Portrait of a Killer

by Patricia Cornwell

  Sickert did not write his memoirs, keep a diary or calendar, or date most of his letters or works of art, so it is difficult to know where he was or what he was doing on or during any given day, week, month, or even year. I could find no record of his whereabouts or activities on August 6, 1888, but there is reason to suspect he was in London. Based on notes he scribbled on music-hall sketches, he was in London on August 4th and also August 5th. Since the music halls rarely let out before half past midnight, it would be fair to assume that he was in London on August 6th, as well.

  Whistler would be getting married in London five days later, on August 11th. Although Sickert hadn’t been invited to the small, intimate wedding, he wasn’t the sort to miss it—even if he had to spy on it.

  The great painter James McNeill Whistler had fallen deeply in love with the “remarkably pretty” Beatrice Godwin, who was to occupy the most prominent position in his life and entirely change the course of it. Likewise, Whistler occupied one of the most prominent positions in Sickert’s life and had entirely changed the course of it. “Nice boy, Walter,” Whistler used to say in the early 1880s when he was still fond of the aspiring and extraordinarily gifted young man. By the time of Whistler’s engagement their friendship had cooled, but Sickert could not have been prepared for what must have seemed a shockingly unexpected and complete abandonment by the Master he idolized, envied, and hated. In a sense, no matter how much Sickert might claim his independence as an artist and a man, he would forever find himself haunted by Whistler, and would vacillate from revering his former Master to trying to destroy him. Much later in his life, Sickert was said to emulate Whistler in personality and elegance—on occasion going so far as to wear the signature Whistler monocle and black ribbon tie.

  In August 1888, Whistler planned to honeymoon and travel with his new bride for the rest of the year in France, where they hoped to reside permanently. The anticipated connubial bliss of the flamboyant artistic genius and egocentric James McNeill Whistler must have been disconcerting to his former errand boy-apprentice. One of Sickert’s many roles was the irresistible womanizer, but offstage he was nothing of the sort. Sickert was dependent on women and loathed them. They were intellectually inferior and useless except as caretakers or objects to manipulate, especially for art or money. Women were a dangerous reminder of an infuriating and humiliating secret that Sickert carried not only to the grave but beyond it, because cremated bodies reveal no tales of the flesh, even if they are exhumed. Sickert was born with a deformity of his penis requiring surgeries when he was a toddler that would have left him disfigured if not mutilated. He probably was incapable of an erection. He may not have had enough of a penis left for penetration, and it is quite possible he had to squat like a woman to urinate.

  “My theory of the crimes is that the criminal has been badly disfigured,” says an October 4, 1888, letter filed with the Whitechapel Murders papers at the Corporation of London Records Office, “—possibly had his privy member destroyed—& he is now revenging himself on the sex by these atrocities.” The letter is written in purple pencil and enigmatically signed “Scotus,” which could be the Latin for Scotsman. “Scotch” can mean a shallow incision or to cut. Scotus could also be a strange and erudite reference to Johannes Scotus Eriugena, a ninth-century theologian and teacher of grammar and dialectics.

  For Walter Sickert to imagine Whistler in love and enjoying a sexual relationship with a woman might well have been the catalyst that made Sickert one of the most dangerous and confounding killers of all time. He began to act out what he had scripted most of his life, not only in thought but in boyhood sketches that depicted women being abducted, tied up, and stabbed.

  The psychology of a violent, remorseless murderer is not defined by connecting dots. There are no facile explanations or infallible sequences of cause and effect. But the compass of human nature can point a certain way, and Sickert’s feelings could only have been inflamed by Whistler’s marrying the widow of architect and archaeologist Edward Godwin, the man who had lived with actress Ellen Terry and fathered her children.

  The sensuously beautiful Ellen Terry was one of the most famous actresses of the Victorian era, and Sickert was fixated on her. As a teenager, he had stalked her and her acting partner, Henry Irving. Now Whistler had links to not one but both objects of Sickert’s obsessions, and these three stars in Sickert’s universe formed a constellation that did not include him. The stars cared nothing about him. He was truly Mr. Nemo.

  But in the late summer of 1888 he gave himself a new stage name that during his life would never be linked to him, a name that soon enough would be far better known than those of Whistler, Irving, and Terry.

  The actualization of Jack the Ripper’s violent fantasies began on the carefree bank holiday of August 6, 1888, when he slipped out of the wings to make his debut in a series of ghastly performances that were destined to become the most celebrated so-called murder mystery in history. It is widely and incorrectly believed that his violent spree ended as abruptly as it began, that he struck out of nowhere and then vanished from the scene.

  Decades passed, then fifty years, then a hundred, and his bloody sexual crimes have become anemic and impotent. They are puzzles, mystery weekends, games, and “Ripper Walks” that end with pints in the Ten Bells pub. Saucy Jack, as the Ripper sometimes called himself, has starred in moody movies featuring famous actors and special effects and spates of what the Ripper said he craved: blood, blood, blood. His butcheries no longer inspire fright, rage, or even pity as his victims moulder quietly, some of them in unmarked graves.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE TOUR

  Not long before Christmas 2001, I was walking to my apartment on New York’s Upper East Side, and I knew I seemed downcast and agitated, despite my efforts to appear composed and in a fine mood.

  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 a scary story about her latest investigation for 60 Minutes, and everyone at the table was talking politics and economics. I offered another writer encouragement, citing my usual empowerment spiels and do-what-you-love lines, because I did not want to talk about myself or the work that I worried was ruining my life. My heart felt squeezed, as if grief would burst in my chest any moment.

  My literary agent, Esther Newberg, and I set out on foot for our part of town. I had little to say on the dark sidewalk as we passed the usual suspects out walking their dogs and the endless stream of loud people talking on cell phones. I barely noticed yellow cabs or horns. I began to imagine some thug trying to grab our briefcases or us. I would chase him and dive for his ankles and knock him to the ground. I am five foot five and weigh 120 pounds, and I can run fast, and I’d show him, 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, because I rarely told Esther the truth.

  It was not my habit to admit to my agent or my publisher, Phyllis Grann, that I was ever frightened or uneasy about what I was doing. The two women were the big shots in my professional existence and had faith in me. If I said I had been investigating Jack the Ripper and knew who he was, they didn’t doubt me for a moment.

  “I’m miserable,” I confessed, and I was so dismayed that I felt like crying.

  “You are?” Esther’s stop-for-nothing stride hesitated for a moment on Lexington Avenue. “You’re miserable? Really? Why?”

  “I hate this book, Esther. I don’t know how the hell . . . All I did was look at his paintings and his life, and one thing led to another. . . .”

  She didn’t say a word.

  It has always been easier for me to get angry than to show fear or loss, and I was losing my life to Walter Richard Sickert. He was taking it away from me. “I want to write my novels,” I said. “I don’t want to write about him. There’s no joy in th
is. None.”

  “Well, you know,” she said very calmly as she resumed her pace, “you don’t have to do it. I can get you out of it.”

  She could have gotten me out of it, but I could never have gotten myself out of it. I knew the identity of a murderer and I couldn’t possibly avert my gaze. “I am suddenly in a position of judgment,” I told Esther. “It doesn’t matter if he’s dead. Every now and then this small voice asks me, what if you’re wrong? I would never forgive myself for saying such a thing about somebody, and then finding out I’m wrong.”

  “But you don’t believe you’re wrong. . . .”

  “No. Because I’m not,” I said.

  It all began innocently enough, like setting out to cross a lovely country lane and suddenly being hit by a cement truck. I was in London in May 2001, promoting the archaeological excavation of Jamestown. My friend Linda Fairstein, bestselling crime novelist and former head of the sex crimes unit for the New York District Attorney’s Office, was in London, too, and asked if I’d like to drop by Scotland Yard for a tour.

  “Not right now,” I said, and even as the words left my mouth, I imagined how little my readers would respect me if they knew that sometimes I just don’t feel like touring one more police department, laboratory, morgue, firing range, cemetery, penitentiary, crime scene, law-enforcement agency, or anatomical museum.

  When I travel, especially abroad, my key to the city is often an invitation to visit its violent, sad sights. In Buenos Aires, I was given a proud tour of that city’s crime museum, a room of decapitated heads preserved in formalin inside glass boxes. Only the most notorious criminals made it into this gruesome gallery, and they had gotten what was coming to them, I supposed, as they stared back at me with milky eyes. In Salta, in northwestern Argentina, I was shown five-hundred-year-old mummies of Inca children who had been buried alive to please the gods. A few years ago in London, I was given VIP treatment in a plague pit where one could scarcely move in the mud without stepping on human bones.

  I worked in the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Richmond, Virginia, for six years, programming computers, compiling statistical analyses, and helping out in the morgue. I scribed for the forensic pathologists, weighed organs, wrote down trajectories and the sizes of wounds, inventoried the prescription drugs of suicide victims who would not take their antidepressants, helped undress fully rigorous people who rigidly resisted our removing their clothes, labeled test tubes, wiped up blood, and saw, touched, smelled, and even tasted death because the stench of it clings to the back of one’s throat.

  I don’t forget the faces of or the smallest details about people who are killed. I’ve seen so many. I couldn’t possibly count how many, and I wish I could fill a huge room with them before it happened and beg them to lock their doors or install an alarm system—or at least get a dog—or not park there or stay away from drugs. I feel the prick of pain when I envision the dented aerosol can of Brut deodorant in the pocket of the teenage boy showing off and deciding to stand up in the back of a pickup truck. He didn’t notice it was about to drive under a bridge. I still can’t comprehend the randomness of the death of the man struck by lightning after he was handed a metaltipped umbrella as he got off a plane.

  My intense curiosity about violence hardened long ago into a suit of clinical armor that is protective but so heavy sometimes I can barely walk after visits with the dead. It seems the dead want my energy and desperately try to suck it out of me as they lie in their own blood on the street or on top of a stainless-steel table. The dead stay dead and I stay drained. Murder is not a mystery, and it is my mission to fight it with my pen.

  It would have been a betrayal of what I am and an insult to Scotland Yard and every law enforcer in Christendom for me to be “tired” the day Linda Fairstein said she could arrange a tour.

  “That’s very kind of Scotland Yard,” I told her. “I’ve never been there.”

  The next morning, I met with Deputy Assistant Commissioner John Grieve, the most respected investigator in Great Britain, and, as it turned out, an expert in Jack the Ripper’s crimes. The fabled Victorian killer interested me mildly. I had never read a Ripper book in my life. I knew nothing about his homicides. I did not know that his victims were prostitutes or how they died. I asked a few questions. Perhaps I could use Scotland Yard in my next Scarpetta novel, I thought. If so, I would need to know factual details about the Ripper cases, and perhaps Scarpetta would have new insights to offer about them.

  John Grieve offered to take me on a retrospective tour of the Ripper crime scenes—what was left of them after 113 years. I cancelled a trip to Ireland to spend a rainy, freezing morning with the famous Mr. Grieve and Detective Inspector Howard Gosling, walking about Whitechapel and Spitalfields, to Mitre Square, and to Miller’s Court where Mary Kelly was flayed to the bone by this serial murderer people call the Ripper.

  “Has anyone ever tried to use modern forensic science to solve these crimes?” I asked.

  “No,” John Grieve said, and he gave me a very short list of very weak suspects. “There’s one other interesting chap you might want to check out, as long as you’re going to look into it. An artist named Walter Sickert. He painted some murder pictures. In one of them in particular, a clothed man is sitting on the edge of a bed with the body of the nude prostitute he just murdered. It’s called The Camden Town Murder. I’ve always wondered about him.”

  It wasn’t the first time Sickert had been connected with Jack the Ripper’s crimes. Most people have always found the notion laughable.

  I began to wonder about Sickert when I was flipping through a book of his art. The first plate I landed on was an 1887 painting of the well-known Victorian performer Ada Lundberg at the Marylebone Music Hall. She is supposed to be singing but looks as if she is screaming as the leering, menacing men look on. I am sure there are artistic explanations for all of Sickert’s works. But what I see when I look at them is morbidity, violence, and a hatred of women. As I continued to follow Sickert and the Ripper, I began to see unsettling parallels. Some of his paintings bear a chilling resemblance to mortuary and scene photographs of Jack the Ripper’s victims.

  I noticed murky images of clothed men reflected in mirrors inside gloomy bedrooms where nude women sit on iron bedsteads. I saw impending violence and death. I saw a victim who had no reason to fear the charming, handsome man who had just coaxed her into a place and state of utter vulnerability. I saw a diabolically creative mind, and I saw evil. I began adding layer after layer of circumstantial evidence to the physical evidence discovered by modern forensic science and expert minds.

  All along, forensic scientists and I have hoped for DNA. But it would be almost a year and more than a hundred tests later before we would begin to see results—most of them poor—from the 75- to 114-year-old genetic evidence that Walter Sickert and Jack the Ripper may have left when they touched and licked postage stamps and envelope flaps. If it is true (and we can’t be certain) that Sickert and the Ripper left the DNA sequences we found, it was from cells inside their mouths that sloughed off into their saliva and were sealed in adhesive until DNA scientists recovered the genetic markers with tweezers, sterile water, and cotton swabs.

  The best result came from a Ripper letter that yielded a single-donor mitochondrial DNA sequence, specific enough to eliminate 99% of the population as the person who licked and touched the adhesive backing of that stamp. All the markers found in the single-donor profile were also present as components of mixtures found in another Ripper letter and two Walter Sickert letters, and other Sickert items, such as coveralls he wore when he painted. (This is neither surprising nor completely damning.) The DNA evidence is the oldest ever tested in a criminal case and is by no means conclusive. We can’t prove the source of any of the DNA because we don’t, at this time, have the mitochondrial DNA profiles of any of the individuals involved—most important, a clean profile of Walter Sickert.

  But we aren’t finished with our DNA testing and other types
of forensic analyses. These could go on for years as the technology advances at an exponential rate and more evidence is found and examined. DNA testing completed since the initial release of this book not only has turned up more genetic components consistent with Sickert and Ripper letters, but remarkably has revealed a single-donor mitochondrial DNA sequence from a letter written by so-called Ripper suspect Montague John Druitt. The mitochondrial DNA sequence acquired from the stamp and envelope flap swabbed on a letter he wrote from Oxford University in 1876 shares no significant markers in common with the single-donor profile from the Openshaw letter written by Jack the Ripper.

  Assuming that it was Druitt’s mitochondrial DNA we recovered from his letter, and that the single-donor mitochondrial DNA recovered from the Openshaw letter was left by the Ripper, it can be argued that Montague Druitt, long considered by some to have been Jack the Ripper, at the very least did not pen this significant Ripper letter (which was also written on stationery that has the same watermark as one of the many types of stationery Sickert used). Since there has never been any evidence to link Druitt to the murders, and since, as I will point out in this book, other murders were committed by the Ripper after Druitt’s suicide in the early winter of 1888, it seems unlikely that the depressed barrister Montague Druitt was Jack the Ripper.

  There is far more convincing physical evidence that points to Sickert. Forensic scientists as well as art, paper, and lettering experts, found the following: a Ripper letter written on artists’ paper; numerous watermarks on paper used in Ripper letters that match watermarks on paper used by Walter Sickert; numerous Ripper letters written with a waxy lithographic crayon; Ripper letters with paint or ink applied with a paintbrush. Microscopic and ultraviolet examinations revealed that swabs of “dried blood” on Ripper letters turn out to be a mixture of white wax, oil, and resin—or etching ground—used by fine-art printmakers to prepare copper etching plates for printing. According to forensic paper expert and paper historian Peter Bower, etching ground was usually mixed in art studios. Sickert began his artistic career as an apprentice to James McNeill Whistler, and, Bower says, “Whistler always used the old-fashioned ground composed of white wax, bitumen pitch, and resin.” But, Bower says, it was not unusual for artists to “develop their own slightly different recipes” that were often based on those used by their teacher.