Portrait of a Killer Page 7

  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, t
o 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.

  CHAPTER SIX

  WALTER AND THE BOYS

  By age five, Sickert had undergone three horrific surgeries for a fistula.

  In every Sickert biography I have read, there is no more than a brief mention of these surgeries, and I am not aware that anyone has ever gone on record to say what this fistula was or why three life-threatening operations were required to repair it. Furthermore, there is to date no scholarly, objective book that sets forth in detail his eighty-one years on this earth.

  While much is to be learned from Denys Sutton’s 1976 biography of Sickert because the author was a thorough researcher and relied on conversations with people who had known the “old master,” Sutton was somewhat compromised since he had to obtain permission from the Sickert Trust in order to use copyrighted materials such as letters. The legal restrictions on the reproduction of Sickert materials, including his art, are the foreboding mountains one must scale to view the entire panorama of the man’s intensely conflicted and complicated personality. In a research note in Sutton’s archives at the University of Glasgow, there appears to be a reference to a “Ripper” painting Sickert may have done in the 1930s. If there is such a painting, I have found no mention of it anywhere else.

  There are other references to Sickert’s peculiar behavior that should have aroused at least a bit of curiosity in anyone who studied him carefully. In a letter from Paris, November 16, 1968, André Dunoyer de Segonzac, a well-known artist with connections to the Bloomsbury group, wrote Sutton that he had known Walter Sickert around 1930 and had very clear memories of Sickert 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.”

  Art historian and Sickert scholar Dr. Anna Gruetzner Robins of the University of Reading says that she does not see how it is possible for one to study Sickert extensively and not begin to suspect that he was Jack the Ripper. Some of her published studies on his art have included observations that are a bit too insightful for the proper Sickert palate. It seems that truths about him are as cloaked in fog as the Ripper was, and bringing to light any detail that might portend anything ignoble about the man is blasphemous.

  In early 2002, Howard Smith, the curator of the Manchester City Art Gallery, contacted me to ask if I was aware that in 1908 Walter Sickert painted a very dark, gloomy painting titled Jack the Ripper’s Bedroom. The work was donated in 1980, and the curator at the time notified Dr. Wendy Baron—who did her doctoral dissertation on Sickert and has written more on the artist than anyone else—to let her know of this remarkable find. “We have just received a bequest of two oil paintings by Sickert,” curator Julian Treuherz wrote to Dr. Baron on September 2, 1980. One of them, he said, was “Jack the Ripper’s Bedroom, oil on canvas, 20 × 16”.”

  Dr. Baron replied to Mr. Treuherz on October 12th and verified that the bedroom in the painting was indeed the bedroom in a Camden Town residence (at 6 Mornington Crescent) where Sickert rented the top two floors when he moved back to London from France in 1906. Dr. Baron further observed that this Camden Town residence was where “Sickert believed Jack the Ripper had lodged” in the 1880s. Although I have not found any references to the Mornington Crescent address as the place where Sickert thought the Ripper once lived, Sickert could have had a secret room there during the 1888 serial murders. And in letters the Ripper wrote, he said he was moving into a lodging house, which could have been the one at 6 Mornington Crescent—where Sickert was living in 1907 when yet another prostitute’s throat was slashed barely a mile from his rooming house.

  Sickert used to tell friends the story that he once had stayed in a house whose landlady claimed that Jack the Ripper had lived there during the crimes and that she knew his identity: The Ripper was a sickly veterinary student who was eventually whisked off to an asylum. She told Sickert the sickly serial killer’s name, which Sickert said he wrote down in a copy of Casanova’s memoirs he happened to be reading at the time. But alas, despite Sickert’s photographic memory, he could not recall the name, and his copy of the book was destroyed in World War II.

  The painting Jack the Ripper’s Bedroom was ignored and remained in storage for twenty-two years. It seems the painting is one of the few Dr. Baron has left out of her writings. Certainly I had never heard of it. Nor had Dr. Robins or the Tate Gallery or anyone else I met during my research. Apparently, not everyone is eager to publicize this painting. The idea of Sickert being Jack the Ripper is “rubbish,” said Sickert’s nephew John Lessore, who is not related to Sickert by blood but through Sickert’s third wife, Thérèse Lessore.

  While writing this book, I had no contact with the Sickert Trust. Neither the people who control it nor anyone else has dissuaded me from publishing what I believe to be the naked truth. I have drawn upon the recollections of people who were Walter Sickert’s contemporaries—such as Whistler and Sickert’s first two wives—who were under no legal obligation to a Sickert Trust.

  I have avoided the recycled inaccuracies that have metastasized from one book to another. I have concluded that information cited since Sickert’s death consistently says nothing intentionally damning or humiliating about his life or character. The fistula was not considered important because apparently those who have mentioned it did not fully realize what it was or that it could have caused devastating repercussions in Sickert’s psyche. I must admit I was shocked when I asked John Lessore about his uncle’s fistula and he told me—as if it were common knowledge—that the fistula was a “hole in [Sickert’s] penis.”

  I don’t think Lessore had a clue as to the significance of what he was saying, and I would be surprised if Denys Sutton knew much about Sickert’s fistula, either. Sutton’s reference to the problem says no more than that Sickert underwent two failed surgeries “for fistula in Munich,” and in 1865, while the Sickert family was in Dieppe, his great-aunt Anne Sheepshanks suggested a third attempt by a prominent London surgeon.

  Helena does not mention her elder brother’s medical problem in her memoirs, but one wonders how much she knew. It’s unlikely that her eldest brother’s genitalia were a topic of family conversation. Helena was an infant when Sickert suffered through his surgeries, and chances are that by the time she was old enough to give much th
ought to the organs of reproduction, Sickert was not inclined to run around naked in front of her—or anyone else. He obliquely alluded to his fistula when he used to joke that he came to London to be “circumcised.”

  In the nineteenth century, fistulas of the anus, rectum, and vagina were so common that St. Mark’s Hospital in London was dedicated to treating them. There are no references to fistulas of the penis in the medical literature I consulted, but the term may have been loosely used to describe penile anomalies such as the one Sickert suffered from. The word fistula—Latin for reed or pipe—is generally used to describe an abnormal opening or sinus that can cause such atrocities as a rectum connected to the bladder or to the urethra or to the vagina.

  A fistula can be congenital but is often caused by an abscess that takes the path of least resistance, and burrows through tissue or the skin surface, forming a new opening for urine, feces, and pus to escape. Fistulas could be extremely uncomfortable, embarrassing, and even fatal. Early medical journals cite harrowing cases such as miserably painful ulcers, bowels emptying into bladders, bowels or bladders emptying into vaginas or uteri, and menstruation through the rectum.

  During the mid-1800s, doctors attributed the cause of fistulas to all sorts of things: sitting on damp seats, sitting outside on omnibuses after physical exertion, swallowing small bones or pins, the “wrong” food, alcohol, improper clothing, the “luxurious” use of cushions, or sedentary habits associated with certain professions. Dr. Frederick Salmon, the founder of St. Mark’s Hospital, treated Charles Dickens for a fistula caused by, he said, the great writer’s sitting at his desk too much.

  St. Mark’s was established in 1835 to relieve the poor of rectal diseases and their “baneful varieties” and in 1864 moved to City Road in Islington. In 1865, it suffered financial devastation when the hospital secretary fled from London after embezzling £400, or one-quarter of the hospital’s annual income. A fund-raising dinner to be hosted by the fistula-free Dickens was proposed, but he declined the honor. In the same year, Walter Sickert arrived at St. Mark’s in the fall to be “cured” by its recently appointed surgeon, Dr. Alfred Duff Cooper, who later married the daughter of the Duke of Fife and was knighted by King Edward VII.