Portrait Of A Killer: Jack The Ripper - Case Closed

Chapter Six. Walter And The Boys

By the age of five, Sickert had undergone three horrific surgeries for a fistula.

In every Sickert biography I have read, there is no more than a brief mention of these surgeries, and I am not aware that anyone has ever gone on record to say what this fistula was or why three life-threatening operations were required to repair it. Furthermore, there is to date no scholarly, objective book that sets forth in detail his eighty-one years on this earth.

While much is to be learned from Denys Sutton's 1976 biography of Sickert because the author was a thorough researcher and relied on conversations with people who had known the "old master," Sutton was somewhat compromised since he had to obtain permission from the Sickert Trust in order to use copyrighted materials such as letters. The legal restrictions on the reproduction of Sickert materials, including his art, are the foreboding mountains one must scale to view the entire panorama of the man's intensely conflicted and complicated personality. In a research note in Sutton's archives at the University of Glasgow, there appears to be a reference to a "Ripper" painting Sickert may have done in the 1930s. If there is such a painting, I have found no mention of it anywhere else.

There are other references to Sickert's peculiar behavior that should have aroused at least a bit of curiosity in anyone who studied him carefully. In a letter from Paris, November 16, 1968, Andre Dunoyer de Segonzac, a well-known artist with connections to the Bloomsbury group, wrote Sutton that he had known Walter Sickert around 1930 and had very clear memories of Sickert claiming to have "lived" in Whitechapel in the same house where Jack the Ripper had lived, and that Sickert had told him "spiritedly about the discreet and edifying life of this monstrous assassin."

Art historian and Sickert scholar Dr. Anna Gruetzner Robins of the University of Reading says that she does not see how it is possible for one to study Sickert extensively and not begin to suspect that he was Jack the Ripper. Some of her published studies on his art have included observations that are a bit too insightful for the proper Sickert palate. It seems that truths about him are as cloaked in fog as the Ripper was, and bringing to light any detail that might portend anything ignoble about the man is blasphemous.

In early 2002, Howard Smith, the curator of the Manchester City Art Gallery, contacted me to ask if I was aware that in 1908 Walter Sickert painted a very dark, gloomy painting titled Jack the Ripper's Bedroom. The work was donated in 1980, and the curator at the time notified Dr. Wendy Baron - who did her doctoral dissertation on Sickert and has written more on the artist than anyone else - to let her know of this remarkable find. "We have just received a bequest of two oil paintings by Sickert," curator Julian Treuherz wrote to Dr. Baron on September 2, 1980. One of them, he said, was "Jack the Ripper's Bedroom, oil on canvas, 20x16"."

Dr. Baron replied to Mr. Treuherz on October 12th and verified that the bedroom in the painting was indeed the bedroom in a Camden Town residence (at 6 Mornington Crescent) where Sickert rented the top two floors when he moved back to London from France in 1906. Dr. Baron further observed that this Camden Town residence was where "Sickert believed Jack the Ripper had lodged" in the 1880s. Although I have not found any references to the Mornington Crescent address as the place where Sickert thought the Ripper once lived, Sickert could have had a secret room there during the 1888 serial murders. And in letters the Ripper wrote, he said he was moving into a lodging house, which could have been the one at 6 Mornington Crescent - where Sickert was living in 1907 when yet another prostitute's throat was slashed barely a mile from his rooming house.

Sickert used to tell friends the story that he once had stayed in a house whose landlady claimed that Jack the Ripper had lived there during the crimes and that she knew his identity: The Ripper was a sickly veterinary student who was eventually whisked off to an asylum. She told Sickert the sickly serial killer's name, which Sickert said he wrote down in a copy of Casanova's memoirs he happened to be reading at the time. But alas, despite Sickert's photographic memory, he could not recall the name, and his copy of the book was destroyed in World War II.

The painting Jack the Ripper's Bedroom was ignored and remained in storage for twenty-two years. It seems the painting is one of the few Dr. Baron has left out of her writings. Certainly I had never heard of it. Nor had Dr. Robins or the Tate Gallery or anyone else I met during my research. Apparently, not everyone is eager to publicize this painting. The idea of Sickert being Jack the Ripper is "rubbish," said Sickert's nephew John Lessore, who is not related to Sickert by blood but through Sickert's third wife, Therese Lessore.

While writing this book, I had no contact with the Sickert Trust. Neither the people who control it nor anyone else has dissuaded me from publishing what I believe to be the naked truth. I have drawn upon the recollections of people who were Walter Sickert's contemporaries - such as Whistler and Sickert's first two wives - who were under no legal obligation to a Sickert Trust.

I have avoided the recycled inaccuracies that have metastasized from one book to another. I have concluded that information cited since Sickert's death consistently says nothing intentionally damning or humiliating about his life or character. The fistula was not considered important because apparently those who have mentioned it did not fully realize what it was or that it could have caused devastating repercussions in Sickert's psyche. I must admit I was shocked when I asked John Lessore about his uncle's fistula and he told me - as if it were common knowledge - that the fistula was a "hole in [Sickert's] penis."

I don't think Lessore had a clue as to the significance of what he was saying, and I would be surprised if Denys Sutton knew much about Sickert's fistula, either. Sutton's reference to the problem says no more than that Sickert underwent two failed surgeries "for fistula in Munich," and in 1865, while the Sickert family was in Dieppe, his great-aunt Anne Sheepshanks suggested a third attempt by a prominent London surgeon.

Helena does not mention her elder brother's medical problem in her memoirs, but one wonders how much she knew. It's unlikely that her eldest brother's genitalia were a topic of family conversation. Helena was an infant when Sickert suffered through his surgeries, and chances are that by the time she was old enough to give much thought to the organs of reproduction, Sickert was not inclined to run around naked in front of her - or anyone else. He obliquely alluded to his fistula when he used to joke that he came to London to be "circumcised."

In the nineteenth century, fistulas of the anus, rectum, and vagina were so common that St. Mark's Hospital in London was dedicated to treating them. There are no references to fistulas of the penis in the medical literature I consulted, but the term may have been loosely used to describe penile anomalies such as the one Sickert suffered from. The word "fistula" - Latin for reed or pipe - is generally used to describe an abnormal opening or sinus that can cause such atrocities as a rectum connected to the bladder or to the urethra or to the vagina.

A fistula can be congenital but is often caused by an abscess that takes the path of least resistance, and burrows through tissue or the skin surface, forming a new opening for urine, feces, and pus to escape. Fistulas could be extremely uncomfortable, embarrassing, and even fatal. Early medical journals cite harrowing cases such as miserably painful ulcers, bowels emptying into bladders, bowels or bladders emptying into vaginas or uteri, and menstruation through the rectum.

During the mid-1800s, doctors attributed the cause of fistulas to all sorts of things: sitting on damp seats, sitting outside on omnibuses after physical exertion, swallowing small bones or pins, the "wrong" food, alcohol, improper clothing, the "luxurious" use of cushions, or sedentary habits associated with certain professions. Dr. Frederick Salmon, the founder of St. Mark's Hospital, treated Charles Dickens for a fistula caused by, he said, the great writer's sitting at his desk too much.

St. Mark's was established in 1835 to relieve the poor of rectal diseases and their "baneful varieties" and in 1864 moved to City Road in Islington. In 1865, it suffered financial devastation when the hospital secretary fled from London after embezzling?400, or one quarter of the hospital's annual income. A fund-raising dinner to be hosted by the fistula-free Dickens was proposed, but he declined the honor. In the same year, Walter Sickert arrived at St. Mark's in the fall to be "cured" by its recently appointed surgeon, Dr. Alfred Duff Cooper, who later married the daughter of the Duke of Fife and was knighted by King Edward VII.

Dr. Cooper was a twenty-seven-year-old medical star rapidly on the rise in his profession. His specialties were the treatment of rectal and venereal diseases, but no search of his published writings or other literature unearthed any mention of his treating so-called fistulas of the penis. Explanations of Sickert's fistula range from fair to awful. Nature may have slighted him with a genetically inherited malformation of the genitals called hypospadias, in which the urethra terminates just below the tip of the penis. German medical literature published at the time of Sickert's birth indicates that a case of simple hypospadias was "trifling" and more common than generally known. A "trifling" case meant the fistula would not interfere with procreation and was not worth the risk of a surgical procedure that could cause infection and death.

Since Sickert's malformation required three surgeries, his problem must not have been "trifling." In 1864, Dr. Johann Ludwig Casper, professor of forensic medicine at the University of Berlin, published a description of a more serious form of hypospadias: In this malformation, there is an opening in the urethra at the "root" or base of the penis. Even worse is epispadias, which occurs when the urethra is divided and runs like a "shallow gutter" along the back of a rudimentary or incompletely developed penis. In mid-nineteenth century Germany, such cases were considered a type of hermaphroditism or "doubtful sex."

When Sickert was born, his gender may have been ambiguous, meaning his penis was small, possibly misshapen, and imperforate (lacking a urethra). The bladder would have been connected to a canal that opened at the base of the penis - or near the anus - and there may have been a cleft in the scrotum that resembled the female clitoris, vagina, and labia. It is possible that Sickert's gender wasn't clearly established until his testicles were discovered in the folds of the so-called labia and it was determined that he had no uterus. In cases of ambiguous genitalia, if the afflicted child's gender turns out to be male, he is usually masculine and healthy in all respects as he matures except for his penis, which may be acceptably functional but is certainly not normal. In the early days of surgery, attempts to repair seriously deformed genitalia generally resulted in mutilation.

Without medical records, I can't say exactly what Sickert's penile anomaly was, but if his problem was only "trifling" hypospadias, why did his parents resort to risky surgery? Why did his mother and father wait so long before attempting to correct what must have been a very unpleasant affliction? Sickert was five when he underwent surgery the third time, and one wonders how soon this occurred following the first two operations. We know that his great-aunt interceded to bring him to London, suggesting that his disability was acute and that possibly the two previous operations had been recent and may have resulted in complications. If indeed he was three or four when this nightmarish medical ordeal began, it could be that his parents delayed corrective procedures until they were certain of his gender. I do not know when Sickert was named Walter Richard. To date, no birth certificate or record of a christening has turned up.

In Helena's memoirs she writes that when she was a child "we" always referred to Walter and his brothers as "Walter and the boys." Who are ire? I doubt his brothers referred to themselves as Walter and the boys, nor would I imagine that little Helena came up with the phrase on her own. I am inclined to suspect that the reference to Walter and the boys came from one or both parents.

Given Helena's picture of a young Walter who was precocious and dominant, such a law unto himself that he wasn't placed in the same category as the other sons, it may be that the phrase Walter and the boys was a way of acknowledging his precocity. It may also be that he was physically different from his brothers - or maybe from all boys. If the latter is the explanation, the repeated use of the phrase could have been humiliating and emasculating for the young Walter.

Sickert's early boyhood was traumatized by medical violence. When corrective surgery for hypospadias occurs after the age of eighteen months, it can create fears of castration. Sickert's operations would have resulted in strictures and scarring that could have made erections painful or impossible. He may have suffered partial amputation. His art does not include nude males, with the exception of two sketches I found that appear to have been done when he was in his teens or in art school. In each, the nude male figure has a vague stub of a penis that looks anything but normal.

One of the most distinctive features of the Ripper letters is that so many of them were written with drawing pens and daubed or smeared with bright inks and paints. They show the skilled hand of a highly trained or professional artist. More than a dozen include phallic drawings of knives - all long, daggerlike instruments - except for two strange, short, truncated blades in brazenly taunting letters. One of the stubby-knife letters, mailed on July 22, 1889, was penned in black ink on two pages of cheap paper that bear no watermarks.

London West

Dear Boss

Back again amp; up to the old tricks. Would you like to catch me? I guess you would well look here - I leave my diggings - close to Conduit St to night at about 10:30 watch Conduit St amp; close round there - Ha - Har I dare you 4 more lives four more cunts to add to my little collection amp; I shall rest content Do what you will you will never nap… Not a big blade but sharp [Jack the Ripper jotted beside his drawing of the knife]

Following the signature is a postscript that trails off in the very clear letters "R. St. w." At first glance this abbreviation might appear to be an address, especially since "St" is used twice in the letter to indicate Street, and "W" might mean West. There is no such London address as R Street West, but I suppose one might interpret the "R. St." as an odd abbreviation of Regent Street, which runs into Conduit Street. It is possible, however, that the cryptic initials are a double entendre - another "catch me if you can." They could hint of the killer's identity and where he spent some of his time.

On a number of Sickert's paintings, etchings, and sketches, he abbreviates Sickert as St. In later years he puzzled the art world by deciding that he was no longer Walter but Richard Sickert, and signed his work R. S. or R. St. In another letter the Ripper wrote to the police on September 30, 1889 - only two months after the one I just described - there is another similarly drawn truncated knife blade and what appears to be a scalpel or straight razor with the initials R (possibly W) S faintly scratched on the blade. I'm not aware that the elusive initials on these 1889 letters have ever been noticed, and Sickert might have been amused by that. He did not want to be caught, but he must have found it exhilarating when the police missed his cryptic clues entirely.

Regent Street and New Bond Street would have been familiar to Walter Sickert. In 1881, he tagged along with Ellen Terry as she hit the shops of Regent Street in search of gowns for her role as Ophelia at the Lyceum. At 148 New Bond Street was the Fine Art Society, where James McNeill Whistler's paintings were exhibited and sold. In the July 1889 letter, the Ripper uses the word "diggings," which is American slang for a house or residence, and can also refer to a person's office. Sickert's professional business would have included the Fine Art Society, which was "close round" Conduit Street.

Speculations about what the Ripper meant in this letter are enticing. However, they are by no means a reliable account of what was going through Sickert's mind. But there are many reasons to think that Sickert would have read Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which was published in 1885. Sickert wouldn't have missed its theatrical performances that began in the summer of 1888. Stevenson's work might have helped Sickert to define his own duality.

There are many parallels between Jack the Ripper and Mr. Hyde: inexplicable disappearances; different styles of handwriting; fog; disguises; secret dwellings where changes of clothing were kept; disguised build, height, and walk. Through the symbolism in his novel, Stevenson gives us a remarkable description of psychopathy. Dr. Jekyll, the good man, is in "bondage" to the mysterious Mr. Hyde, who is "a spirit of enduring evil." After Hyde commits murder, he escapes through the dark streets, euphoric from his bloody deed. He is already fantasizing about the next one.

Dr. Jekyll's evil side is the "animal" that lives within him and feels no fear and relishes danger. It is in the "second character" of Hyde that Dr. Jekyll's mind becomes most nimble, his faculties "sharpened to a point." When the beloved doctor transforms himself into Hyde, he is overwhelmed by rage and a lust to torture and murder whoever he comes upon and can overpower. "That child of hell had nothing human," Stevenson wrote. Neither did Sickert when his "From Hell" other self replaced his ruined manhood with a blade.

As if Sickert's childhood surgeries and subsequent dysfunctions weren't misfortune enough, he suffered from what in the nineteenth century was called "depraved conditions of the blood." Letters written by Sickert in later life indicate that he periodically suffered from abscesses and boils that would send him to bed. He would refuse to seek out a doctor. An exact diagnosis of Sickert's congenital deformity and any other health problems associated with it may always remain elusive, although in 1899, he refers to his "organs of generation" having "suffered all his life," and to his "Physical misery." St. Mark's patient records do not exist prior to 1900, nor does it appear that Sir Alfred Duff Cooper kept any papers that might reveal information about Sickert's surgery in 1865. Cooper's records were not passed down in the family, according to his grandson, the historian and author John Julius Norwich.

Surgery in the early to mid-1800s was not a pleasant experience, especially surgery to the penis. The anesthetics ether, nitrous oxide (laughing gas), and chloroform had been discovered some thirty years earlier, but it wasn't until 1847 that Great Britain began using chloroform, which may not have helped young Walter much. Dr. Salmon, the head of St. Mark's, did not believe in anesthesia and did not allow the use of chloroform in his hospital because it was prone to cause death if the dose wasn't just right.

Whether Walter was chloroformed during his two surgeries in Germany is not known, although he mentions in a letter to Jacques-Emile Blanche that he remembered being chloroformed while his father, Oswald Sickert, looked on. It is hard to know exactly what Sickert was referring to or when or how many times - or even if he was telling the truth. Sickert may or may not have been given anesthesia in London when Dr. Cooper operated on him in 1865. What is most amazing is that the little boy did not die.

Only a year earlier, in 1864, Louis Pasteur had concluded that germs cause disease. Three years later, in 1867, Joseph Lister would argue that germs could be combated by using carbolic acid as an antiseptic. Infection was such a common cause of hospital deaths that many people refused to be operated on, preferring to take their chances with cancer, gangrene, fulminating infections caused by injuries such as burns and fractures, or other potentially fatal maladies. Walter survived, but it is unlikely that he relished recollecting his hospital experience.

One can only imagine his terror when at the age of five he was whisked away by his father to the foreign city of London. The boy left behind mother and siblings and was in the care of a parent not known for compassion or warmth. Oswald Sickert wasn't the sort to hold little Walter's hand and offer words of love and comfort when he helped his son into the horse-drawn taxi that would take them to St. Mark's Hospital. The father may have said nothing at all.

At the hospital, Walter and his small bag of belongings were left with the matron, most likely Mrs. Elizabeth Wilson, a seventy-two-year-old widow who believed in cleanliness and discipline. She would have assigned him a bed, placed his belongings in a locker, deloused and bathed him, then read him the hospital rules. At this time, Mrs. Wilson had one assistant nurse, and there was no nurse on duty at night.

How long Walter was in the hospital before Dr. Cooper performed the surgical procedure, I don't know, and I can't state as fact whether chloroform or an injection of a 5% solution of cocaine or any other type of anesthesia or pain reliever was used. Since it didn't become standard practice at St. Mark's to anesthetize patients until 1882, one might suspect the worst.

Inside the operating theater, an open coal fire blazed to warm the room and heat the irons used to cauterize bleeding. Only steel instruments were sterilized. Dressing gowns and towels were not. Most surgeons wore black frock coats not unlike the ones butchers wore in slaughterhouses. The stiffer and filthier with blood, the more the coat boasted of a surgeon's experience and rank. Cleanliness was considered to be finicking and affected, and a London Hospital surgeon of that time compared washing a frock coat to an executioner manicuring his nails before chopping off a person's head.

St. Mark's operating table was a bedstead - most certainly an iron one - with head- and footboards removed. What a ghastly impression a little boy must have had of an iron bedstead. On his ward he was confined to an iron bedstead, and he had an operation on one. It would be understandable if he associated an iron bedstead with bloody, painful terror - and rage. Walter was alone. His father may not have been very reassuring and might have viewed his son's disfigurement with shame or disgust. Walter was German. This was his first time in London. He was abandoned and powerless in an English-speaking prison where he was surrounded by suffering and subjected to the orders, probing, scrubbings, and bitter medicines of an old, no-nonsense nurse.

Mrs. Wilson - assuming she was on duty at the time of Walter's surgery - would have assisted in the procedure by placing Walter on his back and separating his thighs. Typically, in operations on the rectum or the genitals, the patient was virtually hog-tied, with arms straightened, legs arched, wrists bound to ankles. Walter may have been restrained with cloth ligatures, and as an extra precaution, the nurse may have firmly held his legs in place while Dr. Cooper took a scalpel and cut along the fistula's entire track, according to the hospital's standard procedure.

If Walter was a lucky little boy, his ordeal began by his feeling suffocated as his nose and mouth were covered with a chloroform-soaked rag that was guaranteed to make him violently nauseated later. If he was an unlucky little fellow, he was wide awake and experienced every horror happening to him. It is no wonder Sickert would go through life with no love for "those terrible hospital nurses, their cuffs, their enemas amp; their razors," as he wrote more than fifty years later.

Dr. Cooper may have used a blunt knife for separating tissue, or a "curved director" (steel probe) to pass through the opening in the penis, or a trocar to puncture tender flesh. He may have passed a section of "stout thread" through the track of the new opening and tied a "firm knot" at the end, to strangulate the tissue over time in much the same way a thread or post keeps the hole in a newly pierced ear from closing. It all depends on what was really wrong with Walter's penis, but Dr. Cooper's corrective procedures would by necessity have been made only more extensive and painful after Walter's two earlier surgeries in Germany. There would have been scar tissue. There could have been other disastrous sequelae, such as strictures and partial - or almost complete - amputation.

Dr. Cooper's published medical procedures do not mention fistulas of the penis - or hypospadias - but his method when performing typical fistula operations on a child was to operate as quickly as possible to prevent shock and insure that the "little patient," Dr. Cooper wrote, wasn't "exposed" or left with open wounds "more than absolutely necessary." At the end of this ordeal, Dr. Cooper would close any incisions with silk sutures called "ligatures" and pack cotton wool into the wounds. While Walter was going through all this and who knows what else, the elderly Mrs. Wilson in her starchy uniform would have assisted as needed, doing her best to quiet straining limbs and screams if Walter had not been anesthetized. Or if he had, her face may have been the last one he saw as the sickly-sweet chloroform knocked him out. She may have been the first person he saw when he woke up throbbing with pain and retching.

In 1841, Charles Dickens was operated on without anesthesia. "I suffered agonies, as they related all to me, and did violence to myself in keeping to my seat," Dickens wrote in a letter to a friend. "I could scarcely bear it." Surgery on the penis must have been more painful than any rectal or anal procedure, especially when a patient was a five-year-old foreigner who could not have possessed the coping skills, the insight, or perhaps fluency enough in English to understand what was happening to him when Mrs. Wilson changed his dressings, administered his medicines, or appeared at his bedside with a supply of leeches if he had an inflammation believed to be due to an excess of blood.

Mrs. Wilson may have had a sweet bedside manner. Or she may have been strict and humorless. A typical requirement of a nurse in those days was that she be single or widowed so that all her time could be devoted to the hospital. Nurses were underpaid, worked long, grueling hours, and were exposed to extraordinarily unpleasant conditions and risks. It was not uncommon for nurses to "get into drink" a bit too much, to run home for a nip, to show up at work a bit mellow. I don't know about Mrs. Wilson. She could have been a teetotaler.

Walter's hospital stay must have seemed to him an endless stretch of bleak, scary days, with breakfast at eight, followed by milk and soup at 11:30, then a late-afternoon meal and lights out at 9:30 P.M. There he lay, day in and day out, in pain, no one on duty at night to hear him cry or comfort him in his native tongue or hold his hand. Had he secretly hated Nurse Wilson, no one could really blame him. Had he imagined she was the one who destroyed his penis and caused him so much anguish, that would be understandable. Had he hated his mother, who was far away from him during his ordeal, that would come as no surprise.

In the nineteenth century, to be born illegitimate or to be the child of an illegitimate parent was a terrible stigma. When Sickert's maternal grandmother had sex out of wedlock, according to Victorian standards, she enjoyed it, which implied that she suffered from the same genetic disorder that prostitutes did. The common belief was that this congenital defect was passed down the bloodline and was a "contagious blood poison" routinely described in the newspapers as a "disease that has been the curse of mankind from an early period in the history of the race, leaving its baneful effects on posterity to the third and fourth generations."

Sickert might have blamed his boyhood agonies, his humiliations, and his maimed masculinity on a genetic defect or "blood poison" that he inherited from his immoral dance-hall grandmother and his illegitimate mother. The psychological overlays to young Walter's physical curse are tragic to contemplate. He was damaged, and his language as an adult reveals a significant preoccupation with "things medical" when he was writing about things that were not.

Throughout his letters and art reviews there are metaphors such as operating table, operation, diagnosis, dissection, laying bare, surgeon, doctors, fateful theater, castrated, eviscerated, all your organs taken out, anesthetized, anatomy, ossify, deformation, inoculated, vaccinating. Some of these images are quite shocking, even revolting, when they suddenly uncoil and strike in the middle of a paragraph about art or daily life, just as Sickert's use of violent metaphors strikes unexpectedly, too. When he is discussing art, one doesn't expect to run into morbid horror, horrors, deadly, dead, death, dead ladies' hearts, hacking himself to pieces, terrify, fear, violent, violence, prey, cannibalism, nightmare, stillborn, dead work, dead drawings, blood, putting a razor to his throat, nailing up coffins, putrefied, razor, knife, cutting.

In a 1912 article for the English Review he wrote, "Enlarged photographs of the naked corpse should be in every art school as a standard of drawing from the nude."