Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper--Case Closed (44 page)

He had studios at 18 and 27 Fitzroy Street, which is parallel to Tottenham Court Road and becomes Charlotte Street before passing Windmill Street. He could have walked from either of his studios to the Rising Sun public house in minutes. Mornington Crescent was a mile north of the pub, and Sickert rented the two top floors of the house at number 6. He painted there, usually nudes on a bed in the same setting he used in
Jack the Ripper’s Bedroom,
painted from the point of view of someone outside open double doors that lead into a small murky space, where a dark mirror behind an iron bedstead vaguely reflects a man’s shape.

Six Mornington Crescent was a twenty-minute walk from the rooming house where Emily Dimmock lived at 29 St. Paul’s Road (now Agar Grove). She and Shaw had two rooms on the first floor. One was a sitting room, the second a cramped bedroom behind double doors at the back of the house. After Shaw would leave for St. Pancras Station, Emily might clean and sew or go out, and was described as a cheerful woman who liked to sing to herself. Sometimes she met customers at the Rising Sun, or she might rendezvous with a man at another pub, Euston Station, or perhaps the Middlesex music hall (which Sickert painted around 1895), the Holborn Empire (home of music-hall star Bessie Bellwood, whom Sickert sketched many times around 1888), or the Euston Theater of Varieties.

One of Sickert’s favorite spots for rendezvous was the statue of his former father-in-law, Richard Cobden, on the square off Mornington Crescent in Camden Town. The statue was presented to the vestry of St. Pancras in 1868 in honor of Cobden’s repealing the Corn Laws, and was across from the Mornington Crescent underground station. Even when Sickert was married to Ellen, he had a habit of making sarcastic remarks about the statue as he rode past in a hansom. To use the statue for a rendezvous years after his divorce was perhaps another example of his mockery and contempt for people, especially important ones, especially a man he could never measure up to and had probably heard about all too often from the time he first met Ellen.

Emily Dimmock usually left her rooming house by 8:00 P.M. and did not return while the couple who owned the house, Mr. and Mrs. Stocks, were still awake. They claimed to know nothing about Emily’s “irregular” life, and quite a life it was—two, three, four men a night, sometimes standing up in a dark corner of a train station before she might finally bring the last fellow home and sleep with him. Emily was not an Unfortunate like Annie Chapman or Elizabeth Stride. I wouldn’t call Emily an Unfortunate at all. She did not live in the slums. She had food, a place to call home, and a man who wanted to marry her.

But she had an insatiable craving for excitement and the attention of men. The police described her as a woman “of lustful habits.” I don’t know if lust had anything to do with her sexual encounters. More likely her lust was for money. She wanted clothes and pretty little things. She was “greatly charmed” by artwork and collected penny picture postcards to paste in a scrapbook that was precious to her. The last postcard she had added to her collection, as far as anyone knows, was one that twenty-eight-year-old artist Robert Wood, employed by London Sand Blast Decorative Glass Works on Gray’s Inn Road, had given to her on September 6th inside the Rising Sun. He wrote a note on the back of it, and the postcard became the key piece of evidence when Wood was indicted and tried for murdering her. Handwriting comparisons in Wood’s case were never made by any expert, but instead by another sexual client of Emily’s, a man who swore on the witness stand that handwriting on a postcard and two words on a fragment of charred paper found in Emily’s fireplace had been written by the same person. Apparently, Emily had recently received a number of postcards—at least four. One mailed from “a seaside town” read (as best a witness could recall), “Do not be surprised if you hear of a murder being done. You have ruined my life, and I shall do it soon.”

After what Judge William Grantham described as the most remarkable trial of the century, Robert Wood was acquitted.

Emily Dimmock had given venereal disease to so many men that the police had a long list of former clients who had good cause to do her in. She had been threatened numerous times in the past. Enraged men who had contracted the “disorder” harassed her and threatened to “out” or kill her. But nothing stopped her from continuing her trade, no matter how many men she infected. And besides, she remarked to her women friends, it was a man who gave her the disorder in the first place.

Emily was seen with two strangers the week before her murder. One was a man “who had a short leg, or hip trouble of some sort,” according to Robert Wood’s statement to the police. The other was a Frenchman described by a witness as approximately five foot nine, very dark, with a short-cut beard, and dressed in a dark coat and striped trousers. He briefly came into the Rising Sun on the night of September 9th, leaned over and spoke to Emily, then left. In police reports and at the inquest, there is no reference to this man again, nor did there seem to be any interest in him.

The summer of 1907 had officially ended on August 31st after thirteen weeks of frequent rains and chilly, dreary cloudy weather.
The Times
described the summer as “the coolest experienced since the dismal season of 1888.” The last day of Emily Dimmock’s life had offered a respite, with almost eight hours of sunshine and a light breeze, a very fine day for people to venture out after so many weeks of oppressively bad weather. The night of September 11th, Emily was last seen alive at a Camden Town public house called the Eagle. Earlier in the evening she had been talking to Mrs. Stocks in the kitchen and said she had plans that night. Emily had received a postcard from a man who wanted to meet her at the Eagle, near the Camden Road Station. The postcard read, “Meet me at 8 o’clock at the Eagle tonight [Wednesday, September 11th]” and was signed “Bertie,” which was Robert Wood’s nickname.

Wood denied having sent this postcard. “I only wrote one of them—the one with the sketch of the rising sun on it,” he testified in court. He was befuddled that the handwriting on the charred fragments of paper found in Emily’s fireplace was a “good imitation” of his, he added. When Emily left her house that night of the 11th in her long dust-coat, her hair in curling pins, she was “not dressed to go out.” She mentioned to acquaintances that she didn’t plan to stay at the Eagle long, wasn’t eager to go, and that was why she wasn’t properly dressed.

She still had the curling pins in her hair when she was murdered. Perhaps she was taking extra care to make sure she looked her best the next morning. Shaw’s mother was coming to visit from Northampton, and Emily had been cleaning, doing laundry, and getting the house in order. None of her former clients ever mentioned that Emily wore curling pins while giving them pleasure. It would seem a poor business tactic if one was hoping for a generous payment from a client. The curling pins could suggest that Emily wasn’t expecting the violent visitor who took her life. They might suggest she took her killer home with her and never removed the curling pins from her hair.

A cabman later claimed to have picked up a fare after 1:00 A.M. and dropped him off close to Emily’s house, while another witness said he saw her around midnight walking toward her house with a smartly dressed man. (Neither man resembled Wood, the witnesses said.) Yet another witness, Robert McGowan (who clearly was confused about time), swore that he passed Emily’s house around five o’clock the morning of her murder and noticed a “broad-shouldered” man dressed in a hard felt hat and long overcoat with the collar flipped up, walking away from Emily’s house. The man’s back was to McGowan, and it should be noted that Robert Wood was not wearing an overcoat the previous night when he saw Emily last at the Eagle. Nor was he broad-shouldered.

Another explanation of how the killer might have gained access to Emily is that her back bedroom on the ground floor was accessible by windows and sturdy cast-iron drainpipes a person could climb up. There is no mention in police reports that the windows were locked. Only the bedroom double door, the sitting-room door, and the front door of the house were locked the next morning when Emily’s body was found. Her three keys to those doors were missing when police and Shaw searched the rooms. It is possible that someone climbed into her bedroom while she was asleep, but I don’t think it’s likely.

When she set out from 29 St. Paul’s Road that Wednesday evening, the moon was new, the streets dark. She may not have intended to sell pleasure to anyone, but it could be that while she was on her way home with curling pins in her hair, she ran into a man. He said something to her.

“Where are you a goin my pretty little maid?” someone wrote in The Lizard guest book.

If Emily did have an encounter with her killer on her way home or if he was the man she met at the Eagle, he might have told her he didn’t mind her curling pins in the least.
Will you let me come see you in your room?
It is possible Sickert had noticed Emily Dimmock many times in the past, at train stations, or just walking about. The Rising Sun was right around the corner from his studios, not far from Maple Street, which he would later sketch as an empty back road late at night with two distant shadowy women lingering on the corner. Emily Dimmock may have noticed Walter Sickert, too. He was a familiar sight along Fitzroy Street, carrying his canvases back and forth from one studio to another.

He was a well-known local artist. He was painting nudes during this time. He had to get his models from somewhere, and perhaps it is nothing more than coincidence that not only was Robert Wood an artist, but his “sweetheart” was an artist’s model named Ruby Young, who was willing to pose in the nude and may have been of questionable character, based on her evasiveness when police inquired about her modeling and personal life. Sickert’s taste in models hadn’t changed. He still had a penchant for using prostitutes. He may have been stalking and watching Emily Dimmock and her sexual transactions. He would have seen her as the lowest of the lowest, a filthy diseased whore. Marjorie Lilly writes that once she heard a person defend thieves by telling Sickert, “After all, everyone has a right to exist.” He retorted, “Not at all. There are people who have no right to exist!”

“As you can see I have done another good thing for Whitechapel,” the Ripper wrote November 12, 1888.

The position of Emily Dimmock’s dead body was described as “natural.” The doctor who arrived at the scene said he believed that she was asleep when she was killed. She was facedown, her left arm bent at an angle and across her back, the hand bloody. Her right arm was extended in front of her and on the pillow. In fact, her position was not natural or comfortable. Most people do not sleep or even lie down with one of their arms bent at a right angle behind their backs. There was not sufficient space between the headboard and the wall for the killer to attack her from behind. She needed to be facedown, and her unnatural position on the bed can be explained if the killer straddled her as he pulled back her head with his left hand and cut her throat with his right.

Blood on her left hand suggests she grabbed the hemorrhaging left side of her neck, and her assailant may have wrenched her left arm behind her, perhaps pinning it with a knee to keep her from struggling. He had cut her throat to the spine and she could make no sound. He had slashed her neck from left to right, as a right-handed assailant would. He had so little room to work that his violent sweep of the knife cut the bed ticking and nicked Emily’s right elbow. She was on her face, her left carotid squirting her syphilitic blood into the bed and not all over him.

The police did not discover a bloody nightgown at the scene. Absent that garment, it might be presumed that Emily was nude when she was murdered—or that her killer took a bloody gown as a trophy. A former client who had slept with Emily three times claimed that on those occasions she wore a nightdress and did not have “curlers” in her hair. If she had sex the night of September 11th, especially if she was intoxicated, it is possible that she fell asleep in the nude. Or she may have been with another “client”—her killer—who had her undress and turn over, as if he wanted anal sex or intercourse from the rear. After he cut a six-inch gash in her throat, her killer threw the bedcovers over her. All of this seems to deviate from Sickert’s violent modus operandi, with the exception that apparently there was no sign of “connection.”

After twenty years, Sickert’s patterns, fantasies, needs, and energy would have evolved. This is not surprising, but the usual evolution in a serial offender’s unnatural activities and desires is not necessarily understood by the public. We are inundated by the products of an entertainment industry and media that constantly expose us to increasingly specious psychological profiling and psychopathic sexual offenders who have become stereotypes.

What is generally accepted about a serial killer’s relentless and unvarying pattern would, in the main, apply only to a robot or a laboratory rat. Human predators are still human. They don’t always engage in the same activities in the same way (if at all). They don’t always experience the same emotions toward the same types of people, or make the same choices, or continue to maintain the same beliefs in symbols or religious or superstitious rituals. A human predator’s sexual attraction can shift to a different gender, or the person may find that he or she is no longer sexually aroused by the same stimulation and fantasies.

A serial killer’s victim selection can include women, men, and children, and the means of murder and victim approach can be so different as to be unrecognizable as the work of the same offender. Dr. Louis B. Schlesinger, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a leading expert in serial offenders and sexual violence, says he has worked cases of serial murder in which the killer doesn’t have an MO or a “signature.” In other words, the killer’s choices of victims, methods of attack, and symbolic rituals may have nothing in common from crime to crime. Perhaps the offender approaches his victim in a parking lot, or perhaps he abducts his victim from a car or a residence. Perhaps his signature in one murder is to take a souvenir, such as a piece of jewelry, and in another murder it is the way he poses or displays the body, and in yet another murder it is torture.