Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper - Case Closed

by Patricia Cornwell

  In fact, it is curious that he wrote Blanche at all, because most of the note is about Sickert’s “looking for a colorman” so he could send his brother Bernhard “pastel glass paper or sand paper canvass.” Sickert said he wanted a “packet of samples” and that he did not know “French measurements.” I fail to understand how Sickert, who was fluent in French and had spent so much time in France, did not know where to find samples of papers. “I am a French painter,” he declared in a letter to Blanche, yet the scientifically and mathematically inclined Sickert says he didn’t know French measurements.

  Perhaps Sickert’s letter from Saint-Valery was sincere. Perhaps he did want Blanche’s advice. Or perhaps the truth is that Sickert was exhausted and paranoid and on the run, and thought it wise to supply himself with an alibi. Apart from this note to Blanche, I could find nothing to suggest that Sickert spent any time at all in France during the late summer, early fall, or winter of 1888. The bathing—or swimming—season for Normandy was over as well. It began in early July and by the end of September, Sickert’s friends closed down their Dieppe homes and studios.

  Sickert’s salon of artists and prominent friends would have scattered until the following summer. I wonder if it seemed a little strange to Ellen that her husband planned to join “his people” in Normandy for several weeks when nobody was likely to be there. I wonder if she saw her husband much at all, and if she did, did she think he was behaving a bit oddly? In August, Sickert the compulsive letter writer sent a note to Blanche, apologizing for not “writing for so long. I have been very hard at work, and I find it very difficult to find 5 minutes to write a letter.”

  There is no reason to believe Sickert’s “work” was related to the toils of his trade—beyond his going to music halls and seeking inspiration from the streets all hours of the night. His artistic productivity wasn’t at its usual high from August through the rest of the year. Paintings “circa 1888” are few, and there is no guarantee that “circa” didn’t mean a year or two earlier or later. I found only one published article from 1888, and that was in the spring. It seems that Sickert avoided his friends for much of that year. There is no indication he summered in Dieppe—which was very unusual. No matter where he went or when, it is clear that Sickert wasn’t following his usual routines, if one could call anything Sickert did “routine.”

  In the late nineteenth century, passports, visas, and other forms of identification were not required to travel on the Continent. (However, by late summer of 1888, passports were required to enter Germany from France.) There is no mention of Sickert having any form of “picture identification” until World War I, when he and his second wife, Christine, were issued laissez-passers to show guards at tunnels, railway crossings, and other strategic places as they traveled about France.

  Entering France from England was an easy and friendly transition and remained so during the years Sickert traveled to and fro. Crossing the English Channel in the late 1800s could take as little as four hours in good weather. One could travel by express train and “fast” steamer seven days a week, twice daily, with the trains leaving Victoria Station at 10:30 in the morning or London Bridge at 10:45. The steamer sailed out of Newhaven at 12:45 P.M. and arrived in Dieppe around dinnertime. A single, one-way first-class ticket to Dieppe was twenty-four shillings, second class was seventeen shillings, and part of this Express Tidal Service included trains from Dieppe straight through to Rouen and Paris.

  Sickert’s mother claimed she never knew when her son would suddenly go to France or suddenly come back. Maybe he hopped back and forth from England to Dieppe while the Ripper crimes were going on in 1888, but if he did, it was probably to cool off. He had been going to Dieppe since childhood and kept several places there. French death and crime statistics for the Victorian era do not seem to have survived, and it was not possible to find records of homicides then that might even remotely resemble the Ripper’s crimes. But Dieppe was simply too small a town to commit lust murders and get away with it.

  During the days I spent in Dieppe, with its narrow old streets and passageways, its rocky shore and soaring cliffs that sheer off into the Channel, I tried to see that small seaside village as a killing ground for Sickert, but I could not. His work while he was in Dieppe reflects a different spirit. Most of the pictures he painted there are in lovely colors, his depictions of buildings inspiring. There is nothing morbid or violent in most of his Normandy art. It is as if Dieppe brought out the side of Sickert’s face that is turned to the light in his Jekyll and Hyde self-portraits.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  A SHINY BLACK BAG

  The sun did not show itself on Saturday, September 29th, and a persistent, cold rain chilled the night as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde ended its long run at the Lyceum. The newspapers reported that the “great excesses of sunshine were at an end,” but that didn’t stop Sickert from venturing out to Deacon’s Music Hall, based on his own handwritten notes on sketches he made that night. Deacon’s was located on Myddleton Place (now Rosebery Avenue), a fifteen- or twenty-minute walk from the East End.

  Elizabeth Stride only recently had moved out of a lodging house on Dorset Street in Spitalfields, where she had been living with Michael Kidney, a waterside laborer who was in the Army Reserve. Long Liz, as her friends called her, had left Kidney before. She carried her few belongings with her this time, but there was no reason to assume she was gone for good. Kidney would later testify at her inquest that now and then she wanted her freedom and an opportunity to indulge her “drinking habits,” but after a spell of wandering off, she always came back.

  Elizabeth’s maiden name was Gustafsdotter and she would have turned forty-five on November 27th, although she had led most people to believe she was about ten years younger than she really was. Elizabeth had led a life of lies, most of them pitiful attempts to weave a brighter, more dramatic tale than the truth of her depressing, desperate life. She was born in Torslanda, near Göteborg, Sweden, the daughter of a farmer. Some said she spoke fluent English without a trace of an accent. Others claimed she did not properly form her words and sounded like a foreigner. Swedish, her native tongue, is a Germanic language closely related to Danish, which is what Sickert’s father spoke.

  Elizabeth used to tell people she came to London as a young lady to “see the country,” but this was just one more fabrication. The earliest record found of her living in London was in the Swedish Church register that listed her name in 1879, with the notation that she had been given a shilling. She was five foot two or four, according to people who went to the mortuary to figure out who she was. Her complexion was “pale.” Others described it as “dark.” Her hair was “dark brown and curly,” or “black,” according to someone else. A policeman lifted one of Elizabeth’s eyelids in the poorly lit mortuary and decided that her eyes were “gray.”

  In her black-and-white postmortem photograph, Elizabeth’s hair looks darker because it was wet and stringy from having been rinsed. Her face was pale because she was dead and had lost virtually all of the blood in her body. Her eyes may once have been bright blue, but not by the time the policeman lifted a lid to check. After death, the conjunctiva of the eye begins to dry and cloud. Most people who have been dead awhile appear to have gray or grayish-blue eyes unless their eyes were very dark.

  After her autopsy, Elizabeth was dressed in the dark clothing she was wearing when she was murdered. She was placed in a shell that was stood up against a wall to be photographed. Barely visible in the shadow of her tucked-in chin is the cut made by her killer’s knife as it jaggedly trails off inches below the right side of her neck. Her photograph after death may have been the only one taken in her life. She appears to have been thin, with a nicely shaped face and good features, and a mouth that might have been sensuous had she not lost her upper front teeth.

  Elizabeth may have been a blond beauty in her youth. During her inquest, truths about her began to emerge. She had left Sweden to take a “situation” with a gentleman who lived
near Hyde Park. It is not known how long that “situation” lasted, but at some point after it ended she lived with a policeman. In 1869, she married a carpenter named John Thomas Stride. Everyone who knew her in the local lodging houses she frequented had heard the tragic tale that her husband had drowned when the Princess Alice sank after a steam collier ran it down.

  Elizabeth had different versions of this tale. Her husband and two of her nine children had drowned when the Princess Alice went down. Or her husband and all of her children drowned. Elizabeth, who would have been quite young when she began bearing children to have produced nine of them by 1878, somehow survived the shipwreck that killed 640 people. While she struggled for her life, another panicking passenger kicked her in the mouth, explaining the “deformity” to it.

  Elizabeth told everyone that the entire roof of her mouth was gone, but a postmortem examination revealed nothing wrong with her hard or soft palates. The only deformity was her missing front teeth, which must have been a source of shame to her. Records at the Poplar and Stepney Sick Asylum showed that her husband, John Stride, died there on October 24, 1884. He did not drown in a shipwreck, nor did any of their children—if they had children. Perhaps falsehoods about Elizabeth’s past made her life more interesting to her, for the truth was painful and humiliating and did nothing but cause trouble.

  When the clergy of the Swedish Church she attended discovered that her husband did not die in the shipwreck, they ceased any financial assistance. Perhaps she lied about the death of her husband and their alleged children because a fund had been set aside for the survivors of the Princess Alice shipwreck. When it was suspected that no one related to Elizabeth had died in that disaster, the money stopped. One way or another, Elizabeth had to be supported by a man, and when she wasn’t, she made what she could from sewing, cleaning, and prostitution.

  Of late, she had been spending her nights at a lodging house at 32 Flower and Dean Street, where the deputy, a widow named Elizabeth Tanner, knew her fairly well. During the inquest, Mrs. Tanner testified that she had seen Elizabeth on and off for six years and that until Thursday, September 27th, Elizabeth had been living in another lodging house with a man named Michael Kidney. She had walked out on him with nothing but a few ragged clothes and a hymnbook. On that Thursday night and the following Friday night she stayed in Mrs. Tanner’s lodging house. On the early evening of Saturday, September 29th, Elizabeth and Mrs. Tanner had a drink at the Queen’s Head public house on Commercial Street, and afterward Elizabeth earned sixpence by cleaning two of the lodging-house rooms.

  Between ten and eleven, Elizabeth was in the kitchen and handed a piece of velvet to her friend Catherine Lane. “Please keep it safe for me,” Elizabeth said, and she added that she was going out for a while. She was dressed for the miserable weather in two petticoats made of a cheap material resembling sacking, a white chemise, white cotton stockings, a black velveteen bodice, a black skirt, a black jacket trimmed with fur, a colorful striped silk handkerchief around her neck, and a small black crêpe bonnet. In her pockets were two handkerchiefs, a skein of black worsted darning yarn, and a brass thimble. Before she left the lodging-house kitchen, she asked Charles Preston, a barber, if she could borrow his clothes brush to tidy up a bit. She did not tell anyone where she was going, but she proudly showed off her six newly earned pennies as she headed out into the dark, wet night.

  Berner Street was a narrow thoroughfare of small, crowded dwellings occupied by Polish and German tailors, shoemakers, cigarette makers, and other impoverished people who worked out of their homes. On the street was the clubhouse of the International Working Men’s Educational Club, which had approximately eightyfive members, most of them Eastern European Jewish socialists. The only requirement for joining was to support socialist principles. The IWMC met every Saturday night at 8:30 to discuss various topics.

  They always closed with a social time of singing and dancing, and it was not unusual for people to linger until one o’clock in the morning. On this particular Saturday night, almost a hundred people had attended a debate in German on why Jews should be socialists. The serious talk was winding down. Most people were heading home by the time Elizabeth Stride set out in that direction.

  Her first client of the evening, as far as anyone seems to know, was a man she was observed talking to on Berner Street, very close to where a laborer named William Marshall lived. This was about 11:45 P.M., and Marshall later testified that he did not get a good look at the man’s face, but that he was dressed in a small black coat, dark trousers, and what looked like a sailor’s cap. He wore no gloves, was clean shaven, and was kissing Elizabeth. Marshall said he overheard the man tease, “You would say anything but your prayers,” and Elizabeth laughed. Neither of them appeared intoxicated, Marshall recalled, and they walked off in the direction of the IWMC clubhouse.

  Soon after, another local resident named James Brown saw a woman he later identified as Elizabeth Stride leaning against a wall and talking with a man at the corner of Fairclough and Berner streets. The man wore a long overcoat and was approximately five foot seven. (It seems that almost every man identified by witnesses in the Ripper cases was approximately five foot seven. In the Victorian era, five foot seven would have been considered an average height for a male. I suppose that height was as good a guess as any.)

  The last time Elizabeth Stride was seen alive was by Police Constable William Smith, 452 H Division, whose beat that night included Berner Street. At 12:35 A.M. he noticed a woman he later identified as Elizabeth Stride, and it caught his eye that she was wearing a flower on her coat. The man she was with carried a newspaper-wrapped package that was eighteen inches long and six or eight inches wide. He, too, was five foot seven, Smith recalled, and was dressed in a hard felt deerstalker, a dark overcoat, and dark trousers. Smith thought the man seemed respectable enough, about twenty-eight years old and clean shaven.

  Smith continued his beat, and twenty-five minutes later, at 1:00 A.M., Louis Diemschutz was driving his costermonger’s barrow to the IWMC building at 40 Berner Street. He was the manager of the socialists’ club and lived in the building. He was surprised when he turned into the courtyard to find the gates open, because usually they were closed after 9:00 P.M. As he passed through, his pony suddenly shied to the left. It was too dark to see much, but Diemschutz made out a form on the ground near the wall and poked it with his whip, expecting to find garbage. He climbed down and struggled to light a match in the wind and was startled by the dimly lit shape of a woman. She was either drunk or dead, and Diemschutz ran inside the clubhouse and returned with a candle.

  Elizabeth Stride’s throat was slashed, and Diemschutz and pony and barrow must have interrupted the Ripper. Blood flowed from her neck toward the clubhouse door, and the top buttons of her jacket were undone, revealing her chemise and stays. She was on her left side, her face toward the wall, her dress soaking wet from recent hard rains. In her left hand was a paper packet of cachous, or sweets used to freshen the breath; a corsage of maidenhair fern and a red rose was pinned to her breast. By now, Police Constable William Smith’s beat had gone full circle, and when he reached 40 Berner Street again he must have been shocked to find that a crowd was gathering outside the clubhouse gates and people were screaming “Police!” and “Murder!”

  Smith later testified at the inquest that his patrol had taken no more than a mere twenty-five minutes, and it was during that brief time, while some thirty members of the socialists’ club lingered inside, that the killer must have struck. The windows were open and the club members were singing festive songs in Russian and German. No one heard a scream or any other call of distress. But Elizabeth Stride probably didn’t make a sound that anyone but her killer could hear.

  Police Surgeon Dr. George Phillips arrived at the scene shortly after 1:00 A.M. and decided that since no weapon was present at the scene, the woman had not committed suicide. She must have been murdered, and he deduced that the killer had applied pressure to her shoulders w
ith his hands and lowered her to the ground before cutting her throat from the front. She held the cachous between the thumb and forefinger of her left hand, and when the doctor removed the packet, some of the sweets spilled to the ground. Her left hand must have relaxed after death, Dr. Phillips said, but he could not explain why her right hand was “smeared with blood.” This was most strange, he later testified, because her right hand was uninjured and resting on her chest. There was no explanation for the hand being bloody—unless the killer deliberately wiped blood on it. That would seem an odd thing for the killer to do.

  Perhaps it did not occur to Dr. Phillips that the reflex of any conscious person who is hemorrhaging is to clutch the wound. When Elizabeth’s throat was cut, she would have instantly grabbed her neck. It also made no sense to assume that Elizabeth Stride was pushed to the ground before she was killed. Why didn’t she cry out or struggle when the killer grabbed her and forced her down? Nor is it likely that the Ripper cut her throat from the front.

  To do that, her killer would have had to force her to the ground, attempting all the while to keep her quiet and under control as he slashed at her neck in the dark, blood spurting all over him. Somehow she still held on to her packet of cachous. When throats are cut from the front, there are usually several small incisions because of the awkward angle of attack. When throats are cut from the rear, the incisions are long and often sufficient to sever major blood vessels and cut through tissue and cartilage all the way to the bone.

  Once a killer devises a workable method, he rarely alters it unless something unanticipated occurs, causing the killer to abort his ritual or become more brutal, depending on the circumstances and his reactions. I believe that Jack the Ripper’s modus operandi was to attack from the rear. He did not lower his victims to the ground first because he would have risked a struggle and loss of control. These were streetwise, feisty women who would not hesitate to protect themselves should a client get a bit rough or decide not to pay.