Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper--Case Closed (45 page)

Very little is known about Walter Sickert’s rituals, sexual attractions, or daily activities and routines after he began spending most of his time in France and Italy during the 1890s. So far, documentation that might reveal unsolved murders with striking similarities to Sickert’s crimes doesn’t exist or has yet to surface in other countries. I found references to only two cases in France, not in police records but in newspapers. The murders are so unspecific and unverified that I hesitate to mention them: It was reported that in early 1889, at Pont-à-Mousson, a widow named Madame François was found slain, her head nearly severed from her body. About the same time and in the same area, another woman was found with her head nearly severed from her body. The doctor who conducted both postmortem examinations concluded that the murderer was very skillful with a knife.

Around 1906, Sickert returned to England and settled in Camden Town. He resumed painting music halls—such as the Mogul Tavern (by now called the Old Middlesex Music Hall, on Drury Lane, less than two miles from where he lived in Camden Town). Sickert went out almost every night and was always in his stall at 8:00 P.M. sharp, he wrote in a letter to Jacques-Emile Blanche. Presumably, Sickert stayed until the performances ended at half past midnight.

During his late-night journeys home, it is very possible he could have seen Emily Dimmock out on the streets, perhaps heading to her rooming house with a client. Had Sickert gathered intelligence on her, he could easily have known her patterns, and that she was a notorious prostitute and a walking plague. Periodically she was an outpatient at Lock Hospital on Harrow Road, and most recently had been treated at University College Hospital. When her venereal disease was fulminating, she had eruptions on her face, and she had a few of these at the time of her death. This should have indicated to a street-smart man that she was dangerous to his health.

Sickert would have been foolish to have exposed himself to her body fluids, because by 1907 more was known about contagious diseases. Exposure to blood could be just as dangerous as intercourse, and it would not have been possible for Sickert to disembowel or take organs without subjecting himself to great risk. I believe he would have been shrewd enough to avoid re-creating the twenty-year-old Ripper scare, especially when he was about to begin his most intense period of violent art and produce works that he would not have dared to etch or paint or display in 1888 or 1889. Emily Dimmock’s murder was staged to appear to have been motivated by robbery.

Bertram Shaw arrived home from the train station on the morning of September 12th, and discovered that his mother was already there. She was waiting in the hallway because Emily did not answer the door and she could not get into her son’s rooms. Shaw tried the outer door and was baffled to find it locked. He wondered if Emily might have gone out to meet his mother at the train station and the two women had missed each other. He was getting increasingly uneasy, and asked the landlady, Mrs. Stocks, for a key. Shaw unlocked the outer door and found the double doors locked as well. He broke in and flung back the covers from Emily’s naked body on the blood-soaked bed.

Drawers had been pulled out of the dresser, the contents rummaged through and scattered on the floor. Emily’s scrapbook was open on a chair, and some postcards had been removed from it. The windows and shutters in the bedroom were closed, the windows in the sitting room closed, the shutters slightly open. Shaw ran for the police. Some twenty-five minutes later, Constable Thomas Killion arrived and determined by touching Emily’s cold shoulder that she had been dead for hours. He immediately sent for police divisional surgeon Dr. John Thompson, who arrived at the scene around 1:00 P.M. and concluded—based on the coldness of the body and the advanced stage of rigor mortis—that Emily had been dead seven or eight hours.

This would have placed her time of death at 6:00 or 7:00 A.M., which is not likely. The morning was thick with fog, but the sun rose at 5:30. The killer would have been brazen to the point of stupidity had he left Emily’s house after the sun was up, no matter how gray and muggy the weather, and by six or seven o’clock, people were stirring, many on their way to work.

Under ordinary conditions, it requires six to twelve hours for a body to be fully rigorous, and cold temperatures can retard this process. Emily’s body was under bedclothes that the killer had flung over her, and the windows and doors were shut. Her bedroom would not have been frigid, but on the early morning she died, the low was forty-six degrees. What is not known is how stiff she was, or how advanced her rigor mortis might have been by the time Dr. Thompson began to examine her at some point after 1:00 P.M. By then, the temperature had risen to some seventy degrees, which would have advanced decomposition at a quicker rate. She could have been in full rigor mortis—dead a good ten or twelve hours. This would suggest she could have been murdered between midnight and 4:00 A.M.

Dr. Thompson said at the scene that Emily’s throat had been cut cleanly with a very sharp instrument. The police found nothing except one of Shaw’s straight razors in plain view on top of a dresser. He told police he owned two razors, and both of them were accounted for. It would be difficult to use a straight razor to cut forcefully through muscle and cartilage without the blade folding backward and perhaps severely wounding the perpetrator. A bloody pink petticoat in the hand-wash basin had soaked up all of the water, indicating that the killer had cleaned himself off before he left. He was careful not to touch anything with bloody hands, the police remarked at the inquest. No discernible fingerprints were found, only a few smudges.

The Ripper panic was not suddenly resurrected after Emily’s homicide, but perhaps an allusion to it was made by Wood’s attorney, Marshall Hall, when he asked the jury, “Was it more probable that [the murder] was the work of some maniac, such as terrorized London some years ago?” The Ripper’s spectre may have entered many minds, but the judge, at least, was astute enough to discount Emily’s homicide as being the work of a “maniac.” Her killer was a man who “must have been almost adept at that terrible art . . . ,” the judge said. “No doubt this crime was committed by a man who was leading a double life—a man whom nobody would imagine for a moment would be a murderer—a man who would pass in his particular society without anybody suspecting that he was a murderer.”

Sickert’s name was never mentioned in connection with Emily’s murder. There were no Ripper-type letters to the press or the police, but curiously enough, right after Emily’s homicide a Harold Ashton, a reporter for the
Morning Leader,
went to the police and showed them photographs of four postcards sent to the editor. It is not clear from the police report who sent these postcards, but the implication is that they were signed “A.C.C.” Ashton inquired if the police were aware that the writer of the postcards might be a “racing man.” The reporter went on to point out the following:

A postmark dated January 2, 1907, London, was the first day of racing after “a spell of wintry weather,” and the race that day was at Gatwick.

A second postcard was dated August 9, 1907, Brighton, and the Brighton races were held on the 6th, 7th, and 8th and at Lewes on the 9th and 10th of that month. The reporter said that many people who attended the races at Lewes stayed the weekend in Brighton.

A third postcard was dated August 19, 1907, Windsor, and the Windsor races were held on Friday and Saturday, the 16th and 17th of that month.

The fourth postcard was dated September 9th, two days before Emily’s murder, and one day before the Doncaster autumn race in Yorkshire. But what was very strange about this card, Ashton pointed out, is that it was a French postcard that appeared to have been purchased in Chantilly, France, where a race had been held the week before the Doncaster autumn race. Ashton said, according to the rather confusing police report, that he believed “the post card may have been purchased in France, possibly at Chantilly, brought over and posted with English stamps at Doncaster”—as if to imply that it had been mailed from Doncaster during the races. Had the sender attended the Doncaster autumn races, he could not have been in Camden Town at the time of Emily’s September 11th murder. The Doncaster races were held on the 10th, 11th, 12th, and 13th of September.

Ashton was asked to withhold this information from his newspaper, which he did. On September 30th, Inspector A. Hailstone jotted on the report that the police thought Ashton was correct about the dates of the races, but the reporter was “quite wrong” about the postmark of the fourth postcard. “It is clearly marked London NW.” Apparently, it didn’t strike Inspector Hailstone as somewhat odd that a French postcard apparently written two days before Emily Dimmock’s murder was for some reason mailed in London to a London newspaper. I don’t know if “A.C.C.” were the initials of an anonymous sender or meant something else, but it seems that the police might have questioned why a “racing man” would have sent these postcards to a newspaper at all.

It might have occurred to Inspector Hailstone that what this racing man had accomplished, whether he intended to or not, was to make it clear that he had a habit of attending horse races and was at Doncaster on the date the much-publicized murder of Emily Dimmock occurred. If Sickert was now supplying himself with alibis instead of taunting the police with his “catch me if you can” communications, his actions would make perfect sense. At this stage in his life, his violent psychopathic drive would have lessened. It would be highly unusual for him to continue maniacal killing sprees that required tremendous energy and obsessive focus. If he committed murder, he did not want to be caught. His violent energy had been dissipated—although not eradicated—by age and his career.

When Sickert began his infamous paintings and etchings of nude women sprawled on iron bedsteads—
The Camden Town Murder
and
L’Affaire de Camden Town,
or
Jack Ashore
or the clothed man in
Despair
who sits on a bed, his face in his hands—he was simply viewed as a respected artist who had chosen the Camden Town murder as a narrative theme in his work. It wouldn’t be until many years later that a detail would link him to the Camden Town murder. On November 29, 1937, the
Evening Standard
printed a short article about Sickert’s Camden Town murder paintings, and stated, “Sickert, who was living in Camden Town, was permitted to enter the house where the murder was committed and did several sketches of the murdered woman’s body.”

Supposing this is true, was it another Sickert coincidence that he just happened to be wandering along St. Paul’s Road when he noticed a swarm of police and wanted to see what all the excitement was about? Emily’s body was discovered about 11:30 A.M. Not long after Dr. Thompson examined it at 1:00 P.M., it was removed to the St. Pancras mortuary. There was a relatively short time period of maybe two to three hours for Sickert to have happened by while Emily’s body was still inside the house. If he had no idea when her body would be found, he would have had to case the area for many hours—and risk being noticed—to make sure he didn’t miss the show.

A simple solution is suggested by the missing three keys. Sickert might have locked the doors behind him as he left the house—especially the inner and outer doors to Emily’s rooms—to make it less likely that her body would be found before Shaw came home at 11:30 in the morning. Had Sickert been stalking Emily, he certainly would have known when Shaw left the house for work and when he returned. While the landlady might not have entered a locked room, Shaw would have, had Emily not responded to his calling out and knocking.

Sickert might have taken the keys as a souvenir. I see no reason for him to need them to make his escape after Emily’s murder. It is possible that the three stolen keys could have given him a curtain time of approximately 11:30 A.M. So he just happened to show up at the crime scene before the body was removed and innocently ask the police if he might have a look inside and do a few sketches. Sickert was the local artist, a charming fellow. I doubt the police would have refused him his request. They probably told him all about the crime. Many a police officer likes to talk, especially when a major crime is committed on his shift. At the most, police might have found Sickert’s interest eccentric, but not suspicious. I found no mention in police reports that Sickert appeared at the crime scene, or that any artist did. But when I’ve shown up at crime scenes as a journalist and author, my name has never been entered into reports, either.

Sickert’s appearing at the scene also gave him an alibi. Should the police have discovered fingerprints that for some reason or another were ever identified as Walter Richard Sickert’s, so what? Sickert had been inside Emily Dimmock’s house. He had been inside her bedroom. One would expect him to have left fingerprints and maybe a few hairs or who knows what else while he was busy moving around, sketching, and chatting with the police or with Shaw and his mother.

It was not out of character for Sickert to sketch dead bodies. During World War I, he was obsessed with wounded and dying soldiers and their uniforms and weapons. He even collected piles of uniforms and maintained close relations with people at the Red Cross, asking them to let him know when ill-fated patients would no longer need their uniforms. “I have got a capital fellow,” he wrote to Nan Hudson in the fall of 1914. “The ideal noble & somewhat beefy young Briton . . . & I have already drawn him alive & dead.”

In several letters she wrote to Janie in 1907, Ellen inquires about “poor young Woods” and wants to know what happened when his case went to trial late that year. Ellen was overseas, and if she was referring to the eventual arrest, indictment, and trial of Robert Wood, accused and later acquitted of being Emily Dimmock’s killer, she may have gotten the name slightly wrong, but the question was an atypical one for her to ask. She did not refer to criminal cases in her correspondence. I have found not a single mention of the Ripper murders or any others. For her to suddenly want to know about “poor young Woods” is perplexing, unless “Woods” is not really Robert Wood, but someone else.