Portrait Of A Killer: Jack The Ripper - Case Closed

Chapter Fifteen. A Painted Letter

Walter Sickert was a forensic scientist's worst adversary. He was like a twister tearing through a lab.

He created investigative chaos with his baffling varieties of papers, pens, paints, postmarks, and disguised handwritings, and by his constant moving about without leaving a trail through diaries, calendars, or dates on most of his letters and work. His knockout punch to forensic science was to decide to be cremated. When a body is burned at 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit, that's the end of DNA. If Sickert left behind samples blood or hair that we could be certain were his, we have yet to find them.

Not even a pedigree of Sickert's DNA can be attempted because that would require a sample from his children or siblings. Sickert had no children. His sister had no children. As far as anyone can tell, none of his four brothers had children. To exhume Sickert's mother, father, or siblings on the remote chance that their mitochondrial DNA might have something in common with what Bode laboratories miraculously managed to conjure up from the genetic fragments of past lives we gave them would be ridiculous and unthinkable.

The Ripper case is not one to be conclusively solved by DNA or fingerprints, and in a way, this is good. Society has come to expect the wizardry of forensic science to solve all crimes, but without the human element of deductive skills, teamwork, very hard investigation, and smart prosecution, evidence means nothing. Had we gotten an irrefutable DNA match of a Sickert and a Ripper letter, any sharp defense attorney would say that Sickert's writing a letter doesn't prove he murdered anyone. Perhaps he simply composed a number of Ripper letters because he had a wacky, warped sense of humor. A good prosecutor would counter that if Sickert wrote even one of those Ripper letters, he was in trouble, because the letters are confessional. In them, the Ripper claims to have murdered and mutilated people he calls by name, and he threatens to kill government officials and police.

The watermarks add yet another layer. To date, three Ripper letters and eight Sickert letters have the A Pirie amp; Sons watermark. It seems that from 1885 to 1887, the Sickerts' 54 Broadhurst Gardens stationery was A Pirie, and was folded at the middle like a greeting card. The front of the fold was bordered in pale blue, the embossed address also pale blue. The A Pirie amp; Sons watermark is centered on the crease. In the three Ripper letters, the stationery was torn along the crease and only half of the A Pirie amp; Sons watermark remains.

Unless Jack the Ripper was incredibly stupid, he would have removed the side of folded stationery that was embossed with the address. This is not to say that criminals haven't been known to make numbskull oversights, such as leaving a driver's license at a crime scene or writing a "stick-up" note on a deposit slip that includes the bank robber's address and Social Security number. But Jack the Ripper did not make fatal errors, or he would have been caught at the time of his crimes.

Jack the Ripper was also arrogant and did not believe he would ever be caught. Sickert must not have been worried about the partial watermarks on the Ripper letters he wrote. Perhaps this was another "catch me if you can" taunt. The A Pirie amp; Sons watermarks we found on Sickert stationery include a watermarked date of manufacturing, and the three partial dates on the Ripper letters with the A Pirie amp; Sons watermark are 18 and 18 and 87. The 87, obviously, is 1887.

Repeated trips to archives turned up other matching watermarks that must not have worried Sickert, either. Letters Sickert wrote to Jacques-Emile Blanche in 1887 are on stationery with the address embossed in black, and a Joynson Superfine watermark. A search through the Blanche-Sickert correspondence in the Institut Bibliotheque de L'Institut de France in Paris shows that during the late summer and fall of 1888 and in the spring of 1889, Sickert was still using Joynson Superfine paper with the return address of 54 Broadhurst Gardens either embossed with no color or in bright red with a red border.

Letters Ellen wrote to Blanche as late as 1893 with a 10 Glebe Place, Chelsea, return address are on stationery that also has the Joynson Superfine watermark. In the Whistler collection at Glasgow, there are seven Sickert letters with the Joynson Superfine watermarks, and it would appear that Sickert was using this stationery about the same time he was using A Pirie amp; Sons.

In the Sir William Rothenstein collection at Harvard University's Department of Manuscripts, I found two other Sickert letters with the Joynson Superfine watermark. Rothenstein was an artist and a writer, and a trusted enough friend of Sickert's that the latter felt comfortable asking him to lie under oath. During the late 1890s, Sickert had become friendly with a Madame Villain, a fishwife in Dieppe he referred to as "Titine." Although there was no evidence he committed adultery with her, she did supply him room and board and a space in her small home that he used as a studio. Whatever the nature of their relationship, it would have been used against him in court had he contested Ellen's divorce suit, which he did not. "If subpoenaed," he wrote to Rothenstein in 1899, during the divorce, "you might truly remain as you are in ignorance of Titine's very name. You might say I always call her 'Madame.' "

Both Joynson Superfine watermarked letters that Sickert wrote to Rothenstein are undated. One of them - oddly, written in German and Italian - is on stationery that must have belonged to Sickert's mother because the return address is hers. A second Joynson Superfine watermarked letter to Rothenstein, which includes mathematical scribbles and a cartoonish face and the word "ugh," has a return address of 10 Glebe Place, Chelsea, which is the same return address on Ellen Sickert's 1893 letter to Blanche. There is a Ripper letter at the PRO with a part Joynson mark. It would appear that Sickert used Joynson Superfine watermarked paper from the late 1880s through the late 1890s. I have found no letters with this watermark that date from after his divorce in 1899, when he moved to continental Europe.

Four letters catalogued in "The Whitechapel Murders" file at the Corporation of London Records Office were written on Joynson Superfine paper: October 8, 1888; October 16, 1888; January 29, 1889; and February 16,1889. Two of these letters are signed "Nemo." Three other letters with no watermarks are also signed "Nemo." On October 4, 1888 (four days before the first "Nemo" letter was written to the City of London Police), The Times published a letter to the editor that was signed "Nemo." In it the writer described "mutilations, cutting off the nose and ears, ripping up the body, and cutting out certain organs - the heart, amp; c. -…" The writer continued:

My theory would be that some man of his class has been hocussed and then robbed of his savings (often large), or, as he considers, been in some way greatly injured by a prostitute - perhaps one of the earlier victims; and then has been led by fury and revenge to take the lives of as many of the same class as he can…

Unless caught red-handed, such a man in ordinary life would be harmless enough, polite, not to say obsequious, in his manners, and about the last a British policeman would suspect.

But when the villain is primed with his opium, or bang, or gin, and inspired with his lust for slaughter and blood, he would destroy his defenceless victim with the ferocity and cunning of the tiger; and past impunity and success would only have rendered him the more daring and restless.

Your obedient servant October 2 NEMO

I have already mentioned that Sickert's stage name when he was an actor was "Mr. Nemo."

Other unusual signatories in the some fifty letters at the Corporation of London Records Office are suspiciously reminiscent of those of some PRO Ripper letters: "Justitia," "Revelation," "Ripper," "Nemesis," "A Thinker," "May-bee," "A friend," "an accessary," and "one that has had his eyes opened." Quite a number of these fifty letters were written in October 1888 and also include both art and comments similar to those found in the Jack the Ripper letters at the PRO. For example, in a PRO letter to the Editor of the Daily News Office, October 1, 1888, the Ripper says, "I've got someone to write this for me." In an undated letter at the Corporation of London Records Office, the anonymous sender says, "I've got someone to write this for me."

Other "Whitechapel Murder" letters in the Corporation of London Records Office include a postcard dated October 3rd, with the anonymous sender using many of the same threats, words, and phrases found in Ripper letters at the PRO: "send you my victims ears"; "It amuses me that you think I am mad"; "Just a card to let you know"; "I will write to you again soon"; and "My bloody ink is running out." On October 6,1888, "Anonymous" offers a suggestion that the killer might be keeping "the victims silent by pressure on certain nerves in the neck," and adds that an additional benefit to subduing the victim is that the killer can "preserve his own person and clothing comparatively unstained." In October 1888, an anonymous letter written in red ink uses the terms "spanky ass" and "Saucy Jacky" and promises to "send next ears I clip to Charly Warren."

An undated letter includes a bit of newspaper attached by a rusty paperclip. When my co-worker, Irene Shulgin, removed the clipping and turned it over, she found the phrase "author of works of art." In a letter dated October 7, 1888, the writer signs his name "Homo Sum," Latin for "I am a man." On October 9, 1888, an anonymous writer takes offense, once again, at being thought of as a lunatic: "Don't you rest content on the lunacy fad." Other anonymous letters offer tips to the police, encouraging officers to disguise themselves as women and wear "chain armour" or "light steel collars" under their clothes. An anonymous letter of October 20, 1888, claims the "motive for the crimes is hatred and spite against the authorities of Scotland Yard one of whom is marked as a victim."

In a July 1889 letter a writer signs his letter "Qui Vir," Latin for "Which Man." In a letter Sickert wrote to Whistler in 1897, he rather sarcastically refers to his former "impish master" as "Ecce homo," or "behold the man." In the "Qui Vir" letter, which is at the Corporation of London Records Office, the writer suggests that the killer is "able to choose a time to do the murder 8c get back to his hiding place." On September 11,1889, an anonymous writer teases police by saying he always travels in "third class Cerage" and "I ware black wiskers all over my face." Approximately twenty percent of these Corporation of London Records Office letters have watermarks, including, as I mentioned, the Joynson Superfine. I also found a Monckton's Superfine watermark on a letter signed "one of the public." A letter Sickert wrote to Whistler in the mid to late 1880s also has a Monckton's Superfine watermark.

Certainly, I wouldn't dare claim that these letters were written by Sickert or even Jack the Ripper, but the anonymous communications fit the profile of a violent psychopath who taunts police and tries to insert him-or herself into the investigation. Watermarks and language aside, the problem of handwriting remains. The amazing variety found in the Ripper letters has been a source of hot debate. Many people, including forensic documents examiners, have argued that it is not possible for one person to write in so many hands.

This is not necessarily true, says paper historian and forensic paper analyst Peter Bower, one of the most respected paper experts in the world, and perhaps best known for his work on the papers used by artists as various as Michelangelo, J.M.W. Turner, Constable, and others - as well as for determining that the notorious Jack the Ripper diary was a fraud. Bower has assisted in our examination of the Ripper/Sickert letters. He says he has seen "good calligraphers" who can write in an incredible number of different hands, but "it takes extraordinary skill." His wife, Sally Bower, is a much respected letterer, or person who designs and draws lettering. Although she is not a handwriting expert, she has a different perspective because she is an expert in how a person forms the letters strung together in words. When she looked through Ripper letters with her husband, she immediately connected a number of letters through quirks and how the hand made the writing. I have no doubt that Sickert had an amazing ability to write in many different hands, but his disguised writings are becoming less concealing as the investigation progresses.

Peter Bower's vast knowledge of paper obviously includes watermarks; his opinion of those we have found is that A Pirie 8t Sons and Joynson Superfine "would not have been the commonest paper." But the watermarks were not necessarily uncommon in the late nineteenth century. Monckton's Superfine was a rarer watermark and Monckton's also manufactured artists' drawing and watercolor paper.

Matching watermarks do not necessarily mean the paper was from the same batch, and almost none of the Sickert letters or Sickert/Ripper letters are from the same batch, says Peter Bower, who spent days going through Sickert and Ripper archives and measuring the paper using a 3 Ox lens to study the measurements, fiber content, and distances between chain lines. When paper is manufactured by machine, as A Pirie and Joynson and Monckton's were, the paper comes from one batch, meaning it is from the same roll. Another batch with the same watermark and a fiber content that is relatively the same may have slight differences in measurements of the sheets of paper due to the speed of drying or the way the machine cut it.

These characteristics - measurements and spacing between the wire the paper was formed on - are the paper's Y profile, and matching Y profiles mean the paper came from the same batch. Bower says it is not unusual for an individual to have stationery that comes from many batches, and that even when the paper is ordered from the stationer, there could be different batches mixed in, although the watermarks and embossing or engraving are the same. The discrepancies in the Sickert and Ripper letters pertain to their measurements. For example, the "Dear Openshaw" letter with the A Pirie watermark is from the same batch as the November 22nd A Pirie Ripper letter mailed from London, but not from the same batch as the other November 22nd A Pirie letter supposedly mailed from Manchester. Clearly, the Ripper had a mixture of A Pirie batches when he wrote these November 22nd letters, unless one wishes to make the case that there were two different individuals who just happened to write Ripper letters on A Pirie 8c Sons paper of the same type and color on November 22nd.

Differences in measurements can, in some instances, be attributed to conservation. When paper is heated by applying a protective membrane, for example, the paper shrinks slightly. More probable is that the differences in measurements can be explained by reorders from the stationer. During the late 1880s, personalized stationery was usually ordered in a quire, or twenty-four sheets, including unprinted second sheets. A reorder of the same personalized stationery on the same type of paper with the same watermark could quite easily come from a different batch. Or perhaps the stationer used a different standard size, such as Post quarto, which was approximately seven by nine inches, or Commercial Note, which was eight by five inches, or Octavo Note, which was nominally seven by four-and-a-half inches.

An example of a discrepancy in paper size is a Ripper letter with a Joynson Superfine watermark that was sent to the City of London Police. The torn half of the folded stationery measures 6% inches by 9%o inches. Another Ripper letter on the same type of paper with the same watermark was sent to the Metropolitan Police and that stationery is Commercial Note, or eight by five inches. A Sickert letter written on Monckton's Superfine that we examined in Glasgow measures seven and one-eighth inches by nine inches, while a Ripper letter sent to the City of London Police on the same type of paper with a matching Monckton's Superfine watermark measures seven and one-eighth inches by eight and nine-tenths. Most likely, this suggests the Monckton's Superfine stationery is from different batches, but this by no means indicates it was from different Ripper letter-writers.

I point out these different paper batches only because a defense attorney would. In fact, paper of the same type and watermark but from different batches doesn't necessarily mean a setback in a case and, as Bower pointed out, having studied other artists' paper, he "would expect to find variations like this." Bower also discovered paper in Ripper letters that did not have variations, and because they also had no watermarks, these letters were not really noticed by anyone else. Two Ripper letters written to the Metropolitan Police and one Ripper letter written to the City of London Police are on matching very cheap pale blue paper - and for three letters to come from the same batch of paper strongly indicates that the same person wrote them, just as matching watermarks, especially three different types of matching watermarks, are hard to dismiss as coincidence.

Our discovery of "matching" watermarks has been a source of great excitement for all of us working the Ripper case, but I must admit that a not-so-good watermark moment came early in the investigation. The head of conservation at the Public Record Office, Mario Aleppo, contacted me and said his staff had found numerous other A Pirie amp; Sons watermarks and I might want to have a look. I immediately returned to London and discovered to my horror that the A Pirie amp; Sons watermarks were not on Ripper letters but on the stationery the Metropolitan Police were using at the time. I was shocked. For a moment, I was completely unnerved and thought my life might disintegrate right before my eyes. There has always been a theory that Jack the Ripper was a cop.

The A Pirie amp; Sons watermark on the Metropolitan Police stationery is the only other non-Sickert/Ripper-related A Pirie watermark I have found during my research, but I am happy to report that the watermark on the Metropolitan Police stationery is quite different from the one on the Ripper and the Sickert letters. The police stationery watermark has no date and includes the words LD and Register. The paper is of a different quality and color. It is eight by eleven inches and not greeting-card size. Besides the difference in the wording and design of the watermarks, the police paper is wove and the Sickert/Ripper paper is laid.

The firm Alexander Pirie 8c Sons, Ltd., got its start in the paper-making business in 1770 in Aberdeen, and its rapid growth and respected reputation resulted in the acquisition of cotton mills, plants, and factories in London, Glasgow, Dublin, Paris, New York, St. Petersburg, and Bucharest. A Pirie didn't become a separate company until 1864, and from this information one might presume that there was no A Pirie amp;c Sons watermark prior to that date. However, existing records in Aberdeen do not indicate exactly when A Pirie began using its name on watermarks. A Pirie became a limited-liability company in 1882, merged with another firm in 1922, and went out of business at some point in the 1950s.

The records of A Pirie 8c Sons are preserved in a strong room at the Stoneywood Mills in Aberdeen. Keenly aware of my limitations as a paper-manufacturing or stationery expert, I asked antiquarian books and documents researcher Joe Jameson if he would go to Aberdeen and look through thousands of A Pirie records. For two cold, rainy days, he dug through boxes and was able to ascertain migraine-producing details about lime waste, rag boiling, paper machines, how many tons of soda were ordered, sediment removed from river water, shareholders, sketches of trademarks, types of paper manufactured - just about anything one might want to know about how paper was made from the late 1700s until the 1950s.

Over the better part of a century, tons of Alexander Pirie amp; Sons paper were shipped to London and other parts of the world. This prestigious company was proprietary and did not hesitate to sue if another manufacturer tried to delude the public into thinking its paper was made by A Pirie amp; Sons. The obvious question in this case is exactly what I asked Peter Bower: How common was the A Pirie watermark found on the three Ripper and eight Sickert letters?

After a thorough search of the company records, I can only say with certainty that while the paper may not be uncommon, as Bower said, it might be somewhat uncommon as personal stationery. It seems that A Pirie paper was used primarily for the printing of bankers' and other business ledgers, business stationery, and nonwatermarked printing and lithographic printing paper. I have no idea which stationery shop the Sickerts used when Walter or Ellen ordered the blue-bordered stationery printed on A Pirie amp; Sons paper. The shop may not have been in London, and its records may no longer exist. I also can't say how unique their particular watermark was, but it isn't to be found in an A Pirie amp; Sons list of fifty-six trademark designs that were in the Aberdeen records.

But there is a very good chance I didn't see their watermark in the examples I found because the Aberdeen records might be incomplete. I do know that in the only A Pirie amp; Sons catalogue I managed to get hold of, the list of their products for 1900 shows twenty-three designs, and the watermark of interest is not among them.

Walter Sickert knew about watermarks. He knew about paper. It is hard to imagine him writing Ripper letters and not being aware of the watermark. It is hard to imagine that Sickert wouldn't have been aware of the type of paper he was using, including good paper such as Monckton's Superfine and art paper. He may have used his A Pirie amp; Sons and Joynson Superfine personal stationery because he assumed that even if the police did notice the partial watermarks on the torn paper, they probably would not have linked a Ripper letter to the charming gentleman-artist Walter Sickert, who was not a suspect at the time. One does have to wonder, however, what might have happened had the police published the partial watermarks and printed them on posters.

Probably nothing. If Sickert's friends - or Ellen - recognized a partial watermark, they weren't likely to link Walter Sickert with Jack the Ripper. What surprises me most is that I cannot find any evidence that the police noticed the watermarks, and they should have. More than ten percent of the 211 Ripper letters at the Public Record Office (PRO) have watermarks or partial ones. Not all watermarked paper is expensive, but it also isn't associated with the street-slang-talking paupers who police and the press believed were writing most of the Ripper letters.

Sickert was a magpie with paper. He did not waste it. If he was out of paper, he would paste together remnants of whatever he could find and send a note scrawled on a paper patchwork quilt. In several letters to Whistler, Sickert jotted, "No paper in the house," especially if he was approaching the Master about needing money.

"Excuse paper cannot afford to Buy any dear Boss," the Ripper wrote on November 15, 1888.

Sickert made sketches on a variety of papers, from coarse brown toilet paper to vellum. Paying attention to types of paper and watermarks in criminal and civil investigations certainly was not new technology in 1888. Why no policeman or detective observed what many of the Jack the Ripper letters were written on or with is baffling and inexcusable. Someone should have noticed that the "ink" was actually paint, and "pens" were really paintbrushes or drawing pens with large nibs. Microscopy, infrared spectrophotometry, pyrolysis-gas chromatography, mass spectrometry, x-ray fluorescence, and neutron activation analysis were not required to figure out that much.

One explanation for these oversights is that until now police and others dismissed the letters as hoaxes. Photocopies and photographs aren't the best means of seeing the delicate feathering of brushes, or the beautiful purple, blue, red, burgundy, orange, sienna, and sepia colors used to write words and make splashes and strokes on these letters from so-called illiterates and lunatics. It takes an art expert's eye to detect that smears thought to be blood are really etching ground, and if Dr. Ferrara had not used an Omnichrome alternate light source and a variety of different filters, we would not have been able to coax eradicated writing out from under its cover of heavy black ink.

In one letter, the Ripper gives the police fill-in-the-blanks for his "name" and "address," but as a "Ha Ha" he blots out the "information" with dark black rectangles and coffin shapes. Under the black ink the Omnichrome revealed ha and the barely legible and partial signature Ripper, This sort of diabolical teasing is typical of someone who believes that anything "hidden" will puzzle the hell out of the police. Another bit of Ripper fun was to take an envelope and glue a strip of paper on the front of it, implying that the envelope was recycled and the original recipient's name is under the strip.

Dr. Ferrara performed long, delicate surgery to lift that strip. There was nothing under it. But the Ripper's mean-spirited, mocking teases failed to bring him the satisfaction he craved. There is no sign, for example, that anyone cared what was under that strip before Dr. Ferrara removed it 114 years after the Ripper sent the "joke" in the mail. There is no hint that the police tried to figure out what was hidden under the shapes in heavy black ink.

It is easy to forget that in 1888 Walter Sickert wasn't on investigators' minds and that Scotland Yard did not have access to the likes of Peter and Sally Bower, art historian and Sickert expert Dr. Anna Gruetzner Robins, paper conservator Anne Kennett, and curator of the Sickert archives Vada Hart. It has required intellectual sleuths such as these to discover that many of the Ripper letters contain telltale signs of Sickert's handwriting, and that in some cases, a single letter was written and drawn in several colors or mediums and with at least two different writing instruments, including colored pencils, lithographic crayons, and paintbrushes.

One Ripper communication received by the police on October 18, 1889, is on an eleven-by-fourteen-inch sheet of azure laid foolscap writing paper, the lettering first drawn in pencil, then beautifully painted over in brilliant red. Apparently no one thought it unusual that a lunatic or an illiterate or even a prankster would elaborately paint a letter that reads:

Dear Sir

I shall be in Whitechapel on the 20th of this month - And will begin some very delicate work about midnight, in the street where I executed my third examination of the human body.

Yours till death Jack the Ripper

Catch Me if you can

PS, [postscript at the top of the page] I hope you can read what I have written, and will put it all in the paper, not leave half out. If you can not see the letters let me know and I will write them biger.

He misspells bigger as an illiterate would, and I don't believe the glaring inconsistency in a letter such as this one was an accident. Sickert was playing one of his little games and showing what "fools" the police were. An alert investigator certainly should have questioned why someone would correctly spell "delicate" and "executed" and "examination" and yet misspell the simple word "bigger." But details that seem so obvious to us now have the benefit of hindsight and the analysis of art experts. The only artist looking at those letters then was the artist who created them, and many of his letters are not letters at all, but professional designs and works of art that ought to be framed and hung in a gallery.

Sickert must have thought he had no reason to fear that the police would notice or question the artwork in his taunting, violent, and obscene letters. Or perhaps he assumed that even if a shrewd investigator like Abberline picked up on the uniqueness of some of the letters, the path would never lead northwest to 54 Broadhurst Gardens. After all, the police were "idiots." Most people were stupid and boring, and Sickert often said as much.

Nobody was as brilliant, clever, cunning, or fascinating as Walter Sickert, not even Whistler or Oscar Wilde, neither of whom he enjoyed competing with at dinners and other gatherings. Sickert just might not show up if he wasn't going to be the center of attention. He didn't hesitate to admit that he was a "snob" and divided the world into two classes of people: those who interested him and those who did not. As is typical of psychopaths, Sickert believed that no investigator was his match, and as is also true of these remorseless, scary people, his delusional thinking lured him into leaving far more incriminating clues along his trails than he probably ever imagined.

The distant locations associated with a number of Ripper letters only added to the supposition that most of the letters were hoaxes. Police had no reason to believe that this East End murderer might be in one city one day and in another the next. No one seemed interested in considering that perhaps the Ripper really did move around and that perhaps there might be a link between these cities.

Many were on Henry Irving's theater company's schedule, which was published in the newspapers daily. Every spring and fall, Irving's company toured major theater cities such as Glasgow, Edinburgh, Manchester, Liverpool, Bradford, Leeds, Nottingham, Newcastle, and Plymouth, to name a few. Often Ellen Terry made the grueling journeys. "I shall be in a railway train from Newcastle to Leeds," she dismally reports in a letter written during one of these tours, and one can almost feel her exhaustion.

Most of these cities also had major racecourses, and several Ripper letters mention horse racing and give the police a few lucky betting tips. Sickert painted pictures of horse racing and was quite knowledgeable about the sport. In the March 19, 1914, New Age literary journal, he published an article he titled "A Stone Ginger," which was racing slang for "an absolute certainty," and he tossed in a few other bits of racing slang for good measure: "welsher" and "racecourse thief" and "sporting touts." Racecourses would have been a venue where Sickert could disappear into the crowd, especially if he was wearing one of his disguises and the race was in a city where he wasn't likely to encounter anybody he knew. At the races, prostitutes were plentiful.

Horse racing, gambling in casinos, and boxing were interests of Sickert's, although very little has been written about them in the books and articles I have seen. When the Ripper uses the term "Give up the sponge" in a letter that art experts believe Sickert wrote, is this a peek into Sickert's personality or simply his thoughtless use of a cliche? Is there any meaning to be found in the murky self-portrait that Sickert painted in 1908 that features him in a studio standing behind what is supposed to be a plaster torso of a boxer but looks more like a female who is decapitated, her limbs raggedly severed? Is there any significance in the reference in another Ripper letter to "Bangor Street," an address that doesn't exist in London, but Bangor is the home of a racecourse in Wales?

While I have no evidence that Sickert bet on horse races, I don't have any fact to say he didn't. Gambling may have been a secret addiction. Certainly that would help explain how he managed to go through money so quickly. By the time he and the parsimonious Ellen divorced, she was financially crippled and would never recover. Sickert's organized brain seemed to fail him when it came to finances. He thought nothing of hiring a cab and leaving it sitting all day. He gave away armfuls of paintings - sometimes to strangers - or let the canvases rot in his studios. He never earned much, but he had access to Ellen's money - even after their divorce - and then to the money of other women who took care of him, including his next two wives.

Sickert was generous to his brother Bernhard, who was a failed artist. He rented numerous rooms at a time, bought painting supplies, read multiple newspapers daily, must have had quite a wardrobe for his many disguises, was a devotee of the theaters and music halls, and traveled. But most of what he bought and rented was shabby and cheap, and he wasn't likely to go for the best seats in the house or travel first class. I don't know how much he gave away, but after their divorce, Ellen wrote, "To give him money is like giving it to a child to light a fire with."

She believed him to be so financially irresponsible - for reasons she never cited - that after their divorce she conspired with Jacques-Emile Blanche to buy Sickert's paintings. Blanche began purchasing them and she secretly reimbursed him. Sickert "must never never suspect that it comes from me," Ellen wrote Blanche. "I shall tell no one" - not even her sister Janie, in whom she had always confided. Ellen knew what Janie thought of Sickert and his exploitative ways. She also knew that helping her former husband was not really helping him. No matter what he got, it would never be enough. But she could not seem to help herself when it came to helping him.

"He is never out of my mind day or night," Ellen wrote Blanche in 1899. "You know what he is like - a child where money is concerned. Will you again be as kind as you were before amp; buy one of Walter's pictures at the right moment to be of most use to him? And will you not forget that this will be of no good unless you insist on arranging how the money is to be spent. He borrowed?600 from his brother in law (who is a poor man) amp; he ought to pay him interest on the sum. But I cannot."

Addiction to drugs and alcohol ran in Sickert's family. He probably had an addictive predisposition, which would help explain why he avoided alcohol in his younger years and then abused it later on. It would be risky to say that Sickert had a gambling problem. But money seemed to vanish when he touched it, and while the mention of horse racing and the cities where courses were located in the Ripper letters does not constitute "proof," these details pique our curiosity.

Sickert could have done pretty much whatever he pleased. His career did not require him to keep regular hours. He did not have to account to anyone, especially now that his apprenticeship with Whistler had ended and Sickert was no longer bound to do as the Master demanded. In the fall of 1888, the Master was on his honeymoon and neither knew nor cared what Sickert did with his days. Ellen and Janie were in Ireland - not that Ellen had to be away when Sickert decided to vanish for a night or a week. Disappearing in Great Britain was relatively easy, as long as the trains were running. It was no great matter to cross the English Channel in the morning and have dinner in France that evening.

Whatever caused Sickert's chronic "financial muddle," to borrow Ellen's words, it was serious enough to push her to the extraordinary lengths of secretly funneling money his way after she divorced him for adultery and desertion. It was so serious that Sickert died in 1942 with only?135 to his name.