Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper--Case Closed (9 page)

Sickert’s arrogance, his lack of feeling, and his extraordinary power of manipulation are typical of psychopaths. What is not so apparent—although it betrays itself in Walter’s fits of temper and sadistic games—is the anger that simmered beneath his bewitching surface. Add rage to emotional detachment and a total lack of compassion or remorse, and the resulting alchemy turns Dr. Jekyll into Mr. Hyde. The precise chemistry of this transformation is a mixture of the physical and spiritual that we may never fully understand. Does an abnormal frontal lobe cause a person to become a psychopath? Or does the frontal lobe become abnormal because the person is a psychopath? We don’t yet know the cause.

We do know the behavior, and we know that psychopaths act without fear of consequences. They do not care about the suffering left in the aftermath of their violent storms. It doesn’t bother a violent psychopath if his assassination of a president might damage the entire nation, if his killing spree might break the hearts of women who have lost their husbands and children who have lost their fathers. Sirhan Sirhan has been heard to boast in prison that he has become as famous as Bobby Kennedy. John Hinckley, Jr.’s failed attempt on Reagan’s life catapulted the pudgy, unpopular loser into becoming a cover boy for every major magazine.

The psychopath’s only palpable fear is that he will be caught. The rapist aborts his sexual assault when he hears someone unlocking the front door. Or maybe violence escalates and he kills both his victim and whoever is entering the house. There can be no witnesses. No matter how much violent psychopaths might taunt the police, the thought of captivity fills them with terror, and they will go to any length to avoid it. It is ironic that people who have such contempt for human life will desperately hold on to their own. They continue to thrive on their games, even on death row. They are determined to live and to the bitter end believe they can dodge death by lethal injection or cheat the electric chair.

The Ripper was the gamesman of all gamesmen. His murders, his clues and taunts to the press and the police, his antics—all were such fun. His greatest disillusionment must have come from realizing early on that his opponents were unskilled dolts. For the most part, Jack the Ripper played his games alone. He had no worthy contenders, and he boasted and taunted almost to the point of giving himself away. The Ripper wrote hundreds of letters to the police and the press. One of his favorite words was “fools”—a word that was also a favorite of Oswald Sickert’s. The Ripper letters contain dozens of “ha ha’s”—the same annoying American laugh of James McNeill Whistler that Sickert must have heard hour after hour when he was working for the great Master.

From 1888 to the present day, the millions of people who have associated Jack the Ripper with mystery and murder undoubtedly have no clue that more than anything else, this infamous killer was a mocking, arrogant, spiteful, and sarcastic man who believed virtually everyone on earth was an “idiot” or a “fool.” The Ripper hated the police, he loathed “filthy whores,” and he was maniacal in his sarcastic, “funny little” communications with those desperate to catch him.

The Ripper’s mockeries and utter indifference to his destruction of human life are evident in his letters, which begin in 1888 and end, as far as we know, in 1896. As I read and reread—more times than I can count—the some 250 Ripper letters that survive at the Public Record Office and the Corporation of London Records Office, I began to form a rather horrifying image of a furious, spiteful, and cunning child who was the master controller of a brilliant and talented adult. Jack the Ripper felt empowered only when he savaged people and tormented the authorities, and he got away with all of it for more than 114 years.

When I first began to go through the Ripper letters, I concurred with what the police and most people believe: Almost all of the letters are hoaxes or the communications of mentally unbalanced people. However, during my intensive research of Sickert and the way he expressed himself—and the way the Ripper expressed himself in so many of his alleged letters—my opinion changed. I now believe that the majority of the letters were written by the murderer. The Ripper’s childish and hateful teases and mocking comments and taunts in his letters include:

“Ha Ha Ha”

“Catch me if you can”

“It’s a jolly nice lark”

“What a dance I am leading”

“Love, Jack the Ripper”

“Just to give you a little clue”

“I told her I was Jack the Ripper and I took my hat off”

“Hold on tight you cunning lot of coppers”

“good bye for the present From the Ripper and the dodger”

“Won’t it be nice dear old Boss to have the good ole times once again”

“You might remember me if you try and think a little Ha Ha.”

“I take great pleasure in giving you my whereabouts for the benefit of the Scotland Yard boys”

“The police alias po-lice, think themselves devilish clever”

“you donkeys, you double-faced asses”

“Be good enough to send a few of your clever policemen down here”

“The police pass me close every day, and I shall pass one going to post this.”

“Ha! Ha!”

“you made a mistake, if you thought I dident see you . . . ”

“the good old times once again”

“I really wanted to play a little joke on you all but I haven’t got enough time left to let you play cat and mouse with me.”

“Au revoir, Boss.”

“a good Joke I played on them”

“ta ta”

“Just a line to let you know that I love my work.”

“They look so clever and talk about being on the right track”

“P. S. You can’t trace me by this writing so its no use”

“I think you all are asleep in Scotland Yard”

“I am Jack the ripper catch me if you can”

“I am now going to make my way to Paris and try my little games”

“Oh, it was such a jolly job the last one.”

“Kisses”

“I am still at liberty . . . Ha, ha, ha!”

“don’t I laugh”

“I think I have been very good up to now”

“Yours truly, Mathematicus”

“Dear Boss . . . I was conversing with two or three of your men last night”

“What fools the police are.”

“But they didnt search the one I was in I was looking at the police all the Time.”

“why I passed a policeman yestaday & he didnd take no notice of me.”

“The police now reckon my work a
practical
joke, well well Jacky’s a very practical joker ha ha ha”

“I am very much amused”

“I’m considered a
very
handsome Gentleman”

“You see I am still knocking about. Ha. Ha”

“you will have a job to catch me”

“No use you’re tryin to catch me because it wont do”

“You never caught me and you never will Ha Ha”

—a taunt that certainly turned out to be true during the Ripper’s lifetime.

Such bravado doesn’t mean the Ripper didn’t spend his years paranoid and on the run. Walter Sickert wrote to his friend, art collector Edward Marsh (circa 1914), “you will never know how hunted I have been during the years I have known you.” And in another letter to artist Sir William Eden (circa 1900), Sickert complains of being “irritable to a pitch of madness, nervous, apprehensive, agonies of fear of nothing!” He goes on to say that he hides these moods from other people, which is the “worse for me, perhaps,” and why, he says, that he chooses to live in Normandy, or “in the country,” as he puts it.

My father the lawyer used to say that you can tell a lot by what makes a person angry. A review of the 211 Ripper letters in the Public Record Office at Kew reveals that Jack the Ripper was intellectually arrogant. Even when he disguised his writing to look ignorant, illiterate, or crazy, he did not like to hear that he was. He couldn’t resist reminding people he was literate by an occasional letter with perfect spelling, neat or beautiful script, and excellent vocabulary. As the Ripper protested more than once in communications that were increasingly ignored by the police and the press, “I ain’t a maniac as you say I am to dam [sic] clever for you” and “Do you think I am mad? What a mistake you make.”

In all likelihood, an illiterate cockney would not use the word “conundrum” or sign his letter “Mathematicus.” In all likelihood, an ignorant brute would not refer to the people he has murdered as “victims” or describe mutilating a woman as giving her a “Caesarian.” The Ripper also used vulgarities, such as “cunt,” and worked hard to misspell, mangle, or write in snarls. Then he mailed his trashy letters—“I have not got a stamp”—from Whitechapel, as if to imply that Jack the Ripper was a low-life resident of the slums. Few Whitechapel paupers could either read or write, and a large percentage of the population was foreign and did not speak English. Most people who misspell do so phonetically and consistently, and in some letters, the Ripper misspells the same word several different ways.

The repeated word “games” and much-used “ha ha’s” were favorites of the American-born James McNeill Whistler, whose “ha! ha!” or “cackle,” as Sickert called it, was infamous and was often described as a much-dreaded laugh that grated against the ear of the English. Whistler’s “ha ha” could stop a dinner party conversation. It was enough of an announcement of his presence to make his enemies freeze or get up and leave. “Ha ha” was much more American than English, and one can only imagine how many times a day Sickert heard that irritating “ha ha” when he was with Whistler or in the Master’s studio. One can read hundreds of letters written by Victorians and not see a single “ha ha,” but the Ripper letters are filled with them.

Generations have been misled to think the Ripper letters are pranks, or the work of a journalist bent on creating a sensational story, or the drivel of lunatics, because that was what the press and the police thought. Investigators and most students of the Ripper crimes have focused on the handwriting more than the language. Handwriting is easy to disguise, especially if one is a brilliant artist, but the unique and repeated use of linguistic combinations in multiple texts is the fingerprint of a person’s mind.

One of Walter Sickert’s favorite insults was to call people “fools.” The Ripper was very fond of this word. To Jack the Ripper, everybody was a fool except him. Psychopaths tend to think they are more cunning and more intelligent than everyone else. Psychopaths tend to believe they can outsmart those out to catch them. The psychopath loves to play games, to harass and taunt. What fun to set so much chaos in motion and sit back and watch. Walter Sickert wasn’t the first psychopath to play games, to taunt, to mock, to think he was smarter than anyone else, and to get away with murder. But he may be the most original and creative killer ever to have come along.

Sickert was a learned man who may have had the I.Q. of a genius. He was a talented artist whose work is respected but not necessarily enjoyed. His art shows no whimsy, no tender touches, no dreams. He never pretended to paint “beauty,” and as a draftsman he was better than most of his peers. Sickert “Mathematicus” was a technician. “All lines in nature . . . are located somewhere in radiants within the 360 degrees of four right angles,” he wrote. “All straight lines . . . and all curves can be considered as tangents to such lines.”

He would teach his students that “the basis of drawing is a highly cultivated sensibility to the exact direction of lines . . . within the 180 degrees of right angles.” Allow him to simplify: “Art may be said to be . . . the individual co-efficient of error . . . in [the craftsman’s] effort to attain the expression of form.” Whistler and Degas did not define their art in such terms. I’m not sure they would have understood a word of what Sickert said.

Sickert’s precise way of thinking and calculating was evident not only in his own description of his work, but also in the way he executed it. His method in painting was to “square up” his sketches, enlarging them geometrically to preserve the exact perspectives and proportions. In some of his pictures, the grid of his mathematical method is faintly visible behind the paint. In Jack the Ripper’s games and violent crimes, the grid of who he was is faintly visible behind his machinations.