Portrait of a Killer

by Patricia Cornwell

  What is peculiar about this anonymous letter is that there was no record of any such crimes in the police sections of the newspapers, and one has to wonder how the writer of the letter could possibly have known the details, unless he or she was snooping about the East End or was a police officer. Most letters to the editor were with attribution and offered sincere suggestions. Members of the clergy wanted more police supervision, better lighting, and all slaughterhouses to be moved out of Whitechapel because the violence to animals and the gore in the streets had a bad effect on the “ignorant imagination.” Wealthy Londoners should buy up the East End slums and demolish them. The children of wretched parents should be taken away and raised by the government.

  On October 15th, a peculiar anonymous letter appeared in The Times, and after the initial publication of this book I learned that the letter, it seems, was written by an equally peculiar barrister named Arthur Munby. The anonymous letter to The Times reads like a bad short story, and is reminiscent in places of Jane Beetmoor’s murder in coal-mining country. It also demonstrates that fear of Jack the Ripper was becoming increasingly widespread:Sir,—I have been a good deal about England of late and have been a witness of the strong interest and widespread excitement which the WHITE CHAPEL murders have caused and are causing. Everywhere I have been asked about them; especially by working folk, and most especially by working women. Last week, for instance, in an agricultural county I shared my umbrella during heavy rain with a maid servant, who was going home, “Is it true, Sir,” said she, “that they’re a-cutting down the feminine seck in London?” And she explained herself to mean that “they was murdering of ’em by ones and twos.” This is but one of many examples, and my own main interest in the matter is, that I myself have been taken for the murderer. And if I, why not any other elderly gentleman of quiet habits? It may therefore be well to record the fact by way of warning.

  Two days ago I was in one of the mining districts, had just called on my friend the parson of the parish, and was walking back in the twilight, alone, across certain lonely, grimy fields among the pits and forges. Suddenly I was approached from behind by a party of seven stout collier lads, each of them about 18 years old, except their leader, who was a stalwart young fellow of 23 or so, more than 6ft high. He rudely demanded my name, which, of course, I refused to give. “Then,” said he, “You are Jack the Ripper, and you’ll come along wi’ us to the police at—;” naming the nearest town, two miles off. I inquired what authority he had for proposing this arrangement. He hesitated a moment, and then replied that he was himself a constable, and had a warrant (against me, I suppose), but had left it at home. “And,” he added fiercely, “if you don’t come quietly at once, I’ll draw my revolver and blow your brains out.”

  “Draw it then,” said I, feeling pretty sure that he had no revolver. He did not draw it; and I told him that I should certainly not go with him. All this time I noticed that, though the whole seven stood around me, gesticulating and threatening, no one of them attempted to touch me. And, while I was considering how to accomplish my negative purpose, I saw a forgeman coming across the field from his work. Him I hailed; and, when he came up, I explained that these fellows were insulting me, and that, as the odds were seven to one, he ought to stand by me. He was a dull, quiet man, elderly like myself, and (as he justly remarked) quite ready for his tea.

  But, being an honest workman, he agreed to stand by me; and he and I moved away in spite of the leader of the gang, who vowed that he would take my ally in charge as well as me. The enemy, however, were not yet routed. They consulted together, and very soon pursued and overtook us; for we took care not to seem as fugitives. But, meanwhile, I had decided what to do, and had told my friend that I would walk with him as far as our paths lay together, and then I would trouble him to turn aside with me up to the cottage of a certain stout and worthy pitman whom I knew.

  Thus, then, we walked on over barren fields and slag-heaps for half a mile, surrounded by the seven colliers, who pressed in upon me, but still never touched me, though their leader continued his threats, and freely observed that, whatever I might do, I should certainly go with him to the town. At last we came into the road at a lonesome and murderous-looking spot, commanded on all sides by the mountainous shale-hills of disused pits. Up among these ran the path that led to the pitman’s dwellings which I was making for. When we reached it, I said to my friend the forgeman, “This is our way,” and turned towards the path.

  “That’s not your way,” shouted the tall man, “you’ll come along the road with us,” and he laid his hand on my collar. I shook him off, and informed him that he had now committed an assault, for which I could myself give him in charge. Perhaps it was only post hoc ergo propter hoc, but at any rate, he made no further attempt to prevent me and my friend from ascending the byway. He stuck to us, however, he and his mates; swearing that he would follow me all the night, if need were. We were soon on the top of the col, if I may so call it, from which the pitmen’s cottages, lighted within, were visible in the darkness against a starry sky.

  “That is where I am going,” I said aloud. To my surprise, the tall man answered in a somewhat altered tone, “How long shall you be?” “That depends,” I replied, “you had better come to the house with me.” “No,” said he, “I shall wait for you here;” and the forgeman and I walked up to the cottage together. At its door I dismissed my ally with thanks and a grateful coin; and entering in, I told my tale to my friend the stout pitman and his hearty wife, who heard it with indignation. In less than a minute, he and I sallied from his dwelling in search of the fellows who had dogged me. But they had vanished. Seeing me received and welcomed by people whom they knew, they doubtless felt that pursuit was futile and suspicion vain.

  Now, I do not object to adventures, even in the decline of life; nor do I much blame my antagonists, whether their motive were righteous indignation, or, as is more likely, the hope of reward. But I think them guilty of a serious and even dangerous error of judgment in not distinguishing between the appearance of Jack the Ripper and that of your obedient servant,

  AN ELDERLY GENTLEMAN

  Although it now appears that Sickert did not write this anonymous letter to The Times (for a while I entertained the possibility), he must have enjoyed the fright Jack the Ripper was causing people throughout England.

  “If the people here only new who I was they would shiver in their shoes,” the Ripper writes in a letter mailed from Clapham on November 22, 1889. And as an additional “ha ha” he uses the return address of “Punch & Judy St.” Sickert would have been familiar with Punch and Judy. The puppet plays were wildly popular, and his idol Degas adored Punch and Judy and wrote about the violent puppet plays in his letters.

  Granted, acceptable humor in the Victorian era differs from what is acceptable today. Some people find Punch and Judy offensive. Punch beats his infant daughter and throws her out a window. He repeatedly cracks his wife, Judy, on the head, “fairly splitting it in two.” He kicks his doctor and says, “There; don’t you feel the physic in your bowels? [Punch thrusts the end of the stick into the Doctor’s stomach: the Doctor falls down dead, and Punch, as before, tosses away the body with the end of his staff.] He, he, he! [Laughing.]”

  In Oswald Sickert’s Punch and Judy script, “Murder and Manslaughter or, The Devil Fooled,” the puppets’ cruel antics go beyond Punch’s spending all the household money on “spirits.”

  PUNCH DANCES AROUND WITH THE CHILD.

  (hits the child’s head against the railing, the child cries)

  . . . Oh don’t . . . be quiet my

  boy (puts him in the corner).

  I will get you something to eat (exits).

  PUNCH RETURNS, EXAMINES THE CHILD VERY CLOSELY.

  Have you already fallen? Be quiet, be quiet (exits, the child continues to cry)

  PUNCH WITH PORRIDGE AND SPOON.

  Son of my quiet love

  do not make me stroppy. There, now be quiet.

 
(Feeds the child porridge non-stop) there you go,there you go. Good heavens! . . . don’t you want

  to be quiet? Quiet, I say! There you go, there’s the rest of the porridge.

  (Turns the bowl upside down into the child’s face!)

  Now I have nothing left! (Shakes it crudely)

  You still won’t be quiet?

  . . . (throws the child out of the box)

  Oswald may have been writing and drawing Punch and Judy scripts and illustrations for the magazine Die Fliegende Blatter, and Walter eagerly anticipated every copy of the comical magazine the instant it came off the press. I am reasonably certain Walter Sickert would have been familiar with his father’s Punch and Judy illustrations and scripts, and several Ripper letters include Punch and Judy-like figures. Consistently, the woman is on her back, the man leaning over her, poised to stab her or strike a blow with his raised long dagger or stick.

  The author of the “Elderly Gentleman” letter to The Times may have been using the silly notion of an elderly gentleman being mistaken as the Ripper as an allusion to police and their desperate herding of great masses of “suspects” into police stations for questioning. By now, no East End male was immune from being interrogated. Every residence near the murders had been searched, and adult males of all ages—including men in their sixties—were scrutinized. When a man was taken to a police station, his safety was immediately compromised as angry neighbors looked on. The people of the East End wanted the Ripper. They wanted him badly. They would lynch him themselves if given the chance, and men under suspicion, even briefly, sometimes had to stay inside the police station until it was safe to venture out.

  East End bootmaker John Pizer—also known as “Leather Apron”—became a hunted man when the police found a wet leather apron in the backyard of 29 Hanbury Street, where Annie Chapman was murdered. The leather apron belonged to John Richardson. His mother had washed it and left it outside to dry. Police should have gotten their facts straight before word of this latest “evidence” rang out like a gunshot. Pizer may have been an abusive brute, but he was not a lust murderer. By the time it was clear the leather apron in the yard had nothing to do with the Ripper murders, Pizer dared not leave his room for fear of being torn apart by a mob.

  “That joke about Leather apron gave me real fits,” the Ripper wrote to the Central News Agency on September 25th.

  The Ripper was quite amused by many events he followed in the press, and he thrived on the chaos he caused and adored center stage. He wanted to interact with police and journalists, and he did. He reacted to what they wrote, and they reacted to his reactions until it became virtually impossible to tell who suggested or did what first. He responded to his audience and it responded to him, and Ripper letters began to include more personal touches that could be viewed as an indication of the fantasy relationship the Ripper began to develop with his adversaries.

  This sort of delusional thinking is not unusual in violent psychopaths. Not only do they believe they have relationships with the victims they stalk, but they bond in a cat-and-mouse way with the investigators who track them. When these violent offenders are finally apprehended and locked up, they tend to be amenable to interviews by police, psychologists, writers, film producers, and criminal justice students. They would probably talk their incarcerated lives away if their attorneys permitted it.

  The problem is, psychopaths don’t tell the truth. Every word they say is motivated by the desire to manipulate and by their insatiable egocentric need for attention and admiration. The Ripper wanted to impress his opponents. In his own warped way, he even wanted to be liked. He was brilliant and cunning. Even the police said so. He was amusing. He probably believed that the police enjoyed a few laughs at his funny little games. “Catch me if you can,” he repeatedly wrote. “I can write 5 hand writings,” he boasted in a letter on October 18th. “You can’t trace me by this writing,” he bragged in another letter on November 10th. He often signed letters “your friend.”

  If the Ripper was offstage too long, it bothered him. If the police seemed to forget about him, he wrote the press. On September 11, 1889, the Ripper wrote, “Dear Sir Please will you oblige me by putting this into your paper to let the people of England now [know] that I hum [am] still living and running at large as yet.” He also made numerous references to going “abroad.” “I intend finishing my work late in August when I shall sail for abroad,” the Ripper wrote in a letter police received July 20, 1889. Later—just how much later we don’t know—a bottle washed ashore between Deal and Sandwich, which are across the Straits of Dover from France.

  There appears to be no record of who found the bottle and when, or what kind of bottle it was, but inside it was a scrap of lined paper dated September 2, 1889, and written on it was “S.S. Northumbria Castle Left ship. Am on trail again Jack the Ripper.” The area of the southeast coast of England where the bottle was found is very close to Ramsgate, Broadstairs, and Folkestone.

  At least one Ripper letter was mailed from Folkestone. Sickert painted in Ramsgate and may have visited there during 1888 and 1889, as it was a very popular resort and he loved sea air and swimming. There was a steamer from Folkestone to France that Sickert would take on numerous occasions in his life, and there was a direct line from nearby Dover to Calais. None of this proves Sickert wrote a Ripper note, tucked it inside a bottle, and tossed it overboard or offshore from a beach. But he was familiar with the Kent coast of England. He liked it enough to live in Broadstairs in the 1930s.

  The frustration comes when one tries to trace the Ripper’s locations on a map in hopes of following him along his tortuous, murderous path. As usual, he was a master of creating illusions. On November 8, 1888, a Ripper letter mailed from the East End boasted, “I am going to France and start my work there.” Three days later, on the 11th, the letter from Folkestone arrived, which might hint that the Ripper really was making his way to France. But the problem is, on that same day, November 11th, the Ripper also wrote a letter from Kingston-on-Hull, some two hundred miles north of Folkestone. How could the same person have written both letters during the same twenty-four hours?

  A possibility is that the Ripper wrote letters in batches, not only to compare his own handwriting styles and make certain they were different, but also to give them all the same date and mail them from different locations or make it appear they were mailed from different locations. A letter the Ripper dated November 22, 1888, was written on paper with the A Pirie & Sons watermark. Supposedly, the Ripper mailed it from East London. Another letter on A Pirie & Sons paper, also dated November 22, 1888, claims the Ripper is in Manchester. In two other letters that do not appear to have watermarks (one may have but is too torn to tell) and are also dated November 22nd, he claims to be in North London and in Liverpool.

  If one assumes that all of these November 22nd letters were written by the same person—and they bear similarities that make this plausible—then how could the Ripper have mailed them from London and Liverpool on the same day? The absence of postmarks precludes knowing with certainty when and where a letter was actually posted, and I do not accept as fact any dates or locations on letters that do not include postmarks. Inside a Ripper envelope with the postmark 1896, for example, was a letter the Ripper dated “1886.” This was either a mistake or an attempt to be misleading.

  It is within the realm of possibility that the postmarks may have been different from the dates or locations—or both—that the Ripper wrote on some of his letters. Once the police opened the letters, they wrote down the dates and locations in their case books and the envelope was discarded or lost. The actual dates the Ripper wrote on the letters could be inconsistent by a day or maybe two, and who was going to notice or care? But a day or two could make quite a difference to a man on the run who wants to throw off the police by appearing to be in London, Lille, Dublin, Innerleithen, and Birmingham on October 8th.

  It would have been possible for a person to be in more than one distant location in a twenty
-four-hour period. One could get about fairly rapidly by train. Based on the schedules in an 1887 Bradshaw’s Railway Guide, Sickert could have left Euston Station in London at 6:00 A.M., arrived in Manchester at 11:20 A.M., changed to another train, and left at noon to arrive in Liverpool forty-five minutes later. From Liverpool he could have gone on to Southport on the coast and arrived in an hour and seven minutes.

  In mid-September 1888, the decomposing body of a boy was found in an abandoned house in Southport. At his inquest on the 18th, the jury returned an open verdict. It does not appear that the boy’s identity or cause of death were ever known, but the police strongly suspected that he was murdered.

  “Any youth I see I will kill,” the Ripper wrote on November 26, 1888.

  “I will do the murder in an empty house,” the Ripper wrote in an undated letter.

  Train travel in England was excellent at that time. Sleeper trains were also available. One could leave London at 6:35 in the evening, have a pleasant dinner and a good night’s sleep, and wake up in Aberdeen, Scotland, at five minutes before ten the next morning. One could leave Paddington Station in London at 9:00 P.M. and wake up in Plymouth at 4:15 A.M., take another train to St. Austell in Cornwall, and end up near Lizard Point, the southernmost tip of England. A number of Ripper letters were written from Plymouth or near it. Plymouth was the most convenient destination were one headed to Cornwall by train.