Lilly knew Sickert well until his death in 1942, and many of the details in her book tell far more about her mentor and friend than she perhaps realized. Consistently, she refers to his wanderings, his nocturnal habits, his secrecy, and his well-known habit of having as many as three or four studios, their locations or purposes unknown. She also has numerous odd recollections of his preference for dark basements. “Huge, eerie, with winding passages and one black dungeon succeeding another like some horror story by Edgar Allan Poe” is how she describes them.
Sickert’s private working life “took him to queer places where he improvised studios and workshops,” art dealer Lillian Browse wrote a year after his death. As early as 1888, when he was frequenting the music halls, he obsessively rented secret rooms he could not afford. “I am taking new rooms,” he would tell his friends. In 1911 he writes, “I have taken on a tiny, odd, sinister little home at £45 a year close by here.” The address was 60 Harrington Street NW, and apparently he planned to use the “little home” as a “studio.”
Sickert would accumulate studios and then abandon them after a short while. It was well known among his acquaintances that these hidden rat holes were located on mean streets. William Rothenstein, whom he met in 1889, wrote of Sickert’s taste “for the dingy lodging-house atmosphere.” Rothenstein said that Sickert was a “genius” at ferreting out the gloomiest and most off-putting rooms to work in, and this predilection was a source of bafflement to others. Rothenstein described Sickert as an “aristocrat by nature” who “had cultivated a strange taste for life below the stairs.”
Denys Sutton wrote that “Sickert’s restlessness was a dominating feature of his character.” It was typical for him to always have “studios elsewhere, for at all times he cherished his freedom.” Sutton says that Sickert often dined out alone, and that even after he married Ellen, he would go by himself to the music halls or get up in the middle of a dinner in his own home to head out to a performance. Then he would begin another of his long walks home. Or perhaps go to one of his secret rooms, somehow meandering into the violent East End, walking the dark streets alone, a small parcel or a Gladstone bag in hand, presumably to hold his art supplies.
According to Sutton, during one of these ambles, Sickert was dressed in a loud checked suit and came upon several girls on Copenhagen Street, about a mile northwest of Shoreditch. The girls scattered in terror, screaming “Jack the Ripper! Jack the Ripper!” In a slightly different but more telling account, Sickert told his friends that it was he who called out, “Jack the Ripper, Jack the Ripper.”
“I told her I was Jack the Ripper and I took my hat off,” the Ripper wrote in a letter on November 19, 1888. Three days later the Ripper wrote a letter saying he was in Liverpool and “met a young woman in Scotland Road . . . . I smiled at her and she calls out Jack the ripper. She dident know how right she was.” About this same time, an article appeared in the Sunday Dispatch reporting that in Liverpool, an elderly woman was sitting in Shiel Park when a “respectable looking man, dressed in a black coat, light trousers, and a soft felt hat,” pulled out a long thin knife. He said he planned to kill as many women in Liverpool as he could and send the ears of the first victim to the editor of the Liverpool newspaper.
Sickert made his sketches at Gatti’s in an era when there were few inciting props available to psychopathic violent offenders. Today’s rapist, pedophile, or murderer has plenty to choose from: photographs, audiotapes, and videotapes of his victims being tortured or killed; and violent pornography found in magazines, movies, books, computer software, and on Internet sites. In 1888, few visual or audio aids were available for a psychopath to fuel violent fantasies. Sickert’s props would have been souvenirs or trophies from the victim, paintings and drawings, and the live entertainment of the theater and the music halls. He also could have made dry runs; the terrifying of the old woman in Liverpool could simply have been one of dozens or even hundreds.
Psychopathic killers often try out their modus operandi before going through with the plan. Practice makes perfect, and the killer gets a thrill from the near-strike. The pulse picks up. Adrenaline surges. The killer will continue to go through the ritual, each time getting closer to actualizing the violence. Killers who mimic law-enforcement officers have been known to install emergency grille lights or attach magnetic bubble lights to the roofs of their cars and pull over women drivers many times before actually going through with the abduction and murder.
Jack the Ripper very likely went through dry runs and other rituals before he killed. After a while, dry runs aren’t just about practice and instant gratification. They fuel violent fantasies and may involve more than just stalking a victim, especially if the perpetrator is as creative as Walter Sickert. A number of strange events continued to occur in various parts of England. At approximately ten o’clock on the night of September 14th, in London, a man entered the Tower Subway and approached the caretaker. “Have you caught any of the Whitechapel murderers yet?” the man asked as he pulled out a foot-long knife that had a curved blade.
He then fled, yanking off “false whiskers” as he was pursued by the caretaker, who lost sight of him at Tooley Street. The description the caretaker gave the police was of a man five foot three with dark hair, a dark complexion, and a mustache. He was about thirty years old and was wearing a black suit that looked new, a light overcoat, and a dark cloth double-peaked cap.
“I have got a jolly lot of false whiskers & mustaches,” the Ripper wrote on November 27th.
After the Tower Bridge was completed in 1894, the Tower Subway was closed to pedestrians and turned into a gas main, but in 1888 it was a hellish cast-iron tube seven feet in diameter and four hundred feet long. It began at the south side of Great Tower Hill at the Tower of London, ran under the Thames, and surfaced at Pickle Herring Stairs on the south bank of the river. If what the caretaker told police was accurate, he chased the man through the tunnel to Pickle Herring Stairs, which led to Pickle Herring Street, then to Vine Street, which intersected with Tooley Street. The Tower of London is about half a mile south of Whitechapel, and the subway was sufficiently unpleasant that it is unlikely many people or police used it to cross the river, especially if one were claustrophobic or fearful of traveling through a dirty, gloomy tube under water.
No doubt the police considered the man with the false whiskers a kook. I found no mention of this incident in any police reports. But this “kook” was rational enough to pick a deserted, poorly lit place for the brazen display of his knife, and it is unlikely he viewed the caretaker as one who could physically overtake him. The man had every intention of causing a stir and no intention of being caught. Friday the 14th was also the day that Annie Chapman was buried.
Three days later, on September 17th, the Metropolitan Police received the first letter signed “Jack the Ripper.”
Dear Boss,
So now they say I am a Yid when will they lern Dear old Boss? You an me know the truth don’t we. Lusk can look forever he’ll never find me but I am rite under his nose all the time. I watch them looking for me an it gives me fits ha ha. I love my work an I shant stop untill I get buckled and even then watch out for your old pal Jacky
Catch me if you can
The letter came to light only recently because it had never been included in the Metropolitan Police records. Originally, it had been filed at the Home Office.
At ten o’clock at night on September 17th—the same day that the Ripper made his debut in what we know as his first letter—a man appeared at the district police court of Westminster. He said he was an art student from New York, and was in London to “study art” at the National Gallery. A Times reporter relayed a dialogue that is so comical and clever it reads like a script.
The “American from New York” said he’d had trouble with his landlady the night before and was seeking advice from the magistrate, a Mr. Biron, who asked what sort of trouble the man meant.
“A terrible shindy,” came the reply.
/> (Laughter)
The American went on to say he had given the land lady notice that he wanted to leave her premises on Sloane Street, and she had been “annoying” him in every way since. She had pushed him against a wall, and when he inquired about dinner, she almost spat in his face with “the vehemence of her language” and stigmatized him “as a low American.”
“Why don’t you leave such a land lady and her apartment?” Mr. Biron asked.
“I went there with some furniture, and I was foolish enough to tell her that she might have it and take it out in the rent. Instead she took it out of me.”
(Laughter)
“And I could not take it away,” the American went on.
“I should be positively frightened to try.”
(Renewed laughter)
“It seems you have made a very ridiculous bargain,” Mr. Biron told him. “You find yourself in an exceedingly embarrassing position.”
“I do indeed,” the American agreed. “You can have no conception of such a land lady. She threw a pair of scissors at me, lustily screamed ‘murder,’ and then caught hold of the lappels [sic] of my coat to prevent my escape, really a most absurd situation.”
(Laughter)
“Well,” said Mr. Biron, “you have brought all the unpleasantness on yourself.”
This was the lead police story in The Times, yet no crime had been committed and no arrest was made. The best the magistrate could offer was perhaps to send a warrant officer by the Sloane Street address to “caution” the landlady that she had best behave. The American thanked “his worship” and expressed his hope that the caution “would have a salutary result.”
The reporter identified the New York art student only as the “Applicant.” No name, age, or description was given. There was no follow-up story in days to come. The National Gallery did not have an art school or students. It still doesn’t. I find it strange if not unbelievable that an American would use the language the so-called art student did. Would an American use the word shindy, which was London street slang for fight or row? Would an American say that the landlady “lustily screamed ‘murder’ ?”
Screaming “murder” could have been a reference to testimony at Ripper victim inquests, and why would the landlady scream “murder” when she was the attacker, not the American? The reporter never mentioned whether the “American” spoke like an American. Sickert was quite capable of faking an American accent. He had spent years with Whistler, who was American.
About this time, a story began to circulate through the news that an American had contacted a subcurator of a medical school in hopes of buying human uteri for £20 each. The would-be purchaser wanted the organs preserved in glycerine to keep them pliable, and planned to send them out with a journal article he had written. The request was refused. The “American” was not identified, and no further information about him was given. The story gave rise to a new possibility: The East End murderer was killing women to sell their organs, and the stealing of Annie Chapman’s rings was a “veil” to hide the real motive, which was to steal her uterus.
The stealing of human organs might seem ridiculous, but it had been barely fifty years since the infamous case of Burke and Hare, the “Resurrectionists”—or body snatchers—who were charged with robbing graves and committing as many as thirty murders to supply doctors and medical schools in Edinburgh with anatomical specimens for dissection. Organ-stealing as a motive for the Ripper’s murders continued to be circulated and more confusion eddied around the Ripper crimes.
On September 21st, Ellen Sickert wrote a letter to her brother-in-law, Dick Fisher, and said that Sickert had left England for Normandy to visit “his people” and would be gone for weeks. Sickert may have left, but not necessarily for France. The next night, Saturday, a woman was murdered in Birtley, Durham, which is in the coal-mining country of northeast England, near Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Jane Beetmoor (also spelled Peatmoor), a twenty-six-year-old mother who was rumored to lead a somewhat less than respectable life, was last seen alive by friends the night before, on Saturday, at eight o’clock. Her body was found the following morning, Sunday, September 23rd, in a gutter near Guston Colliery Railway.
The left side of her neck had been cut through to her vertebrae. A gash on the right side of her face had laid open her lower jaw to the bone, and her bowels protruded from her mutilated abdomen. The striking similarities between her murder and those in London’s East End prompted Scotland Yard to send Dr. George Phillips and an inspector to meet with Durham police officials. No helpful evidence was found, and for some reason, it was decided that the killer probably had committed suicide. Local people made extensive searches of mine shafts, but no body was recovered and the crime went unsolved for months.
Later, Jane Beetmoor’s “sweetheart,” William Waddle, was charged with her murder, although the accusation, indictment, and conviction were “not supported by any tangible evidence,” as reported in the news. Waddle, described as dull witted, was hanged December 19, 1888, in Durham. His executioner described a five-foot drop, and that “death was instanteous.” The only suspicion aroused by Waddle was that he disappeared right after the murder and was romantically involved with the victim. Perhaps he murdered her, perhaps he didn’t and fled because he feared he would be accused. Whatever the truth, Scotland Yard investigators and police surgeon Dr. Phillips were struck by how closely the murder resembled those of the Ripper’s. In an anonymous letter to the City of London Police, dated November 20, 1888, the writer offers this suggestion: “Look at the case in County Durham . . . twas made to appear as if it was Jack the Ripper.” Was it the Ripper who sent this letter? Quite possibly. Was he telling the truth or taunting? It’s unlikely we’ll ever know.
The police had no clue that the Ripper liked to manipulate the machinery behind the scenes. His violent appetite had been whetted and he craved “blood, blood, blood,” as the Ripper wrote. He craved drama. He had an insatiable appetite for enthralling his audience. As Henry Irving once said to an unresponsive house, “Ladies and gentlemen, if you don’t applaud, I can’t act!” Perhaps the applause was too faint. Several more events happened in quick succession.
On September 24th, the police received the taunting letter with the killer’s “name” and “address” blacked out with heavily inked rectangles and coffins. The next day, Jack the Ripper wrote another letter, but this time he made sure someone paid attention. He mailed his missive to the Central News Agency. “Dear Boss, I keep on hearing the police have caught me but they won’t fix me just yet,” the Ripper wrote in red ink. His spelling and grammar were correct, his writing as neat as a clerk’s. The postmark was London’s East End. The defense would say that the letter couldn’t have been from Sickert. He was in France. The prosecutor would reply, “Based on what evidence?” In his biography of Degas, Daniel Halévy mentions that Sickert was in Dieppe at some point during the summer, and letters that Sickert’s mother wrote place him in Normandy, possibly on September 6th. But I could find no evidence that he was in France, at least not exclusively, after September 6th, and dates in Sickert’s handwriting on music-hall sketches prove that in 1888, he was in London from February 4th through March “and after,” in his words, including in the spring, on May 25th, and at some point during June, July, August, September, and October.
Sickert’s “people,” as Ellen ruefully called them, were his cliquish artist friends in Dieppe. To them, Ellen would always be an outsider. She was not the least bit bohemian or stimulating. It is likely that when she was in Dieppe with her husband, he ignored her. If he wasn’t hobnobbing at cafés or in the summer homes of artists such as Jacques-Emile Blanche or George Moore, he was off the radar screen, as usual, wandering about, mingling with fishermen and sailors, or locked away in one of his secret rooms.
What is suspicious about Sickert’s alleged plans to visit Normandy at the end of September and part of October is that there is no mention of him in letters exchanged among his friends. One would think if
Sickert had been in Dieppe, then Moore or Blanche might have mentioned seeing him—or not seeing him. One might suppose that when Sickert wrote Blanche in August, he might have mentioned that he would be in France next month and hoped to see him—or would be sorry to miss him.
There is no mention in the letters of Degas or Whistler that they saw Sickert in September or October 1888, and no hint that they had a clue he was in France. Letters Sickert wrote to Blanche in the autumn of 1888 appear to have been written in London, because they are written on Sickert’s 54 Broadhurst Gardens stationery, which apparently he did not use except when he was actually there. The only indication I could find that he was in France at all during the autumn of 1888 is an undated note to Blanche that Sickert supposedly wrote from the small fishing village Saint-Valery-en-Caux, twenty miles from Dieppe:
“This is a nice little place to sleep & eat in,” Sickert writes, “which is what I am most anxious to do now.”
The envelope is missing and there is no postmark to prove that Sickert was in Normandy. Nor is there any way to determine where Blanche was. But Sickert very well may have been in Saint-Valery-en-Caux when he wrote the letter. He probably did need rest and nourishment after his frenzied violent activities, and crossing the Channel was not an ordeal. I find it curious if not suspicious that he chose Saint-Valery when he could have stayed in Dieppe.