Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper--Case Closed (38 page)

Eleven months after the Ripper letter of 1896, twenty-year-old Emma Johnson disappeared on the early evening of Wednesday, September 15th, while walking home near Windsor, about twenty miles west of London. The next day, two women picking blackberries close to Maidenhead Road discovered two muddy petticoats, a bloody chemise, and a black coat in a ditch under shrubbery.

On Friday, September 17th, the Berkshire police were notified of Emma’s disappearance and organized a search. The clothing was identified as Emma’s, and Sunday, in the same field where the women had been picking berries, a laborer found a skirt, a bodice, a collar, and a pair of cuffs in a ditch. On the banks of a stagnant inlet of the Thames, Emma’s mother discovered a pair of her daughter’s stays. Near these were the imprint of a woman’s boot and scrape marks in the dirt apparently made by someone dragging a heavy object toward the murky inlet.

Police dragged the stagnant water, and fifteen feet offshore a muddy, slimy, naked body emerged. It was identified by the Johnsons as their daughter. A doctor examined Emma’s body at the family home, and it was his conclusion that she was grabbed by the right arm and received a blow to the head to render her insensible before the killer cut her throat. At some point, her clothing was removed. Then the killer dragged her body to the inlet and shoved or threw it into the water. Maidenhead Road was a well-known spot for romantic couples to frequent at night.

There was no suspect and the murder was never solved. There is no evidence it was committed by Walter Sickert. I do not know where he was in September 1897, although he was not with Ellen. The couple had separated the year before and were still friendly and occasionally traveled together, but Ellen was in France when Emma Johnson was murdered and had not been in Sickert’s company for months. Eighteen ninety-seven was a particularly stressful year for Sickert. An article he had written for the
Saturday Review
the previous year had precipitated artist Joseph Pennell’s suing him for libel.

Sickert had publicly and foolishly claimed that Pennell’s prints made by transfer lithography were not true lithography. Whistler used the same lithographic process—as did Sickert—and the Master appeared as a witness in Pennell’s case. In an October 1896 letter to Ellen from her sister Janie, Whistler was quoted as saying that he believed Sickert’s arrow was really aimed at him, not Pennell. Sickert had a “treacherous side to his character,” Whistler told Janie. “Walter will do anything, throw anyone over for the object of the moment.” Sickert lost the lawsuit, but perhaps the greater sting had already come—when Whistler testified from the witness stand that his former pupil was an unimportant and irresponsible man.

In 1897, Sickert’s relationship with Whistler finally came to an end. Sickert was poor. He was publicly humiliated. His marriage was ending. He had resigned from the New English Art Club. The fall seemed to be a prime time for the Ripper’s crimes. It was the time of year when five-year-old Sickert endured his terrible surgery in London. Mid-September was when Ellen decided she wanted a divorce, and it was also the time of year when Sickert usually returned to London from his beloved Dieppe.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

BARREN FIELDS AND SLAG-HEAPS

A
t the mortuary on Golden Lane, Catherine Eddows’s naked body was hung up by a nail on the wall, rather much like a painting.

One by one the male jurors and the coroner, Samuel Frederick Langham, Esquire, filed in to look at her. John Kelly and Catherine’s sister had to look at her, too. On October 4, 1888, the jurors returned what was becoming a familiar verdict to the press and the public: “Wilful murder by some person unknown.” The public outcry was broaching hysteria. Two women had been slaughtered within an hour of each other, and the police still had no clue.

Letters from the public warned that “the condition of the lowest classes is most fraught with danger to all other classes.” Londoners in better neighborhoods were beginning to fear for their lives. Perhaps they ought to raise a fund for the poor to “offer them a chance to forsake their evil lives.” An “agency” should be formed. Letters to
The Times
suggested that if the upper class could clean up the lower class, there would be no more of this violence.

Overpopulation and the class system, few people seemed to realize, created problems that could not be remedied by tearing down slums or forming “agencies.” The advocacy of birth control was considered blasphemous, and certain types of people were trash and would always be trash. Social problems certainly existed. But London’s class problems were not why prostitutes were dying at the Ripper’s hands. Psychopathic murder is not a social disease. People who lived in the East End knew that, even if they didn’t know the word “psychopath.” The streets of the East End were deserted at night, and scores of plainclothes detectives lurked in the shadows, waiting for the first suspicious male to appear, their disguises and demeanor fooling no one. Some police began wearing rubber-soled boots. So did reporters. It was a wonder people didn’t terrify each other as they quietly crossed paths in the dark, waiting for the Ripper.

No one knew he had committed yet another murder—this one weeks earlier and never really attributed to him. On Tuesday, October 2nd—two days after the murders of Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddows—a decomposing female torso was discovered in the foundations of Scotland Yard’s new headquarters, which was under construction on the Embankment near Whitehall.

A severed arm had turned up first on September 11th. No one had gotten very excited about it except a Mrs. Potter, whose feeble-minded seventeen-year-old daughter had been missing since September 8th, the same morning Annie Chapman was murdered. The police had little power of intervention or interest in the cases of missing teenagers, especially the likes of Emma Potter, who had been in and out of workhouses and infirmaries, and was nothing but a nuisance.

Emma’s mother was accustomed to her disappearances and brushes with the law, and was terrified when her daughter took off yet again, and then a dismembered female arm was found as gruesome murders continued in the metropolis. Mrs. Potter’s pleas to the police were rewarded by a benevolent fate when a constable found Emma wandering about, alive and well. But had it not been for the hue and cry her mother made and the news stories that followed, it is possible that not much would have been made of a body part. Reporters began to pay attention. Was it possible that the Whitechapel fiend was up to other horrors? But the police said no. Dismemberment was an entirely different modus operandi, and neither Scotland Yard nor its surgeons were inclined to accept the view that a killer changed his pattern.

The arm had been severed from the shoulder and was tied with string. It was discovered on the foreshore of the Thames near the Grosvenor Railway Bridge in Pimlico, less than four miles southwest of Whitechapel and on the same side of the river. Pimlico was about five miles south of 54 Broadhurst Gardens—a short walk for Sickert. “I went [on] such a walk yesterday about 11 kilom.’s,” he wrote from Dieppe when he was fifty-four years old. Five miles was no distance at all, not even when he was an old man whose disoriented and bizarre wanderings were a constant worry to his third wife and others who looked after him.

Pimlico was barely a mile east of Whistler’s studio on Tite Street, in Chelsea, an area quite familiar to Sickert. Battersea Bridge, which traverses the Thames from Chelsea on the north bank to Battersea on the south, was a few blocks from Whistler’s studio and approximately a mile from where the arm was found. In 1884, Sickert painted Battersea Park, which was visible from Whistler’s studio window. In 1888, Pimlico was a quaint area of neat homes and small gardens where the sewage system was raised lest it overflow into the Thames.

It was laborer Frederick Moore’s sorry luck to be working outside the gates of Deal Wharf, near the railway bridge, when he heard excited voices on the shore of the Thames. The tide was low, and several men were talking loudly as they stared at an object in the mud. Since no one seemed inclined to pick up whatever it was, Moore did. The police carried the arm to Sloane Street, where a Dr. Neville examined it and determined it was the right arm of a female. He suggested that the string tied around it was “in order for it to be carried.” He said the arm had been in the water two or three days and was amputated after death. Had it been cut off while the person was still alive, Dr. Neville wrongly deduced, the muscles would have been more “contracted.”

In the late nineteenth century, the notion persisted that the expression on a dead person’s face indicated pain or fear, as did clenched fists or rigidly bent limbs. It was not understood that the body undergoes a variety of changes after death, resulting in clenched teeth and fists due to rigor mortis. The pugilistic position and broken bones of a burned body can be confused with trauma when they are actually due to the shrinking of tissues and fracturing of bones caused by extreme heat, or “cooking.”

The arm, Dr. Neville went on to say, had been “cleanly severed” from the body with a “sharp weapon.” For a while, the police were inclined to believe the amputated limb was some medical student’s doing. It was a prank, police told journalists, a very bad joke. The finding of the torso in the foundations of the new Scotland Yard building was not considered a joke, but maybe it should have been. While the murder wasn’t funny, if this was the Ripper’s work again, what a huge joke, indeed.

News about this latest development was kept relatively brief. There had been enough bad publicity in August and September, and people were beginning to complain that details printed in the newspapers made matters worse. It was “hurting the work of the police,” one person wrote to
The Times.
Publicity adds to the “state of panic,” which only helps the killer, someone else wrote.

The police were ignorant and an embarrassment, Londoners began to complain. Scotland Yard could not bring offenders to justice, and in confidential memorandums, police officials worried that “if the perpetrator is not speedily brought to justice, it will not only be humiliating but also an intolerable danger.” The amount of mail sent to Scotland Yard was overwhelming, and Charles Warren published a letter in newspapers “thanking” citizens for their interest and apologizing that he simply did not have time to answer them. One might expect that a great many letters were also written to newspapers, and to sort out crank mail,
The Times
had a policy that while a person did not have to publish his name and address, the information must be included in the original letter to show good faith.

The policy could not have been an easy one to enforce. The telephone had been patented only twelve years earlier and was not yet a household appliance. I doubt that a member of the newspaper staff got into a hansom or galloped off on a horse to check out the validity of a name and address when the individual wasn’t listed in the local directory, and not everybody was. My scan of hundreds of newspapers printed in 1888 and 1889 revealed that anonymous letters were published but not frequently. Most writers allowed their name, address, and even occupation to be published. But as the Ripper crimes began to pick up momentum, there seemed to be an increase in published letters with no attribution beyond initials or cryptic titles, or in some instances, names that strike me, at any rate, as Dickensian or mocking.

Days after Annie Chapman’s murder, a letter to
The Times
suggested that the police should check on the whereabouts of all cases of “homicidal mania which may have been discharged as ‘cured.’” The letter was signed, “A Country Doctor.” A letter published September 13th and signed “J.F.S.” stated that the day before, a man had been “robbed at 11:00 A.M. on Hanbury Street” in the East End, and at 5:00 P.M. a seventy-year-old man had been attacked on Chicksand Street, and at 10:00 A.M. that very morning a man ran into a bakery shop and made off with the till. All of this, the anonymous writer said, happened “within 100 yards of each other and midway between the scenes of the last two horrible murders.”

What is peculiar about this anonymous letter is that there was no record of any such crimes in the police sections of the newspapers, and one has to wonder how the writer of the letter could possibly have known the details, unless he or she was snooping about the East End or was a police officer. Most letters to the editor were with attribution and offered sincere suggestions. Members of the clergy wanted more police supervision, better lighting, and all slaughterhouses to be moved out of Whitechapel because the violence to animals and the gore in the streets had a bad effect on the “ignorant imagination.” Wealthy Londoners should buy up the East End slums and demolish them. The children of wretched parents should be taken away and raised by the government.

On October 15th, a peculiar anonymous letter appeared in
The Times,
and after the initial publication of this book I learned that the letter, it seems, was written by an equally peculiar barrister named Arthur Munby. The anonymous letter to
The Times
reads like a bad short story, and is reminiscent in places of Jane Beetmoor’s murder in coal-mining country. It also demonstrates that fear of Jack the Ripper was becoming increasingly widespread: