Certainly, I wouldn’t dare claim that all of the anonymous letters in the Corporation of London Records Office were written by Sickert (Jack the Ripper), but the communications fit the profile of a violent psychopath who taunts police and tries to insert himself or herself into the investigation. Watermarks and language aside, the problem of handwriting remains. The amazing variety found in the Ripper letters has been a source of hot debate. Many people, including forensic documents examiners, have argued that it is not possible for one person to write in so many hands.
This is not necessarily true, according to Peter Bower. He says he has seen “good calligraphers” who can write in an incredible number of different hands, but “it takes extraordinary skill.” His wife, Sally Bower, is a much respected letterer, or person who designs and draws lettering. Although she is not a handwriting expert, she has a different perspective because she is an expert in how a person forms the letters strung together in words. When she looked through Ripper letters with her husband, she immediately connected a number of letters through quirks and how the hand made the writing. I have no doubt that Sickert had an amazing ability to write in many different hands.
In a letter he wrote to artist Sir William Eden, Sickert crossed through a paragraph that mentions a woman named Janon who couldn’t read Sickert’s handwriting. “I have written again in a copperplate hand,” Sickert wrote to Eden. Certainly Sickert the artist was capable of a variety of styles of writing, including writing backward, as is evident on a number of his etchings. When prints of an etching are pulled from the press, the images are reversed, meaning the artist’s name (if etched on the copperplate) will also be reversed. In many of Sickert’s etchings, it is unmistakable that he engraved his name backward on the plate, his signature, in some cases (but not all) in cursive and different from his normal signature.
Sickert didn’t need to write backward for his penmanship to vary. Typical of his many personas and disguises, his handwriting in his correspondence is inconsistent and at times unrecognizable, including his signature. It is no wonder the Ripper confounded so many handwriting experts. In some instances, Sickert’s T’s, S’s, and W’s are formed in such different ways that one may not believe the same person wrote them. However, the more one studies the original Ripper letters, the more one begins to notice both similarities in Ripper and Sickert handwritings, and also consistent dissimilarities.
Sickert did not fear that the police would notice or question the artwork in his taunting, violent, and obscene letters, or subtle similarities in disguised handwriting. Or perhaps he assumed that even if a shrewd investigator like Abberline zeroed in on the uniqueness of some of the letters, the path would never lead northwest to 54 Broadhurst Gardens. After all, the police were “idiots.” Most people were stupid and boring, and Sickert often said as much. “I think the future, my Billy, is ours. No one else has any intelligence at all!” he wrote Rothenstein (circa late 1890s).
Few people on the planet were as brilliant, clever, cunning, or fascinating as Walter Sickert, not even Whistler or Oscar Wilde, neither of whom he enjoyed competing with at dinners and other gatherings. Sickert just might not show up if he wasn’t going to be the center of attention. He didn’t hesitate to admit that he was a “snob” and divided the world into two classes of people: those who interested him and those who did not. As is typical of psychopaths, Sickert believed that no investigator was his match, and as is also true of these remorseless, scary people, his delusional thinking lured him into leaving far more incriminating clues along his trails than he probably ever imagined.
The distant locations associated with a number of Ripper letters only added to the supposition that most of the letters were hoaxes. Police had no reason to believe that this East End murderer might be in one city one day and in another the next. No one seemed interested in considering that perhaps the Ripper really did move around and that perhaps there might be a link between these cities.
Many of the cities mentioned in the Ripper letters were on Henry Irving’s theater company’s schedule, which was published in the newspapers daily. Every spring and fall, Irving’s company toured major theater cities such as Glasgow, Edinburgh, Manchester, Liverpool, Bradford, Leeds, Nottingham, Newcastle, and Plymouth, to name a few. Often Ellen Terry made the grueling journeys. “I shall be in a railway train from Newcastle to Leeds,” she dismally reports in a letter written during one of these tours, and one can almost feel her exhaustion.
Most of these cities also had major racecourses, and several Ripper letters mention horse racing and give the police a few lucky betting tips. Sickert painted pictures of horse racing and was quite knowledgeable about the sport. In the March 19, 1914, New Age literary journal, he published an article he titled “A Stone Ginger,” which was racing slang for “an absolute certainty,” and he tossed in a few other bits of racing slang for good measure: “welsher” and “racecourse thief” and “sporting touts.” Racecourses would have been a venue where Sickert could disappear into the crowd, especially if he was wearing one of his disguises and the race was in a city where he wasn’t likely to encounter anybody he knew. At the races, prostitutes were plentiful.
Horse racing, gambling in casinos, and boxing were interests of Sickert’s, although very little has been written about them in the books and articles I have seen. When the Ripper uses the phrase Give up the sponge in a letter that art experts believe Sickert wrote, is this a peek into Sickert’s personality or simply his thoughtless use of a cliché? Is there any meaning to be found in the murky self-portrait that Sickert painted in 1908 that features him in a studio standing behind a plaster cast of Venus, her limbs raggedly severed? Is there any significance in the reference in another Ripper letter to “Bangor Street,” considering that such an address doesn’t exist in London, but Bangor is the home of a racecourse in Wales?
While I have no evidence that Sickert bet on horse races, I don’t have any fact to say he didn’t. Gambling may have been a secret addiction. Certainly that would help explain how he managed to go through money so quickly. By the time he and the parsimonious Ellen divorced, she was financially crippled and would never recover. Sickert’s organized brain seemed to fail him when it came to finances. He thought nothing of hiring a cab and leaving it sitting all day. He gave away armfuls of paintings—sometimes to strangers—or let the canvases rot in his studios. He never earned much, but he had access to Ellen’s money—even after their divorce—and then to the money of other women who took care of him, including his next two wives.
Sickert was generous to his brother Bernhard, who was a failed artist. He rented numerous rooms at a time, bought painting supplies, read multiple newspapers daily, must have had quite a wardrobe for his many disguises, was a devotee of the theaters and music halls, and traveled. But most of what he bought and rented was shabby and cheap, and he wasn’t likely to go for the best seats in the house or travel first class. I don’t know how much he gave away, but after their divorce, Ellen wrote, “To give him money is like giving it to a child to light a fire with.”
She believed him to be so financially irresponsible—for reasons she never cited—that after their divorce she conspired with Jacques-Emile Blanche to buy Sickert’s paintings. Blanche began purchasing them and she secretly reimbursed him. Sickert “must never never suspect that it comes from me,” Ellen wrote Blanche. “I shall tell no one”—not even her sister Janie, in whom she had always confided. Ellen knew what Janie thought of Sickert and his exploitative ways. She also knew that helping her former husband was not really helping him. No matter what he got, it would never be enough. But she could not seem to help herself when it came to helping him.
“He is never out of my mind day or night,” Ellen wrote Blanche in 1899. “You know what he is like—a child where money is concerned. Will you again be as kind as you were before & buy one of Walter’s pictures at the right moment to be of most use to him? And will you not forget that this will be of no good unless you insist on ar
ranging how the money is to be spent. He borrowed £600 from his brother in law (who is a poor man) & he ought to pay him interest on the sum. But I cannot.”
Addiction to drugs and alcohol ran in Sickert’s family. He probably had an addictive predisposition, which would help explain why he avoided alcohol in his younger years and then abused it later on. It would be risky to say that Sickert had a gambling problem. But money seemed to vanish when he touched it, and while the mention of horse racing and the cities where courses were located in the Ripper letters does not constitute “proof,” these details pique our curiosity.
Sickert could have done pretty much whatever he pleased. His career did not require him to keep regular hours. He did not have to account to anyone, especially now that his apprenticeship with Whistler had ended and Sickert was no longer bound to do as the Master demanded. In the fall of 1888, the Master was on his honeymoon. Ellen and Janie were in Ireland—not that Ellen had to be away when Sickert decided to vanish for a night or a week. Disappearing in Great Britain was relatively easy, as long as the trains were running. It was no great matter to cross the English Channel in the morning and have dinner in France that evening.
Whatever caused Sickert’s chronic “financial muddle,” to borrow Ellen’s words, it was serious enough to push her to the extraordinary lengths of secretly funneling money his way after she divorced him for adultery and desertion. It was so serious that Sickert died in 1942 with only £135 to his name.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
STYGIAN BLACKNESS
Five hours after Annie Chapman’s body was carried inside the Whitechapel mortuary, Dr. George Phillips arrived and found she had been stripped and washed. Furious, he demanded an explanation.
Robert Mann, the mortuary supervisor who had caused so much trouble in Mary Ann Nichols’s case, replied that workhouse authorities had instructed two nurses to undress and clean the body. No police or doctors had witnessed this, and as the angry Dr. Phillips looked around the mortuary, he noticed Annie’s clothing piled on the floor in a corner. His earlier admonition that the body was not to be touched by inmates, nurses, or anyone else unless the police instructed otherwise had had little effect on Mann. The inmate had heard all this before.
The mortuary was nothing more than a cramped, filthy, stinking shed with a scarred wooden table darkened by old blood. In the summer it was stuffy and warm, and in the winter it was so cold Mann could barely bend his fingers. What a job his was, Mann must have thought, and maybe the doctor should have been grateful that two nurses had saved him some trouble. Besides, it didn’t take a doctor to see what had killed the poor woman. Her head was barely attached to her neck and she had been gutted like a hog hanging in a butcher’s shop. Mann didn’t pay much attention as Dr. Phillips continued to vent his disgust, complaining that his working conditions were not only unsuitable but also dangerous to his health.
The doctor’s point would be made more fully during the inquest. Coroner Wynne Baxter announced to jurors and the press that it was a travesty that there was no proper mortuary in the East End. If any place in the Great Metropolis needed an adequate facility for handling the dead, it was certainly the impoverished East End, where in nearby Wapping, bodies recovered from the Thames had “to be put in boxes” for lack of anywhere else to take them, said Baxter.
There had once been a mortuary in Whitechapel, but it had been destroyed when a new road was put in. For one reason or another, London officials hadn’t gotten around to building a new facility to take care of the dead, and the problem wasn’t one that would soon be addressed. As we used to say when I worked in the medical examiner’s office, “Dead people don’t vote or pay taxes.” Dead paupers don’t lobby politicians for funding. Even though death is the great equalizer, it doesn’t make all dead people equal.
Dr. Phillips settled down and began his examination of Annie Chapman’s body. By now, it was in full rigor mortis, which would have been slower to form because of the cool temperature. Dr. Phillips’s estimation that Annie had been dead two or three hours when her body was found may have been relatively within bounds. He was out of bounds, however, when he concluded that the small amount of food in her stomach and the absence of liquid meant she was sober when she died.
Body fluids such as blood, urine, and the vitreous humor of the eye were not routinely tested for alcohol or drugs. Had they been, the doctor would most likely have found that Annie was still under the influence of alcohol when she was murdered. The more impaired she was, the better for her killer.
The cuts to Annie’s neck were on the “left side of the spine” and were parallel and separated by approximately half an inch. The killer had attempted to separate the bones of the neck, suggesting he had tried to decapitate her. Since the cuts were deepest on the left side and trailed off to the right, he was probably right-handed, assuming he attacked her from behind. Annie’s lungs and brain showed signs of advanced disease, and despite her obesity, she was malnourished.
At her inquest, Dr. Phillips gave his assessment of the sequence of events causing Annie Chapman’s death: Her breathing was interfered with, and then her heart stopped due to blood loss. Death, he said, was the result of “syncope,” or a dramatic drop in blood pressure. Had Virginia’s chief medical examiner, Dr. Marcella Fierro, been present at the inquest, I can just imagine what she would have said. A drop in blood pressure was a mechanism, not the cause, of Annie Chapman’s death. Blood pressure drops when anyone is dying, and there is no blood pressure when the person is dead.
Breathing stops, the heart stops, digestion stops, brain waves go flat when a person dies. Saying a person died of cardiac or respiratory arrest or syncope is like saying a person’s blindness is due to his not being able to see. What Dr. Phillips should have told the jury was that the cause of death was exsanguination due to cutting injuries of the neck. I have never understood the logic of a doctor filling in a death certificate with cardiac or respiratory arrest as the cause of death no matter if the poor person was shot, stabbed, beaten, drowned, run over by a car, or hit by a train.
During Annie Chapman’s inquest, a juror interrupted Dr. Phillips to ask if he had taken a photograph of Annie’s eyes, in the event her retinas might have captured the image of her killer. Dr. Phillips said he had not. He abruptly concluded his testimony by telling Coroner Baxter that the details given were sufficient to account for the victim’s death and to go into further detail would “only be painful to the feelings of the jury and the public.” Of course, Dr. Phillips added, “I bow to your decision.”
Baxter was not of the same opinion. “However painful it may be,” he replied, “it is necessary in the interests of justice” that the details of Annie Chapman’s murder be given. Dr. Phillips countered, “When I come to speak of the wounds on the lower part of the body I must again repeat my opinion that it is highly injudicious to make the results of my examination public. These details are fit only for yourself, sir, and the jury, but to make them public would simply be disgusting.” Coroner Baxter asked all ladies and boys to leave the crowded room. He added that he had “never before heard of any evidence requested being kept back.”
Dr. Phillips did not waver in his demurral, and he repeatedly requested that the coroner spare the public any further details. The doctor’s requests were denied, and he was given no choice but to reveal all he knew about the mutilation of Annie Chapman’s body and the organs and tissue the killer had taken. He testified that had he been the murderer, he could not possibly have inflicted such injuries upon the victim in less than fifteen minutes. Had he, as a surgeon, inflicted such damage with deliberation and skill, he estimated that it would have taken “the better part of an hour.”
The more details Dr. Phillips was forced to divulge, the farther off track he stepped. Not only did he reemphasize the illogical assertion that Mary Ann Nichols’s abdomen had been slashed before her throat was, but he went on to say that the motive for Annie Chapman’s murder was the taking of the “body parts.” He
added that the killer must possess anatomical knowledge and was possibly associated with a profession that exposed him to dissection or surgery.
The suggestion of using bloodhounds came up, and Dr. Phillips pointed out that this might not be helpful since the blood belonged to the victim and not the killer. It did not occur to him—and perhaps to no one else at the inquest—that bloodhounds aren’t called bloodhounds because they are capable of picking up only the scent of blood.
The conflicting witness statements were not resolved during the inquest and never have been. If Annie was murdered as late as 5:30 A.M., as witness statements to the police would lead one to believe, then according to that day’s weather report, she was attacked shortly before the sun began to rise. It would be incredibly risky to grab a victim in a populated area, cut her throat, and disembowel her just before sunrise, especially on a market day when people would be out early.
A plausible scenario was suggested by the foreman of the coroner’s jury: When John Richardson sat on the steps to trim his boot, the back door was open and blocked his view of Annie’s body two feet below where he sat because the door opened to the left, where the body was. Richardson halfway agreed with what the foreman suggested, admitting that since he did not go into the yard, he could not say with certainty that the body wasn’t there while he was trimming his boot. He didn’t think so. But it was still dark when he stopped by his mother’s house, and he was interested in the cellar door and his boot, not the space between the back of the house and the fence.
Elisabeth Long’s statements are more problematic. She claimed she saw a woman talking with a man at 5:30 A.M. and was certain the woman was Annie Chapman. If this is true, then Annie was murdered and mutilated at dawn and had been dead less than half an hour when her body was discovered. Elisabeth did not get a good look at the man and told police she would not recognize him if she saw him again. She went on to say that he wore a brown deerstalker and perhaps a dark coat and was a “little” taller than Annie, which would have made him quite short since Annie was only five feet tall. He appeared to be a “foreigner,” had a “shabby, genteel” appearance, and was more than forty years old.