him to be so financially irresponsible—for reasons she never cited—that after their divorce she conspired with Jacques-Emile Blanche to buy Sickert’s paintings. Blanche began purchasing them and she secretly reimbursed him. Sickert “must
never never
suspect that it comes from me,” Ellen wrote Blanche. “I shall tell no one”—not even her sister Janie, in whom she had always confided. Ellen knew what Janie thought of Sickert and his exploitative ways. She also knew that helping her former husband was not really helping him. No matter what he got, it would never be enough. But she could not seem to help herself when it came to helping him.

“He is never out of my mind day or night,” Ellen wrote Blanche in 1899. “You know what he is like—a child where money is concerned. Will you again be as kind as you were before & buy one of Walter’s pictures at the right moment to be of most use to him? And will you not forget that this will be of no good unless you insist on arranging how the money is to be spent. He borrowed £600 from his brother in law (who is a poor man) & he ought to pay him interest on the sum.
But I cannot.
”

Addiction to drugs and alcohol ran in Sickert’s family. He probably had an addictive predisposition, which would help explain why he avoided alcohol in his younger years and then abused it later on. It would be risky to say that Sickert had a gambling problem. But money seemed to vanish when he touched it, and while the mention of horse racing and the cities where courses were located in the Ripper letters does not constitute “proof,” these details pique our curiosity.

Sickert could have done pretty much whatever he pleased. His career did not require him to keep regular hours. He did not have to account to anyone, especially now that his apprenticeship with Whistler had ended and Sickert was no longer bound to do as the Master demanded. In the fall of 1888, the Master was on his honeymoon. Ellen and Janie were in Ireland—not that Ellen had to be away when Sickert decided to vanish for a night or a week. Disappearing in Great Britain was relatively easy, as long as the trains were running. It was no great matter to cross the English Channel in the morning and have dinner in France that evening.

Whatever caused Sickert’s chronic “financial muddle,” to borrow Ellen’s words, it was serious enough to push her to the extraordinary lengths of secretly funneling money his way after she divorced him for adultery and desertion. It was so serious that Sickert died in 1942 with only £135 to his name.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

STYGIAN BLACKNESS

F
ive hours after Annie Chapman’s body was carried inside the Whitechapel mortuary, Dr. George Phillips arrived and found she had been stripped and washed. Furious, he demanded an explanation.

Robert Mann, the mortuary supervisor who had caused so much trouble in Mary Ann Nichols’s case, replied that workhouse authorities had instructed two nurses to undress and clean the body. No police or doctors had witnessed this, and as the angry Dr. Phillips looked around the mortuary, he noticed Annie’s clothing piled on the floor in a corner. His earlier admonition that the body was not to be touched by inmates, nurses, or anyone else unless the police instructed otherwise had had little effect on Mann. The inmate had heard all this before.

The mortuary was nothing more than a cramped, filthy, stinking shed with a scarred wooden table darkened by old blood. In the summer it was stuffy and warm, and in the winter it was so cold Mann could barely bend his fingers. What a job his was, Mann must have thought, and maybe the doctor should have been grateful that two nurses had saved him some trouble. Besides, it didn’t take a doctor to see what had killed the poor woman. Her head was barely attached to her neck and she had been gutted like a hog hanging in a butcher’s shop. Mann didn’t pay much attention as Dr. Phillips continued to vent his disgust, complaining that his working conditions were not only unsuitable but also dangerous to his health.

The doctor’s point would be made more fully during the inquest. Coroner Wynne Baxter announced to jurors and the press that it was a travesty that there was no proper mortuary in the East End. If any place in the Great Metropolis needed an adequate facility for handling the dead, it was certainly the impoverished East End, where in nearby Wapping, bodies recovered from the Thames had “to be put in boxes” for lack of anywhere else to take them, said Baxter.