Portrait Of A Killer: Jack The Ripper - Case Closed

Chapter Twenty-Five. Three Keys

Ellen Cobden Sickert was almost obsessive in her zeal to see that the Cobden role in history would be remembered and cherished. In December 1907, she sent a sealed document to her sister Janie and insisted it was to be locked in a safe. It doesn't appear we'll ever know what was in Ellen's sealed letter, but I doubt it was a will or similar instructions. She wrote all that out later and apparently didn't care who saw it. Those instructions, along with the rest of Ellen's letters and diaries, were donated by the Cobden family to the West Sussex Public Record office.

Ellen sent her sealed letter to Janie three months after the Camden Town murder, which was committed blocks from Sickert's studios in Camden Town and about a mile from where he had recently settled after returning to London from France. Emily Dimmock was twenty-two years old, of medium height, pale and had dark brown hair. She had been with many men, most of them sailors. According to the Metropolitan Police, she led "an utterly immoral life," and was "known to every prostitute in Euston Rd." When she was found nude in bed with her throat cut on the morning of September 12,1907, the police, according to their report, first thought she had taken her own life as "she was a respectable married woman." Respectable women were far more likely to commit suicide than to be murdered, the police apparently believed.

The man Emily lived with was not her husband, but they talked about getting married one day. Bertram John Eugene Shaw was a cook for the Midland Railway. He was paid twenty-seven shillings per six-day week, leaving daily on a 5:42 train for Sheffield, where he would spend the night, then leave the next morning and arrive back at the St. Pancras Station at 10:40. He was almost always home at 11:30 A.M. He later told police he had no idea that Emily was going out at night and seeing other men.

The police did not believe him. Shaw knew Emily was a prostitute when he met her. She swore to him she had changed her ways, and now she supplemented their income through dressmaking. Emily had been a good woman ever since they had begun to live together. Her days as a prostitute were in the past, he said. He truly may not have known - unless someone had told him - that usually by 8:00 or 8:30 P.M., Emily could be found at the Rising Sun public house on "Euston Road," as witnesses referred to it. The Rising Sun still exists and is really at the corner of Tottenham Court Road and Windmill Street. Tottenham runs into Euston Road. In 1932, Sickert did an oil painting titled Graver's Island from Richmond Hill, which has an uncharacteristic Van Gogh-like rising sun so large and bright on the horizon as to dominate the picture. The rising sun is almost identical to the one etched in glass over the front door of the Rising Sun pub.

Letters Sickert wrote in 1907 reveal that he spent part of the summer in Dieppe and was enjoying a "daily bathe before dejeuner. Big breakers that you have to look sharp and dive through." Apparently he was "hard at work" on paintings and drawings. He returned to London earlier than usual and the weather was "chilly" and "miserable." The summer was cool with frequent rains and very little sunshine.

Sickert had art exhibitions coming up in London. The 15th Annual Photographic Salon was opening on September 13th at the Royal Water Color Society's Gallery, and it would not have been unusual for him to want to see that. He was becoming increasingly interested in photography, which "like other branches of art," said The Times, "has proceeded in the direction of impressionism." September was a good month to stay in London. The bathing season in Dieppe would soon be ending, and most of Sickert's letters of 1907 were written from London. One of them stands out as weird and inexplicable.

The letter was to his American friend Nan Hudson, and in it Sickert tells the fantastic story of a woman who lived below him at 6 Morning-ton Crescent suddenly rushing into his room at midnight "with her whole head ablaze like a torch, from a celluloid comb. I put her out by shampooing her with my hands so quickly that I didn't burn myself at all." He said the woman wasn't injured but was now "bald." I fail to see how his story can possibly be true. I find it hard to believe that neither the woman nor Sickert was burned. Why did he mention this traumatic event only to dismiss it quickly and move on to discuss the New English Art Club? As far as I know, he never mentioned his bald-headed neighbor again.

One might begin to wonder whether at age forty-seven Sickert was getting quite eccentric, or perhaps his bizarre story is true. (I don't see how it can be.) I was left to wonder if it might be possible that Sickert fabricated the incident with his downstairs neighbor because it might have occurred the same night or early morning of Emily Dimmock's murder, and Sickert was making sure someone knew he was home. The alibi would be a weak one should the police ever check it out. It wouldn't be hard to locate a bald downstairs neighbor or find out that she had a full head of hair and no recollection of a horrific encounter with a fiery comb. The alibi may have been for the benefit of Nan Hudson.

She and her companion, Ethel Sands, were very close to Sickert. His most revealing letters are the ones he wrote to them. He shared confidences with them - as much as he was capable of sharing confidences with anyone. The two women were alleged lesbians and, most likely, no threat to him sexually. He used them for money, sympathy, and other favors, manipulated them by mentoring and encouraging them in art, and revealed to them many details about himself that he did not divulge to others. He might suggest they "burn" a letter after they read it, or go to the other extreme and encourage them to save it, in the event he ever got around to writing a book.

It is obvious from other episodes in Sickert's life that he had periods of severe depression and paranoia. He could have had good reason to be paranoid after Emily Dimmock's murder, and if he wanted to make sure that at least somebody believed he was home in Camden Town the night the prostitute was slain, then he unwittingly placed the time of Emily's murder at around midnight - or when the flaming neighbor rushed inside Sickert's bedroom. Emily Dimmock usually took her clients home at half past midnight, when the public houses closed. This is only a theory. Sickert did not date his letters, including the one about his neighbor's flaming hair. Apparently, the envelope with its postmark is gone. I don't know why he felt inclined to tell such a dramatic story to Nan Hudson. But he had a reason. Sickert always had a reason.

He had studios at 18 and 27 Fitzroy Street, which is parallel to Tottenham Court Road and becomes Charlotte Street before passing Windmill Street. He could have walked from either of his studios to the Rising Sun public house in minutes. Mornington Crescent was a mile north of the pub, and Sickert rented the two top floors of the house at number 6. He painted there, usually nudes on a bed in the same setting he used in Jack the Ripper's Bedroom, painted from the point of view of someone outside open double doors that lead into a small murky space, where a dark mirror behind an iron bedstead vaguely reflects a man's shape.

Six Mornington Crescent was a twenty-minute walk from the rooming house where Emily Dimmock lived at 29 St. Paul's Road (now Agar Grove). She and Shaw had two rooms on the first floor. One was a sitting room, the second a cramped bedroom behind double doors at the back of the house. After Shaw would leave for St. Pancras Station, Emily might clean and sew or go out. Sometimes she met customers at the Rising Sun, or she might rendezvous with a man at another pub, Euston Station, or perhaps the Middlesex Music-hall (which Sickert painted around 1895), the Holborn Empire (home of music-hall star Bessie Bellwood, whom Sickert sketched many times around 1888), or the Euston Theater of Varieties.

One of Sickert's favorite spots for rendezvous was the statue of his former father-in-law, Richard Cobden, on the square off Mornington Crescent in Camden Town. The statue was presented to the vestry of St. Pancras in 1868 in honor of Cobden's repealing the Corn Laws, and was across from the Mornington Crescent underground station. Even when Sickert was married to Ellen, he had a habit of making sarcastic remarks about the statue as he rode past in a hansom. To use the statue for a rendezvous years after his divorce was perhaps another example of his mockery and contempt for people, especially important ones, especially a man he could never measure up to and had probably heard about all too often from the time he first met Ellen.

Emily Dimmock usually left her rooming house by 8:00 P.M. and did not return while the couple who owned the house, Mr. and Mrs. Stocks, were still awake. They claimed to know nothing about Emily's "irregular" life, and quite a life it was - two, three, four men a night, sometimes standing up in a dark corner of a train station before she might finally bring the last fellow home and sleep with him. Emily was not an Unfortunate like Annie Chapman or Elizabeth Stride. I wouldn't call Emily an Unfortunate at all. She did not live in the slums. She had food, a place to call home, and a man who wanted to marry her.

But she had an insatiable craving for excitement and the attention of men. The police described her as a woman "of lustful habits." I don't know if lust had anything to do with her sexual encounters. More likely her lust was for money. She wanted clothes and pretty little things. She was "greatly charmed" by artwork and collected penny picture postcards to paste in a scrapbook that was precious to her. The last postcard she had added to her collection, as far as anyone knows, was the one artist Robert Wood, employed by London Sand Blast Decorative Glass Works, Gray's Inn Road, had given to her on September 6, inside the Rising Sun. He wrote a note on the back of it, and the postcard became the key piece of evidence when Wood was indicted and tried for murdering her. His indictment was based mostly on handwriting comparisons, and after a long, highly publicized trial, he was acquitted.

Emily Dimmock had given venereal disease to so many men that the police had a long list of former clients who had good cause to do her in. She had been threatened numerous times in the past. Enraged men who had contracted the "disorder" harassed her and threatened to "out" or kill her. But nothing stopped her from continuing her trade, no matter how many men she infected. And besides, she remarked to her women friends, it was a man who gave her the disorder in the first place.

Emily was seen with two strangers the week before her murder. One was a man "who had a short leg, or hip trouble of some sort," according to Robert Wood's statement to the police. The other was a Frenchman described by a witness as approximately five foot nine, very dark, with a short cut beard, and dressed in a dark coat and striped trousers. He briefly came into the Rising Sun on the night of September 9th, leaned over and spoke to Emily, then left. In police reports and at the inquest, there is no reference to this man again, nor did there seem to be any interest in him.

Emily Dimmock was last seen alive at a Camden Town public house called the Eagle on the night of September 11th. Earlier in the evening she had been talking to Mrs. Stocks in the kitchen and said she had plans for the evening. Emily had received a postcard from a man who wanted to meet her at the Eagle, near the Camden Road Station. The postcard read, "Meet me at 8 o'clock at the Eagle tonight [Wednesday, September 11th]" and was signed "Bertie," which was Robert Wood's nickname. When she left the house that night in her long dustcoat, her hair in curling pins, she was "not dressed to go out." She mentioned to acquaintances that she didn't plan to stay at the Eagle long, wasn't eager to go, and that was why she wasn't properly dressed.

She still had the curling pins in her hair when she was murdered. Perhaps she was taking extra care to make sure she looked her best the next morning. Shaw's mother was coming to visit from Northampton, and Emily had been cleaning, doing laundry, and getting the house in order. None of her former clients ever mentioned that Emily wore curling pins while giving them pleasure. It would seem a poor business tactic if one was hoping for a generous payment from a client. The curling pins could suggest that Emily wasn't expecting the violent visitor who took her life. They might suggest she took her killer home with her and never removed the curling pins from her hair.

Her back bedroom on the ground floor was accessible by windows and sturdy cast-iron drainpipes a person could climb up. There is no mention in police reports that the windows were locked. Only the bedroom double door, the sitting room door, and the front door of the house were locked the next morning when Emily's body was found. Her three keys to those doors were missing when police and Shaw searched the rooms. It is possible someone climbed into her bedroom while she was asleep, but I don't think it's likely.

When she set out from 29 St. Paul's Road that Wednesday evening, she may not have intended to sell pleasure to anyone, but it could be that while she was on her way home with curling pins in her hair, she ran into a man. He said something to her.

"Where are you a goin my pretty little maid?" someone wrote in The Lizard guest book.

If Emily did have an encounter with her killer on her way home or if he was the man she met at the Eagle, he might have told her he didn't mind her curling pins in the least. Will you let me come see you in your room? It is possible Sickert had noticed Emily Dimmock many times in the past, at train stations, or just walking about. The Rising Sun was right around the corner from his studios, not far from Maple Street, which he would later sketch as an empty back road late at night with two distant shadowy women lingering on the corner. Emily Dimmock may have noticed Walter Sickert, too. He was a familiar sight along Fitzroy Street, carrying his canvases back and forth from one studio to another.

He was a well-known local artist. He was painting nudes during this time. He had to get his models from somewhere, and he had a penchant for prostitutes. He may have been stalking and watching Emily and her sexual transactions. She was the lowest of the lowest, a filthy diseased whore. Marjorie Lilly writes that once she heard a person defend thieves by telling Sickert, "After all, everyone has a right to exist." He retorted, "Not at all. There are people who have no right to exist!"

"As you can see I have done another good thing for Whitechapel," the Ripper wrote November 12, 1888.

The position of Emily Dimmock's dead body was described as "natural." The doctor who arrived at the scene said he believed that she was asleep when she was killed. She was face-down, her left arm bent at an angle and across her back, the hand bloody. Her right arm was extended in front of her and on the pillow. In fact, her position was not natural or comfortable. Most people do not sleep or even lie down with one of their arms bent at a right angle behind their backs. There was not sufficient space between the headboard and the wall for the killer to attack her from behind. She needed to be face-down, and her unnatural position on the bed can be explained if the killer straddled her as he pulled back her head with his left hand and cut her throat with his right.

Blood on her left hand suggests she grabbed the hemorrhaging left side of her neck, and her assailant may have wrenched her left arm behind her, perhaps pinning it with a knee to keep her from struggling. He had cut her throat to the spine and she could make no sound. He had slashed her neck from left to right, as a right-handed assailant would. He had so little room to work that his violent sweep of the knife cut the bed ticking and nicked Emily's right elbow. She was on her face, her left carotid squirting her syphilitic blood into the bed and not all over him.

The police did not discover a bloody nightgown at the scene. Absent that garment, it might be presumed that Emily was nude when she was murdered - or that her killer took a bloody gown as a trophy. A former client who had slept with Emily three times claimed that on those occasions she wore a nightdress and did not have "curlers" in her hair. If she had sex the night of September 11th, especially if she was intoxicated, it is possible that she fell asleep in the nude. Or she may have been with another "client" - her killer - who had her undress and turn over, as if he wanted anal sex or intercourse from the rear. After he cut a six-inch gash in her throat, her killer threw the bedcovers over her. All of this seems to deviate from Sickert's violent modus operandi, with the exception that apparently there was no sign of "connection."

After twenty years, Sickert's patterns, fantasies, needs, and energy would have evolved. Very little is known about his activities after he began spending most of his time in France and Italy during the 1890s. So far, documentation that might reveal unsolved murders with striking similarities to Sickert's crimes doesn't exist or has yet to surface in other countries. I found references to only two cases in France, not in police records but in newspapers. The murders are so unspecific and unverified. I hesitate to mention them: It was reported that in early 1889, at Pont-a-Mousson, a widow named Madame Francois was found slain, her head nearly severed from her body. About the same time and in the same area, another woman was found with her head nearly severed from he-body. The doctor who conducted both postmortem examinations concluded that the murderer was very skillful with a knife.

Around 1906, Sickert returned to England and settled in Camden Town. He resumed painting music halls - such as the Mogul Tavern (by now called the Old Middlesex Music Hall, on Drury Lane, less than two miles from where he lived in Camden Town). Sickert went out almost every night and was always in his stall at 8:00 P.M. sharp, he wrote in a letter to Jacques-Emile Blanche. Presumably, Sickert stayed until the performances ended at half past midnight.

During his late-night journeys home, it is very possible he could have seen Emily Dimmock out on the streets, perhaps heading to her rooming house with a client. Had Sickert gathered intelligence on her, he could easily have known her patterns, and that she was a notorious prostitute and a walking plague. Periodically she was an outpatient at Lock Hospital on Harrow Road, and most recently had been treated at University College Hospital. When her venereal disease was fulminating, she had eruptions on her face, and she had a few of these at the time of her death. This should have indicated to a street-smart man that she was dangerous to his health.

Sickert would have been foolish to have exposed himself to her body fluids, because by 1907 more was known about contagious diseases. Exposure to blood could be just as dangerous as intercourse, and it would not have been possible for Sickert to disembowel or take organs without subjecting himself to great risk. I believe he would have been shrewd enough to avoid re-creating the twenty-year-old Ripper scare, especially when he was about to begin his most intense period of violent art and produce works that he would not have dared to etch or paint or display in 1888 or 1889. Emily Dimmock's murder was staged to appear to have been motivated by robbery.

Bertram Shaw arrived home from the train station on the morning of September 12th, and discovered that his mother was already there. She was waiting in the hallway because Emily did not answer the door and she could not get into her son's rooms. Shaw tried the outer door and was baffled to find it locked. He wondered if Emily might have gone out to meet his mother at the train station and the two women had missed each other. He was getting increasingly uneasy, and asked the landlady, Mrs. Stocks, for a key. Shaw unlocked the outer door and found the double doors locked as well. He broke in and flung back the covers from Emily's naked body on the blood-soaked bed.

Drawers had been pulled out of the dresser, the contents rummaged through and scattered on the floor. Emily's scrapbook was open on a chair, and some postcards had been removed from it. The windows and shutters in the bedroom were closed, the windows in the sitting room closed, the shutters slightly open. Shaw ran for the police. Some twenty-five minutes later, Constable Thomas Killion arrived and determined by touching Emily's cold shoulder that she had been dead for hours. He immediately sent for police divisional surgeon Dr. John Thompson, who arrived at the scene around 1:00 P.M. and concluded - based on the coldness of the body and the advanced stage of rigor mortis - that Emily had been dead seven or eight hours.

This would have placed her time of death at 6:00 or 7:00 A.M., which is not likely. The morning was thick with fog, but the sun rose at 5:30. The killer would have been brazen to the point of stupidity had he left Emily's house after the sun was up, no matter how gray and muggy the weather, and by six or seven o'clock, people were stirring, many on their way to work.

Under ordinary conditions, it requires six to twelve hours for a body to be fully rigorous, and cold temperatures can retard this process. Emily's body was under bedclothes that the killer had flung over her, and the windows and doors were shut. Her bedroom would not have been frigid, but on the early morning she died, the low was 47 degrees Fahrenheit. What is not known is how stiff she was, or how advanced her rigor mortis might have been by the time Dr. Thompson began to examine her at some point after 1:00 P.M. She could have been in full rigor mortis - dead a good ten or twelve hours. This would suggest she could have been murdered between midnight and 4:00 A.M.

Dr. Thompson said at the scene that Emily's throat had been cut cleanly with a very sharp instrument. The police found nothing except one of Shaw's straight razors in plain view on top of a dresser, and it would be difficult to use a straight razor to cut forcefully through muscle and cartilage without the blade folding backward and perhaps severely wounding the perpetrator. A bloody petticoat in the handwash basin had soaked up all of the water, indicating the killer had cleaned himself off before he left. He was careful not to touch anything with bloody hands, the police remarked at the inquest.

The Ripper panic was not suddenly resurrected after Emily's homicide, and Sickert's name was never mentioned in connection with the crime. There were no Ripper-type letters to the press or the police, but curiously enough, right after Emily's homicide a Harold Ashton, a reporter for the Morning Leader, went to the police and showed them photographs of four postcards sent to the editor. It is not clear from the police report who sent these postcards, but the implication is they were signed "A.C.C." Ashton inquired if the police were aware that the writer of the postcards might be a "racing man." The reporter went on to point out the following:

A postmark dated January 2, 1907, London, was the first day of racing after "a spell of wintry weather," and the race that day was at Gatwick.

A second postcard was dated August 9, 1907, Brighton, and the Brighton races were held on the 6th, 7th, and 8th and at Lewes on the 9th and 10th of that month. The reporter said that many people who attended the races at Lewes stayed the weekend in Brighton.

A third postcard was dated August 19, 1907, Windsor, and the Windsor races were held on Friday and Saturday, the 16th and 17th of that month.

The fourth postcard was dated September 9th, two days before Emily's murder, and one day before the Doncaster autumn race in Yorkshire. But what was very strange about this card, Ashton pointed out, is that it was a French postcard that appeared to have been purchased in Chantilly, France, where a race had been held the week before the Doncaster autumn race. Ashton said, according to the rather confusing police report, that he believed "the post card may have been purchased in France, possibly at Chantilly, brought over and posted with English stamps at Don-caster" - as if to imply it had been mailed from Doncaster during the races. Had the sender attended the Doncaster autumn races, he could not have been in Camden Town at the time of Emily's September 11th murder. The Doncaster races were held on the 10th, 11th, 12th, and 13th of September.

Ashton was asked to withhold this information from his newspaper, which he did. On September 30th, Inspector A. Hailstone jotted on the report that the police thought Ashton was correct about the dates of the races, but the reporter was "quite wrong" about the postmark of the fourth postcard. "It is clearly marked London NW." Apparently, it didn't strike Inspector Hailstone as somewhat odd that a French postcard apparently written two days before Emily Dimmock's murder was for some reason mailed in London to a London newspaper. I don't know if "A.C.C." were the initials of an anonymous sender or meant something else, but it seems that the police might have questioned why a "racing man" would have sent these postcards to a newspaper at all.

It might have occurred to Inspector Hailstone that what this racing man had accomplished, whether he intended to or not, was to make it clear he had a habit of attending horse races and was at Doncaster on the date the much-publicized murder of Emily Dimmock occurred. If Sickert was now supplying himself with alibis instead of taunting the police with his "catch me if you can" communications, his actions would make perfect sense. At this stage in his life, his violent psychopathic drive would have lessened. It would be highly unusual for him to continue maniacal killing sprees that required tremendous energy and obsessive focus. If he committed murder, he did not want to be caught. His violent energy had been dissipated - although not eradicated - by age and his career.

When Sickert began his infamous paintings and etchings of nude women sprawled on iron bedsteads - the Camden Town Murder and L'affair de Camden Town, or Jack Ashore or the clothed man in Despair who sits on a bed, his face in his hands - he was simply viewed as a respected artist who had chosen the Camden Town murder as a narrative theme in his work. It wouldn't be until many years later that a detail would link him to the Camden Town murder. On November 29, 1937, the Evening Standard printed a short article about Sickert's Camden Town murder paintings, and stated, "Sickert, who was living in Camden Town, was permitted to enter the house where the murder was committed and did several sketches of the murdered woman's body."

Supposing this is true, was it another Sickert coincidence that he just happened to be wandering along St. Paul's Road when he noticed a swarm of police and wanted to see what all the excitement was about? Emily's body was discovered about 11:30 A.M. Not long after Dr. Thompson examined it at 1:00 P.M., it was removed to the St. Pancras mortuary. There was a relatively short time period of maybe two to three hours for Sickert to have happened by while Emily's body was still inside the house. If he had no idea when her body would be found, he would have had to case the area for many hours - and risk being noticed - to make sure he didn't miss the show.

A simple solution is suggested by the missing three keys. Sickert might have locked the doors behind him as he left the house - especially the inner and outer doors to Emily's rooms - to make it less likely that her body would be found before Shaw came home at 11:30 in the morning. Had Sickert been stalking Emily, he certainly would have known when Shaw left the house for work and when he returned. While the landlady might not have entered a locked room, Shaw would have, had Emily not responded to his calling out and knocking.

Sickert might have taken the keys as a souvenir. I see no reason for him to need them to make his escape after Emily's murder. It is possible that the three stolen keys could have given him a curtain time of approximately 11:30 A.M. So he just happened to show up at the crime scene before the body was removed and innocently ask the police if he might have a look inside and do a few sketches. Sickert was the local artist, a charming fellow. I doubt the police would have refused him his request. They probably told him all about the crime. Many a police officer likes to talk, especially when a major crime is committed on his shift. At the most, police might have found Sickert's interest eccentric, but not suspicious. I found no mention in police reports that Sickert appeared at the crime scene, or that any artist did. But when I've shown up at crime scenes as a journalist and author, my name has never been entered into reports, either.

Sickert's appearing at the scene also gave him an alibi. Should the police have discovered fingerprints that for some reason or another were ever identified as Walter Richard Sickert's, so what? Sickert had been inside Emily Dimmock's house. He had been inside her bedroom. One would expect him to have left fingerprints and maybe a few hairs or who knows what else while he was busy moving around, sketching, and chatting with the police or with Shaw and his mother.

It was not out of character for Sickert to sketch dead bodies. During World War I, he was obsessed with wounded and dying soldiers and their uniforms and weapons. He collected a pile of them and maintained close relations with people at the Red Cross, asking them to let him know when uniforms might not be needed any longer by ill-fated patients. "I have got a capital fellow," he wrote to Nan Hudson in the fall of 1914. "The ideal noble 6c somewhat beefy young Briton… amp; I have already drawn him alive 8c dead."

In several letters she wrote to Janie in 1907, Ellen inquires about "poor young Woods" and wants to know what happened when his case went to trial late that year. Ellen was overseas, and if she was referring to the eventual arrest, indictment, and trial of Robert Wood, accused and later acquitted of being Emily Dimmock's killer, she may have gotten the name slightly wrong, but the question was an atypical one for her to ask. She did not refer to criminal cases in her correspondence. I have found not a single mention of the Ripper murders or any others. For her to suddenly want to know about "poor young Woods" is perplexing, unless "Woods" is not really Robert Wood, but someone else.

I can't help but wonder if by 1907 Ellen secretly entertained doubts about her former husband, doubts that she dared not articulate and did her best to deny. But now a man was on trial, and should he be found guilty, he would be hanged. Ellen was a moral woman. If the slightest thing disturbed her conscience, she might have felt compelled to write a sealed letter to her sister. Ellen may even have begun to fear for her own life.

After the Camden Town murder, her mental and physical health began to deteriorate, and she spent most of her time away from London. She still saw Sickert now and then and continued to help him as best she could until she severed their relationship for good in 1913. A year later she was dead from cancer of the uterus.