Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper--Case Closed (52 page)

Andrina sat with Christine while their father went downstairs and was so entertained by Sickert’s stories and singing that Angus later felt guilty for enjoying himself. The doctor arrived and gave Christine an injection. Her family left, and soon afterward she died. They did not find out until the next day, the 14th. Sickert sketched his wife’s dead body while it was still upstairs in bed. He sent for a caster to make a plaster cast of her head, then met with an agent who was interested in buying paintings. Sickert asked Angus if he would mind sending a telegram to
The Times
about her death, only to become irritated that Angus had listed Christine as the “wife of Walter Sickert” and not the “wife of Walter Richard Sickert.” Sickert’s friends gathered about him, and artist Thérèse Lessore moved in and took care of him. His grief was apparent—and apparently as false as most everything about him, his sentiments about his “dear departed,” as D. D. Angus bitterly described it, “completely bogus.” Sickert, wrote Angus, “lost no time getting his Therese [sic].” In 1926, he and Thérèse would marry.

“You must miss her,” Marjorie Lilly consoled Sickert not long after Christine’s death.

“It’s not that,” he replied. “My grief is, that she
no longer exists.
”

In the early months of 1921, when Christine’s ashes had been in her grave not even half a year, Sickert wrote obsequious, morbid letters to his father-in-law, the point of them clearly being that he wanted his share of Christine’s estate prior to the probate of her will. He needed money now to pay the workmen who were continuing to fix up Maison Mouton. It was so “unpleasant” not to pay one’s bills on time, and since Mr. Angus was on his way to South Africa, Sickert certainly could use an advance to make sure Christine’s wishes about the Maison were respected. John Angus sent Sickert an advance of £500.

Sickert—one of the first people in Envermeu to own a motor car—spent £60 on building a garage with a deep brick mechanic’s pit. It “will make my house a good motoring centre,” he wrote Angus. “Christine always had that idea.” Sickert’s many letters to Christine’s family after her death were so obviously self-serving and manipulative that her siblings passed them around and found them “entertaining.”

He continued to worry about dying intestate, as if this could happen at any moment. He needed the services of Mr. Bonus, the Angus family lawyer, to draft a will right away. Mr. Bonus lived up to his name. By using him, Sickert didn’t have to pay legal fees. “I am in no hurry for probate,” Sickert assured Angus. “My only anxiety is not to die intestate. I have given Bonus directions about my will.”

Finally, the seventy-year-old Angus wrote the sixty-year-old Sickert that his relentless “anxiety” about dying “intestate, may be summarily dismissed, as surely it won’t take Bonus years and years and years to draw up your will.” Christine’s estate was valued at about £18,000. Sickert wanted his money, and used the excuse that all legal matters needed to be settled immediately lest he suddenly die, perhaps in a motoring accident. Should the worst happen, Sickert’s wishes were to be cremated “wherever convenient, and my ashes (without box or casket)” were to be poured into Christine’s grave. He generously added that everything Christine had left him was to revert back “unconditionally” to the Angus family. “If I live a few years,” Sickert promised, he would make arrangements to ensure that Marie, his housekeeper, had an annual annuity upon his death of 1,000 francs.

In 1990, when Christine’s private papers were donated to the Tate Archive, a member of her family (her father’s grandson, it would seem) wrote that Sickert’s “ ‘intentions’ to leave it all to the Angus Trust was completely bogus! Not a penny came our way.”

In a letter to them about ten days after the burial, Sickert describes the sad affair as a grand occasion. The “entire village” showed up and he greeted each one at the cemetery gate. His dear late wife was buried “just under a little wood which was our favorite walk.” It had a “lovely view of the whole valley.” As soon as the earth settled, Sickert planned on buying a slab of marble or granite and having it carved with her name and dates. He never did. For seventy years, her green marble headstone was carved with her name and “made in Dieppe,” “but not,” according to Angus, “the dates he promised.” They were finally added by her family.

Marie Françoise Hinfray, the daughter of the family that bought Maison Mouton from Sickert, was kind enough to give me a tour of the former gendarmerie where Sickert lived, and Christine died. It is now occupied by the Hinfrays, who are undertakers. Madame Hinfray said that when her parents bought the house from Walter Sickert, the walls were painted in very somber shades, all “dark and unhappy with low ceilings.” It was filled with abandoned paintings, and when the outhouse or latrine was dug up, workmen discovered rusted pieces of a small-caliber six-shot revolver dating back to the turn of the century. It was not the sort of gun used by the gendarmes.

Madame Hinfray showed me the revolver. It had been soldered back together and painted black, and she was very proud of it. She showed me the master bedroom and said that Sickert used to keep the curtains open to the dark street and build such big fires that the neighbors could see in. Madame Hinfray sleeps there now, and the generous space is filled with plants and pretty colors. I had her take me upstairs last, to the room where Christine died, a former jail cell with a small wood-burning stove.

I stood there alone looking around, listening. I knew that had Sickert been downstairs, or out in the yard or garage, he could not have heard Christine call him if the stove needed stoking or she wanted a glass of water or was hungry. He didn’t need to hear her because she probably couldn’t make a sound. She probably did not wake up very often, or if she did, she dozed. Morphine would have kept her floating in painless slumber.

There is no record of the entire village gathering at Christine’s funeral. It seems that most in the crowd were Sickert’s people, as Ellen used to call them, and Christine’s father was there. He later recalled being “shocked” by Sickert’s “sangfroid,” or complete indifference. It was raining when I visited the old graveyard surrounded by a brick wall. Christine’s modest headstone was hard to find. I saw no “little wood” or “favorite walk,” and from where I stood, there was no “lovely view of the whole valley.”

The day of Christine’s funeral was blustery and cold, and the procession was late. Sickert did not pour her ashes into her grave. He dug his hands inside the urn and flung them into the air, and the wind blew them onto the coats and into the faces of his friends.

MY TEAM

Without the help of many people and archival and academic resources, I could not have conducted this investigation or written the account of it.

There would be no story of Walter Sickert—no resolution to the vicious crimes he committed under the alias of Jack the Ripper—had history not been preserved in a way that really is no longer possible because of the rapidly vanishing arts of letter writing and diary keeping. I could not have followed Sickert’s century-old tracks had I not been aided by tenacious and courageous experts.

I am indebted to the Virginia Institute of Forensic Science and Medicine—especially co-directors Dr. Paul Ferrara and Dr. Marcella Fierro and forensic scientists Lisa Schiermeier, Chuck Pruitt, and Wally Forst; Kevin McElfresh and The Bode Technology Group—especially Mitch Holland, who has helped walk me through the complexity of his laboratory’s mitochondrial DNA analyses; Sickert curator and researcher Vada Hart; art historian and Sickert expert Dr. Anna Gruetzner Robins; paper historian and forensic paper expert Peter Bower, whose scientific findings have proven to be the most important in this case; letterer Sally Bower; paper conservator Anne Kennett; FBI profiler and law-enforcement instructor Edward Sulzbach; Assistant New York District Attorney Linda Fairstein; rare documents and antiquarian book researcher Joe Jameson; and Peter Harrington Antiquarian Bookseller.

I thank artist John Lessore for his kind and gentle conversations and generosity.

I am grateful to members of my relentless and patient staff who have facilitated my work in every way possible and demonstrated admirable talents and skills of their own: Irene Shulgin, Alex Shulgin, Sam Tamburin, and Jonathan Daniels.

I fear I cannot remember everyone I have met along this grueling and often painful and depressing journey, and I hope any person or institution I might have overlooked will be forgiving and understanding.

I could not have carried on without the following galleries, museums, and archival sources and their staffs: Mario Aleppo, head of preservation, Michael Prata, Paul Johnson, Hugh Alexander, Kate Herst, Clea Relly, and David Humphries of the Public Record Office, Kew; R. J. Childs, Peter Wilkinson, and Timothy McCann at the West Sussex Record Office; Hugh Jaques at the Dorset Record Office; Sue Newman at Christchurch Local History Society; Ashmolean Museum; Dr. Rosalind Moad at Cambridge University, King’s College Modern Archives Centre; Professor Nigel Thorp and Andrew Hale at Glasgow University Library, Special Collections Department.

Jenny Cooksey at Leeds City Art Gallery; Sir Nicholas Serota, director, Tate Gallery; Robert Upstone, Adrian Glew, and Julia Creed at the Tate Gallery Archive, London; Julian Treuherz at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool; Martin Banham of Islington Central Libraries, Islington Archives, London; Institut Bibliothèque de L’Institut de France, Paris; James Sewell, Juliet Banks, and Jessica Newton of the Corporation of London Records Office; University of Reading Department of History of Art.

The Fine Art Society, London; St. Mark’s Hospital; St. Bartholomew’s Hospital; Julia Sheppard at the Wellcome Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine, London; Bodleian Library, Oxford University, M.S. English History; Jonathan Evans at the Royal London Hospital Archives and Museum ; Dr. Stella Butler and John Hodgson at the University of Manchester, the John Rylands Library and History of Art Department ; Howard Smith, Manchester City Galleries; Reese Griffith at the London Metropolitan Archives; Ray Seal and Steve Earl at Metropolitan Police Historical Museum; Metropolitan Police Archives.

John Ross at the Metropolitan Police Crime Museum; Christine Penny of Birmingham University Information Services ; Dr. Alice Prochaska at the British Library Manuscripts Collection ; National Register of Archives, Scotland; Mark Pomeroy of the Royal Academy of Arts, London; Iain MacIver of the National Library of Scotland; Sussex University Library Special Collections; New York Public Library; British Newspaper Library; rare books, autographs, and manuscripts dealers Clive Farahar and Sophie Dupre; Denison Beach of Harvard University’s Houghton Library.

Registrar Births, Deaths and Marriage Certificates, London; Aberdeen University Library, Special Libraries and Archives, Kings College (business records of Alexander Pirie & Sons); House of Lords Records Office, London; National Registrar Family Records Center; London Bureau of Camden; Marylebone Registry Office.

Since I do not speak French, I would have been quite helpless in all things French were it not for my publisher, Nina Salter, who mined the following sources: Professor Dominique Lecomte, Director of the Paris Institute for Forensic Medicine; Records of Department of the Seine-Maritime; Archives of the French National Gendarmerie; Archives of the Central Police Station in Rouen; the archives of the Town Council, Rouen; the archives of the prefecture in Rouen; the Rouen Morgue; Reports of the Central Police in Rouen; Records of the Sectors of Dieppe, Neuchâtel, and Rouen; Records of the French regional press; the National Archives in Paris; Appeal Courts 1895-1898; Dieppe Historical Collection; Appeal Courts of Paris and Rouen.

Of course, my respectful, humble thanks to Scotland Yard, which may have been young and inexperienced in days of old, but is now an enlightened force against injustice. First, my gratitude to the remarkable Deputy Assistant Commissioner John D. Grieve; and to my British partner in crime fighting, Detective Inspector Howard Gosling; to Maggie Bird; Professor Betsy Stanko; and Detective Sergeant David Field. I thank the people of the Home Office and the Metropolitan Police Department. All of you were nothing but cooperative, courteous, and encouraging. No one tried to get in my way or cast the slightest shadow of egotism, or—no matter how cold the case—to be an obstruction to long-overdue justice.

My warmest gratitude, as always, to my masterful editor, Dr. Charles Cornwell; to my empowering agent, Esther Newberg; to my British publisher, Hilary Hale; to David Highfill and all the fine people at my American publisher, Putnam; and to my special publishing advisor and mentor, Phyllis Grann.

I honor those who have gone before me and dedicated their efforts to catching Jack the Ripper. He is caught. We have done it together.

Patricia Cornwell