Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper--Case Closed (41 page)

Dr. Robins noticed many details in the guest book that eluded me, including a message in poor German and Italian written over one of the male cartoon figures. Roughly translated, the vandal is saying he is “The Ripper Doctor” and has “cooked up a good meat [or flesh] dish in Italy. News! News!” The play on words and the innuendos, which are difficult to convey in translation, says Dr. Robins, are that the Ripper killed a woman in Italy and cooked her flesh into a tasty meal. Several Ripper letters refer to cooking his victims’ organs. Some serial killers do engage in cannibalism. It is possible that Sickert did. It is also possible that he cooked up parts of his victims and served them to his guests. Of course, the suggestions of cooking human flesh could be nothing more than taunts meant to disgust and shock.

Dr. Robins believes, as do I, that Sickert’s hand is behind the insults, annotations, and most of the drawings in The Lizard guest book. Such names as Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh are penciled in and are people Sickert knew or painted. Dr. Robins suspects that male cartoon figures with different hats and beards may be self-portraits of Sickert in Ripper disguises. A drawing of “a local rustic damsel” in the book may suggest that Sickert murdered a woman while he was in Cornwall.

I bought the guest book from Mrs. Hill. It has been studied by many experts, including forensic paper analyst Peter Bower, who says that nothing about the paper and binding is “out of period.” The Lizard guest book is considered so extraordinary by those who have examined it that it is now at the Tate Archive for further study and much-needed conservation.

The Jack the Ripper name did not appear in public until September 17, 1888—two months after The Lizard guest book was filled, on July 15, 1888. My explanation for how the signatures of “Jack the Ripper” could appear in the guest book is fairly simple. Sickert visited The Lizard at some point after the Ripper crimes were committed, and he vandalized the guest book. This may have occurred in October 1889, because in very small writing in pencil, almost in the gutter of the book, there appears to be the monogram “W” on top of an “R,” followed by an “S,” and the date “October 1889.”

While the date is very clear, the monogram is not. It could be a cipher or tease, and I would expect nothing less than that from Sickert. October 1889 would have been a good time for him to flee to the southernmost tip of England. About a month earlier, on September 10th, another female torso was found in the East End, this time under a railway arch off Pinchin Street.

It is interesting—an eerie coincidence, perhaps—that fourteen years earlier, in 1875, Henry and Thomas Wainright were convicted of the murder and dismemberment of a woman named Harriet Lane. The crime occurred at the same time of year (on or about September 11th) as the 1889 murder and dismemberment of the unidentified woman whose torso was found off Pinchin Street. In the 1875 case, the victim was murdered and dismembered in Whitechapel, and her body parts were bound in parcels of cloth tied with string. The case was highly publicized and written up in sensational tabloids and pamphlets. Was Sickert aware of the notorious and gruesome slaying of Harriet Lane? He may have been. (Ancedotal material certainly makes it clear that he was fascinated with another of England’s legendary killers, Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen, who murdered and dismembered his wife in 1910.)

The modus operandi suggested by the female torso that was discovered in the East End on September 10, 1889, was all too familiar. A constable’s routine beat had taken him past the very spot, and he hadn’t noticed anything unusual. Less than thirty minutes later, he passed by again and discovered a bundle just off the pavement. The torso was missing its head and legs, but for some reason the killer had left the arms. The hands were smooth and the nails were certainly not those of someone who led a terribly hard life. The fabric of what was left of her dress was silk, which the police traced to a manufacturer in Bradford. It was a physician’s opinion that the victim had been dead several days. Oddly enough, her torso had been found in the place that the London office of the
New York Herald
had been alerted to some days before its discovery.

At midnight on September 8th, a man dressed as a soldier approached a newspaper carrier outside the offices of the
Herald,
and the “soldier” exclaimed that there had been another terrible murder and mutilation. He gave the location as the area off Pinchin Street where the torso was eventually found. The newspaper carrier rushed inside the newspaper building and informed the night editors, who rode off in a hansom to find the body. There wasn’t one. The “soldier” vanished, and the torso turned up on September 10th. The victim was probably already dead at midnight on September 8th, based on the drying of her tissue. Draped over a paling near her dismembered body was a stained cloth that was the sort women wore during their menstrual periods.

“You had better be carefull How you send those Bloodhounds about the streets because of the single females wearing stained napkins—women smell very strong when they are unwell,” the Ripper wrote October 10, 1888.

“. . . wrapt in a clean napkin like a lady’s dirty valent!” Sickert crudely wrote in a letter (circa late 1890s), describing a ham his friend Rothenstein had sent him.

Once again, the killer had managed to conceal bodies and body parts and carry them in what must have been heavy bundles, which he then dropped virtually at a policeman’s feet.

“I had to over come great difficulties in bringing the bodies where I hid them,” the Ripper wrote on October 22, 1888.

Twelve days after the woman’s torso was found, the
Weekly Dispatch
reprinted a story from the London edition of the
New York Herald,
reporting that a landlord claimed to know the “identification” of Jack the Ripper. The landlord, who is not named in the story, said he was convinced that the Ripper had rented rooms in his house, and that this “lodger” would come in “about four o’clock in the morning,” when everybody was asleep. One early morning, the landlord happened to be up when the lodger came in. He was “excited and incoherent in his talk.” He claimed he had been assaulted, his watch stolen, and “he gave the name of a police station,” where he had reported the incident.

The landlord checked out the information and was told by police that no such report had been filed. The landlord got increasingly suspicious when he found the man’s freshly washed shirt and underclothing draped over chairs. The lodger “had the habit of talking about the women of the street, and wrote ‘long rigmaroles’” about them in handwriting resembling “that of letters sent to the police purporting to come from Jack the Ripper,” according to the news story. The lodger had “eight suits of clothes, eight pairs of boots, and eight hats.” He could speak several languages and “when he went out he always carried a black bag.” He never wore the same hat two nights in a row.

Shortly after the torso was discovered near Pinchin Street, the lodger told the landlord he was going abroad and left abruptly. When the landlord went inside the rooms, he discovered that the lodger had left “bows, feathers and flowers, and other articles which had belonged to the lower class of women,” and three pairs of leather lace-up boots and three pairs of “galoshes” with India rubber soles and American cloth uppers that were “bespattered with blood.”

The Ripper obviously kept up with the news and was aware of this story as it appeared in the London edition of the
New York Herald,
or perhaps in some other paper such as the
Weekly Dispatch.
In the Ripper’s poem of November 8, 1889, he makes clear references to the tale told by the landlord:

“Togs 8 suits, many hats I wear.”

He denies he was the peculiar lodger who wrote “rigmaroles” about immoral women:

Some months hard gone near Finsbury Sqre:
An eccentric man lived with an unmarried pair—
The tale is false there never was a lad,
Who wrote essays on women bad.

It is hard to believe that Walter Sickert would leave boots or any incriminating belongings in rooms he had rented unless he wanted these items to be found. Maybe Sickert had stayed in that lodging house, maybe he never did. But wittingly or not, the Ripper left a wake of suspicion and created more drama. He may even have lurked somewhere behind the curtain of the next act, an account of which was printed right under the story about the “lodger” in the
Weekly Dispatch
.

A “woman” wrote a letter to the Leman Street Police Station “stating it has been ascertained that a tall, strong woman has for some time” been working in various slaughterhouses “attired as a man.” This story gave rise “to the theory that the East End victims may have been murdered by a woman. It is remarked that in each case there is no evidence of a man being seen in the vicinity at the time of the murder.”

The slaughterhouse transvestite was never found, and police searching East End slaughterhouses got no verification at all that a potential “Jill the Ripper” had been in their midst. The letter the “woman” wrote the Leman Street Police Station does not appear to have survived. From July 18th (three days after Sickert “resigned” from the
New York Herald
) through October 30th of 1889, thirty-seven Ripper letters were sent to the Metropolitan Police (based on what is in the Public Record Office and Corporation of London files). Seventeen of these letters were written in September. With the exception of three, all were supposedly written from London, which would have placed the Ripper—or Sickert—in London during the time of the “lodger” and slaughterhouse woman news reports.

From March through mid-July of 1889, Sickert had written twenty-one articles for the London edition of the
New York Herald.
He was very likely in London on September 8th, because the
Sun
had just interviewed him days earlier at 54 Broadhurst Gardens and published the article on the 8th. The focus of the article was an important Impressionistic art exhibition scheduled for December 2nd at the Goupil Gallery on Bond Street, and Sickert’s work was to be included in it. The reporter also quizzed Sickert about why he was no longer the art critic for the
New York Herald.

Sickert’s printed reply was evasive and not the whole truth. He claimed he didn’t have time to write for the
Herald
anymore. He said that art criticism should be left to people who are not painters. Yet in March 1890, Sickert was at it again, writing articles for the
Scots Observer, Art Weekly,
and
The Whirlwind
—at least sixteen articles for that year. Maybe it is just another one of those Sickert coincidences that the very day his “resignation” from the
New York Herald
was publicized in the
Sun,
the mysterious soldier appeared at the
New York Herald
and announced a murder and mutilation he could not have known about unless he was an accomplice or the killer.

The torso found in September 1889 was never identified. She may not have been a “filthy whore” of doss-houses and the street. She could have been a prostitute of a higher pecking order, such as a music-hall performer. One of these questionable types of women could have disappeared easily enough. They moved about from town to town or country to country. Sickert liked to draw them. He painted music-hall star Queenie Lawrence’s portrait and must have been a bit upset when she refused to accept it as a gift and said she wouldn’t even use it as a screen to keep the wind out. Queenie Lawrence seemed to fade from public view in 1889. I have found no record of what became of her. Sickert’s models and art students sometimes just slipped away to who knows where.

“. . . [O]ne of my art students, a darling who drew worse than anyone I have ever seen & has vanished into the country. Her name?” Sickert wrote to his wealthy American friends Ethel Sands and Nan Hudson, probably around 1914.

During Sickert’s most intense killing times, he could have lived on the rails. He could have mailed letters from all over. Lust murderers tend to move about when they are in the throes of their sexually violent addiction. They go from town to town, from city to city, often killing near rest stops and train stations, some of their predatory places predetermined, some of them random. Bodies and body parts can be scattered for hundreds of miles. Remains are discovered in trash cans and the woods. Some victims are concealed so well that they will always be “missing.”

The murderous highs, the risks, the rushes are intoxicating. But these people do not want to be caught, and neither did Sickert. Getting out of London now and then was smart, especially after the double murder of Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddows. But if his motive in mailing so many letters from so many distant places was to drive the police to distraction and create an uproar, Sickert misfired. To paraphrase D. S. MacColl’s words, he “over-calculated himself.” Sickert was so clever that neither the press nor the police believed the letters could be from the murderer. The letters were ignored.

Some of them mailed from distant places such as Lille or Lisbon could very well be hoaxes. Or perhaps Sickert got someone else to mail the letters for him. He seemed to have a habit of that. In August 1914, while he was in Dieppe, he wrote Ethel Sands, “I am not always able to nip down to the boat & catch some kind stranger to whom to confide my letters.”