Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper--Case Closed (59 page)

Ellen Cobden, the daughter of a famous politician and first wife of Jack the Ripper. She divorced Sickert in 1899.
By courtesy of the trustees of the Cobden Estate, with acknowledgments to West Sussex Record Office.

Walter at age twenty-four, James McNeill Whistler’s apprentice, about 1884.
Tate Gallery Archive, Photograph Collection.

One of Sickert’s self-portraits, one of Sickert’s many looks.

Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

Drawing of a man stabbing a woman to death, and a second of a brute lunging for a woman. Both are in the collection of Oswald Sickert. walter’s father, who was a professional artist, but some believe that these were drawn by Walter as a youth.
Collection of Islington Libraries, London.

M
ary Ann Nichols, the second victim, is pictured here in the mortuary after her autopsy, her wounds discreetly covered.

Public Record Office, London.

Sickert sketch
Venetian Studies
brings to mind the murdered Mary Ann Nichols, whose eyes were wide open when her body was discovered.

Current location and ownership of original unknown.

Annie Chapman in the mortuary, her savage wounds hidden from view. She was the third of the Ripper’s highly publicized murders. (I say “highly publicized” because the six murders were not the only ones he committed.)

Material in the Public Record Office, London, in the copyright of the Metropolitan Police is reproduced by permission of the Metropolitan Police Authority.

The Ripper’s mutilation of Elizabeth Stride, the fourth victim, was interrupted by a pony cart turning into the yard.

Material in the Public Record Office, London, in the copyright of the Metropolitan Police is reproduced by permission of the Metropolitan Police Authority.

The violence escalates. Less than an hour after Stride’s murder, the Ripper slashed Catherine Eddows almost beyond recognition and took her uterus.

Material in the Public Record Office, London, in the copyright of the Metropolitan Police is reproduced by permission of the Metropolitan Police Authority.

Sickert’s painting
Putana a Casa
resembles mortuary photographs of Eddows and is suggestive of the mutilations to the right side of Eddows’s face.

Collection of Patricia Cornwell.

Catherine Eddows’s facial mutilations included cuts through her lower eyelids, her nose almost severed from her face, and an earlobe slashed off.

Material in the Public Record Office, London, in the copyright of the Metropolitan Police is reproduced by permission of the Metropolitan Police Authority.