Other titles by Patricia Cornwell
SCARPETTA SERIES
Postmortem
Body of Evidence
All That Remains
Cruel and Unusual
The Body Farm
From Potter’s Field
Cause of Death
Unnatural Exposure
Point of Origin
Black Notice
The Last Precinct
Blow Fly
Trace
Predator
Book of the Dead
Scarpetta
The Scarpetta Factor
Port Mortuary
Red Mist
The Bone Bed
Dust
Flesh and Blood
NONFICTION
Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper—Case Closed
ANDY BRAZIL SERIES
Hornet’s Nest
Southern Cross
Isle of Dogs
WIN GARANO SERIES
At Risk
The Front
BIOGRAPHY
Ruth, a Portrait: The Story of Ruth Bell Graham
OTHER WORKS
Food to Die For: Secrets from Kay Scarpetta’s Kitchen
Life’s Little Fable
Scarpetta’s Winter Table
Text copyright © 2014 Patricia Cornwell
All rights reserved.
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Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle
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eISBN: 9781477879146
Cover design by Shasti O’Leary-Soudant
Contents
Preface
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
About the Author
Preface
THE QUESTIONS I’m asked most frequently have nothing to do with my Scarpetta novels or my personal life. People want to know why I remain convinced that Jack the Ripper was the celebrated British artist Walter Richard Sickert.
How is it possible and why am I so sure? Does it make sense that a highly intelligent, multilingual, handsome man who hobnobbed with the rich and famous would murder and mutilate? Did the well-bred woman he was married to at the time have a clue? Did his friends and colleagues suspect him? How did he get away with serial homicides for more than a century?
It’s fascinating to ponder the name Jack the Ripper. Who thought of it? I’m quite certain he did. The Ripper’s communications indicate he dubbed himself that and many other variations of it. He called himself all sorts of things, whatever pleased and amused him at the moment. Sickert was accustomed to having stage names. As a child he was acting in his homespun Shakespeare plays, and when he reached his teens he chose the theater as a career.
As an actor, he called himself Mr. Nemo. Nemo is Latin for nobody, and he very well may have felt like one. By the time he was in his late twenties, when the Ripper murders began, Sickert had abandoned acting, and he was a fledgling artist who was getting unfavorable critical reviews. He was supported by his much older, prim and proper wife and berated and belittled by his master, the megalomaniacal James McNeill Whistler.
Prior to my investigation into this case, Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper—Case Closed, it doesn’t appear that any significance was attributed to the fact that some of the mocking, taunting communications the Ripper sent to the police and the press were signed Nemo. He also signed a postal telegram Mr. Nobody, then crossed it out and wrote Jack the Ripper instead. At the time, the police paid no attention to curiosities like this.
They weren’t interested in another Ripper tease with a fake return address of Punch & Judy St. No attention was paid to several Ripper documents that feature cartoonish stick figures evocative of the violent puppet shows. When Sickert was growing up, his heavy-drinking, sadistic father was an illustrator and scriptwriter for Punch and Judy.
The Ripper’s communications are illustrated with all sorts of doodles, sketches and cartoons. He was fond of artistic media such as paints and crayons, and he wrote his ugly communications on some of the same watermarked stationery Sickert used. Forensic analysis has matched paper from both the Ripper and Sickert. If one considers how many of their letters are lost, it’s extraordinary to imagine the number of matches there might be. The hundreds of extant Ripper-related communications are probably only a fraction of his output.
Sickert was, among other things, a graphomaniac (a compulsive writer). So was the Ripper. Early on, the police placed no stock in the crude, violent documents that today are the only accepted physical evidence left in this case. Not all of the telegrams, notes, letters and envelopes that the police decided to keep necessarily survived. Some were destroyed in World War II. Others vanished after the Ripper case files were unsealed and made available to the public.
The examples I’m giving are but a few of the details that create the intricate layers of this investigation. It’s an extraordinarily complex one, rife with maddening subtleties. The more you look, the more you find. There’s no smoking gun. I’m convinced there never will be. The police didn’t know what to look for at the time, and I’ve concluded it’s too late for fingerprints or DNA that are unimpeachably reliable. Succinctly put, a crime scene is like an archaeology site. If an excavation is botched or bulldozed away, there’s no going back.
By the time Sickert reached his late twenties he’d created a new dramatic role and cast himself in it for real. There are many possible explanations for what stoked his raging, sexually violent compulsions, but the most compelling one is the three surgeries to his genitals and/or rectum that he had endured by the time he was five. He may have been left physically incapable of sex. Unquestionably, what’s been described as “medical violence” would have had a profound impact on him psychologically.
My claims about his surgeries and the likely deformity he was born with (described to me as “a hole in his penis”) continue to be angrily disputed. It’s as if I had insulted the manhood of England. I didn’t. I simply repeated what I had read and was told about Sickert’s “fistula.” For the most part, the exact nature of this defect remains a mystery. But it was significant enough for his family to risk corrective procedures that in the early 1860s could have killed him.
I had no idea at the time of my first book how far from finished I was with the investigation. It’s rather stunning to realize I’ve continued it ever since. Funny thing is, it’s not because I’ve wanted to—not hardly when I consider the distractions, frustrations and aspersions, not to mention the time and expense.
But it’s been the right thing to do. My pursuit of the Ripper isn’t a murder mystery or a thriller. It isn’t an essay, a movie or a TV show. He isn’t mere entertainment, and the defenseless women and children I believe he targeted were destroyed for real. They suffered and died terrifying deaths, and I don’t believe for a minute that the Ripper killed only the prostitutes we hear about—five and only five.
This is a baseless claim that no longer should be accepted as an indisputable fact. The mundane truth is that after Mary Kelly was butchered in early November of 1888, the police stopped counting. If they didn’t attribute any additional acts of depraved violence to the Ripper, then maybe London’s frightened citizens could assume this brutish madman had vanished. How convenient to suppose he was locked up in an asylum or better yet d
ead.
Without a doubt the Ripper was an embarrassment to the government, to the police, to Queen Victoria herself. His crimes made a mockery of them and drew international attention to the appallingly impoverished conditions of the Great Metropolis. Writers such as Charles Dickens had done enough damage with their depictions of orphans, child laborers, vicious overseers, slumlords and rat-infested hovels. As the queen remained bereft over the death of her husband, Prince Albert, she busied herself with the expansion of her empire and didn’t need to be plagued with such outrageously sensationalized crimes and what they might imply. Worst of all, there was nothing she could do about it any more than the police could.
Most of what went wrong in the Ripper investigation was due to ignorance. Serial crimes and the offenders who commit them weren’t viewed then as they are now, and the Ripper got better at his role. He became more skilled in the execution of his lustful and enraged violent acts, evolving rapidly as the body count climbed. It wasn’t understood in those days that a killer’s modus operandi can change, that sexual murders often become increasingly violent. Certainly the Ripper’s did.
I put his toll at a dozen, maybe as many as twenty or possibly more, and he didn’t slaughter only prostitutes—or “Unfortunates,” as they were called. It’s also not true that he struck exclusively in the East End slums or even just in London. He killed in multiple cities, and he quickly escalated to mutilation, dismemberment and possibly cannibalism. His victim selection began to include children, and he boasted about all of it in his written communications that for the most part were ignored.
Many of his victims will never be identified or linked to him. Their cases remain unsolved horrors that tore apart loved ones and falsely pinned crimes on innocent people. In some instances, the accused were hanged. They likely weren’t guilty of anything more than being peculiar, suspicious, uncouth, mentally impaired, “sexually insane” (homosexual) or simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. It’s appalling that many witnesses were inebriated. They were in poorly lit parts of the slums, and didn’t have their glasses on (assuming they could afford them).
When the Ripper’s murders began in the summer of 1888, there was no such thing as using science in police investigations. Imagine living in a time when a witness claiming to have seen you in the area of a violent crime might be all it takes to bring about your arrest. Maybe you’re sent to prison. Maybe you’re sentenced to death.
Some of the men of interest in the Ripper’s murders became such pariahs they couldn’t leave their homes without the risk of being pursued by a mob. What caused the police to take notice of these hapless individuals to begin with? I’ve concluded that the Ripper himself had a lot to do with it. An aspect of this case I didn’t realize early on is that his diabolical antics included more than just his very public taunts.
He also enjoyed cooking up mayhem, uproars and other chaotic concoctions. He deliberately implicated certain individuals in homicides he in fact committed. He disrupted, damaged and ruined those who cared for him. He thought nothing of wrecking reputations and careers, and breaking hearts. What great fun until he got bored. All forms of life were nothing to him beyond what he could exploit. He was supremely self-absorbed and narcissistic. Most people were stupid or fools, and there was no God. Sickert couldn’t love, although his obsessions, his stalking of beautiful actresses or potential wives, may have been confused with love. He had no empathy and complained at least once that he couldn’t “feel.”
We rarely think about the Ripper as being a respectable man who lived a “normal” life. What was he doing when he wasn’t stalking and “ripping”? He was eating, sleeping, strolling, traveling in taxis and on trains and steamships, attending music halls and the theater, reading, writing journal and newspaper articles and an avalanche of letters, drawing, painting, making himself the center of attention and hobnobbing with whomever he fancied.
He tolerated rich upper-class “snobs” if he could use them. He adored spying on the wretches of the slums if they fueled his dark, violent fantasies. He craved accolades and the company of celebrities. In later life he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Reading University. He would give painting lessons to Winston Churchill. His art hung in royal palaces. He inspired biographies and was honored with commemorative plaques on the sides of buildings he once inhabited.
It’s hard to envision Jack the Ripper as a workingman, a husband or a human being for that matter. We don’t think of him as admired and emulated, as having peers, friends and family. It’s very difficult to imagine him as a brilliant artist whom England continues to revere and calls its own. It wasn’t a popular thing for me to do when I concluded that this fabled Victorian killer was the former actor, painter and writer Sickert, who lived a long, respectable life.
By the time he died in 1942 there were many books and films about his evil alias. I feel sure he read and watched anything related to the Ripper. I have good reason to suspect that when Sickert was old and becoming demented, he bragged about the atrocities he’d committed. It’s possible that by then, when he was a heavy drinker “in his dotage,” as one close to him put it, the response was to shush him and send him off to bed. I doubt anyone believed him. If they did, the ugly stories were swept under the rug.
There’s no statute of limitations on homicide, although in this instance there isn’t anyone left to bring to justice. Except me. I’ve continued to interrogate myself ever since my conclusions became public. What did I miss the first time? What mistakes did I make? What might I say or do differently more than a decade after the fact? What if I was wrong?
Since I began this work almost half of my career ago, the coldest of cold cases has gotten a lot warmer. In fact I’d call it hot. After more than thirteen years of additional analyses and discoveries, I can say with confidence that what propelled the Ripper’s violent impulses makes more sense with time.
I don’t forgive the pain and death he caused, but I better understand why he was driven to it—as much as anyone can understand such a thing. I would go so far as to say that some of what the Ripper perpetrated upon others wasn’t as awful as what was done to him.
The Ripper’s victims include himself. Whether it was five or fifty people he slaughtered before his spree finally ended, he will always be that one additional casualty few people think about. Genetics aside, he didn’t enter this world with the intention of leaving behind such carnage. I doubt he set out wanting to be the most infamous killer in history. I suspect he would have preferred to be known as an artistic master like Degas, Turner and of course Whistler, the man Sickert admired, resented and despised.
His must have been a miserable existence. I don’t quite feel sorry for him, but I’m more sympathetic than I was. Frankly, I used to hate him. I don’t anymore.
I’ve been asked, “If you could meet him, would you?” Absolutely. I would travel back in time for that. I’d put him through a metal detector, and I wouldn’t turn my back on him, but I fear I might have liked Walter Sickert. He could be devastatingly attractive, entertaining and charming. People were eager to be in his circle. He exploited, belittled and mocked his friends and benefactors even as they offered him their love and loyalty. He was a baffling chameleon. He was witty. He was fascinating and flamboyant. He was too damn brilliant and wily to be caught.
Some of my critics have said that the Ripper is an obsession for me. A more accurate description is that what began as simple curiosity took on an intensely dark life of its own. Going after him is as dark as it gets.
Was Sickert a mean-spirited practical jokester and a hoaxster? Did he live a lie? The answer to both is an undisputed “yes.” But did that make him the most notorious serial killer of all time? I’ll let you deliberate and decide. But do so cautiously and with the respect that these violent deaths deserve. To loosely quote Chaucer, if you must eat with a fiend, use a long spoon.
1
IN LATE 2001, I was having dinner in New York City’s Upper East Side and doing m
y best to appear composed and in a relaxed mood. The truth is, I was unsettled, maybe as unsettled as I’d ever been about a commitment I’d made.
I don’t remember much about that night, not even the restaurant where a group of us ate. I vaguely recall that Lesley Stahl told an intriguing story about her latest investigation for 60 Minutes, and everyone at the table was talking politics and economics as Ground Zero continued to smolder. I was offering another writer encouragement, citing my usual empowerment spiels and do-what-you-love lines. But I didn’t feel confident about my own career.
I was preoccupied with a project that I worried was going to ruin my life, a good life, a privileged one I never in my wildest dreams believed I’d have when I was growing up not-so-well-off in the foothills of North Carolina. My heart felt squeezed, my stomach hollow while I made pleasantries and chatty observations. I felt overwhelmed and full of dread as I said good night to friends and left with my literary agent, Esther Newberg.
On foot we headed toward our apartment buildings, just a street away from each other, and I had little to say. I was somber and distant on the dark sidewalk as we passed the usual suspects walking their dogs and the endless stream of loud people talking on cell phones. I barely noticed yellow cabs or horns as I began to imagine some thug trying to grab our briefcases or us. . . .
I envisioned myself chasing him, diving for his ankles and knocking him to the ground. I’m five foot four and weigh 125 pounds, and I can run fast, and I’d show him, hell yes I would. I fantasized about what I would do if some psychopathic piece of garbage came up from behind us in the dark and suddenly—
“How’s it going?” Esther asked.
“To tell you the truth . . .” I began hesitantly because I rarely was honest with her about my feelings.