Chasing the Ripper Read online

  I remember reading Keith Skinner’s letter in Concord, Massachusetts, where I lived at the time, and saying to my partner, Staci, “I’m not sure what to do about this. The last thing I want is to tangle with Ripperologists.” But I did some soul-searching. Maybe I did have mistakes in my book, I mused to her. Maybe I overlooked certain people and details.

  On May 2, 2007, I replied to Keith by email that I would meet with Jean Overton Fuller. I explained why I’d avoided doing so while I was filming the Omnibus documentary and also finishing my book:

  “I would be happy to meet [her] with you as I think her information (although ‘hearsay’) is fascinating. That was my wish, to quote her rendition of it as it comes directly from her vs. her book. As I recall, she wouldn’t allow me to do that without going into her ‘theory’ as opposed to mine, and added to that, she had to see the MS and approve what I wrote about her and what she said.”

  7

  ON OCTOBER 4, 2007, I met her in the small village of Wymington, where she lived in a stone and brick cottage climbing with red ivy and roses.

  She was ninety-two, dressed that day in a colorful cardigan and green slacks. I found her elegant and extraordinarily articulate, and I was keenly interested if not perplexed by the story I’d come to hear, which in 1990 was the basis of her book Sickert and the Ripper Crimes.

  We sat in a living room comfortably cluttered with books and art, and she began to tell me about her mother Violet’s encounter in France with artist Florence Pash, a close friend and confidante of Walter Sickert’s. Jean Overton Fuller wasn’t sure exactly when this took place, but she was a young girl at the time, and she remembered her mother returning to London, “bubbling over with information.”

  As I took notes in my journal, Ms. Fuller went on to explain that Florence Pash had told “the most amazing story” about having just been with Sickert, who shocked and frightened her with what he confided. “He said he knew who Jack the Ripper was,” Ms. Fuller recalled, “and that he could never get out of his mind the dreadful bleeding corpses. I was very puzzled by this. How did he come to see the dreadful bleeding corpses? If he saw all of the bleeding corpses, that makes him Jack the Ripper.”

  Sickert went on to tell Ms. Pash that a member of the Royal Family “in direct line to the throne” had an illegitimate child he deserted. The implication was this royal deserter was Prince Eddy, the Duke of Clarence. The mother of this child, whose name Ms. Fuller didn’t reveal, deposited her infant daughter on Sickert’s doorstep, so to speak, asking him to keep an eye on the little girl in his studio while he painted.

  As the story unfolds, eventual Ripper victim Mary Kelly was working as a tobacconist’s assistant in a shop across the street, and she suggested that Sickert should confront the Royal Family. “If he was good enough to bring the child up, he should get some money for it,” were Ms. Fuller’s words that I wrote down in my journal. “He [Sickert] did say Mary Kelly was as good as telling him to blackmail the Royal Family, which he had no intention of doing.”

  Sickert supposedly paid a visit to the palace and took up the matter with Sir William Gull, Queen Victoria’s physician, who would become a Ripper “suspect” when the Royal Conspiracy theory became big news in the late 1970s. What’s fascinating about this detail is that Sickert’s mother, Eleanor, knew Dr. Gull, and I’m not aware that this fact has emerged before now.

  In an undated letter she wrote to her close friend Pennie Muller, Eleanor expresses concern about either her husband or one of her sons, both named Oswald, and she says, “Sir W. Gull has given me much comfort—he says that Oswald is absolutely without disease in any organ & the pain of the neuralgia is all there is in the matter. . . . Your loving friend, Nell.”

  Walter Sickert would have been familiar with Sir William Gull. Sickert would have known who he was, and likely knew him personally. I find the link significant since it was Joseph Gorman who connected the name Gull with the Ripper crimes in a story published by Stephen Knight (December 7, 1973, East London Advertiser). Joseph claimed it was his alleged father, Walter Sickert, who had told him about Gull, and these words gain new meaning when one realizes Sickert knew Gull or at least knew of him.

  It seems that Sickert also mentioned Gull to Florence Pash, supposedly telling her that his most famous series of paintings and etchings, titled Ennui, feature a gull on Queen Victoria’s shoulder as a clue. (Most art experts see neither a gull nor Queen Victoria in Ennui, and I didn’t either when I looked at a version of it at the Tate Britain.)

  Ms. Fuller explained to me that the reason Sickert gave Ms. Pash for his divulging such a fantastic and shocking story was he wanted the truth “known but not during his lifetime.” To prove his point, Sickert supposedly showed Ms. Pash a number of “murder paintings that he later burned,” Ms. Fuller told me. She added, “It makes no sense” that her mother would make up such a story.

  Maybe Violet Overton Fuller didn’t make it up. Maybe Florence Pash didn’t either, although I don’t believe that a conspiracy explains why women were being slaughtered in the late summer and fall of 1888 and probably well beyond. Sexual homicides don’t fit with an elaborate explanation that sounds like a violent fairy tale involving a royal palace, a prince and a love child left in the care of strangers.

  But I don’t doubt that Sickert might have told the story he did to Florence Pash. I don’t doubt he might have brainwashed the young Joseph Gorman with a similar tale, and it’s important to realize that Ms. Pash and Joseph couldn’t have gotten these stories from each other. The two of them weren’t acquainted. She died in 1951, more than half a century before he did.

  Sickert might have confabulated such a myth because it allowed him to obsess covertly about what he didn’t dare confess in the open. His fanciful yarns also gave meaning, motive and even nobility to his base, cowardly crimes. Certainly the Ripper liked to believe he was actually doing the world a favor by ridding it of “vermin,” as he put it. In his mind, his victims were “whores” who got what they deserved.

  8

  I ALSO DON’T DOUBT that Joseph Gorman believed what he claimed. His widow, Edna, remains convinced that he was telling the truth about who he believed his real father was.

  When I visited her in her Kentish Town home and spoke to her on the phone as late as 2013, she shared Joseph’s boyhood stories of visits with Sickert. “He went to Walter Sickert’s home many times,” she said, explaining that Joseph called him “Teethy because he had large teeth.” She added that Sickert also would visit young Joseph at the Gorman home on Drummond Street.

  I suggested to Edna that the only way to prove the true identity of her late husband would be to conduct the same sort of genetic testing that was used on skeletal remains discovered in a grave outside Yekaterinburg, Russia, in 2007. Scientists with the United States Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory (AFDIL) proved the bones were those of two Romanov children murdered by a Bolshevik firing squad.

  During my visit to the Gorman home in 2007, Edna presented a possible source of her late husband’s DNA, an old bloodstain of his on a favorite jacket he had worn. A DNA scientist removed the stain, an effort that proved to be futile due to contamination.

  There likely won’t be a way to establish the absolute truth about Joseph’s ancestral claims. But it was obvious when I was with his family that they had no hesitation about using any means possible to “prove” Joseph was Walter Sickert’s son. There are other tenuous connections between Sickert and Joseph Gorman that only add to the intrigue.

  Among Joseph’s papers was a statement dated September 19, 1989, that had accompanied a check for £154.88 from a literary agency. The payment was a permission fee and a 50 percent share of an advance due to Joseph for the use and paperback release of A Free House!, a compilation of Walter Sickert’s writings edited by Osbert Sitwell. The book originally was published in 1947, and one has to wonder how it’s possible Joseph Gorman was entitled to any revenues from it.

  On March 10, 2005, the liter
ary agency involved provided a written explanation: “It is our understanding that Joseph Sickert was Walter Sickert’s son and inherited the copyright in his father’s work. . . . Our original contact for the Estate was Walter Sickert’s widow. Our files indicate that we received instruction in 1989 that future income was to go to Joseph Sickert so presumably it was at that point that he inherited copyrights.”

  A spokesperson for that agency, which requested anonymity, would later state in October 2012 that the source of this original directive can’t be clarified. Maybe the instruction came from the Sickert estate. Maybe it came from Joseph Gorman or from someone else. Perhaps adding to the mystery is Sickert’s 1926 drawing of an infant in a pram. The title is Boy Jos, which presumably is short for “Joseph.” Joseph Gorman would have been one at the time. He was born in Camden Town in 1925.

  9

  I’VE YET TO LOCATE any documentation about Florence Pash’s visit with Sickert in France.

  Perhaps there are no letters that would verify Jean Overton Fuller’s recollections. But certainly she isn’t the only one who has relayed odd and disturbing memories of Sickert’s behavior.

  In a letter from Paris dated November 16, 1968, André Dunoyer de Segonzac, a well-known artist with connections to the Bloomsbury Group, wrote one of Sickert’s biographers, Denys Sutton, that he’d known Walter Sickert since around 1930. Segonzac had very clear recollections of Sickert’s claiming to have “lived” in Whitechapel in the same house where Jack the Ripper had lived, and that Sickert had told him “spiritedly about the discreet and edifying life of this monstrous assassin.”

  Sickert apparently also told friends he’d once stayed in a house where the landlady claimed Jack the Ripper lived during the early crimes. Supposedly he was a sickly veterinary student who eventually was whisked off to an asylum, and Sickert said he wrote down the name in a copy of Casanova’s memoirs he happened to be reading at the time. But alas, the book allegedly was destroyed in World War II.

  In an undated letter to artist William Rothenstein, English writer Osbert Sitwell mentions something similar:

  I am writing an essay on Sickert, and editing his papers—Years ago he told me the story of how he had occupied rooms in which previously Jack-the-Ripper (a young vetnerary [sic] surgeon) had lived. His landlady had told him the name of the murderer but Sickert could not remember it. . . . He added “At the time she told me, I was reading a volume, in French, of Casanova’s memoirs, which Will Rothenstein had leant me. I jotted the name down in pencil on the margin of one of the pages—and afterwards forgot about it, and returned the book to him. . . . One day, ask him if he still has it. . . . If he has, that’s the name of Jack-the-Ripper!!”

  Probably it has long ago been borrowed or stolen? . . . But if not, it wd [sic] be very interesting. . . . If you are too busy to remember I shall perfectly understand.

  Yrs [sic] ever Osbert Sitwell

  Christopher Hassall’s biography of Winston Churchill’s private secretary Edward Marsh recounts a bizarre dinner conversation with Sickert: “He told me that it was he who gave Marie Lowndes the idea of The Lodger. His landlady had been Jack the Ripper’s—and if he hadn’t gone to the dinner party where he sat next to her there would have been no novel, no play, no film!”

  In a diary entry of March 9, 1923, Marie Lowndes gave a different explanation. She claimed to have written The Lodger after overhearing a man at a dinner party claim that his mother employed a butler and a cook who got married and kept lodgers. They were convinced that “Jack the Ripper had spent the night under their roof.” One is left to wonder if the man who told this story at the dinner party was Walter Sickert.

  It’s indisputable that he was intrigued by—if not obsessed with—murder. In 1960, Helen Lessore, sister-in-law of his third wife, Thérèse Lessore, said in a radio interview that Sickert used to take her on taxi rides and show her a house where either “Crippen” or “Jack the Ripper” had lived.

  Andrina Schweder made a similar comment in her October 20, 1976, letter to Stephen Knight. She recalled that Sickert was fascinated by Jack the Ripper, Dr. Hawley Crippen (accused of killing and dismembering his wife), and the Camden Town murders. Ms. Schweder also confided that in 1922, Sickert encouraged her eight-year-old daughter to read The Lodger.

  His obsession with the Ripper isn’t coincidental, and his interest in the Crippen case might have been more than casual. It’s possible that he encountered the Crippens or was acquainted with them. In 1910 when Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen allegedly murdered his wife and hid her remains in the basement, Sickert had a studio at 142 Brecknock Road (now blocks of flats), barely one-third of a mile from Dr. Crippen’s house (which no longer exists) at 39 Hilldrop Crescent.

  Mrs. Crippen also was a former singer with the stage name Belle Elmore and had appeared at the Collins Music Hall. Sickert was no stranger to the Collins. One of his greatest sources of artistic inspiration was the bawdy music halls he frequented. As an interesting footnote, recent DNA testing conducted by forensic scientists in Michigan on microscopic biological evidence from the Crippen case indicates the human remains police discovered in the basement weren’t Cora Crippen’s. In fact they were from a male.

  Sickert’s circle of colleagues and friends was aware of his fixation on the macabre and that he seemed to talk about Jack the Ripper a little too much. Sickert included the notorious name in at least one of his works of art (Jack the Ripper’s Bedroom, circa 1906). Sickert was known to act out murder and mock real cases of it. He was witnessed stepping into a murderer’s character while he painted, and such antics likely were viewed by his fans, friends and apologists as nothing more than the unpredictable artist’s typical flair for drama. But were they?

  If anyone in Sickert’s close circle of friends and fellow artists suspected his obsession with violence might have manifested itself in actual acts of it, no one talked while he was alive, it seems. Some descendants of people who knew him well still aren’t talking. During the reworking of this book, certain estates in control of copyrights denied me permission to quote from the documents or include related photographs.

  I found this a bit of a shock since the documents are part of collections donated to universities or government offices, ostensibly because the original owner or author wished to make his or her papers available for study. The thought of Sickert as the Ripper seems to make a number of people uncomfortable. Sickert himself certainly talked openly about the Ripper. He bragged, confabulated, spun wild tales and theories that clearly were inspired by whatever fed his sexually violent fantasies.

  Why would he script such outrages? Was he a twisted joker who created the greatest horror show on earth that likely will endure for centuries more? Or was he a vicious killer whose savage acts were driven by malignant compulsions he couldn’t control?

  10

  MY MOTIVE for taking on this case can best be summarized by a practical question I asked at the very start: “What if modern science were applied?”

  I never imagined my efforts would be ridiculed and resented. With time and careful reexamination, I admit I initially made minor errors in London geography, the spelling of names, and some dates and a few minor facts. I was guilty of an anachronism or two, and yes, typos. Worst of all, I fell into the trap of being a bit too adamant.

  That wasn’t wise. People don’t appreciate being told what to believe, especially if it’s by an American crime novelist who probably came across as too sure of herself. Even so, the vitriol my book inspired upon its initial release in the U.S. and the U.K. was an ambush I didn’t expect. I never saw it coming, and I should have.

  On a chilly London night in 2002, John Grieve said to me, “You know you will be hated for this, Patricia.”

  As I make my revised case against Sickert, it’s only fair I include the case against me. I will briefly mention the most vocal criticisms and accusations:

  CRITICISM: I supposedly ripped up a Walter Sickert canvas for no good reason.

  FACT:
I actually didn’t rip up one for any reason.

  But that hasn’t stopped people from making angry comments about it publicly. “I can’t believe she has done this,” said art historian Richard Shone (Guardian, December 8, 2001). “It all sounds monstrously stupid to me.”

  In a letter to the editor of the Sunday Telegraph on December 8, 2002, Bernard Dunstan wrote: “Patricia Cornwell says that she ‘knows’ that Walter Sickert was Jack the Ripper . . . and has cut up one of his pictures to help prove her point—oblivious, apparently, of the fact that he was perhaps the finest English artist of the last Century. . . . I suppose Miss Cornwell has to be allowed her theories but I do hope she does not find it necessary to cut any more paintings.”

  This act of vandalism in the name of science or otherwise never happened, and I’ve been saying this for years. But no one seems to listen. When the Sickert painting in question was transported from London to the Richmond, Virginia, crime labs in 2001, the canvas arrived with a large hole in it. An ABC Primetime Live crew was filming a show on this case, and apparently it was incorrectly assumed the damage to the painting was due to some sort of scientific extraction.

  On January 7, 2002, I addressed my alleged “monstrous stupidity” in a five-page letter I wrote to John Lessore after he accused me of the same thing:

  Let me say that it is patently false that I destroyed a Sickert painting. In fact, the painting in question was sold to me . . . for some 27,000 [pounds] and flown by private jet back to the U.S. When it was unwrapped we were horrified to find a large hole punched through the middle of it. This painting did go to the labs but was only examined by non-destructive light sources. . . . What you should know however is that I would not hesitate to “cut up” a Sickert or anything else if it was the only way to expose a terrible crime and ensure justice. No work of art is worth as much as a human life. . . .