Portrait of a Killer

by Patricia Cornwell

  Sickert knew Cornwall. In early 1884, he and Whistler spent quite a lot of time there painting at St. Ives, one of Cornwall’s most popular seaside spots for artists. In a late-1887 letter to Whistler, Sickert indicated that he was planning on going to Cornwall. He may have visited Cornwall frequently. That southwest part of England has always been attractive to artists because of its majestic cliffs and views of the sea, and its picturesque harbors.

  Cornwall would have been a good place for Sickert to tuck himself away when he wanted to rest and “hide.” During the Victorian era there was a popular private house called Hill’s Hotel—affectionately known as “The Lizard”—at Lizard Point, a narrow peninsula of farmland and steep, rocky cliffs about twenty miles from St. Ives. The sea crashes all around the peninsula. A visit today requires parking into the wind lest it rip off your car door.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  THE GUEST BOOK

  In the spring of 2001, award-winning food writer Michael Raffael was working on a Food & Travel feature and happened to stay at the Rockland Bed & Breakfast at Lizard Point. The B&B is a modest 1950s farmhouse that can sleep seven, and the woman who owns it is the only living remnant of The Lizard Hotel’s distant and illustrious past.

  It had been a hard year for Joan Hill, who inherited The Lizard guest books and other records that had been in her husband’s family for 125 years. Cornwall had been in the throes of foot-and-mouth disease, and her son is a farmer. Government restrictions reduced his income, and Mrs. Hill, recently widowed, found her business all but gone when quarantines kept tourists far away from anything with hooves.

  Michael Raffael recalled that while he was there, Mrs. Hill began telling him stories about the prosperous days when The Lizard was frequented by artists, writers, Members of Parliament, and lords and ladies. Scans through guest books show the introverted scrawl of Henry James and the confident flourish of William Gladstone. Artist and critic George Moore knew The Lizard. Sickert knew James but thought his writing was boring. Sickert was a crony of Moore’s and tended to make fun of him. Artist Fred Hall stayed there, and Sickert couldn’t stand him at all.

  Food and drink were enjoyed with abandon, the rates were reasonable, and people would travel from as far away as South Africa and the United States to vacation on that desolate spit of land jutting out into the sea. They would forget about their cares for a while as they strolled, rode bicycles, and went sightseeing in the bracing air, or read in front of the fire. Sickert could have mingled with interesting people he did not know, or kept to himself. He could have wandered to the cliffs to sketch—or just wandered, as was his habit. He could have taken excursions by train or horse and carriage to other villages, including St. Ives. Sickert could easily have gotten away with registering under an assumed name. He could have signed anything he liked in the guest book.

  The Lizard had survived two world wars and was a romance from a long-ago past. The Hills sold the three-hundred-year-old farmhouse in 1950 and opened the small Rockland B&B. Mrs. Hill was telling Michael Raffael all this, and perhaps because he took the time to listen, she was reminded of the old guest book dated from 1877 to July 15, 1888, and dug it out of a cupboard. He “spent maybe thirty minutes flicking through it, mostly by myself,” when he came across drawings and the name “Jack the Ripper.” “From their position on the page in the book, from the style of handwriting and from the sepia ink I can assure you that the Jack entry was most probably contemporaneous with the book and the other entries around it,” he wrote to me after ABC’s Diane Sawyer interviewed me about Jack the Ripper on a Prime Time special.

  I contacted Mrs. Hill, who verified that the book existed and had Jack the Ripper entries and some drawings, and I could see it if I liked. Within days I was on a plane to Cornwall.

  I arrived with friends, and we were the only guests. The village was virtually deserted and swept by cold winds blowing up from the English Channel. Mrs. Hill is a guileless, shy woman in her early sixties who worries a lot about the happiness of her guests and cooks breakfasts far too big for comfort. She has lived in Cornwall all her life and had never heard of Sickert or Whistler but was remotely familiar with the name “Jack the Ripper.”

  “I believe I know the name. But I don’t know anything about him,” she said, except she knew he was a very bad man.

  The sketches Raffael was referring to when he alerted me about the guest book are ink drawings of a man and a woman on a stroll. The man, who is dressed in a cutaway and top hat, and has both monocle and umbrella, has “Jack the Ripper” written in pencil by his very big nose. He is staring at the woman from the rear, and a balloon has been drawn coming out of his mouth. “Aint she a beauty though,” he says.

  The woman, in feathered hat, bodice, bustle, and flounces, says, “Ain’t I lovely.” In another balloon underneath is the comment, “only by Jack the Ripper.” What was neither noticed nor of much interest, perhaps, was everything else in this remarkable book. An ugly mole has been drawn on a woman’s nose, and penciled in under her clothes are her naked breasts and legs. The page is filled in with scribbles and comments and allusions to Shakespeare, most of it crude and snide. I took the book upstairs to my room, and other details I began to notice kept me up until 3:00 A.M., the space heater on high as the wind howled and the water pounded beyond my window.

  The annotations and dozens of doodles and drawings and malicious remarks were astonishing and completely unexpected, and I suddenly felt as if Sickert were in my room.

  Someone—I am convinced it was Sickert, but I will refer to the person as the “vandal”—went through that book with lead pencil, violet-colored pencil, and pen, and wrote rude, sarcastic, childish, and violent annotations on most of the pages:

  bosh! fools, fool, a big fool, wiseass. Hell fool, Ha and Ha Ha, Dear Dear! Funny, O Lord, of girls oh fie (slang when encountering an immoral woman), garn (vulgar slang for gal), donkey (slang for penis), Dummkopf (German for idiot), ta ra ra boon de á (refrain of a music-hall song), henfool (seventeenth-century slang for a prostitute or mistress), Ballhead, Bosh! Bosh!! Bosh!!! or under “Reverend” scrawling 3 times married, or after another person’s name jotting Became a Snob or altering a guest’s name to read Parchedigass.

  The vandal writes snide ditties on pages filled with cheery comments about what a lovely place Hill’s Hotel was, how comfortable it was, how good the food was, and how modest the rates were:

  “As I fell out/They all fell in/The rest they ran away.”

  “Rather a queer sort of place.”

  If a guest had tried his hand at a verse or two, he thereby set himself up for a blasting, such as a rhyme by F. E. Marshall from Chester:Misfortune overtook me here

  Still had I little cause to fear

  Since Hill’s kind care cause my every ill

  To disappear—after a pill [the vandal added]

  The vandal drew a cartoon face and remarked, “How Brilliant!!!” After another guest’s bad poem the vandal wrote:A Poet is he? It would be rash

  To call one so who wrote such trash.

  The moon forsooth in all her glory

  Had surely touched his upper storey!!

  The vandal corrects the spelling and grammar of guests. This seems to have been a habit of Sickert’s. In his copy of Ellen Terry’s autobiography, in which she makes no mention of Sickert, he has a good deal to say about her spelling, grammar, and diction. Sickert’s copy of the book, which I purchased from his nephew by marriage, John Lessore, is filled with Sickert’s annotations and corrections, all in pencil. He changed and added to Terry’s accounts of events, as if he knew her life better than she did.

  Another bad poem by a guest at Hill’s Hotel ends with “Receive all thanks O hostess fare.” The vandal makes the correction “fair” and follows it with three exclamation marks. He turns the “O” into a funny little cartoon with arms and legs. Under this, he jots cockney slang, “garn Bill that aint a gal,” in response to a guest’s mention of having visited the inn w
ith “my wife.”

  “Why do you leave out your apostrophe?” the vandal complains on another page, and includes another cartoon. Turn that page and there is yet another cartoon, this one reminiscent of some of the impish, elfin sketches in the Sickert collection at Islington Public Libraries. The S’s in the signature of “Sister Helen” and her address of “S. Saviour’s Priory London” are turned into dollar signs.

  On the bottom of a page, obviously penciled in after that page was already filled, was “Jack the Ripper, Whitechapel.” On another page, a guest’s London address had been penciled over with “Whitechapel.” I noticed drawings of a bearded man in a cutaway exposing his circumcised penis, and a Punch and Judy-like drawing of a woman striking a child on the head with a long stick. Ink blots had been turned into figures. In some Ripper letters, ink blots were turned into figures.

  On two other pages, the vandal signs his name “Baron Ally Sloper.” I suppose the “Baron” is ironical—a very Sickert-like snipe at English aristocrats. Sloper was a lowlife, sleazy cartoon figure with a big red nose and tattered top hat and a habit of eluding the rent man. He was very popular with the English lower class and appeared in a periodical and penny dreadfuls between 1867 and 1884, then again in 1916. “Tom Thumb and his wife” signed the book August 1, 1886, even though Tom Thumb (Charles Sherwood Stratton) had died July 15, 1883. There are far too many examples to cite here. The guest book—or “ASSES BOOK,” as the vandal called it—is remarkable. After Dr. Anna Gruetzner Robins studied it, she agreed. “Certainly no one could dispute that these drawings match the drawings in the Ripper letters,” she said. “These are very skilled pen drawings.” One of them, she said, is a caricature of Whistler.

  Dr. Robins noticed many details in the guest book that eluded me, including a message in poor German and Italian written over one of the male cartoon figures. Roughly translated, the vandal is saying he is “The Ripper Doctor” and has “cooked up a good meat [or flesh] dish in Italy. News! News!” The play on words and the innuendos, which are difficult to convey in translation, says Dr. Robins, are that the Ripper killed a woman in Italy and cooked her flesh into a tasty meal. Several Ripper letters refer to cooking his victims’ organs. Some serial killers do engage in cannibalism. It is possible that Sickert did. It is also possible that he cooked up parts of his victims and served them to his guests. Of course, the suggestions of cooking human flesh could be nothing more than taunts meant to disgust and shock.

  Dr. Robins believes, as do I, that Sickert’s hand is behind the insults, annotations, and most of the drawings in The Lizard guest book. Such names as Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh are penciled in and are people Sickert knew or painted. Dr. Robins suspects that male cartoon figures with different hats and beards may be self-portraits of Sickert in Ripper disguises. A drawing of “a local rustic damsel” in the book may suggest that Sickert murdered a woman while he was in Cornwall.

  I bought the guest book from Mrs. Hill. It has been studied by many experts, including forensic paper analyst Peter Bower, who says that nothing about the paper and binding is “out of period.” The Lizard guest book is considered so extraordinary by those who have examined it that it is now at the Tate Archive for further study and much-needed conservation.

  The Jack the Ripper name did not appear in public until September 17, 1888—two months after The Lizard guest book was filled, on July 15, 1888. My explanation for how the signatures of “Jack the Ripper” could appear in the guest book is fairly simple. Sickert visited The Lizard at some point after the Ripper crimes were committed, and he vandalized the guest book. This may have occurred in October 1889, because in very small writing in pencil, almost in the gutter of the book, there appears to be the monogram “W” on top of an “R,” followed by an “S,” and the date “October 1889.”

  While the date is very clear, the monogram is not. It could be a cipher or tease, and I would expect nothing less than that from Sickert. October 1889 would have been a good time for him to flee to the southernmost tip of England. About a month earlier, on September 10th, another female torso was found in the East End, this time under a railway arch off Pinchin Street.

  It is interesting—an eerie coincidence, perhaps—that fourteen years earlier, in 1875, Henry and Thomas Wainright were convicted of the murder and dismemberment of a woman named Harriet Lane. The crime occurred at the same time of year (on or about September 11th) as the 1889 murder and dismemberment of the unidentified woman whose torso was found off Pinchin Street. In the 1875 case, the victim was murdered and dismembered in Whitechapel, and her body parts were bound in parcels of cloth tied with string. The case was highly publicized and written up in sensational tabloids and pamphlets. Was Sickert aware of the notorious and gruesome slaying of Harriet Lane? He may have been. (Ancedotal material certainly makes it clear that he was fascinated with another of England’s legendary killers, Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen, who murdered and dismembered his wife in 1910.)

  The modus operandi suggested by the female torso that was discovered in the East End on September 10, 1889, was all too familiar. A constable’s routine beat had taken him past the very spot, and he hadn’t noticed anything unusual. Less than thirty minutes later, he passed by again and discovered a bundle just off the pavement. The torso was missing its head and legs, but for some reason the killer had left the arms. The hands were smooth and the nails were certainly not those of someone who led a terribly hard life. The fabric of what was left of her dress was silk, which the police traced to a manufacturer in Bradford. It was a physician’s opinion that the victim had been dead several days. Oddly enough, her torso had been found in the place that the London office of the New York Herald had been alerted to some days before its discovery.

  At midnight on September 8th, a man dressed as a soldier approached a newspaper carrier outside the offices of the Herald, and the “soldier” exclaimed that there had been another terrible murder and mutilation. He gave the location as the area off Pinchin Street where the torso was eventually found. The newspaper carrier rushed inside the newspaper building and informed the night editors, who rode off in a hansom to find the body. There wasn’t one. The “soldier” vanished, and the torso turned up on September 10th. The victim was probably already dead at midnight on September 8th, based on the drying of her tissue. Draped over a paling near her dismembered body was a stained cloth that was the sort women wore during their menstrual periods.

  “You had better be carefull How you send those Bloodhounds about the streets because of the single females wearing stained napkins—women smell very strong when they are unwell,” the Ripper wrote October 10, 1888.

  “. . . wrapt in a clean napkin like a lady’s dirty valent!” Sickert crudely wrote in a letter (circa late 1890s), describing a ham his friend Rothenstein had sent him.

  Once again, the killer had managed to conceal bodies and body parts and carry them in what must have been heavy bundles, which he then dropped virtually at a policeman’s feet.

  “I had to over come great difficulties in bringing the bodies where I hid them,” the Ripper wrote on October 22, 1888.

  Twelve days after the woman’s torso was found, the Weekly Dispatch reprinted a story from the London edition of the New York Herald, reporting that a landlord claimed to know the “identification” of Jack the Ripper. The landlord, who is not named in the story, said he was convinced that the Ripper had rented rooms in his house, and that this “lodger” would come in “about four o’clock in the morning,” when everybody was asleep. One early morning, the landlord happened to be up when the lodger came in. He was “excited and incoherent in his talk.” He claimed he had been assaulted, his watch stolen, and “he gave the name of a police station,” where he had reported the incident.

  The landlord checked out the information and was told by police that no such report had been filed. The landlord got increasingly suspicious when he found the man’s freshly washed shirt and underclothing draped over chairs. The lodger “had th
e habit of talking about the women of the street, and wrote ‘long rigmaroles’” about them in handwriting resembling “that of letters sent to the police purporting to come from Jack the Ripper,” according to the news story. The lodger had “eight suits of clothes, eight pairs of boots, and eight hats.” He could speak several languages and “when he went out he always carried a black bag.” He never wore the same hat two nights in a row.

  Shortly after the torso was discovered near Pinchin Street, the lodger told the landlord he was going abroad and left abruptly. When the landlord went inside the rooms, he discovered that the lodger had left “bows, feathers and flowers, and other articles which had belonged to the lower class of women,” and three pairs of leather lace-up boots and three pairs of “galoshes” with India rubber soles and American cloth uppers that were “bespattered with blood.”

  The Ripper obviously kept up with the news and was aware of this story as it appeared in the London edition of the New York Herald, or perhaps in some other paper such as the Weekly Dispatch. In the Ripper’s poem of November 8, 1889, he makes clear references to the tale told by the landlord:

  “Togs 8 suits, many hats I wear.”

  He denies he was the peculiar lodger who wrote “rigmaroles” about immoral women:Some months hard gone near Finsbury Sqre:

  An eccentric man lived with an unmarried pair—

  The tale is false there never was a lad,

  Who wrote essays on women bad.

  It is hard to believe that Walter Sickert would leave boots or any incriminating belongings in rooms he had rented unless he wanted these items to be found. Maybe Sickert had stayed in that lodging house, maybe he never did. But wittingly or not, the Ripper left a wake of suspicion and created more drama. He may even have lurked somewhere behind the curtain of the next act, an account of which was printed right under the story about the “lodger” in the Weekly Dispatch.