The summer of 1907 had officially ended on August 31st after thirteen weeks of frequent rains and chilly, dreary cloudy weather. The Times described the summer as “the coolest experienced since the dismal season of 1888.” The last day of Emily Dimmock’s life had offered a respite, with almost eight hours of sunshine and a light breeze, a very fine day for people to venture out after so many weeks of oppressively bad weather. The night of September 11th, Emily was last seen alive at a Camden Town public house called the Eagle. Earlier in the evening she had been talking to Mrs. Stocks in the kitchen and said she had plans that night. Emily had received a postcard from a man who wanted to meet her at the Eagle, near the Camden Road Station. The postcard read, “Meet me at 8 o’clock at the Eagle tonight [Wednesday, September 11th]” and was signed “Bertie,” which was Robert Wood’s nickname.
Wood denied having sent this postcard. “I only wrote one of them—the one with the sketch of the rising sun on it,” he testified in court. He was befuddled that the handwriting on the charred fragments of paper found in Emily’s fireplace was a “good imitation” of his, he added. When Emily left her house that night of the 11th in her long dust-coat, her hair in curling pins, she was “not dressed to go out.” She mentioned to acquaintances that she didn’t plan to stay at the Eagle long, wasn’t eager to go, and that was why she wasn’t properly dressed.
She still had the curling pins in her hair when she was murdered. Perhaps she was taking extra care to make sure she looked her best the next morning. Shaw’s mother was coming to visit from Northampton, and Emily had been cleaning, doing laundry, and getting the house in order. None of her former clients ever mentioned that Emily wore curling pins while giving them pleasure. It would seem a poor business tactic if one was hoping for a generous payment from a client. The curling pins could suggest that Emily wasn’t expecting the violent visitor who took her life. They might suggest she took her killer home with her and never removed the curling pins from her hair.
A cabman later claimed to have picked up a fare after 1:00 A.M. and dropped him off close to Emily’s house, while another witness said he saw her around midnight walking toward her house with a smartly dressed man. (Neither man resembled Wood, the witnesses said.) Yet another witness, Robert McGowan (who clearly was confused about time), swore that he passed Emily’s house around five o’clock the morning of her murder and noticed a “broad-shouldered” man dressed in a hard felt hat and long overcoat with the collar flipped up, walking away from Emily’s house. The man’s back was to McGowan, and it should be noted that Robert Wood was not wearing an overcoat the previous night when he saw Emily last at the Eagle. Nor was he broad-shouldered.
Another explanation of how the killer might have gained access to Emily is that her back bedroom on the ground floor was accessible by windows and sturdy cast-iron drainpipes a person could climb up. There is no mention in police reports that the windows were locked. Only the bedroom double door, the sitting-room door, and the front door of the house were locked the next morning when Emily’s body was found. Her three keys to those doors were missing when police and Shaw searched the rooms. It is possible that someone climbed into her bedroom while she was asleep, but I don’t think it’s likely.
When she set out from 29 St. Paul’s Road that Wednesday evening, the moon was new, the streets dark. She may not have intended to sell pleasure to anyone, but it could be that while she was on her way home with curling pins in her hair, she ran into a man. He said something to her.
“Where are you a goin my pretty little maid?” someone wrote in The Lizard guest book.
If Emily did have an encounter with her killer on her way home or if he was the man she met at the Eagle, he might have told her he didn’t mind her curling pins in the least. Will you let me come see you in your room? It is possible Sickert had noticed Emily Dimmock many times in the past, at train stations, or just walking about. The Rising Sun was right around the corner from his studios, not far from Maple Street, which he would later sketch as an empty back road late at night with two distant shadowy women lingering on the corner. Emily Dimmock may have noticed Walter Sickert, too. He was a familiar sight along Fitzroy Street, carrying his canvases back and forth from one studio to another.
He was a well-known local artist. He was painting nudes during this time. He had to get his models from somewhere, and perhaps it is nothing more than coincidence that not only was Robert Wood an artist, but his “sweetheart” was an artist’s model named Ruby Young, who was willing to pose in the nude and may have been of questionable character, based on her evasiveness when police inquired about her modeling and personal life. Sickert’s taste in models hadn’t changed. He still had a penchant for using prostitutes. He may have been stalking and watching Emily Dimmock and her sexual transactions. He would have seen her as the lowest of the lowest, a filthy diseased whore. Marjorie Lilly writes that once she heard a person defend thieves by telling Sickert, “After all, everyone has a right to exist.” He retorted, “Not at all. There are people who have no right to exist!”
“As you can see I have done another good thing for Whitechapel,” the Ripper wrote November 12, 1888.
The position of Emily Dimmock’s dead body was described as “natural.” The doctor who arrived at the scene said he believed that she was asleep when she was killed. She was facedown, her left arm bent at an angle and across her back, the hand bloody. Her right arm was extended in front of her and on the pillow. In fact, her position was not natural or comfortable. Most people do not sleep or even lie down with one of their arms bent at a right angle behind their backs. There was not sufficient space between the headboard and the wall for the killer to attack her from behind. She needed to be facedown, and her unnatural position on the bed can be explained if the killer straddled her as he pulled back her head with his left hand and cut her throat with his right.
Blood on her left hand suggests she grabbed the hemorrhaging left side of her neck, and her assailant may have wrenched her left arm behind her, perhaps pinning it with a knee to keep her from struggling. He had cut her throat to the spine and she could make no sound. He had slashed her neck from left to right, as a right-handed assailant would. He had so little room to work that his violent sweep of the knife cut the bed ticking and nicked Emily’s right elbow. She was on her face, her left carotid squirting her syphilitic blood into the bed and not all over him.
The police did not discover a bloody nightgown at the scene. Absent that garment, it might be presumed that Emily was nude when she was murdered—or that her killer took a bloody gown as a trophy. A former client who had slept with Emily three times claimed that on those occasions she wore a nightdress and did not have “curlers” in her hair. If she had sex the night of September 11th, especially if she was intoxicated, it is possible that she fell asleep in the nude. Or she may have been with another “client”—her killer—who had her undress and turn over, as if he wanted anal sex or intercourse from the rear. After he cut a six-inch gash in her throat, her killer threw the bedcovers over her. All of this seems to deviate from Sickert’s violent modus operandi, with the exception that apparently there was no sign of “connection.”
After twenty years, Sickert’s patterns, fantasies, needs, and energy would have evolved. This is not surprising, but the usual evolution in a serial offender’s unnatural activities and desires is not necessarily understood by the public. We are inundated by the products of an entertainment industry and media that constantly expose us to increasingly specious psychological profiling and psychopathic sexual offenders who have become stereotypes.
What is generally accepted about a serial killer’s relentless and unvarying pattern would, in the main, apply only to a robot or a laboratory rat. Human predators are still human. They don’t always engage in the same activities in the same way (if at all). They don’t always experience the same emotions toward the same types of people, or make the same choices, or continue to maintain the same beliefs in symbols or religiou
s or superstitious rituals. A human predator’s sexual attraction can shift to a different gender, or the person may find that he or she is no longer sexually aroused by the same stimulation and fantasies.
A serial killer’s victim selection can include women, men, and children, and the means of murder and victim approach can be so different as to be unrecognizable as the work of the same offender. Dr. Louis B. Schlesinger, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a leading expert in serial offenders and sexual violence, says he has worked cases of serial murder in which the killer doesn’t have an MO or a “signature.” In other words, the killer’s choices of victims, methods of attack, and symbolic rituals may have nothing in common from crime to crime. Perhaps the offender approaches his victim in a parking lot, or perhaps he abducts his victim from a car or a residence. Perhaps his signature in one murder is to take a souvenir, such as a piece of jewelry, and in another murder it is the way he poses or displays the body, and in yet another murder it is torture.
Very little is known about Walter Sickert’s rituals, sexual attractions, or daily activities and routines after he began spending most of his time in France and Italy during the 1890s. So far, documentation that might reveal unsolved murders with striking similarities to Sickert’s crimes doesn’t exist or has yet to surface in other countries. I found references to only two cases in France, not in police records but in newspapers. The murders are so unspecific and unverified that I hesitate to mention them: It was reported that in early 1889, at Pont-à-Mousson, a widow named Madame François was found slain, her head nearly severed from her body. About the same time and in the same area, another woman was found with her head nearly severed from her body. The doctor who conducted both postmortem examinations concluded that the murderer was very skillful with a knife.
Around 1906, Sickert returned to England and settled in Camden Town. He resumed painting music halls—such as the Mogul Tavern (by now called the Old Middlesex Music Hall, on Drury Lane, less than two miles from where he lived in Camden Town). Sickert went out almost every night and was always in his stall at 8:00 P.M. sharp, he wrote in a letter to Jacques-Emile Blanche. Presumably, Sickert stayed until the performances ended at half past midnight.
During his late-night journeys home, it is very possible he could have seen Emily Dimmock out on the streets, perhaps heading to her rooming house with a client. Had Sickert gathered intelligence on her, he could easily have known her patterns, and that she was a notorious prostitute and a walking plague. Periodically she was an outpatient at Lock Hospital on Harrow Road, and most recently had been treated at University College Hospital. When her venereal disease was fulminating, she had eruptions on her face, and she had a few of these at the time of her death. This should have indicated to a street-smart man that she was dangerous to his health.
Sickert would have been foolish to have exposed himself to her body fluids, because by 1907 more was known about contagious diseases. Exposure to blood could be just as dangerous as intercourse, and it would not have been possible for Sickert to disembowel or take organs without subjecting himself to great risk. I believe he would have been shrewd enough to avoid re-creating the twenty-year-old Ripper scare, especially when he was about to begin his most intense period of violent art and produce works that he would not have dared to etch or paint or display in 1888 or 1889. Emily Dimmock’s murder was staged to appear to have been motivated by robbery.
Bertram Shaw arrived home from the train station on the morning of September 12th, and discovered that his mother was already there. She was waiting in the hallway because Emily did not answer the door and she could not get into her son’s rooms. Shaw tried the outer door and was baffled to find it locked. He wondered if Emily might have gone out to meet his mother at the train station and the two women had missed each other. He was getting increasingly uneasy, and asked the landlady, Mrs. Stocks, for a key. Shaw unlocked the outer door and found the double doors locked as well. He broke in and flung back the covers from Emily’s naked body on the blood-soaked bed.
Drawers had been pulled out of the dresser, the contents rummaged through and scattered on the floor. Emily’s scrapbook was open on a chair, and some postcards had been removed from it. The windows and shutters in the bedroom were closed, the windows in the sitting room closed, the shutters slightly open. Shaw ran for the police. Some twenty-five minutes later, Constable Thomas Killion arrived and determined by touching Emily’s cold shoulder that she had been dead for hours. He immediately sent for police divisional surgeon Dr. John Thompson, who arrived at the scene around 1:00 P.M. and concluded—based on the coldness of the body and the advanced stage of rigor mortis—that Emily had been dead seven or eight hours.
This would have placed her time of death at 6:00 or 7:00 A.M., which is not likely. The morning was thick with fog, but the sun rose at 5:30. The killer would have been brazen to the point of stupidity had he left Emily’s house after the sun was up, no matter how gray and muggy the weather, and by six or seven o’clock, people were stirring, many on their way to work.
Under ordinary conditions, it requires six to twelve hours for a body to be fully rigorous, and cold temperatures can retard this process. Emily’s body was under bedclothes that the killer had flung over her, and the windows and doors were shut. Her bedroom would not have been frigid, but on the early morning she died, the low was forty-six degrees. What is not known is how stiff she was, or how advanced her rigor mortis might have been by the time Dr. Thompson began to examine her at some point after 1:00 P.M. By then, the temperature had risen to some seventy degrees, which would have advanced decomposition at a quicker rate. She could have been in full rigor mortis—dead a good ten or twelve hours. This would suggest she could have been murdered between midnight and 4:00 A.M.
Dr. Thompson said at the scene that Emily’s throat had been cut cleanly with a very sharp instrument. The police found nothing except one of Shaw’s straight razors in plain view on top of a dresser. He told police he owned two razors, and both of them were accounted for. It would be difficult to use a straight razor to cut forcefully through muscle and cartilage without the blade folding backward and perhaps severely wounding the perpetrator. A bloody pink petticoat in the hand-wash basin had soaked up all of the water, indicating that the killer had cleaned himself off before he left. He was careful not to touch anything with bloody hands, the police remarked at the inquest. No discernible fingerprints were found, only a few smudges.
The Ripper panic was not suddenly resurrected after Emily’s homicide, but perhaps an allusion to it was made by Wood’s attorney, Marshall Hall, when he asked the jury, “Was it more probable that [the murder] was the work of some maniac, such as terrorized London some years ago?” The Ripper’s spectre may have entered many minds, but the judge, at least, was astute enough to discount Emily’s homicide as being the work of a “maniac.” Her killer was a man who “must have been almost adept at that terrible art . . . ,” the judge said. “No doubt this crime was committed by a man who was leading a double life—a man whom nobody would imagine for a moment would be a murderer—a man who would pass in his particular society without anybody suspecting that he was a murderer.”
Sickert’s name was never mentioned in connection with Emily’s murder. There were no Ripper-type letters to the press or the police, but curiously enough, right after Emily’s homicide a Harold Ashton, a reporter for the Morning Leader, went to the police and showed them photographs of four postcards sent to the editor. It is not clear from the police report who sent these postcards, but the implication is that they were signed “A.C.C.” Ashton inquired if the police were aware that the writer of the postcards might be a “racing man.” The reporter went on to point out the following:
A postmark dated January 2, 1907, London, was the first day of racing after “a spell of wintry weather,” and the race that day was at Gatwick.
A second postcard was dated August 9, 1907, Brighton, and the Brighton races were held on the 6th,
7th, and 8th and at Lewes on the 9th and 10th of that month. The reporter said that many people who attended the races at Lewes stayed the weekend in Brighton.
A third postcard was dated August 19, 1907, Windsor, and the Windsor races were held on Friday and Saturday, the 16th and 17th of that month.
The fourth postcard was dated September 9th, two days before Emily’s murder, and one day before the Doncaster autumn race in Yorkshire. But what was very strange about this card, Ashton pointed out, is that it was a French postcard that appeared to have been purchased in Chantilly, France, where a race had been held the week before the Doncaster autumn race. Ashton said, according to the rather confusing police report, that he believed “the post card may have been purchased in France, possibly at Chantilly, brought over and posted with English stamps at Doncaster”—as if to imply that it had been mailed from Doncaster during the races. Had the sender attended the Doncaster autumn races, he could not have been in Camden Town at the time of Emily’s September 11th murder. The Doncaster races were held on the 10th, 11th, 12th, and 13th of September.
Ashton was asked to withhold this information from his newspaper, which he did. On September 30th, Inspector A. Hailstone jotted on the report that the police thought Ashton was correct about the dates of the races, but the reporter was “quite wrong” about the postmark of the fourth postcard. “It is clearly marked London NW.” Apparently, it didn’t strike Inspector Hailstone as somewhat odd that a French postcard apparently written two days before Emily Dimmock’s murder was for some reason mailed in London to a London newspaper. I don’t know if “A.C.C.” were the initials of an anonymous sender or meant something else, but it seems that the police might have questioned why a “racing man” would have sent these postcards to a newspaper at all.
Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper - Case Closed Page 33
