Portrait of a Killer

by Patricia Cornwell

  I doubt Elizabeth Stride knew what hit her. She may have drifted toward the building on Berner Street because she knew the IWMC members—most of them there without their girlfriends or wives—would begin heading out around 1:00 A.M. and might be interested in quick sex. The Ripper may have been watching her from the deep shadows as she conducted business with other men, then waited until she was alone. He may have been familiar with the socialists’ club and shown up there before, possibly even earlier that night. The Ripper could have been wearing a false mustache or beard, or some other disguise to ensure that he would not be recognized.

  Walter Sickert was fluent in German and would have understood the debate that had been going on for hours inside the club the Saturday night of September 29th. Maybe he was in the crowd as the debate went on. It would have been in keeping with his character to participate before slipping out close to one o’clock, just as the singing began. Or maybe he never stepped inside the club at all and had been watching Elizabeth Stride ever since she left the lodging house. Whatever he did, it may not have been as difficult as one might suppose. If a killer is sober, intelligent, and logical; knows several languages; is an actor; has hiding places; and does not live in the area, then it really is not so mind-boggling to imagine him getting away with murder in unlighted slums. But I think he may have spoken to this victim. There was never an explanation for her single red rose.

  The Ripper had ample time to escape when Louis Diemschutz hurried inside the building for a candle and members of the socialists’ club rushed outside to look. Shortly after the commotion began, a woman living several doors down at 36 Berner Street stepped outside and noticed a young man walking quickly toward Commercial Road. He glanced up at the lighted windows of the clubhouse, and the woman testified later that he was carrying a shiny black Gladstone case—popular in those days and similar in appearance to a medical bag.

  Marjorie Lilly recalled in her written recollections of Sickert that he owned a Gladstone bag “to which he was much attached.” On one occasion in the winter of 1918 while they were painting in his studio, he suddenly decided they should go to Petticoat Lane and he brought the bag out of the basement. For reasons she failed to comprehend, she wrote, Sickert painted “The Shrubbery, 81 Camden Road,” in big white numbers and letters on the bag. She never did understand the “Shrubbery” part of the address, since Sickert had no shrubbery in his patchy front yard. Nor did Sickert ever offer her an explanation for his bizarre behavior. He was fifty-eight years old at the time. He was anything but senile. But he acted strange sometimes, and Lilly recalled being unnerved when he carried his Gladstone bag out the door and took her and another woman on a frightening excursion into Whitechapel during a thick, acrid fog.

  They ended up on Petticoat Lane, and Ms. Lilly watched in astonishment as Sickert and his black bag disappeared along mean streets as “the fog exceeded our worst fears” and it was almost as dark as night, she wrote. The women chased Sickert “up and down endless side streets until we were exhausted” as he stared at poor wretches huddled on steps leading into their slums, and joyfully exclaimed, “such a beautiful head! What a beard. A perfect Rembrandt.” He could not be dissuaded from his adventure, which had taken him within blocks of where the Ripper’s victims had been murdered exactly thirty years earlier.

  In 1914, when World War I began and London was dark with lights unlit and blinds drawn, Sickert wrote in a letter, “Such interesting streets lit as they were 20 years ago when everything was Rembrandt.” He had just walked home “by bye-ways” through Islington at night, and he added, “I wish the fear of Zeppelins would continue for ever so far as the lighting goes.”

  I questioned John Lessore about his uncle’s Gladstone bag, and he told me he wasn’t aware of anyone in the family knowing about a Gladstone bag that might have belonged to Walter Sickert. I tried very hard to find that bag. If it had been used to carry bloody knives, DNA could very well have come up with some interesting findings. Since I am speculating, I may as well add that for Sickert to paint “The Shrubbery” on his bag seems crazy, but then it may not be. During the Ripper murders, the police found a bloody knife in shrubbery close to where Sickert’s mother lived. In fact, bloody knives began to turn up in several places, as if left deliberately to excite police and neighbors.

  The Monday night after Elizabeth Stride’s murder, Thomas Coram, a coconut dealer, was leaving a friend’s house in Whitechapel and noticed a knife at the bottom of steps leading into a laundry. The blade was a foot long with a blunted tip, and the black handle was six inches long and was wrapped in a bloody white handkerchief that had been tied in place with string. Coram did not touch the knife but immediately showed it to a local constable, who later testified that the knife was in the exact spot where he had stood not an hour earlier. He described the knife as “smothered” with dried blood and the sort a baker or chef might use. Sickert was an excellent cook and often dressed as a chef to entertain his friends.

  While police were interrogating the members of the socialists’ club who were singing inside the building when Elizabeth Stride was murdered, Jack the Ripper was making his way toward Mitre Square, where another prostitute, named Catherine Eddows, had headed after being released from jail. If the Ripper took the direct route of Commercial Road, followed it west, and turned left on Aldgate High Street to enter the City of London, his next crime scene was but a fifteen-minute walk from his last one.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  THESE CHARACTERS ABOUT

  Catherine Eddows spent Friday night in a casual ward north of Whitechapel Road because she did not have fourpence to pay for her half of John Kelly’s bed.

  It had been seven or eight years now that she had been living with him in the lodging house at 55 Flower and Dean Street in Spitalfields. Before Kelly, she was with Thomas Conway, the father of her children—two boys, fifteen and twenty, and a daughter named Annie Phillips, twenty-three, who was married to a lampblack packer.

  The sons lived with Conway, who had left Catherine because of her drinking habits. She had not seen him or her children in years, and this was by design. In the past when she would come around, she was always in need of money. Although she and Conway had never been married, he had bought and paid for her, she used to say, and his initials were tattooed in blue ink on her left forearm.

  Catherine Eddows was forty-three years old and very thin. Hardship and drink had given her a pinched look, but she may have been attractive once, with her high cheekbones, dark eyes, and black hair. She and Kelly took one day at a time, holding themselves together mostly by hawking cheap items on the streets, and now and then she cleaned houses. They usually left London in the fall because September was harvest season. They had only just gotten back on Thursday from weeks of “hopping” with thousands of other people who had fled the city for migrant work. Catherine and Kelly had spirited themselves away from the East End to roam the farming districts of Kent, gathering hops used in the brewing of beer. The work was grueling, and the couple earned no more than a shilling per bushel, but at least they were far away from smog and filth and could feel the sun on their bodies and breathe fresh air. They ate and drank like royalty and slept in barns. When they returned to London, they had not a cent.

  Friday, September 28th, Kelly returned to the lodging house at 55 Flower and Dean Street in Spitalfields, and Catherine stayed without him in a free bed at a casual ward. It is not known what she did that night. Kelly later stated at her inquest that she was not a woman of the streets, nor was he the sort to tolerate her being with another man. Catherine never brought him money in the morning, he added, perhaps to forestall any intimations that she might have picked up a pittance here and there through prostitution. He was adamant that she did not have an addiction to alcohol and was only occasionally “in the habit of slightly drinking to excess.”

  Catherine and Kelly considered themselves man and wife and were fairly regular in paying the nightly rate of eightpence for their double bed at Flo
wer and Dean Street. It was true they might have a word or two now and then. Some months earlier she had left him for “a few hours,” but Kelly swore under oath that he and Catherine had been getting along just fine of late. He said that on Saturday morning she offered to pawn some of her clothing so they could buy food, but he insisted that she pawn his boots instead. She did, for half a crown. That pawn ticket and another one they had bought from a woman while hopping were safely tucked inside one of Catherine’s pockets, in hopes she might be able to reclaim Kelly’s boots and other valuables someday soon.

  Saturday morning, September 29th, Catherine met up with Kelly between ten and eleven in the old clothing market at Houndsditch, a healed gash in the earth that in Roman days had been a moat protecting the city wall. Houndsditch ran between Aldgate High Street and Bishopsgate Within, and bordered the northeast side of the City of London. As Catherine and Kelly spent most of his boot money on food and enjoyed what for them was a hearty breakfast, she moved into the outer limits of her life. Within less than fifteen hours, Catherine Eddows would be bloodless and cold.

  By early afternoon, she was dressed in what must have been everything she owned: a black jacket with imitation fur around the collar and the sleeves, two outer jackets trimmed in black silk braid and imitation fur, a chintz shirt with a Michaelmas daisy pattern and three flounces, a brown linsey dress bodice with a black velvet collar and brown metal buttons down the front, a gray petticoat, a very old green Alpaca skirt, a very old ragged blue skirt with a red flounce and light twill lining, a white calico chemise, a man’s white vest with buttons down the front and two outer pockets, brown ribbed stockings mended at the feet with white thread, a pair of men’s lace-up boots (the right boot repaired with red thread), a black straw bonnet trimmed with black beads and green and black velvet, a white apron, and “red gauze silk” and a large white handkerchief tied around her neck.

  In her many layers and pockets were another handkerchief, bits and pieces of soap, string, white rag, white coarse linen, blue and white skirting, blue ticking and flannel, two black clay pipes, a red leather cigarette case, a comb, pins and needles, a ball of hemp, a thimble, a table knife, a teaspoon, and two old mustard tins safely securing a precious stash of sugar and tea she had bought with Kelly’s boot money. He did not have money for their bed that night, and at 2:00 P.M., Catherine told him she was going to Bermondsey in the southeast part of the city. Maybe she could find her daughter, Annie.

  Annie used to have a house on King Street, and apparently Catherine didn’t know that her daughter had not lived in that house or in Bermondsey for years. Kelly said he wished Catherine wouldn’t go anywhere. “Stay here,” he said to her. She was insistent, and when Kelly called out to her to be careful of the “Knife”—the street name for the East End murderer—Catherine laughed. Of course she would be careful. She was always careful. She promised to be back in two hours.

  Mother and daughter never saw each other that day, and no one seems to know where Catherine went. Perhaps she walked to Bermondsey and was dismayed to find that Annie had moved. Perhaps the neighbors told Catherine that Annie and her husband had left the neighborhood at least two years ago. Perhaps no one knew who Catherine was talking about when she said she was looking for her daughter. It’s possible Catherine didn’t intend to go to Bermondsey at all and just wanted an excuse to earn pennies for gin. She may have been all too aware that no one in her family wanted anything to do with her. Catherine was a drunken, immoral woman who belonged in the dustbin. She was an Unfortunate and a disgrace to her children. She did not return to Kelly by four o’clock, as she had said she would, but got herself locked up at Bishopsgate Police Station for being drunk.

  The police station was just north of Houndsditch, where Kelly had seen Catherine last when they were eating and drinking away his boot money. When word reached him that she was in jail for being drunk, he figured she was safe enough and went to bed. At the inquest, he would admit that she had been locked up before. But as was said of the other Ripper victims, Catherine was a “sober, quiet” woman who got jolly and liked to sing when she had one drink too many, which, of course, was rare. None of the Ripper’s victims were addicted to alcohol, friends swore from the witness stand.

  In Catherine Eddows’s time, alcoholism was not considered a disease. “Habitual drunkenness” afflicted someone “of a weak mind” or “weak intellect” who was destined for the lunatic asylum or jail. Drunkenness was a clear indication that a person was of thin moral fiber, a sinner given to vice, an imbecile in the making. Denial was just as persistent then as it is now and euphemisms were plentiful. People got into the drink. They had a drop to drink. They were known to drink. They were the worse for drink. Catherine Eddows was the worse for drink Saturday night. By 8:30, she had passed out on a footway on Aldgate High Street, and Police Constable George Simmons picked her up and moved her off to the side. He leaned her against shutters, but she could not stay on her feet.

  Simmons called for another constable and they got on either side of her to help her to the Bishopsgate Police Station. Catherine was too drunk to say where she lived or whether she knew anyone who might come for her, and when she was asked her name, she mumbled, “Nothing.” At close to 9:00 P.M., she was in jail. At quarter past midnight, she was awake and singing to herself. Constable George Hutt testified at the inquest that he had been checking on her the past three or four hours, and when he stopped by her cell at approximately 1:00 A.M., she asked him when he was going to let her go. When she was capable of taking care of herself, he replied.

  She told him she was capable of that now, and wanted to know what time it was. Too late for her to get “any more drink,” he said. “Well, what time is it?” she persisted. He told her “just on one,” and she retorted, “I shall get a damned fine hiding when I get home.” Constable Hutt unlocked her cell and warned her, “And serves you right; you have no right to get drunk.” He brought her inside the office for questioning by the station sergeant, and she gave a false name and address: “Mary Ann Kelly” of “Fashion Street.”

  Constable Hutt pushed open swinging doors that led to a passageway, showing her out. “This way, Missus,” he said, and told her to make sure to pull the outer door shut behind her. “Good night, ol’ Cock,” she said, leaving the door open and turning left toward Houndsditch, where she had promised to meet John Kelly nine hours earlier. Probably no one will ever know why Catherine headed that way first and then set out to the City, to Mitre Square, which was an eight- or ten-minute walk from Bishopsgate Police Station. Perhaps she planned to earn a few more pennies, and trouble wasn’t likely in the City, at least not the kind of trouble Catherine was considering. The wealthy City of London was crowded and thriving during the workday, but most people whose jobs brought them into the Square Mile did not live there. Catherine and John Kelly didn’t live there, either.

  Their common lodging house at Flower and Dean Street was outside the City, and since Kelly was unaware of her after-hours entrepreneurial activities (or so he claimed after her death), perhaps she concluded that it was wise to stay in the City for a while, and not wander home and get into a row. Perhaps Catherine simply didn’t know what she was doing. She had been in jail less than four hours. The average person metabolizes approximately one ounce of alcohol—or about one beer—per hour. Catherine must have had quite a lot of alcohol on board to have been “falling down drunk,” and it is possible that when Constable Hutt bade her good night, she was still intoxicated.

  At the very least, she was hung over and bleary headed, maybe suffering from tremors and blank spots in her memory, too. The best cure was a little hair of the dog that bit her. She needed another drink and a bed, and could have neither without money. If her man was going to give her hell, maybe it was best if she earned her pennies and slept somewhere else the rest of the night. Whatever she was thinking, it doesn’t appear that reconnecting with Kelly was foremost on her mind when she left the police station. Heading to Mitre Square
meant walking in the opposite direction from where Kelly was staying on Flower and Dean Street.

  Some thirty minutes after Catherine left her jail cell, Joseph Lawende, a commercial traveler, and his friends Joseph Levy and Harry Harris left the Imperial Club at 16 and 17 Duke Street, in the City. It was raining and Lawende was walking at a slightly faster pace than his companions. At the corner of Duke Street and Church Passage, the street that led to Mitre Square, he noticed a man and a woman together. Lawende would state at the inquest that the man’s back was to him, and all he could tell was that the man was taller than the woman and wearing a cap that might have had a peak.

  The woman was dressed in a black jacket and a black bonnet, Lawende recalled, and as bad as the lighting conditions were at the time, he was later able to identify these items of clothing at the police station as having belonged to the woman he saw at 1:30 A.M., an exact time he based on the clubhouse clock and his own watch. “I doubt whether I should know him again,” Lawende said of the man. “I did not hear a word said. They did not either of them appear to be quarreling. They appeared conversing very quietly—I did not look back to see where they went.”

  Joseph Levy, a butcher, did not get a good look at the couple, either, but he estimated that the man was perhaps three inches taller than the woman. As he passed down Duke Street, he commented to his friend Harris, “I don’t like going home by myself when I see these characters about.” When questioned closely by the coroner at the inquest, Levy amended his statement a bit. “There was nothing I saw about the man and woman which caused me to fear them,” he said.

  City of London officials would assure journalists that Mitre Square was not the sort of place where prostitutes prowled, and that City Police routinely were on the lookout for men and women together at late hours. If constables were instructed to take note of men and women in the Square at late hours, perhaps this suggested that questionable activity did go on there. Mitre Square was poorly lit. It was accessible by three long, dark passageways. It was filled with empty buildings, and a policeman’s leather heels striking the pavement could be heard from far away and allowed plenty of time to hide.