Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper--Case Closed (37 page)

Sickert was afraid of diseases. He had a fetish about hygiene and was continually washing his hands. He would immediately wash his hair and face if he accidentally put on another person’s hat. Sickert would have known about germs, infections, and diseases; he would have known that one didn’t have to engage in oral, vaginal, or anal intercourse to contract them. Blood splashed into his face or transferred from his hands to his eyes or mouth or an open wound was enough to cause him a serious problem. Years later, he would go through a time of worry when he thought he had a sexually transmitted disease that turned out to be gout.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

A GREAT JOKE

A
t 3:00 A.M., September 30th, Metropolitan Police Constable Alfred Long was patrolling Goulston Street in Whitechapel.

H Division wasn’t usually his beat, but he had been called in because Jack the Ripper had just murdered two more women. Long walked past several dark buildings occupied by Jews, directing his bull’s-eye lantern into the darkness and listening for any unusual sounds. His bleary light shone into a foreboding passageway leading inside a building and illuminated a piece of dark-stained fabric on the ground. Written above it in white chalk on the black dado of the wall was

The Juwes are
The men That

Will not

be Blamed

for nothing.

Long picked up the patch of fabric. It was a piece of apron wet with blood, and he immediately searched the staircases of 100-119. He would admit later at Catherine Eddows’s inquest, “I did not make any enquiries of the tenements in the buildings. There were six or seven staircases. I searched every one; found no traces of blood or footmarks.”

He should have checked all of the tenements. It is possible that whoever dropped the piece of apron might have been heading inside the building. The Ripper might live there. He might be hiding there. Long got out his notebook and copied down the chalk writing on the wall, and he rushed to the Commercial Street Police Station. It was important that he report what he had discovered, and he didn’t have a partner with him. He may have been scared.

Police Constable Long had passed the same passageway on Goulston Street at 2:20 A.M., and he swore in court that the piece of apron wasn’t there then. He would also testify at the inquest that he couldn’t say that the chalk message on the wall was “very recently written.” Perhaps the ethnic slur had been there for a while and it was simply a coincidence that the bit of bloody apron had been found right below it. The accepted and sensible point of view has always been that the Ripper wrote those bigoted words right after he murdered Catherine Eddows. It wouldn’t make sense for a slur about Jews to have been left for many hours or days in the passageway of a building occupied by Jews.

The writing on the wall has continued to be the source of great controversy in the Ripper case. The message—presumably dashed off by the Ripper—was in a legible hand, and in the Metropolitan Police files at the Public Record Office, I found two versions of it. Long was fastidious. The copies he made in his notebook are almost identical, suggesting they may closely resemble what he saw in chalk. His facsimiles resemble Sickert’s handwriting. The uppercase T’s appear very similar to ones in the Ripper letter of September 25th. But it is treacherous—and worthless in court—to compare writing that is a “copy,” no matter how carefully it was made.

People have always been intent on decoding the writing on the wall. Why was “Jews” spelled “Juwes”? Perhaps the writing on the wall was nothing more than a scribble intended to create the very stir it has. The Ripper liked to write. He made sure his presence was known. So did Sickert, and he also had a habit of scrawling notes in chalk on the dark walls of his studios. There is no photograph of the writing on the wall in Catherine Eddows’s case because Charles Warren insisted that it be removed immediately. The sun would rise soon and the Jewish community would see the chalky slur and all hell would break loose.

What Warren didn’t need was another riot. So he made another foolish decision. As his policemen anxiously waited for the cumbersome wooden camera, they sent word to Warren suggesting that the first line, containing the word “Juwes,” could be scrubbed off and the rest of the writing left to be photographed for handwriting comparison. Absolutely not, Warren fired back. Rub out the writing
right now.
Day was breaking. People were stirring about. The camera had not arrived and the writing was rubbed out.

No one doubted that the piece of apron Constable Long found had come from the white apron Catherine was wearing over her clothing. Dr. Gordon Brown said he could not possibly know if the blood on it was human—even if St. Bartholomew’s, the oldest hospital in London with one of the finest medical schools, was right there in the City. Dr. Brown could have submitted the bloody piece of apron to a microscopist. At least he thought to tie both ends of Catherine’s stomach and submit it for chemical analysis in the event narcotics were present. They weren’t. The Ripper wasn’t drugging his victims first to incapacitate them.

I suspect the question of human blood wasn’t important to Dr. Brown or the police. The cut-out piece of bloody cloth seemed to fit the cut-out section of Catherine’s apron, and proof that the blood was human may not have been an issue if a suspect went to court. Perhaps not testing the blood was a smart investigative tactic. If the blood had come back as human, one still could not prove it was Catherine’s.

The police decided that the killer had cut off the bit of apron so he could wipe blood and fecal matter off his hands. For some reason, he hung on to the soiled fabric as he left the City and retraced his steps back toward Whitechapel. He ducked into the entrance of the building on Goulston Street to write the note on the wall, and then thought to discard the piece of soiled apron—perhaps when he rummaged in a pocket for a piece of chalk, which I suppose he just happened to be carrying around with him.

The bit of bloody apron was not viewed as part of the Ripper’s deliberate game, nor was his visit to Goulston Street seen as part of his ongoing mockery of authority. I wonder why police didn’t ask why the killer was carrying around chalk. Did people of the East End routinely carry chalk or even own it? Perhaps it should have been considered that if the Ripper did bring a stick of chalk with him when he set out that night, he had planned to write the bigoted message—or something like it—on the wall after he committed murder.

For the Ripper to backtrack from Mitre Square to Goulston Street involved his virtually returning to Elizabeth Stride’s crime scene. Quite likely, this route took him from the Church Passage out of Mitre Square, and to Houndsditch, Gravel Lane, Stoney Lane—and across Petticoat Lane, where Sickert went on his unnerving sojourn in the fog many years later when he carried his Gladstone bag and took Marjorie Lilly and her friend with him. The police were baffled that the murderer would be this bold. There were constables and detectives all over the place. The law enforcement community would have been better served had it spent more energy analyzing the killer’s outrageous backtrack and his piece of chalk instead of getting stuck in the muck of the meaning of “Juwes.”

“Togs 8 suits, many hats I wear,” the Ripper wrote in an eighty-one-line poem he sent the “Superintendent of Great Scotland Yard” on November 8th a year later. “The man is keen: quick, and leaves no trace—” His objective is to “destroy the filthy hideous whores of the night; Dejected, lost, cast down, ragged, and thin, Frequenters of Theatres, Music-halls and drinkers of Hellish gin.”

For Walter Sickert, it would have been another big “ha ha” to head back to the scene of Elizabeth Stride’s murder and ask a constable what was going on. In the same poem of 1889, the Ripper boasts, “I spoke to a policeman who saw the sight, And informed me it was done by a Knacker in the night . . . . I told the man you should try and catch him; Say another word old Chap I’ll run you in.

“One night hard gone I did a policeman meet—Treated and walked with him down High St.”

The 1889 poem was “filed with the others.” No significant attention was paid to the distinctive form of printing or the relatively clever rhymes, which were not those of an illiterate or deranged person. The reference to theaters and music halls as places where the Ripper spots “whores” should have been a clue. Perhaps an undercover man or two should have begun frequenting such places. Sickert spent many of his nights at theaters and music halls. Lunatics and impoverished butchers and East End ruffians probably did not.

In the 1889 poem, the Ripper admits he reads the “papers” and takes great exception to being called “insane.” He says, “I always do my work alone,” contradicting the much-publicized theory that the Ripper might have an accomplice. He claims he doesn’t “smoke, swill, or touch gin.” “Swill” was street slang for excessive drinking, which Sickert certainly did not do at this stage in his life. If he drank at all, he wasn’t likely to touch rotgut gin. He did not smoke cigarettes, although he was fond of cigars and became rather much addicted to them in later years.

“Altho, self taught,” the Ripper says, “I can write and spell.”

The poem is difficult to decipher in places, and “Knacker” might be used twice or might be “Knocker” in one of the lines. “Knacker” was street slang for a horse slaughterer. “Knocker” was street slang for finely or showily dressed. Sickert was no horse slaughterer, but the police publicly theorized that the Ripper might be one.

Sickert’s greatest gift was not poetry, but this did not deter him from jotting a rhyme or two in letters or singing silly, original lyrics he set to music-hall tunes. “I have composed a poem to Ethel,” he wrote in later years when his friend Ethel Sands was volunteering for the Red Cross:

With your syringe on your shoulder
And your thermometer by your side
You’ll be curing some young officer
And making him your pride

In another letter, he jots a verse about the “incessant sopping drizzle” in Normandy:

It can’t go on for ever
It would if it could
But there is no use talking
For it couldn’t if it would

In a Ripper letter sent in October 1896 to the Commercial Street Police Station in Whitechapel, he mocks the police by quoting, “‘The Jewes are people that are blamed for nothing’ Ha Ha have you heard this before.” The spelling of “Jews” was hotly debated during Catherine Eddows’s inquest, and the coroner repeatedly questioned police whether the word on the wall was “Juwes” or “Jewes.” Even though the Ripper was supposed to be dead by 1896—according to Chief Constable Melville Macnaghten—the letter of 1896 concerned the police enough to result in a flurry of memorandums:

“I beg to submit attached letter received per post 14th inst. Signed Jack the Ripper stating that writer has just returned from abroad and means to go on again when he gets the chance,” Supervisor George Payne wrote in his special report from the Commercial Street station. “The letter appears similar to those received by police during the series of murders in the district in 1888 and 1889. Police have been instructed to keep a sharp lookout.”

A telegram was sent to all divisions, asking police to keep this “sharp look out, but at the same time to keep the information quiet. Writer in sending the letter no doubt considers it a great joke at the expense of the police.” On October 18, 1896, a chief inspector wrote in a Central Officer’s Special Report that he had compared the recent letter with old Jack the Ripper letters and “failed to find any similarity of handwriting in any of them, with the exception of the two well remembered communications which were sent to the ‘Central News’ Office; one a letter, dated 25th Sept./88 and the other a postcard, bearing the postmark 1st Oct./88.”

What is so blatantly inconsistent in the chief inspector’s report is that he first says there are no similarities between the recent letter and the earlier Ripper letters, but then he goes on to cite similarities: “I find many similarities in the formation of letters. For instance the y’s, t’s and w’s are very much the same. Then there are several words which appear in both documents.” But in conclusion, the chief inspector decides, “I beg to observe that I do not attach any importance to this communication.” CID Superintendent Donald Swanson agreed. “In my opinion,” he jotted at the end of the inspector’s report, “the handwritings are not the same . . . . I beg that the letter may be put with other similar letters. Its circulation is to be regretted.”

The letter of 1896 was given no credibility by police and was not published in the newspapers. The Ripper was banished, exorcised. He no longer existed. Maybe he never had existed, but was just some fiend who killed a few prostitutes, and all of those letters were from crackpots. Ironically, Jack the Ripper became a “Mr. Nobody” again, at least to the police, for whom it was most convenient to live in denial.

It has often been asked—and I expect the question will always be asked—if Sickert committed other murders in addition to the ones believed to have been committed by Jack the Ripper. Serial killers don’t suddenly start and stop. The Ripper was no exception, and as is true of other serial killers, he did not restrict his murders to one location, especially a heavily patrolled area where thousands of anxious citizens were looking for him. It would have been incredibly risky to write letters laying claim to every murder he committed, and I don’t think the Ripper did. Sickert thrived on the publicity, on the game. But first and foremost was his need to kill and not be caught.