Portrait Of A Killer: Jack The Ripper - Case Closed

Chapter Seventeen. The Streets Until Dawn

Gatti's Hungerford Palace of Varieties was one of the most vulgar music halls in London. It was Sickert's favorite haunt the first eight months of 1888, and he went there several nights a week.

Built into a 250-foot-wide arch underneath the South Eastern railway near Charing Cross Station, Gatti's could seat six hundred, but on some nights as many as a thousand rowdy spectators crowded in for hours of drinking, smoking, and sexually charged entertainment. The popular Katie Lawrence shocked polite society by dressing in men's breeches or a loose, short frock that exposed more female flesh than was deemed decent at the time. Music-hall stars Kate Harvey and Florence Hayes as "The Patriotic Lady" were regulars when Sickert was making his quick sketches in the flickering lights.

Cleavage and exposed thighs were scandalous, but nobody seemed to worry much about the exploitation of the female child stars prancing about singing the same racy songs as the adults. Girls as young as eight years old dressed in costumes and little frocks and aped sexual awareness that invited pedophilic excitement and became the material for a number of Sickert's paintings. Art historian Dr. Robins explains that "among decadent writers, painters, and poets, there was something of a cult for the supposed sweetness and innocence of child music-hall performers." In her book Walter Sickert: Drawings, she provides new insight into Sickert's artistic interpretations of the female performers he watched night after night and followed from music hall to music hall. His sketches are a glimpse into his psyche and how he lived his life. While he did not mind impetuously giving away a painting, he would not part with the on-the-spot drawings he made on postcards and other small pieces of cheap paper.

To look at these faint pencil sketches in the collections at the Tate Gallery, the University of Reading, the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, and Leeds City Art Gallery is to slip inside Sickert's mind and emotions. His hasty artistic strokes capture what he saw as he sat in a music hall, gazing up at the stage. They are snapshots made through the lens of his own fantasies. While other men leered and egged on the half-naked performers, Sickert sketched dismembered female body parts.

One might argue that these drawings were Sickert's attempt at improving his technique. Hands, for example, are difficult, and some of the greatest painters had their struggles with hands. But when Sickert was sitting in his box or several rows back from the stage and making sketches on his little bits of paper, he wasn't perfecting his art. He was drawing a head severed from its neck; arms with no hands; a torso with no arms; plump chopped-off naked thighs; a limbless torso with breasts bulging out of a low-cut costume.

One might also argue that Sickert was thinking about new ways to reposition the body in a manner that wasn't stilted or posed. Perhaps he was trying out new methods. He would have seen Degas's pastel nudes. It could simply be that Sickert was following the lead of his idol, who had moved far beyond the old, static way of using draped models in the studio and was experimenting with more natural human postures and motion. But when Degas drew an arm in isolation, he was practicing technique, and the purpose of that arm was to be used in a painting.

The female body parts Sickert depicted in his music-hall sketches were rarely if ever used in any of his studies, pastels, etchings, or paintings. His penciled-in limbs and torsos seem to have been drawn simply for the sake of drawing them as he sat in the audience watching the scantily dressed Queenie Lawrence in her lily-white lingerie or the nine-year-old Little Flossie perform. Sickert did not depict male figures or male body parts in quite the same way. There is nothing about his sketches of males to suggest the subjects are being victimized, except for a pencil drawing titled He Killed His Father in a Fight. In it, a man is hacking to death a figure on a bloody bed.

Sickert's female torsos, severed heads, and limbs are images from a violent imagination. One can look at sketches his artist friend Wilson Steer made at the same time and in some of the same music halls and note a marked difference in Steer's depictions of the human body and facial expressions. He may have drawn a female head, but it does not seem chopped off at the neck. He may have drawn the ankles and feet of a ballerina, but they are obviously alive, poised on toe, the calf muscles bunching. Nothing about Steer's sketches looks dead. Sickert's sketched body parts have none of the tension of life but are limp and disconnected.

His 1888 music-hall sketches and the notes he scribbled on them place him in Gatti's on February 4th through March 24th; May 25th; June 4th through the 7th; July 8th, 30th, and 31st; and August 1st and 4th. Gatti's and other music halls Sickert visited in 1888, such as the Bedford, were by law supposed to end their performances and sales of liquor no later than half past midnight. If we assume that Sickert stayed until the entertainment ended, he would have been on London's streets on many early mornings. Then he could wander. Apparently Sickert didn't require much sleep.

Artist Marjorie Lilly recalled in her memoir of him that "he only seemed to relax in odd snatches of sleep during the day and was seldom in bed until after midnight, when he might get up again to wander about the streets until dawn." Lilly, who once shared a studio and a house with Sickert, observed that his habit was to wander after the music-hall performances. This peripatetic behavior, she added, continued throughout his life. Whenever "an idea tormented him" he would "thresh round the streets until dawn, lost in meditation."

Lilly knew Sickert well until his death in 1942, and many of the details in her book tell far more about her mentor and friend than she perhaps realized. Consistently, she refers to his wanderings, his nocturnal habits, his secrecy, and his well-known habit of having as many as three or four studios, their locations or purposes unknown. She also has numerous odd recollections of his preference for dark basements. "Huge, eerie, with winding passages and one black dungeon succeeding another like some horror story by Edgar Allan Poe," is how she describes them.

Sickert's private working life "took him to queer places where he improvised studios and workshops," art dealer Lillian Browse wrote a year after his death. As early as 1888, when he was frequenting the music halls, he obsessively rented secret rooms he could not afford. "I am taking new rooms," he would tell his friends. In 1911 he writes, "I have taken on a tiny, odd, sinister little home at? 45 a year close by here." The address was 60 Harrington Street NW, and apparently he planned to use the "little home" as a "studio."

Sickert would accumulate studios and then abandon them after a short while. It was well known among his acquaintances that these hidden rat holes were located on mean streets. His friend and fellow artist William Rothenstein, whom he met in 1889, wrote of Sickert's taste "for the dingy lodging-house atmosphere." Rothenstein said that Sickert was a "genius" at ferreting out the gloomiest and most off-putting rooms to work in, and this predilection was a source of bafflement to others. Rothenstein described Sickert as an "aristocrat by nature" who "had cultivated a strange taste for life below the stairs."

Denys Sutton wrote that "Sickert's restlessness was a dominating feature of his character." It was typical for him to always have "studios elsewhere, for at all times he cherished his freedom." Sutton says that Sickert often dined out alone, and that even after he married Ellen, he would go by himself to the music halls or get up in the middle of a dinner in his own home to head out to a performance. Then he would begin another one of his long walks home. Or perhaps go to one of his secret rooms, somehow meandering into the violent East End, walking the dark streets alone, a small parcel or a Gladstone bag in hand, presumably to hold his art supplies.

According to Sutton, during one of these ambles, Sickert was dressed in a loud checked suit and came upon several girls on Copenhagen Street, about a mile northwest of Shoreditch. The girls scattered in terror, screaming "Jack the Ripper! Jack the Ripper!" In a slightly different but more telling account, Sickert told his friends that it was he who called out, "Jack the Ripper, Jack the Ripper."

"I told her I was Jack the Ripper and I took my hat off," the Ripper wrote in a letter on November 19, 1888. Three days later the Ripper wrote a letter saying he was in Liverpool and "met a young woman in Scotland Road… I smiled at her and she calls out Jack the ripper. She dident know how right she was." About this same time, an article appeared in the Sunday Dispatch reporting that in Liverpool, an elderly woman was sitting in Shiel Park when a "respectable looking man, dressed in a black coat, light trousers, and a soft felt hat," pulled out a long thin knife. He said he planned to kill as many women in Liverpool as he could and send the ears of the first victim to the editor of the Liverpool newspaper.

Sickert made his sketches at Gatti's in an era when there were few inciting props available to psychopathic violent offenders. Today's rapist, pedophile, or murderer has plenty to choose from: photographs, audio-tapes, and videotapes of his victims being tortured or killed; and violent pornography found in magazines, movies, books, computer software, and on Internet sites. In 1888 there were few visual or audible aids available for a psychopath to fuel violent fantasies. Sickert's props would have been souvenirs or trophies from the victim, paintings and drawings, and the live entertainment of the theater and the music halls. He also could have made dry runs; the terrifying of the old woman in Liverpool could simply have been one of dozens or even hundreds.

Psychopathic killers often try out their modus operandi before going through the plan. Practice makes perfect, and the killer gets a thrill from the near-strike. The pulse picks up. Adrenaline surges. The killer will continue to go through the ritual, each time getting closer to actualizing the violence. Killers who mimic law enforcement officers have been known to install emergency grille lights or attach magnetic bubble lights to the roofs of their cars and pull over women drivers many times before actually going through with the abduction and murder.

Jack the Ripper very likely went through dry runs and other rituals before he killed. After a while, dry runs aren't just about practice and instant gratification. They fuel violent fantasies and may involve more than just stalking a victim, especially if the perpetrator is as creative as Walter Sickert. A number of strange events continued to occur in various parts of England. At approximately ten o'clock on the night of September 14th, in London, a man entered the Tower Subway and approached the caretaker. "Have you caught any of the Whitechapel murderers yet?" the man asked as he pulled out a foot-long knife that had a curved blade.

He then fled, yanking off "false whiskers" as he was pursued by the caretaker, who lost sight of him at Tooley Street. The description the caretaker gave the police was of a man five foot three with dark hair, a dark complexion, and a mustache. He was about thirty years old and was wearing a black suit that looked new, a light overcoat, and a dark cloth double-peaked cap.

"I have got a jolly lot of false whiskers amp; mustaches," the Ripper wrote on November 27th.

After the Tower Bridge was completed in 1894, the Tower Subway was closed to pedestrians and turned into a gas main, but in 1888 it was a hellish cast-iron tube seven feet in diameter and four hundred feet long. It began at the south side of Great Tower Hill at the Tower of London, ran under the Thames, and surfaced at Pickle Herring Stairs on the south bank of the river. If what the caretaker told police was accurate, he chased the man through the tunnel to Pickle Herring Stairs, which led to Pickle Herring Street, then to Vine Street, which intersected with Tooley Street. The Tower of London is about half a mile south of Whitechapel, and the subway was sufficiently unpleasant that it is unlikely many people or police used it to cross the river, especially if one were claustrophobic or fearful of traveling through a dirty, gloomy tube under water.

No doubt the police considered the man with the false whiskers a kook. I found no mention of this incident in any police reports. But this;'kook" was rational enough to pick a deserted, poorly lit place for the brazen display of his knife, and it is unlikely he viewed the caretaker as one who could physically overtake him. The man had every intention of causing a stir and no intention of being caught. Friday the 14th was also the day that Annie Chapman was buried.

Three days later, on September 17th, the Metropolitan Police received the first letter signed "Jack the Ripper."

Dear Boss,

So now they say I am a Yid when will they lern Dear old Boss? You an me know the truth don't we. Lusk can look forever he'll never find me but I am rite under his nose all the time. I watch them looking for me an it gives me fits ha ha. I love my work an I shant stop untill I get buckled and even then watch out for your old pal Jacky

Catch me if you can

The letter came to light only recently because it had never been included in the Metropolitan Police records. Originally, it had been filed at the Home Office.

At ten o'clock at night on September 17th - the same day that the Ripper made his debut in what we know as his first letter - a man appeared at the district police court of Westminster. He said he was an art student from New York, and was in London to "study art" at the National Gallery. A Times reporter relayed a dialogue that is so comical and clever it reads like a script.

The "American from New York" said he'd had trouble with his landlady the night before and was seeking advice from the magistrate, a Mr. Biron, who asked what sort of trouble the man meant.

"A terrible shindy," came the reply.

(Laughter)

The American went on to say he had given the land lady notice that

he wanted to leave her premises on Sloane Street, and she had been

"annoying" him in every way since. She had pushed him against a

wall, and when he inquired about dinner, she almost spat in his face

with "the vehemence of her language" and stigmatized him "as a low

American."

"Why don't you leave such a land lady and her apartment?" Mr.

Biron asked.

"I went there with some furniture, and I was foolish enough to tell

her that she might have it and take it out in the rent. Instead she took

it out of me."

(Laughter)

"And I could not take it away," the American went on. "I should be

positively frightened to try."

(Renewed laughter)

"It seems you have made a very ridiculous bargain," Mr. Biron told

him. "You find yourself in an exceedingly embarrassing position."

"I do indeed," the American agreed. "You can have no conception of

such a land lady. She threw a pair of scissors at me, lustily screamed

'murder,' and then caught hold of the lappels [sic] of my coat to prevent my escape, really a most absurd situation." (Laughter)

"Well," said Mr. Biron, "you have brought all the unpleasantness on yourself."

This was the lead police story in The Times, yet no crime had been committed and no arrest was made. The best the magistrate could offer was perhaps to send a warrant officer by the Sloane Street address to "caution" the landlady that she best behave. The American thanked "his worship" and expressed his hope that the caution "would have a salutary result."

The reporter identified the New York art student only as the "Applicant. " No name, age, or description was given. There was no follow-up story in days to come. The National Gallery did not have an art school or students. It still doesn't. I find it strange if not unbelievable that an American would use the language the so-called art student did. Would an American use the word shindy, which was London street slang for fight or row? Would an American say that the landlady "lustily screamed 'murder' "?

Screaming "murder" could have been a reference to testimony at Ripper victim inquests, and why would the landlady scream "murder" when she was the attacker, not the American? The reporter never mentioned whether the "American" spoke like an American. Sickert was quite capable of faking an American accent. He had spent years with Whistler, who was American.

About this time, a story began to circulate through the news that an American had contacted a sub-curator of a medical school in hopes of buying human uteri for?20 each. The would-be purchaser wanted the organs preserved in glycerine to keep them pliable, and planned to send them out with a journal article he had written. The request was refused.

The "American" was not identified, and no further information about him was given. The story gave rise to a new possibility: The East End murderer was killing women to sell their organs, and the stealing of Annie Chapman's rings was a "veil" to hide the real motive, which was to steal her uterus.

The stealing of human organs might seem ridiculous, but it had been barely fifty years since the infamous case of Burke and Hare, the "Resurrectionists" - or body snatchers - who were charged with robbing graves and committing as many as thirty murders to supply doctors and medical schools in Edinburgh with anatomical specimens for dissection. Organ-stealing as a motive for the Ripper's murders continued to be circulated and more confusion eddied around the Ripper crimes.

On September 21st, Ellen Sickert wrote a letter to her brother-in-law, Dick Fisher, and said that Sickert had left England for Normandy to visit "his people," and would be gone for weeks. Sickert may have left, but not necessarily for France. The next night, Saturday, a woman was murdered in Birtley, Durham, which is in the coal-mining country of northeast Eng- (land, near Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Jane Boatmoor, a twenty-six-year-old mother who was rumored to lead a somewhat less than respectable life, was last seen alive by friends the night before, on Saturday, at eight o'clock. Her body was found the following morning, Sunday, September 23rd, in a gutter near Guston Colliery Railway.

The left side of her neck had been cut through to her vertebrae. A gash i on the right side of her face had laid open her lower jaw to the bone, and? her bowels protruded from her mutilated abdomen. The similarities between her murder and those in London's East End prompted Scotland Yard to send Dr. George Phillips and an inspector to meet with Durham police officials. No helpful evidence was found, and for some reason, it was decided that the killer probably had committed suicide. Local people made extensive searches of mine shafts, but no body was recovered and the crime went unsolved. However, in an anonymous letter to the City of London Police, dated November 20, 1888, the writer offers this suggestion: "Look at the case in County Durham… twas made to appear as if it was Jack the Ripper."

The police did not link the murder of Jane Boatmoor to Jack the Ripper. Investigators had no clue that the Ripper liked to manipulate the machinery behind the scenes. His violent appetite had been whetted and he craved "blood, blood, blood," as the Ripper wrote. He craved drama. He had an insatiable appetite for enthralling his audience. As Henry Irving once said to an unresponsive house, "Ladies and gentlemen, if you don't applaud, I can't act!" Perhaps the applause was too faint. Several more events happened in quick succession.

On September 24th, the police received the taunting letter with the killer's "name" and "address" blacked out with heavily inked rectangles and coffins. The next day, Jack the Ripper wrote another letter, but this time he made sure someone paid attention. He mailed his missive to the Central News Agency. "Dear Boss, I keep on hearing the police have caught me but they won't fix me just yet," the Ripper wrote in red ink. His spelling and grammar were correct, his writing as neat as a clerk's. The postmark was London's East End. The defense would say that the letter couldn't have been from Sickert. He was in France. The prosecutor would reply, "Based on what evidence?" In his biography of Degas, Daniel Halevy mentions that Sickert was in Dieppe at some point during the summer, but there is no evidence I could find that Sickert was in France at the end of September.

Sickert's "people," as Ellen ruefully called them, were his cliquish artist friends in Dieppe. To them, Ellen would always be an outsider. She was not the least bit bohemian or stimulating. It is likely that when she was in Dieppe with her husband, he ignored her. If he wasn't hobnobbing at cafes or in the summer homes of artists such as Jacques-Emile Blanche or George Moore, he was off the radar screen, as usual, wandering about, mingling with fishermen and sailors, or locked away in one of his secret rooms.

What is suspicious about Sickert's alleged plans to visit Normandy at the end of September and part of October is that there is no mention of him in letters exchanged among his friends. One would think if Sickert had been in Dieppe, then Moore or Blanche might have mentioned seeing him - or not seeing him. One might suppose that when Sickert wrote Blanche in August, he might have mentioned that he would be in France next month and hoped to see him - or would be sorry to miss him.

There is no mention in the letters of Degas or Whistler that they saw Sickert in September or October 1888, and no hint that they had a clue he was in France. Letters Sickert wrote to Blanche in the autumn of 1888 appear to have been written in London, because they are written on Sickert's 54 Broadhurst Gardens stationery, which apparently he did not use except when he was actually there. The only indication I could find that he was in France at all during the autumn of 1888 is an undated note to Blanche that Sickert supposedly wrote from the small fishing village Saint-Valery-en-Caux, twenty miles from Dieppe:

"This is a nice little place to sleep amp; eat in," Sickert writes, "which is what I am most anxious to do now."

The envelope is missing and there is no postmark to prove that Sickert was in Normandy. Nor is there any way to determine where Blanche was. But Sickert very well may have been in Saint-Valery-en-Caux when he wrote the letter. He probably did need rest and nourishment after his frenzied violent activities, and crossing the Channel was not an ordeal. I find it curious if not suspicious that he chose St. Valery when he could have stayed in Dieppe.

In fact, it is curious that he wrote Blanche at all, because most of the note is about Sickert's "looking for a colorman" so he could send his brother Bernhard "pastel glass paper or sand paper canvass." Sickert said he wanted a "packet of samples" and that he did not know "French measurements." I fail to understand how Sickert, who was fluent in French and had spent so much time in France, did not know where to find samples of papers. "I am a French painter," he declared in a letter to Blanche, yet the scientifically and mathematically inclined Sickert says he didn't know French measurements.

Perhaps Sickert's letter from St. Valery was sincere. Perhaps he did want Blanche's advice. Or perhaps the truth is that Sickert was exhausted and paranoid and on the run, and thought it wise to supply himself with an alibi. Apart from this note to Blanche, I could find nothing to suggest that Sickert spent any time at all in France during the late summer, early fall, or winter of 1888. The bathing - or swimming - season for Normandy was over as well. It began in early July and by the end of September, Sickert's friends closed down their Dieppe homes and studios.

Sickert's salon of artists and prominent friends would have scattered until the following summer. I wonder if it seemed a little strange to Ellen that her husband planned to join "his people" in Normandy for several weeks when nobody was likely to be there. I wonder if she saw her husband much at all, and if she did, did she think he was behaving a bit oddly? In August, Sickert the compulsive letter writer sent a note to Blanche, apologizing for not "writing for so long. I have been very hard at work, and I find it very difficult to find 5 minutes to write a letter."

There is no reason to believe Sickert's "work" was related to the toils of his trade - beyond his going to music halls and seeking inspiration from the streets all hours of the night. His artistic productivity wasn't at its usual high from August through the rest of the year. Paintings "circa 1888" are few, and there is no guarantee that "circa" didn't mean a year or two earlier or later. I found only one published article from 1888, and that was in the spring. It seems that Sickert avoided his friends for much of that year. There is no indication he summered in Dieppe - which was very unusual. No matter where he went or when, it is clear that Sickert wasn't following his usual routines, if one could call anything Sickert did "routine."

In the late nineteenth century, passports, visas, and other forms of identification were not required to travel on the Continent. (However, by late summer of 1888, passports were required to enter Germany from France.) There is no mention of Sickert having any form of "picture identification" until World War I, when he and his second wife, Christine, were issued laissez-passers to show guards at tunnels, railway crossings, and other strategic places as they traveled about France.

Entering France from England was an easy and friendly transition and remained so during the years Sickert traveled to and fro. Crossing the English Channel in the late 1800s could take as little as four hours in good weather. One could travel by express train and "fast" steamer seven days a week, twice daily, with the trains leaving Victoria Station at 10:30 in the morning or London Bridge at 10:45. The steamer sailed out of Newhaven at 12:45 P.M. and arrived in Dieppe around dinnertime. A single, one-way first-class ticket to Dieppe was twenty-four shillings, second class was seventeen shillings, and part of this Express Tidal Service included trains from Dieppe straight through to Rouen and Paris.

Sickert's mother claimed she never knew when her son would suddenly go to France or suddenly come back. Maybe he hopped back and forth from England to Dieppe while the Ripper crimes were going on in 1888, but if he did, it was probably to cool off. He had been going to Dieppe since childhood and kept several places there. French death and crime statistics for the Victorian era do not seem to have survived, and it was not possible to find records of homicides then that might even remotely resemble the Ripper's crimes. But Dieppe was simply too small a town to commit lust-murders and get away with it.

During the days I spent in Dieppe, with its narrow old streets and passageways, its rocky shore and soaring cliffs that sheer off into the Channel, I tried to see that small seaside village as a killing ground for Sickert, but I could not. His work while he was in Dieppe reflects a different spirit. Most of the pictures he painted there are in lovely colors, his depictions of buildings inspiring. There is nothing morbid or violent in most of his Normandy art. It is as if Dieppe brought out the side of Sickert's face that is turned to the light in his Jekyll and Hyde self-portraits.