Portrait of a Killer

by Patricia Cornwell

  Obviously, the times given by witnesses conflict, and they never stated at the inquest how they happened to know what time it was when they walked past people or stumbled onto bodies. In that era, most people told time by their routines, the position of the sun in the sky, and church clocks that chimed the hour or half hour. Harriet Hardiman of 29 Hanbury testified at the inquest she was certain it was 6:00 A.M. when she was awakened by a commotion outside her window. She was a cat meat saleswoman whose shop was inside the rooming house; she made her living by going out with a barrow full of stinking fish or slop left over from slaughterhouses to sell to cat owners while long lines of felines followed along her routes.

  Harriet was fast asleep on the ground floor when the excited voices woke her with a start. Fearing the building was on fire, she awakened her son and told him to go outside and look. When he returned, he said that a woman had been murdered in the yard. Both mother and son had slept soundly all night, and Harriet Hardiman later testified she often heard people on the stairs and in the passage that led into the yard, but all had been quiet. John Richardson’s mother, Amelia, had been awake half the night and certainly she would have been aware had someone been arguing or screaming. But she claimed she had heard not a sound, either.

  Residents were continually in and out of the rooming house at 29 Hanbury, and the front and back doors were always kept unlocked, as was the passage door that opened onto the enclosed yard at the rear of the house. It would have been easy for anyone to unlatch the gate and walk into the yard, which is what Annie Chapman must have done just before she was murdered. At 5:55 A.M., John Davis, a porter who lived in the rooming house, headed out to market and had the distinct misfortune of discovering Annie Chapman’s body in the yard between the house and the fence, very close to where Richardson had been sitting on the stone steps about an hour earlier mending his boot.

  She was on her back, her left hand on her left breast, her right arm by her side, her legs bent. Her disarrayed clothing was pulled up to her knees, and her throat was cut so deeply that her head was barely attached to her body. Annie Chapman’s killer had slashed open her abdomen and removed her bowels and a flap of her belly. They were in a puddle of blood on the ground above her left shoulder, an arrangement that may or may not be symbolic.

  Quite likely, the placement of the body organs and tissue was utilitarian—to get them out of the Ripper’s way. It would become apparent that he was after the kidneys, uterus, and vagina, but one can’t dismiss the supposition that he also intended to shock people. He succeeded. John Davis fled upstairs to his room and drank a glass of brandy. Then he frantically rushed inside his workshop for a tarpaulin to drape over the body and ran to find the nearest police constable.

  Moments later, Inspector Joseph Chandler of the Commercial Street police station arrived. When he saw what he was dealing with, he sent for Dr. George Phillips, a divisional surgeon. A crowd was gathering and voices cried out, “Another woman has been murdered!” With little more than a glance, Dr. Phillips determined that the victim’s throat had been cut before her “stomach” was mutilated, and that she had been dead about two hours. He noted that her face seemed swollen and that her tongue was protruding between her front teeth. She had been strangled to death, Dr. Phillips said—or at least rendered unconscious before the killer cut her throat. Rigor mortis was just beginning to set in, and the doctor noted “six patches” of blood on the back wall, about eighteen inches above Annie’s head.

  The droplets ranged from very small to the size of a sixpence and each “patch” was in a tight cluster. In addition, there were “marks” of blood on the fence in back of the house. Neatly arranged at Annie’s feet were a bit of coarse muslin, a comb, and a piece of bloody torn envelope with the Sussex Regiment coat of arms on it and a London postmark with the date August 20, 1888. Nearby were two pills. Her cheap metal rings were missing, and an abrasion on her finger indicated that they had been forcibly removed. Later, on an undated, unsigned postcard believed to have been sent by the Ripper to the City Police, the writer skillfully drew a cartoon figure with a cut throat. He wrote “poor annie” and claimed to have her rings “in my possession.”

  None of Annie’s clothing was torn, her boots were on, and her black coat was still buttoned and hooked. The neck of the coat inside and out was stained with blood. Dr. Phillips also pointed out drops of blood on her stockings and her left sleeve. It was not mentioned in the newspaper or police reports, but Dr. Phillips must have scooped up her intestines and other body tissues and placed them back inside her abdominal cavity before covering her body with sacking. Police helped place her into the same shell that had cradled Mary Ann Nichols’s body until she had been taken away to be buried. Police transported Annie Chapman’s body by hand ambulance to the Whitechapel mortuary.

  It was daylight now. Hundreds of excited people were hurrying to the enclosed yard at 29 Hanbury. Neighbors on either side of the rooming house began charging admission to step inside for a better view of the bloodstained area where Annie had been slain.

  HAVE YOU SEEN THE “DEVIL”

  If not

  Pay one Penny & Walk inside

  wrote Jack the Ripper on October 10.

  On the same postcard, the Ripper added, “I am waiting every evening for the coppers at Hampstead heath,” a sprawling parkland famous for its healing springs, its bathing ponds, and its longtime appeal to writers, poets, and painters, including Dickens, Shelley, Pope, Keats, and Constable. On bank holidays, as many as 100,000 people had been known to visit the rolling farmlands and dense copses. Walter Sickert’s home in South Hampstead was no more than a twenty-minute walk away from Hampstead Heath.

  Alleged Ripper letters not only drop hints—such as the “Have You Seen The ‘Devil’” postcard, which could be an allusion to East End residents charging money for peeks at the Ripper’s crime scenes—but also reveal an emerging geographical profile. Many of the locations mentioned—some of them repeatedly—are places and areas that were well known to Walter Sickert: the Bedford Music Hall in Camden Town, which he painted many times; his home at 54 Broadhurst Gardens; and theatrical, artistic, and commercial parts of London that Sickert would have frequented.

  Postmarks and mentions of locations in close proximity to the Bedford Music Hall include Hampstead Road, King’s Cross, Tottenham Court, Somers Town, Albany Street, and St. Pancras Church.

  Those that are in close proximity to 54 Broadhurst Gardens include Kilburn, Palmerston Road (mere blocks from his house), Princess Road, Kentish Town, Alma Street, and Finchley Road (which runs off Broadhurst Gardens).

  Postmarks and locations in close proximity to theaters, music halls, art galleries, and places of possible business or personal interest to Sickert include Piccadilly Circus, Haymarket, Charing Cross, Battersea (near Whistler’s studio), Regent Street North, Mayfair, Paddington (where Paddington Station is located), York Street (near Paddington), Islington (where St. Mark’s Hospital is located), Worcester (a favorite place for painters), Greenwich, Gipsy Hill (near the Crystal Palace), Portman Square (not far from the Fine Art Society, and also the location of the Heinz Gallery collection of architectural drawings), and Conduit Street (close to the Fine Art Society, and during the Victorian era the site of the 19th Century Art Society and the Royal Institute of British Architects).

  Sickert’s sketches are remarkably detailed, his pencil recording what his eyes were seeing so that he could later paint the picture. His mathematical formula of “squaring up” paintings, or using a geometrical formula for enlarging his drawings without losing dimension and perspective, reveals an organized and scientific mind. Sickert painted many intricate buildings during his career, especially unusually detailed paintings of churches in Dieppe and Venice. One might suppose he would have been interested in architecture and perhaps visited the Heinz Gallery, which had the largest collection of architectural drawings in the world.

  Sickert’s first career was acting, which he is believed to have begun
in 1879. In one of the earliest existing Sickert letters, one he wrote in 1880 to historian and biographer T. E. Pemberton, he described playing an “old man” in Henry V while on tour in Birmingham. “It is the part I like best of all,” he wrote. Despite recycled stories that Sickert gave up acting because his true ambition was to be a painter, letters collected by Denys Sutton reveal a different story. “Walter was anxious to take up a stage career,” one letter said. But, wrote another Sickert acquaintance, “He was not very successful so he took up painting.”

  In his early twenties, Sickert was still an actor and touring with Henry Irving’s company. He was acquainted with the famous architect Edward W. Godwin, a theater enthusiast, costume designer, and good friend of Whistler’s. Godwin lived with Ellen Terry during Sickert’s early acting days and had built Whistler’s house—the White House, on Tite Street in Chelsea. Godwin’s widow, Beatrice, had just married Whistler on August 11, 1888. Although I can’t prove that biographical and geographical details such as these were connected in Sickert’s psyche when Ripper letters were mailed or purportedly written from the London locations cited, I can speculate that these areas of the metropolis at least would have been familiar to him. They were not likely places for “homicidal lunatics” or East End “low life paupers” to have spent much time.

  While it is true that many of the Ripper letters were mailed in the East End, it is also true that many of them were not. But Sickert spent a fair amount of time in the East End and probably knew that run-down part of London better than the police did. The orders of the day did not allow Metropolitan Police constables to enter pubs or mingle with the neighbors. Beat police were supposed to stay on their beats, and to enter lodging houses or pubs without cause or simply to stray from one’s measured walks around assigned blocks was to invite reprimand or suspension. Sickert, however, could mingle as he pleased. No place was off-limits to him.

  The police seemed to suffer from East End myopia. No matter how much the Ripper tried to inveigle them into investigating other locales or likely haunts, he was mostly ignored. There appears to be no record that the police thoroughly investigated the postmarks or locations of Ripper letters not mailed from the East End or thought twice about other letters that were allegedly written or mailed from other cities in Great Britain. Not all envelopes have survived, and without a postmark one has only the location that the Ripper wrote on his letter. That may or may not have been where he really was at the time.

  According to the postmarks, the alleged locations of the Ripper at various times, or where he claimed to be going, include Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Bradford, Dublin, Belfast, Limerick, Edinburgh, Plymouth, Leicester, Bristol, Clapham, Woolwich, Nottingham, Portsmouth, Croydon, Folkestone, Gloucester, Leith, Lille (France), Lisbon (Portugal), and Philadelphia (USA).

  A number of these locations seem extremely unlikely, especially Portugal and the United States. As far as anyone seems to know, Walter Sickert never visited either country. Other letters and their alleged dates make it almost impossible to believe that, for example, he could have mailed or written letters in London, Lille, Birmingham, and Dublin all on the same day, October 8. But again, what is unclear 114 years after the fact—when so many envelopes and their postmarks are missing, when evidence is cold and witnesses are dead—is whether letters really were written on a given date and where they were written from. Only postmarks and eyewitnesses could swear to that.

  Of course not all the Ripper letters were written by Sickert, but he could disguise his handwriting in ways an average person could not, and no records have yet turned up to prove he wasn’t in a given city on a given day. The month of October 1888 was a busy letter-writing period for the Ripper. Some eighty letters written that month still exist, and it would make sense for the killer to be on the run after multiple, closely spaced murders. As the Ripper himself wrote in several letters, Whitechapel was getting too hot for him and he was seeking peace and quiet in distant ports.

  We know from modern cases that serial killers tend to move around. Some virtually live in their cars. October would have been a convenient time for Sickert to disappear from London. His wife, Ellen, was part of a Liberal delegation that was holding meetings in Ireland to support home rule and free trade. She was away from England almost the entire month of October. If she and Sickert had any contact at all during this separation, no letters or telegrams to each other seem to have survived.

  Sickert loved to write letters and sometimes apologized to friends for writing them so often. He habitually wrote letters to newspapers. He had such a knack for stirring up news that letters by him and articles about him amounted to as many as six hundred in one year. It is daunting to go through Sickert’s archives at Islington Public Libraries and look at his several reams of clippings. He began gathering them himself around the turn of the century, and then used clipping services to keep up with his seemingly endless publicity. Yet throughout his life, he was known as a man who refused to give interviews. He managed to create the myth that he was “shy” and hated publicity.

  Sickert’s obsession with writing letters to the editor became an embarrassment to some newspapers. Editors squirmed when they got yet another Sickert letter about art or the aesthetic quality of telephone poles or why all Englishmen should wear kilts or the disadvantages of chlorinated water. Most editors did not wish to insult the well-known artist by ignoring him or relegating his prose to a small, inconspicuous space.

  From January 25 through May 25, 1924, Sickert delivered a series of lectures and articles that were published in the Southport Visiter, in Southport, north of Liverpool, on the coast. Although these articles came to more than 130,000 words, that wasn’t enough. On May 6th, 12th, 15th, 19th, and 22nd, Sickert wrote or telegraphed W. H. Stephenson of the Visiter: “I wonder if the Visiter could bear one more article at once. . . . If so you should have it at once” and “delighted writing” and “please ask printer to express early six copies” and “Do let me send you just one more article” and “if you hear of any provincial paper that would care to carry series over the summer let me know.”

  Throughout Sickert’s life, his literary prolificacy was astonishing. His clippings book at Islington Public Libraries contains more than 12,000 news items about him and letters he wrote to editors in Great Britain alone, most of them written between 1911 and the late 1930s. He published some four hundred lectures and articles, and I believe these known writings do not represent the entirety of his literary output. Sickert was a compulsive writer who enjoyed persuading, manipulating, and impressing people with his words. He craved an audience. He craved seeing his name in print. It would have been in character for him to have written a startling number of the Ripper letters, including some of those mailed from all over the map.

  He may have written far more of them than some document examiners would be inclined to believe, because one makes a mistake to judge Walter Sickert by the usual handwriting-comparison standards. He was a multitalented artist with an amazing memory. He was multilingual. He was a voracious reader and skilled mimic. A number of books on graphology were available at the time, and the handwriting in many Ripper letters is similar to examples of writing styles that Victorian graphologists associated with various occupations and personalities. Sickert could have opened any number of graphology books and imitated the styles he found there. For graphologists to study Ripper letters must have struck Sickert as most amusing.

  Using chemicals and highly sensitive instruments to analyze inks, paints, and paper is scientific. Handwriting comparison is not. It is an investigative tool that can be powerful and convincing, especially in detecting forgeries. But if a suspect is adept in disguising his handwriting, comparison can be frustrating or impossible. The police investigating the Ripper cases were so eager to pinpoint similarity in handwriting that they did not explore the possibility that the killer might use many different styles. Other leads, such as cities the Ripper mentioned and postmarks on envelopes, were not
pursued. Had they been, it may have been discovered that most of the distant cities shared points in common, including theaters and racecourses. Many of these locations would appear on a map of Sickert’s travels.

  Let’s start with Manchester. There were at least three reasons for Sickert to visit that city and be quite familiar with it. His wife’s family, the Cobdens, owned property in Manchester. Sickert’s sister, Helena, lived in Manchester. Sickert had friends as well as professional connections in Manchester. Several Ripper letters mention Manchester. One of them that the Ripper claims to have written from Manchester on November 22, 1888, has a partial A Pirie & Sons watermark. Another letter the Ripper claims to have written from East London, also on November 22nd, has a partial A Pirie & Sons watermark. The stationery Walter and Ellen Sickert began using after they were married on June 10, 1885, has the A Pirie & Sons watermark.

  Dr. Paul Ferrara, codirector of the Virginia Institute of Forensic Science and Medicine, made the first watermark connection when we were examining original Ripper and Sickert letters in London and Glasgow. Transparencies of the letters and their watermarks were submitted to the Institute, and when the Ripper partial watermark and a Sickert complete watermark were scanned into a forensic image-enhancement computer and superimposed on the video screen, they matched identically.

  In September 2001, the Virginia Institute of Forensic Science and Medicine received permission from the British government to conduct nondestructive forensic testing on the original Ripper letters at the Public Record Office in Kew. Dr. Ferrara, DNA analyst Lisa Schiermeier, forensic image-enhancement expert Chuck Pruitt, and others traveled to London, and we examined the Ripper letters. Many of what seemed the most promising envelopes—ones that still had flaps and stamps intact—were moistened and painstakingly peeled back for swabbing. Photographs were taken and handwriting was compared.