Portrait Of A Killer: Jack The Ripper - Case Closed

Chapter Five. A Glorius Boy

Walter Richard Sickert was born May 31, 1860, in Munich, Germany.

One of England's most important artists wasn't English. The "thoroughly English" Walter, as he was often described, was the son of a thoroughly Danish artist named Oswald Adalbert Sickert and a not-so-thoroughly English-Irish beauty named Eleanor Louisa Moravia Henry. As a child, Walter was thoroughly German.

Sickert's mother was called "Nelly"; his younger sister, Helena, was called "Nellie"; and Sickert's first wife, Ellen Cobden, was called "Nelly." Ellen Terry was called "Nelly." For purposes of clarity, I will not use the name "Nelly" except when referring to Sickert's mother, and I will resist giving in to the temptation to resort to Oedipal psychobabble because the four strongest women in Sickert's life had the same nickname.

Walter was the firstborn of six children - five boys and one girl. Remarkably, it appears that not one of them would ever have children.

Each child apparently had a curdled chemistry, except, perhaps, Oswald Valentine, a successful salesman about whom, it seems, nothing else is known. Robert would become a recluse and die from injuries sustained when he was hit by a lorry. Leonard always seemed strangely detached from reality and would die after a long battle with substance abuse. Bernhard was a failed painter and suffered from depression and alcoholism. A poetic observation their father, Oswald, wrote seems tragically prophetic:

Where there is freedom, there, of course,

the bad thing has to be free, too, but it dies,

since it carries the germ of destruction within

itself and dies of its own consequence/logicality.

The Sickerts' only daughter, Helena, had a brilliant mind and a fiery spirit, but a body that failed her all of her life. She was the only member of the family who seemed interested in humanitarian causes and other people. She would explain in her autobiography that early suffering made her compassionate and gave her sensitivity toward others. She was sent off to a harsh boarding school where she ate terrible food and was humiliated by the other girls because she was sickly and clumsy. The males in her home made her believe she was ugly. She was inferior because she wasn't a boy.

Walter was the third generation of artists. His grandfather, Johann Jurgen Sickert, was so gifted as a painter that he earned the patronage of Denmark's King Christian VIII. Walter's father, Oswald, was a talented painter and graphic artist who could make neither a name for himself nor a living. An old photograph shows him with a long bushy beard and cold eyes that glint of anger. Along with most of the Sickert family, details about him have faded like a poorly made daguerreotype. A search of records came up with a small collection of his writings and art that are included with his son's papers at Islington Public Libraries. Oswald's handwritten high German had to be translated into low German and then English, a process that took about six months and produced only sixty fragments of pages because most of what he wrote was impossible to read and could not be deciphered at all.

But what could be made out gave me a glimpse of an extraordinarily strong-willed, complex, and talented man who wrote music, plays, and poetry. His gift of words and his theatrical flair made him a favorite for giving speeches at weddings, carnivals, and other social events. He was active politically during the Danish-German War of 1864 and traveled quite a lot to different cities, encouraging the working men to pull together for a united Germany.

"I want your help," he said in one undated speech. "Everyone of you needs to do his share… It is also up to those of you who deal with the workers, to the larger tradesmen, factory owners, among you, it is up to you to care for the honest worker." Oswald could rouse the spirits of the oppressed. He could also compose beautiful music and poetic verses full of tenderness and love. He could create cartoonlike artwork that reveals a cruel and fiendish sense of fun. Pages of his diaries show that when Oswald wasn't sketching, he was wandering, a practice imitated by his eldest son.

Oswald was always on the move, so much so that one wonders when he got his work done. His walks might consume the better part of the day, or perhaps he was on a train somewhere until late at night. A cursory sampling of his activities reveals a man who could scarcely sit still and constantly did what he pleased. The diary pages are incomplete and undated, but his words portray him as a self-absorbed, moody, restless man.

During one week, on Wednesday, Oswald Sickert traveled by train from Echkenforde to Schleswig to Echen to Flensburg in northern Germany. Thursday, he took a look "at the new road along the railroad" and walked "along the harbor to the Nordertor [North Gate]" and across a field "to the ditch and home." He ate lunch and spent the afternoon at "Notke's beergarden." From there he visited a farm and then went home. Friday: "Went by myself" to visit Allenslob, Nobbe, Jantz, Stropatil, and Moller. He met up with a group of people, ate dinner with them, and at 10:00 P.M. returned home. Saturday: "Went for a walk by myself through the city."

Sunday he was out of the house all day, then he had dinner, and afterward there was music and singing at home until 10:00 P.M. Monday, he walked to Gottorf, then "back across over the property/estates and the peat bog…" Tuesday, he went by horse to Mugner's, fished until 3:00 P.M. and caught "30 perch." He visited with acquaintances at a pub. "Ate and drank" lunch. "Return at 11:00 P.M."

Oswald's writings make it clear he hated authority, particularly police, and his angry, mocking words eerily portend Jack the Ripper's own taunts to the police: "Catch me if you can," the Ripper repeatedly wrote.

" - Hooray! The watchman is asleep!" wrote Walter Sickert's father. "When you see him like that, you wouldn't believe that he is a watchman. Shall I nudge him out of love for humanity and tell him what the bell has tolled [or what trouble he is in for]… O no, let him slumber. Maybe he dreams that he has me, let him hold on to this illusion."

Oswald's sentiments about authority must have been voiced within the walls of his home, and Walter could not have been oblivious to them. Nor could he or his mother have been unaware of Oswald's frequent visits to beer gardens and pubs - to his being "plied with punch."

"I have boozed away the money," Oswald wrote. "I owed that much to my stomach. I sleep during my leisure hours, of which I have plenty."

Whatever prompted his obsessive walks, frequent journeys, and regular patronage of pubs and beer gardens, they cost money. And Oswald could not earn a living. Without his wife's money the family would not have survived. Perhaps it is no coincidence that in a Punch and Judy script Oswald wrote (probably in the early 1860s), the sadistic puppet-husband Punch is spending the family money on booze and cares nothing for his wife and infant son:…

Punch appears in the box: Ah yes, I believe you don't know me… my name is Punch. This also used to be my father's name, and my grandfather's, too… I like nice clothes. I am married by the way. I have a wife and a child. But that doesn't mean anything…

WIFE (JUDY): No, I can't stand this anymore! Even this early in the morning, this awful man has drunk brandy!… Oh, what an unhappy woman I am. All earnings are spent on spirits. I have no bread for the children -

If Walter Sickert got his carelessness with money and his restlessness from his father, he got his charm and good looks from his mother. He may have been handed a few of her less attractive attributes as well. The story of Mrs. Sickert's bizarre childhood has an uncanny resemblance to Charles Dickens's Bleak House - Walter's favorite novel. In that book, an orphan girl named Esther is mysteriously sent to live in the mansion of the kind and wealthy Mr. Jarndyce, who later wants to marry her.

Born in 1830, Nelly was the illegitimate daughter of a beautiful Irish dancer who had no interest in being a mother. She neglected Nelly, she was a heavy drinker, and finally she ran off to Australia to get married when Nelly was twelve. It was at this juncture in Nelly's life that she suddenly found herself in the guardianship of a wealthy anonymous bachelor who sent her to a school in Neuville-les-Dieppe, on the English Channel in northern France. Over the next six years, he wrote her affectionate letters he cryptically signed "R."

When Nelly turned eighteen and at last met her guardian, he revealed himself as Richard Sheepshanks, a former ordained priest turned much-acclaimed astronomer. He was witty and dashing - everything a young woman might conjure up in her dreams - and she was intelligent and very pretty. Sheepshanks spoiled Nelly and adored her even more than she adored him. He connected her with the right people and placed her in the proper settings. Soon she found herself going to parties, the theater, and the opera, and traveling abroad. She learned several foreign languages, and developed into a cultured young woman, all under the watchful eye of her fairy-tale, doting benefactor, who at some point finally confessed to her that he was her biological father.

Sheepshanks made Nelly promise to destroy all of his letters to her, and it isn't possible to determine whether his love as a father skirted the passion of a lover. Perhaps she knew very well what he was feeling and chose to deny it, or she could have been trusting and naive. But it must have been a shocking moment for him when Nelly joyfully announced in Paris that she was in love and was engaged to be married to an art student named Oswald Sickert.

Her father's reaction was an outburst of rage. He wildly accused her of being ungrateful, dishonest, and unfaithful, and he demanded that she break off the engagement immediately. Nelly refused. Her father withdrew his generosity and returned to England. He wrote several bitter letters to her and then died suddenly after a stroke. Nelly never got over his death and blamed herself for it. She destroyed all of his letters except one that she hid inside an old chronometer of his. "Love me, Nelly, love me dearly, as I love you," he had written.

Richard Sheepshanks left nothing to Nelly. Fortunately, his kind sister, Anne Sheepshanks, came to Nelly's rescue and gave her a generous allowance that made it possible for her to support a husband and six children. Nelly's desolate childhood and ultimate betrayal and abandonment by her father would surely have left their scars. Although there is no record of how she felt about her irresponsible dance-hall mother or the seemingly incestuous love of a father who had been little more than a romantic secret most of her young life, one assumes that Nelly would have suffered from deeply felt grief, anger, and shame.

Had Helena Sickert not grown up to be a famous suffragette and political figure who wrote her memoirs, it is safe to say that there would be very little to tell us about the Sickert family and what Walter was like as a boy. Almost every published reference to Walter's early life can be traced back to Helena's memoirs. If any other family member left a record, either it no longer exists or it is safely locked up somewhere.

Helena's description of her mother reveals an intelligent, complex woman who could be fun, charming, and independent and at other times strict, emotionally absent, manipulative, and submissive.

The home Nelly made for her family was an inconsistent one - severe and harsh, then suddenly blooming into games and song. In the evenings, Nelly often sang while Oswald accompanied her on the piano. She sang when she was at her needlework and when she took her children for romps in the woods or to swim. She taught them delightful nonsense songs such as "The Mistletoe Bough" and "She Wore a Wreath of Roses" and the children's favorite:

I am Jack Jumper the youngest but one

I can play nick-nacks upon my own thumb…

From an early age, Walter was a fearless swimmer with a head full of pictures and music. He was blue-eyed with long blond curls, and his mother used to dress him in "Little Lord Fauntleroy velvet suits," recalled a family friend. Helena, four years younger than Walter, remembers her mother's endless praises of his "beauty" and "perfect behavior," the latter of which did not quite mirror his sister's view. Walter may have been lovely to look at, but he was anything but gentle or sweet. Helena recollected that he was a charming, energetic, and quarrelsome little boy who made friends on command but was indifferent to them once they no longer amused him or served a useful purpose. His mother often found herself having to console Walter's abandoned playmates and make feeble excuses for her son's suddenly vanishing from their lives.

Walter's coldness and self-absorption were obvious at a young age, and one suspects that his mother never considered that her relationship with him might have been a contributing factor to the darkening shades of his character. Nelly may have adored her angelic-looking son, but not necessarily for healthy reasons. It's possible that he was nothing more than an extension of her own ego, and that her doting behavior was a projection of her own deeply rooted and unrequited needs. She probably treated him the only way she knew how, which was to disconnect from him emotionally the way her mother had from her, and to feel for him the selfish and inappropriate intensity that she had experienced from her father. When Walter was a toddler, an artist named Fuseli insisted on painting the "glorious" little boy. Nelly kept the life-size portrait hanging in her sitting room until the day she died at the age of ninety-two.

Oswald Sickert's pretense that he was head of the household was a fraud, and Walter must have known it. A ritual the children witnessed all too often was "Mummy" begging her husband for money while he dug in his purse and demanded, "How much must I give you, extravagant woman?"

"Will fifteen shillings be too much?" she would ask after going down the list of all their household needs.

Oswald would then magnanimously give her money that was hers to begin with, for she diligently turned over her yearly allowance to him. His scripted generosity was always rewarded with his wife's kisses and expressions of delight, their playacting weirdly re-creating the relationship between her and her omnipotent, controlling father, Richard Sheepshanks. Walter learned his parents' drama by heart. He would adopt the worst traits of his father and forever seek out women who would pander to his megalomania and every need.

Oswald Sickert was an artist for the humorous German journal Die Fliegende Blatter, but there was nothing funny about him at home. He had no patience with children and bonded with none of his own. His daughter, Helena, recalls that he talked only to Walter, who would later claim that he remembered "everything" his father ever told him. There wasn't much that Walter didn't learn quickly and remember precisely. As a child in Germany, he taught himself to read and write, and throughout his life his acquaintances would marvel at his photographic recall.

Legend has it that Walter was taking a walk with his father one day and passed by a church where Oswald directed his young son's attention to a memorial. "There's a name you will never remember," Oswald commented as he kept walking. Walter paused to read

When he was eighty years old, Walter Sickert could still recall the inscription and write it without error.

Oswald did not encourage any of his children to pursue art, but from an early age, Walter could not resist drawing, painting, and making models out of wax. Sickert would claim that what he knew of art theory he had learned from his father, who in the 1870s used to take him to the Royal Academy at Burlington House to study the paintings of the "Old Masters." Searches through collections of Sickert archives suggest that Oswald may have had a hand in Walter's development as a draftsman as well. In Islington Public Libraries in north London, there is a collection of sketches that have been attributed to Oswald but are now believed by historians and art experts to include sketches made by the father's talented son, Walter. It is possible that Oswald critiqued Walter's early artistic efforts.

Many of the drawings are clearly the efforts of the tentative but gifted hand of someone learning to sketch street scenes, buildings, and figures. But the creative mind guiding the hand is disturbed, violent, and morbid, a mind that takes delight in conjuring up a cauldron of men being boiled alive and demonic characters with long, pointed faces, tails, and evil smiles. A favorite theme is that of soldiers storming castles and battling one another. A knight abducts a buxom maiden and rides off with her as she pleads not to be raped or murdered or both. Sickert could have been describing his own juvenilia when he described an etching made by Karel du Jardin in 1652: It is, he said, a ghastly scene of a "cavalier" on horseback pausing to look at a "stripped" and "hacked" up "corpse," while troops "with spears and pennants" ride off in the distance.

The most violent amateurish drawing in this collection depicts a bosomy woman in a low-cut dress sitting in a chair, her hands bound behind her, her head thrown back as a right-handed man plunges a knife into the center of her chest at the level of her sternum. She has additional wounds on the left side of her chest, a wound on the left side of her neck - where the carotid artery would be - and possibly a wound below her left eye. Her killer's only facial feature is a slight smile, and he is dressed in a suit. Opposite this sketch, on the same scrap of rectangular paper, there is a crouching, frightening-looking man who is about to spring on a woman dressed in long skirt, shawl, and bonnet.

While I have found no hint that Oswald Sickert was sexually violent, he could be mean-spirited and stony. His favorite target was his daughter. Helena's fear of him was so great that she would tremble in his presence. He showed not a whit of sympathy for her while she was bedridden with rheumatic fever for two years. When she recovered at the age of seven, she was very weak and had poor control of her legs. She dreaded it when her father began forcing her to take walks with him. During these outings, he never spoke. To her, his silence was more frightening than his harsh words.

When she awkwardly ran to keep up with his relentless pace, or if she clumsily bumped into him, "he would," Helena wrote, "then silently take me by the shoulder and silently turn me into the opposite direction, where I was apt to run into the wall or gutter." Her mother never intervened on her behalf. Nelly preferred her "pretty little fellows" with their fair hair and sailor suits to her homely, red-headed daughter.

Walter was by far the prettiest of the fair little fellows and the "cleverest." He usually got his way through manipulation, deception, or charm. He was the leader, and other children did what he demanded, even if Walter's "games" were unfair or unpleasant. When playing chess, he thought nothing of changing the rules as it suited him, such as making it possible to check the king without consequences. When Walter was a bit older, after the family had moved to England in 1868, he began recruiting friends and siblings to play scenes from Shakespeare, and some of his stage direction was nasty and degrading. In an unpublished draft of Helena's memoirs, she recalled:

I must have been a child when [Walter] roped us in to rehearse the three witches to his Macbeth in a disused quarry near Newquay, which innocently I thought was really called "The Pit of Achaeron." Here he drilled us very severely. I was made (being appropriately thin and red-haired) to discard my dress amp; shoes amp; stockings, in order to brood over the witches cauldron, or stride around it, regardless of thorns and sharp stones, in my eyes the acrid smoke of scorching seaweed.

This account as well as other telling ones were softened or deleted by the time Helena's memoirs were published, and were it not for a six-page handwritten remnant that was donated to the National Art Library of the Victoria amp; Albert Museum, there would be little known about Walter's youthful tendencies. I suspect that much has been censored.

In the Victorian era and the early 1900s it was unheard of to tell all, especially about family. Queen Victoria herself could have burned down one of her palaces with the conflagration she made of her private papers. By the time Helena published her memoirs in 1935, her brother Walter was seventy-five years old and a British icon hailed by young artists as the roi, or king. His sister might have had second thoughts about lacerating him in her book. She was one of the few people he was never able to dominate, and the two of them were never close.

It isn't clear that she even knew quite what to make of him. He was "… at once the most fickle and the most constant of creatures… unreasonable, but always rationalizing. Utterly neglectful of his friends and relations in normal times and capable of the utmost kindness, generosity and resourcefulness in crises - never bored, except by people."

Sickert scholars agree that he was a "handful." He was "brilliant" with a "volatile temperament," and when he was three, his mother told a family friend that he was "perverse and wayward" - a physically strong boy whose "tenderness" easily turns to "temper." He was a master of persuasion and, like his father, disdainful of religion. Authority did not exist any more than God did. In school, Walter was energetic and intellectually keen, but he did not abide by rules. Those who have written about his life are vague and elusive about his "irregularities," as his biographer Denys Sutton put it.

When Sickert was ten, he was "removed" from a boarding school in Reading, where, he would later say, he found the "horrible old schoolmistress" intolerable. He was expelled from University College School for reasons unknown. Around 1870, he attended Bayswater Collegiate School, and for two years, he was a student at Kings College School. In 1878, he made first class honors on his Matriculation exam (the exam all schoolchildren took in their last year), but he did not attend a university.

Sickert's arrogance, his lack of feeling, and his extraordinary power of manipulation are typical of psychopaths. What is not so apparent - although it betrays itself in Walter's fits of temper and sadistic games - is the anger that simmered beneath his bewitching surface. Add rage to emotional detachment and a total lack of compassion or remorse, and the resulting alchemy turns Dr. Jekyll into Mr. Hyde. The precise chemistry of this transformation is a mixture of the physical and spiritual that we may never fully understand. Does an abnormal frontal lobe cause a person to become a psychopath? Or does the frontal lobe become abnormal because the person is a psychopath? We don't yet know the cause.

We do know the behavior, and we know that psychopaths act without fear of consequences. They do not care about the suffering left in the aftermath of their violent storms. It doesn't bother a violent psychopath if his assassination of a president might damage the entire nation, if his killing spree might break the hearts of women who have lost their husbands and children who have lost their fathers. Sirhan Sirhan has been heard to boast in prison that he has become as famous as Bobby Kennedy. John Hinckley, Jr.'s failed attempt on Reagan's life catapulted the pudgy, unpopular loser into becoming a cover boy for every major magazine.

The psychopath's only palpable fear is that he will be caught. The rapist aborts his sexual assault when he hears someone unlocking the front door. Or maybe violence escalates and he kills both his victim and whoever is entering the house. There can be no witnesses. No matter how much violent psychopaths might taunt the police, the thought of captivity fills them with terror, and they will go to any length to avoid it. It is ironic that people who have such contempt for human life will desperately hold on to their own. They continue to thrive on their games, even on death row. They are determined to live and to the bitter end believe they can dodge death by lethal injection or cheat the electric chair.

The Ripper was the gamesman of all gamesmen. His murders, his clues and taunts to the press and the police, his antics - all were such fun. His greatest disillusionment must have come from realizing early on that his opponents were unskilled dolts. For the most part, Jack the Ripper played his games alone. He had no worthy contenders, and he boasted and taunted almost to the point of giving himself away. The Ripper wrote hundreds of letters to the police and the press. One of his favorite words was Fools - a word that was also a favorite of Oswald Sickert's. The Ripper letters contain dozens of Ha Ha's - the same annoying American laugh of James McNeill Whistler that Sickert must have heard hour after hour when he was working for the great Master.

From 1888 to the present day, the millions of people who have associated Jack the Ripper with mystery and murder undoubtedly have no clue that more than anything else, this infamous killer was a mocking, arrogant, spiteful, and sarcastic man who believed virtually everyone on earth was an "idiot" or a "fool." The Ripper hated the police, he loathed "filthy whores," and he was maniacal in his sarcastic, "funny little" communications with those desperate to catch him.

The Ripper's mockeries and utter indifference to his destruction 01 human life are evident in his letters, which begin in 1888 and end, as far as we know, in 1896. As I read and reread - more times than I can count - the some 250 Ripper letters that survive at the Public Record Office and the Corporation of London Records Office, I began to form a rather horrifying image of a furious, spiteful, and cunning child who was the master controller of a brilliant and talented adult. Jack the Ripper felt empowered only when he savaged people and tormented the authorities, and he got away with all of it for more than 114 years.

When I first began to go through the Ripper letters, I concurred with what the police and most people believe: Almost all of the letters are hoaxes or the communications of mentally unbalanced people. However, during my intensive research of Sickert and the way he expressed himself - and the way the Ripper expressed himself in so many of his alleged letters - my opinion changed. I now believe that the majority of the letters were written by the murderer. The Ripper's childish and hateful teases and mocking comments and taunts in his letters include:

"Ha Ha Ha"

"Catch me if you can" "It's a folly nice lark " "What a dance I am leading"

"Love, Jack the Ripper"

"Just to give you a little clue"

"I told her I was Jack the Ripper and I took my hat off"

"Hold on tight you cunning lot of coppers"

"good bye for the present From the Ripper and the dodger"

"Won't it be nice dear old Boss to have the good ole times once again"

"You might remember me if you try and think a little Ha Ha."

"I take great pleasure in giving you my whereabouts for the benefit of

the Scotland Yard boys"

"The police alias po-lice, think themselves devilish clever" "you donkeys, you double-faced asses"

"Be good enough to send a few of your clever policemen down here" "The police pass me close every day, and I shall pass one going to

post this." "Ha! Ha!"

"you made a mistake, if you thought I dident see you…" "the good old times once again" "I really wanted to play a little joke on you all but I haven't got enough

time left to let you play cat and mouse with me." "Au revoir, Boss." "a good Joke I played on them" "ta ta"

"Just a line to let you know that I love my work." "They look so clever and talk about being on the right track" "P.S. You can't trace me by this writing so its no use" "I think you all are asleep in Scotland Yard" "I am jack the ripper catch me if you can"

"I am now going to make my way to Paris and try my little games" "Oh, it was such a jolly job the last one." "Kisses"

"I am still at liberty… Ha, ha, ha!" "don't I laugh"

"I think I have been very good up to now"

"Yours truly, Mathematicus"

"Dear Boss… I was conversing with two or three of your men last

night"

"What fools the police are." "But they didnt search the one I was in I was looking at the police all

the Time."

"why I passed a policeman yestaday amp; he didnd take no notice of me." "The police now reckon my work a practical joke, well well Jacky's a

very practical joker ha ha ha" "I am very much amused" "I'm considered a very handsome Gentleman" "You see I am still knocking about. Ha. Ha" "you will have a job to catch me" "No use you're try in to catch me because it wont do" "You never caught me and you never will Ha Ha"

My father the lawyer used to say that you can tell a lot by what makes a person angry. A review of the 211 Ripper letters in the Public Record Office at Kew reveals that Jack the Ripper was intellectually arrogant. Even when he disguised his writing to look ignorant, illiterate, or crazy, he did not like to hear that he was. He couldn't resist reminding people he was literate by an occasional letter with perfect spelling, neat or beautiful script, and excellent vocabulary. As the Ripper protested more than once in communications that were increasingly ignored by the police and the press, "I ain't a maniac as you say I am to dam [sic] clever for you" and "Do you think I am mad? What a mistake you make."

In all likelihood, an illiterate cockney would not use the word "conundrum" or sign his letter "Mathematicus." In all likelihood, an ignorant brute would not refer to the people he has murdered as "victims" or describe mutilating a woman as giving her a "Caesarian." The Ripper also used vulgarities, such as "cunt," and worked hard to misspell,

mangle, or write in snarls. Then he mailed his trashy letters - "I have not got a stamp" - from Whitechapel, as if to imply that Jack the Ripper was a low-life resident of the slums. Few Whitechapel paupers could either read or write, and a large percentage of the population was foreign and did not speak English. Most people who misspell do so phonetically and consistently, and in some letters, the Ripper misspells the same word several different ways.

The repeated word "games" and much-used "ha ha"s were favorites of the American-born James McNeill Whistler, whose "ha! ha!" or "cackle," as Sickert called it, was infamous and was often described as a much-dreaded laugh that grated against the ear of the English. Whistler's "ha ha" could stop a dinner party conversation. It was enough of an announcement of his presence to make his enemies freeze or get up and leave. "Ha ha" was much more American than English, and one can only imagine how many times a day Sickert heard that irritating "ha ha" when he was with Whistler or in the Master's studio. One can read hundreds of letters written by Victorians and not see a single "ha ha," but the Ripper letters are filled with them.

Generations have been misled to think the Ripper letters are pranks, or the work of a journalist bent on creating a sensational story, or the drivel of lunatics, because that was what the press and the police thought. Investigators and most students of the Ripper crimes have focused on the handwriting more than the language. Handwriting is easy to disguise, especially if one is a brilliant artist, but the unique and repeated use of linguistic combinations in multiple texts is the fingerprint of a person's mind.

One of Walter Sickert's favorite insults was to call people "fools." The Ripper was very fond of this word. To Jack the Ripper, everybody was a fool except him. Psychopaths tend to think they are more cunning and more intelligent than everyone else. Psychopaths tend to believe they can outsmart those out to catch them. The psychopath loves to play games, to harass and taunt. What fun to set so much chaos in motion and sit back and watch. Walter Sickert wasn't the first psychopath to play games, to taunt, to mock, to think he was smarter than anyone else, and to get away with murder. But he may be the most original and creative killer ever to have come along.

Sickert was a learned man who may have had the I.Q. of a genius. He was a talented artist whose work is respected but not necessarily enjoyed. His art shows no whimsy, no tender touches, no dreams. He never pretended to paint "beauty," and as a draftsman he was better than most of his peers. Sickert "Mathematicus" was a technician. "All lines in nature… are located somewhere in radiants within the 360 degrees of four right angles," he wrote. "All straight lines… and all curves can be considered as tangents to such lines."

He would teach his students that "the basis of drawing is a highly cultivated sensibility to the exact direction of lines… within the 180 degrees of right angles." Allow him to simplify: "Art may be said to be… the individual co-efficient of error… in [the craftsman's] effort to attain the expression of form." Whistler and Degas did not define their an in such terms. I'm not sure they would have understood a word of what Sickert said.

Sickert's precise way of thinking and calculating was evident not only in his own description of his work, but also in the way he executed it. His method in painting was to "square up" his sketches, enlarging them geometrically to preserve the exact perspectives and proportions. In some of his pictures, the grid of his mathematical method is faintly visible behind the paint. In Jack the Ripper's games and violent crimes, the grid of who he was is faintly visible behind his machinations.