Portrait of a Killer

by Patricia Cornwell

  Afterward, in an undated, partial letter, the Ripper wrote to the Metropolitan Police, “I riped up little boy in Bradford.” A Ripper letter of January 16, 1889, refers to “my trip to Bradford.”

  There are no known Ripper letters from December 23rd until January 8th. I don’t know where Sickert spent his holidays, but I suspect he would have wanted to be in London on the last Saturday of the year, December 29th, when Hamlet opened at the Lyceum, starring Henry Irving and Ellen Terry. Sickert’s wife may have been with her family in We st Sussex, but I have found no letters from this period that tell me where either Sickert or Ellen was.

  But the month of December could not have been a happy one for Ellen. It is unlikely she saw Sickert much at all, and one has to wonder where she thought he was and what he was doing. She would have been deeply worried and saddened by the critical illness of a dear family friend, reform politician and orator John Bright. Daily, The Times gave reports on his condition, reports that could have evoked bittersweet memories of Ellen’s late father, who had been one of Bright’s closest friends.

  The dairyman arrested in the John Gill case was eventually cleared and the murder would remain unsolved. The murder of Rose Mylett was never solved. The notion that Jack the Ripper might have committed either crime didn’t seem plausible and was soon forgotten by the people who mattered. The Ripper didn’t mutilate Rose. He didn’t cut her throat, and it wasn’t his MO to savage a little boy, no matter what was threatened in letters that the police would have considered hoaxes, anyway.

  Because of the scarcity of medico-legal facts revealed in the newspapers and the inquest, it is difficult to reconstruct John Gill’s case. One of the most important unanswered questions is the identity of the man John was last seen talking to, assuming this reported detail is true. If the man was a stranger, it would seem that quite an effort should have been made to discover who he was and what he was doing in Bradford. Clearly, the boy went off with someone, and this person murdered and mutilated him.

  The piece of “shirting” around John’s neck is a curious signature on the part of the killer. Every Jack the Ripper victim, as far as I know, was wearing a scarf, a handkerchief, or some other piece of fabric around the neck. When the Ripper cut a victim’s throat, he did not cut off the neckerchief, and in Rose Mylett’s murder, a folded handkerchief was draped over her neck. Clearly, neckerchiefs or scarves symbolized something to the killer.

  Sickert friend and artist Marjorie Lilly recalled that he had a favorite red neckerchief. While he was working on his Camden Town murder paintings, and “was reliving the scene he would assume the part of a ruffian, knotting the handkerchief loosely around his neck, pulling a cap over his eyes and lighting his lantern.” It was commonly known that if a criminal wore a red neckerchief to his execution, it signaled that he had divulged no truths to anyone, and carried his darkest secrets to the grave. Sickert’s red handkerchief was a talisman and not to be touched by anyone, including the housekeeper, who knew to steer clear of it when she saw it “dangling” from the bedpost inside his studio or tied to a doorknob or peg.

  The red handkerchief, Lilly wrote, “played a necessary part in the performance of the drawings, spurring him on at crucial moments, becoming so interwoven with the actual working out of his idea that he kept it constantly before his eyes.” Sickert began what I call his “Camden Town Murder Period” not long after the actual Camden Town murder of a prostitute in 1907. Lilly said that during this era of his life, “he had two fervent crazes . . . crime and the princes of the Church.” Crime was “personified by Jack the Ripper, the Church by Anthony Trollope.”

  “I hate Christianity!” Sickert once yelled at a Salvation Army band.

  He was not a religious man unless he was playing an important biblical role. Lazarus Breaks His Fast: Self Portrait and The Servant of Abraham: Self Portrait are two of his later works. When he was almost seventy, he painted his famous The Raising of Lazarus by getting a local undertaker to wrap the life-size lay figure once owned by the eighteenth-century artist William Hogarth in a shroud. The heavily bearded Sickert climbed up a stepladder and assumed the role of Christ raising Lazarus from the dead while Ciceley Hey posed as Lazarus’s sister. Sickert painted the huge canvas from a photograph, and in it, Christ is another self-portrait.

  Perhaps Sickert’s fantasies about having power over life and death were different in his sunset years. He was getting old. He felt bad much of the time. If only he had the power to give life. He already knew he had the power to take it. Testimony at John Gill’s inquest verified that the seven-year-old boy’s heart was “plucked,” not cut out. The killer reached inside the slashed-open chest and ribs and took the boy’s heart in his hand and tore it from the body.

  Do unto others as was done unto you. If Walter Sickert murdered John Gill, it was because he could. Sickert had sexual power only when he could dominate and cause death. He may not have felt remorse, but he must have hated what he could not have and could not be. He could not have a woman. He was never a normal boy and could never be a normal man. I don’t know of a single instance when Sickert showed physical courage. He victimized people only when he had the advantage.

  When he betrayed Whistler in 1896, he did so the same year Whistler’s wife, Beatrice, died. Her death devastated Whistler. He would never recover from it. In the last life-size self-portrait Whistler painted, his black figure recedes into blackness until the man is hard to find. He was still in the midst of a financially ruinous lawsuit and was perhaps at the lowest point of his life when Sickert covertly went after him in the Saturday Review. The same year Sickert lost the lawsuit, 1897, Oscar Wilde emerged from prison, his once-glorious career in shambles, his body a wreck. Sickert shunned him.

  Wilde had been kind to Helena Sickert when she was a girl. From him she received her first book of poetry and encouragement to be whatever she wanted to be in life. When Walter Sickert went to Paris in 1883 to deliver Whistler’s portrait of his mother to the annual Salon exhibition, the dashing, famous Wilde hosted the young, wideeyed artist at the Hôtel Voltaire for a week.

  When Sickert’s father died in 1885, her mother, Helena wrote, was “nearly mad with grief.” Oscar Wilde came to see Mrs. Sickert. She was receiving no company. But of course she will, Wilde said as he bounded up the stairs. It wasn’t very long before Mrs. Sickert was laughing—a sound her daughter thought she would never hear again.

  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 that it 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. News accounts described Emily Dimmock as twenty-three years old, rather tall, thin, and pale with dark-brown hair. She was known for being polite and neatly dressed, and a newspaper sketch of her depicted her as attractive. 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 Eu
gene Shaw was a cook for the Midland Railway. He was paid twenty-seven shillings per six-day week, leaving daily on a 5:42 P.M. 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 Grover’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 Mornington 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, and was described as a cheerful woman who liked to sing to herself. 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 one that twenty-eight-year-old artist Robert Wood, employed by London Sand Blast Decorative Glass Works on Gray’s Inn Road, had given to her on September 6th 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. Handwriting comparisons in Wood’s case were never made by any expert, but instead by another sexual client of Emily’s, a man who swore on the witness stand that handwriting on a postcard and two words on a fragment of charred paper found in Emily’s fireplace had been written by the same person. Apparently, Emily had recently received a number of postcards—at least four. One mailed from “a seaside town” read (as best a witness could recall), “Do not be surprised if you hear of a murder being done. You have ruined my life, and I shall do it soon.”

  After what Judge William Grantham described as the most remarkable trial of the century, Robert Wood 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.