Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper--Case Closed (40 page)

A possibility is that the Ripper wrote letters in batches, not only to compare his own handwriting styles and make certain they were different, but also to give them all the same date and mail them from different locations or make it appear they were mailed from different locations. A letter the Ripper dated November 22, 1888, was written on paper with the A Pirie & Sons watermark. Supposedly, the Ripper mailed it from East London. Another letter on A Pirie & Sons paper, also dated November 22, 1888, claims the Ripper is in Manchester. In two other letters that do not appear to have watermarks (one may have but is too torn to tell) and are also dated November 22nd, he claims to be in North London and in Liverpool.

If one assumes that all of these November 22nd letters were written by the same person—and they bear similarities that make this plausible—then how could the Ripper have mailed them from London and Liverpool on the same day? The absence of postmarks precludes knowing with certainty when and where a letter was actually posted, and I do not accept as fact any dates or locations on letters that do not include postmarks. Inside a Ripper envelope with the postmark 1896, for example, was a letter the Ripper dated “1886.” This was either a mistake or an attempt to be misleading.

It is within the realm of possibility that the postmarks may have been different from the dates or locations—or both—that the Ripper wrote on some of his letters. Once the police opened the letters, they wrote down the dates and locations in their case books and the envelope was discarded or lost. The actual dates the Ripper wrote on the letters could be inconsistent by a day or maybe two, and who was going to notice or care? But a day or two could make quite a difference to a man on the run who wants to throw off the police by appearing to be in London, Lille, Dublin, Innerleithen, and Birmingham on October 8th.

It would have been possible for a person to be in more than one distant location in a twenty-four-hour period. One could get about fairly rapidly by train. Based on the schedules in an 1887
Bradshaw’s Railway Guide,
Sickert could have left Euston Station in London at 6:00 A.M., arrived in Manchester at 11:20 A.M., changed to another train, and left at noon to arrive in Liverpool forty-five minutes later. From Liverpool he could have gone on to Southport on the coast and arrived in an hour and seven minutes.

In mid-September 1888, the decomposing body of a boy was found in an abandoned house in Southport. At his inquest on the 18th, the jury returned an open verdict. It does not appear that the boy’s identity or cause of death were ever known, but the police strongly suspected that he was murdered.

“Any youth I see I will kill,” the Ripper wrote on November 26, 1888.

“I will do the murder in an empty house,” the Ripper wrote in an undated letter.

Train travel in England was excellent at that time. Sleeper trains were also available. One could leave London at 6:35 in the evening, have a pleasant dinner and a good night’s sleep, and wake up in Aberdeen, Scotland, at five minutes before ten the next morning. One could leave Paddington Station in London at 9:00 P.M. and wake up in Plymouth at 4:15 A.M., take another train to St. Austell in Cornwall, and end up near Lizard Point, the southernmost tip of England. A number of Ripper letters were written from Plymouth or near it. Plymouth was the most convenient destination were one headed to Cornwall by train.

Sickert knew Cornwall. In early 1884, he and Whistler spent quite a lot of time there painting at St. Ives, one of Cornwall’s most popular seaside spots for artists. In a late-1887 letter to Whistler, Sickert indicated that he was planning on going to Cornwall. He may have visited Cornwall frequently. That southwest part of England has always been attractive to artists because of its majestic cliffs and views of the sea, and its picturesque harbors.

Cornwall would have been a good place for Sickert to tuck himself away when he wanted to rest and “hide.” During the Victorian era there was a popular private house called Hill’s Hotel—affectionately known as “The Lizard”—at Lizard Point, a narrow peninsula of farmland and steep, rocky cliffs about twenty miles from St. Ives. The sea crashes all around the peninsula. A visit today requires parking into the wind lest it rip off your car door.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

THE GUEST BOOK

I
n the spring of 2001, award-winning food writer Michael Raffael was working on a
Food & Travel
feature and happened to stay at the Rockland Bed & Breakfast at Lizard Point. The B&B is a modest 1950s farmhouse that can sleep seven, and the woman who owns it is the only living remnant of The Lizard Hotel’s distant and illustrious past.

It had been a hard year for Joan Hill, who inherited The Lizard guest books and other records that had been in her husband’s family for 125 years. Cornwall had been in the throes of foot-and-mouth disease, and her son is a farmer. Government restrictions reduced his income, and Mrs. Hill, recently widowed, found her business all but gone when quarantines kept tourists far away from anything with hooves.

Michael Raffael recalled that while he was there, Mrs. Hill began telling him stories about the prosperous days when The Lizard was frequented by artists, writers, Members of Parliament, and lords and ladies. Scans through guest books show the introverted scrawl of Henry James and the confident flourish of William Gladstone. Artist and critic George Moore knew The Lizard. Sickert knew James but thought his writing was boring. Sickert was a crony of Moore’s and tended to make fun of him. Artist Fred Hall stayed there, and Sickert couldn’t stand him at all.

Food and drink were enjoyed with abandon, the rates were reasonable, and people would travel from as far away as South Africa and the United States to vacation on that desolate spit of land jutting out into the sea. They would forget about their cares for a while as they strolled, rode bicycles, and went sightseeing in the bracing air, or read in front of the fire. Sickert could have mingled with interesting people he did not know, or kept to himself. He could have wandered to the cliffs to sketch—or just wandered, as was his habit. He could have taken excursions by train or horse and carriage to other villages, including St. Ives. Sickert could easily have gotten away with registering under an assumed name. He could have signed anything he liked in the guest book.

The Lizard had survived two world wars and was a romance from a long-ago past. The Hills sold the three-hundred-year-old farmhouse in 1950 and opened the small Rockland B&B. Mrs. Hill was telling Michael Raffael all this, and perhaps because he took the time to listen, she was reminded of the old guest book dated from 1877 to July 15, 1888, and dug it out of a cupboard. He “spent maybe thirty minutes flicking through it, mostly by myself,” when he came across drawings and the name “Jack the Ripper.” “From their position on the page in the book, from the style of handwriting and from the sepia ink I can assure you that the Jack entry was most probably contemporaneous with the book and the other entries around it,” he wrote to me after ABC’s Diane Sawyer interviewed me about Jack the Ripper on a
Prime Time
special.

I contacted Mrs. Hill, who verified that the book existed and had Jack the Ripper entries and some drawings, and I could see it if I liked. Within days I was on a plane to Cornwall.

I arrived with friends, and we were the only guests. The village was virtually deserted and swept by cold winds blowing up from the English Channel. Mrs. Hill is a guileless, shy woman in her early sixties who worries a lot about the happiness of her guests and cooks breakfasts far too big for comfort. She has lived in Cornwall all her life and had never heard of Sickert or Whistler but was remotely familiar with the name “Jack the Ripper.”

“I believe I know the name. But I don’t know anything about him,” she said, except she knew he was a very bad man.

The sketches Raffael was referring to when he alerted me about the guest book are ink drawings of a man and a woman on a stroll. The man, who is dressed in a cutaway and top hat, and has both monocle and umbrella, has “Jack the Ripper” written in pencil by his very big nose. He is staring at the woman from the rear, and a balloon has been drawn coming out of his mouth. “Aint she a beauty though,” he says.

The woman, in feathered hat, bodice, bustle, and flounces, says, “Ain’t I lovely.” In another balloon underneath is the comment, “only by Jack the Ripper.” What was neither noticed nor of much interest, perhaps, was everything else in this remarkable book. An ugly mole has been drawn on a woman’s nose, and penciled in under her clothes are her naked breasts and legs. The page is filled in with scribbles and comments and allusions to Shakespeare, most of it crude and snide. I took the book upstairs to my room, and other details I began to notice kept me up until 3:00 A.M., the space heater on high as the wind howled and the water pounded beyond my window.

The annotations and dozens of doodles and drawings and malicious remarks were astonishing and completely unexpected, and I suddenly felt as if Sickert were in my room.

Someone—I am convinced it was Sickert, but I will refer to the person as the “vandal”—went through that book with lead pencil, violet-colored pencil, and pen, and wrote rude, sarcastic, childish, and violent annotations on most of the pages:

bosh! fools, fool, a big fool, wiseass. Hell fool, Ha
and
Ha Ha, Dear Dear! Funny, O Lord, of girls oh fie
(slang when encountering an immoral woman),
garn
(vulgar slang for gal),
donkey
(slang for penis),
Dummkopf
(German for idiot),
ta ra ra boon de á
(refrain of a music-hall song),
henfool
(seventeenth-century slang for a prostitute or mistress),
Ballhead, Bosh! Bosh!! Bosh!!!
or under “Reverend” scrawling
3 times married,
or after another person’s name jotting
Became a Snob
or altering a guest’s name to read
Parchedigass.

The vandal writes snide ditties on pages filled with cheery comments about what a lovely place Hill’s Hotel was, how comfortable it was, how good the food was, and how modest the rates were:

“As I fell out/They all fell in/The rest they ran away.”

“Rather a queer sort of place.”

If a guest had tried his hand at a verse or two, he thereby set himself up for a blasting, such as a rhyme by F. E. Marshall from Chester:

Misfortune overtook me here
Still had I little cause to fear
Since Hill’s kind care cause my every ill
To disappear—
after a pill
[the vandal added]

The vandal drew a cartoon face and remarked, “How Brilliant!!!” After another guest’s bad poem the vandal wrote:

A Poet is he? It would be rash
To call one so who wrote such trash.
The moon forsooth in all her glory
Had surely touched his upper storey!!

The vandal corrects the spelling and grammar of guests. This seems to have been a habit of Sickert’s. In his copy of Ellen Terry’s autobiography, in which she makes no mention of Sickert, he has a good deal to say about her spelling, grammar, and diction. Sickert’s copy of the book, which I purchased from his nephew by marriage, John Lessore, is filled with Sickert’s annotations and corrections, all in pencil. He changed and added to Terry’s accounts of events, as if he knew her life better than she did.

Another bad poem by a guest at Hill’s Hotel ends with “Receive all thanks O hostess
fare.
” The vandal makes the correction “fair” and follows it with three exclamation marks. He turns the “O” into a funny little cartoon with arms and legs. Under this, he jots cockney slang, “garn Bill that aint a gal,” in response to a guest’s mention of having visited the inn with “my wife.”

“Why do you leave out your
apostrophe?
” the vandal complains on another page, and includes another cartoon. Turn that page and there is yet another cartoon, this one reminiscent of some of the impish, elfin sketches in the Sickert collection at Islington Public Libraries. The S’s in the signature of “Sister Helen” and her address of “S. Saviour’s Priory London” are turned into dollar signs.

On the bottom of a page, obviously penciled in after that page was already filled, was “Jack the Ripper, Whitechapel.” On another page, a guest’s London address had been penciled over with “Whitechapel.” I noticed drawings of a bearded man in a cutaway exposing his circumcised penis, and a Punch and Judy-like drawing of a woman striking a child on the head with a long stick. Ink blots had been turned into figures. In some Ripper letters, ink blots were turned into figures.

On two other pages, the vandal signs his name “Baron Ally Sloper.” I suppose the “Baron” is ironical—a very Sickert-like snipe at English aristocrats. Sloper was a lowlife, sleazy cartoon figure with a big red nose and tattered top hat and a habit of eluding the rent man. He was very popular with the English lower class and appeared in a periodical and penny dreadfuls between 1867 and 1884, then again in 1916. “Tom Thumb and his wife” signed the book August 1, 1886, even though Tom Thumb (Charles Sherwood Stratton) had died July 15, 1883. There are far too many examples to cite here. The guest book—or “ASSES BOOK,” as the vandal called it—is remarkable. After Dr. Anna Gruetzner Robins studied it, she agreed. “Certainly no one could dispute that these drawings match the drawings in the Ripper letters,” she said. “These are very skilled pen drawings.” One of them, she said, is a caricature of Whistler.