Portrait of a Killer

by Patricia Cornwell

  When Sickert began his infamous paintings and etchings of nude women sprawled on iron bedsteads—The Camden Town Murder and L’Affaire 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 even collected piles of uniforms and maintained close relations with people at the Red Cross, asking them to let him know when ill-fated patients would no longer need their uniforms. “I have got a capital fellow,” he wrote to Nan Hudson in the fall of 1914. “The ideal noble & somewhat beefy young Briton . . . & I have already drawn him alive & 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.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  THE DAUGHTERS OF COBDEN

  Ellen Melicent Ashburner Cobden was born on August 18, 1848, in Dunford, the family’s old farmhouse near the village of Heyshott, in West Sussex.

  At the end of May 1860, when Walter was born in Munich, the eleven-year-old Ellen was spending the spring in Paris. She had saved a sparrow that had fallen out of its nest in the garden. “A dear little tame thing it will eat out of my hand and perch upon my finger,” she wrote a pen pal. Ellen’s mother, Kate, was planning a lovely children’s party with fifty or sixty guests, and was planning to take Ellen to the circus and to a picnic in an “enormous tree” with a staircase leading to a table on top. Ellen had just learned a special trick of “putting an egg in a wine bottle,” and now and then her father wrote special letters just to her.

  Life back in England was not so enchanting. In the most recent letter from Richard Cobden, he told his daughter that a violent storm had slammed the family estate and torn up thirty-six trees by the roots. A severe cold front destroyed most of the shrubbery on the estate, including the evergreens, and the vegetable garden would be barren come summer. The report was like a foreshadowing of the evil that had entered the world through a distant city in Germany. Ellen’s future husband would soon enough cross the Channel and settle in London, where he would uproot the lives of many people, including hers.

  Numerous biographies have been written about Ellen’s father, Richard Cobden. He was one of twelve children, and his childhood was a desolate, harsh one. He was sent away from home at the age of ten after his father’s disastrous business sense spiraled the family to ruin. Cobden’s growing-up years were spent working for his uncle, a merchant in London, and attending a school in Yorkshire. This period of his life was physical and emotional torture, and in years to come Cobden could scarcely bear to speak of it.

  Suffering bears the fruits of unselfishness and love in some people, and it did with him. There was nothing bitter or unkind about Richard Cobden, not even when he was battered by his most derisive detractors during his polarizing political career. His great passion was people, and he was never far from his pained memories of watching farmers, including his own father, lose everything they owned. Cobden’s compassion for people gave him the mission of repealing the Corn Laws, a terrible piece of legislation that kept families poor and hungry.

  The Corn Laws (corn meant grain) were enacted in 1815 when the Napoleonic Wars had left England almost in a state of famine. Bread was precious, and it was illegal for a baker to sell his loaves until after they had been out of the oven for at least twenty-four hours. If bread was stale, people weren’t as likely to overeat and would “waste not and want not.” The penalty for defying this law was harsh. Bakers were fined as much as five pounds and court costs. As a small boy, Richard Cobden watched the desperate come to Dunford and beg for alms or food that his own family could not afford.

  Only well-off farmers and landlords profited, and they were the ones who would make sure that the price of grain remained as high in good times as it had been in
bad. The landlords who wanted to keep prices inflated were the majority in Parliament, and the Corn Laws were not hard to pass. The logic was simple: Place impossibly high duties on imported foreign grains, and the supply in England stays low, the prices artificially high. The enactment of the Corn Laws was disastrous for the common worker, and riots broke out in London and other parts of the country. The laws would remain in effect until 1846, when Cobden won his fight to repeal them.

  He was greatly respected at home and abroad. On his first trip to America, he was invited to stay in the White House. He gained the admiration and friendship of author Harriet Beecher Stowe after she came to visit him at Dunford in 1853 and the two of them discussed the importance of “cultivating cotton by free labour.” In an essay she wrote a year later, she described him as a slender man of small stature who had “great ease of manner” and “the most frank, fascinating smile.” Cobden was a peer to every powerful politician in England, including Sir Robert Peel, the father of the police force that would one day take on Cobden’s future son-in-law, Jack the Ripper, and lose.

  Richard Cobden was devoted to his family and became the only stability in his daughters’ young lives after his only son, Richard Brooks, died at age fifteen in 1856. He was in boarding school near Heidelberg, and was healthy, mischievous, and adored. His mother had turned him into her best friend during her husband’s frequent absences.

  Ellen adored her big brother, too. “I send you a little curl of my hair, that you may sometimes think of one who loves you very much,” she wrote him when he was off at boarding school. “You will write to me very soon and tell me how long it will be before I shall have the pleasure of seeing you.” The affection was mutual and unusually sweet. “I shall bring down some presents for you,” Richard wrote her in his boyish scrawl. “I will try to get you a little kitten.”

  Richard’s letters hint at the mature, insightful, and witty man he might have become. He was a practical jokester whose April Fools’ Day naughtiness included writing “kick me out of the shop” in German and giving the note to a French boy to present as a shopping list at a nearby grocery store. Yet Richard Brooks was tenderhearted enough to be concerned about a family friend’s dog, who might need an “extra blanket” during the “east winds.”

  The boy’s letters home were entertaining, and much too full of life to cause anyone to imagine that he would not grow up to be the perfect only son of his famous father. On April 3rd, Richard Brooks wrote a letter to his father from boarding school that would be his last one. He was suddenly stricken with scarlet fever and died on April 6th.

  The story is made all the more tragic by an almost unforgivable blunder. The headmaster at Richard’s school contacted a Cobden family friend, and each man assumed the other had wired Richard Cobden about his son’s sudden death. Young Richard Brooks was already buried by the time his father got the news in a most heart-wrenching way. Cobden had just sat down to breakfast in his hotel room on Grosvenor Street in London and was going through his mail. He found the April 3rd letter from his son, and eagerly read it first. Moments later, he opened another letter that consoled him over his terrible loss. Stunned and beside himself with grief, Cobden immediately began the five-hour journey to Dunford, anguishing over how to tell his family, especially Kate. She had already lost two children and was unhealthily attached to Richard.

  Cobden appeared at Dunford, ashen and drawn, and broke down as he told them what had happened. The shock was more than Kate could bear, and the loss of her beloved son took on the mythical proportions of Icarus flying into the face of the sun. After several days of denial, she fell into an almost catatonic state, sitting “like a statue, neither speaking nor seeming to hear,” Cobden wrote. Hour by hour he watched his wife’s hair turn white. Seven-year-old Ellen had lost her brother, and now she had lost her mother, too. Kate Cobden would outlive her husband by twelve years, but she was an emotionally stricken woman who, as her husband put it, “stumbles over [Richard’s] corpse as she is passing from room to room.” She could not recover from her grief and became addicted to opiates. Ellen found herself in a role too overwhelming for any young girl to play. Just as Richard Brooks had become his mother’s best friend, Ellen became a replacement helpmeet for her father.

  On September 21, 1864, when Ellen was fifteen, her father wrote her asking her to please look after her younger sisters. “Much will depend on your influence & still more on your example,” he wrote. “I wished to have told you how much your Mamma & I looked to your good example,” and he expected her to help “bring [your sisters] into a perfect state of discipline.” This was an unrealistic expectation for a fifteen-year-old struggling with her own losses. Ellen was never allowed to grieve, and the burden and pain must have become almost unbearable when her father died a year later.

  The very smog that helped cloak the peregrinations and violent crimes of Ellen’s future husband robbed her father of his life. For years Cobden had been susceptible to respiratory infections that sent him on voyages or to the seaside or the countryside—wherever there was better air than the sooty soup of London. His last trip to London before his death was in March 1865. Ellen was sixteen and accompanied him. They stayed in a lodging house on Suffolk Street reasonably close to the House of Commons. Cobden was immediately laid up with asthma as black smoke gushed from chimneys of nearby houses, and the east wind blew the noxious air into his room.

  A week later, he lay in bed praying that the winds would mercifully shift, but his asthma worsened and he developed bronchitis. Cobden sensed that the end had come and made out his will. His wife and Ellen were by his bed when he died on Sunday morning, April 2, 1865, at the age of sixty-one. Ellen was the “one whose attachment to her father seems to have been a passion scarcely equaled among the daughters,” said Cobden’s lifelong friend and political ally John Bright. She was the last one to let go of her father’s coffin as it was lowered into the earth. She never let go of his memory or forgot what he expected of her.

  Bright would later tell Cobden’s official biographer, John Morley, that Cobden’s “was a life of perpetual self-sacrifice . . . . I never knew how much I loved him until I had lost him.” Monday, the day after Cobden’s death, Benjamin Disraeli said to Members of Parliament in the House of Commons, “There is this consolation . . . that these great men are not altogether lost to us.” Today in the Heyshott village church, a plaque on Cobden’s family pew reads, “In this place Richard Cobden, who loved his fellow men, was accustomed to worship God.” Despite Cobden’s best intentions, he left an unstable wife to take care of four spirited daughters, and despite the many promises made by influential friends at the funeral, the “daughters of Cobden,” as the press called them, were on their own.

  In 1898, Janie reminded Ellen how “all those who professed such deep admiration and affection for [our] father during his lifetime forgot the existence of his young daughters, the youngest but 3½ years old. Do you remember Gladstone at father’s funeral telling mother that she might always rely on his friendship & her children also—The next time I met him, or spoke to him . . . was more than 20 years later. Such is the way of the world!”

  Ellen held the family together, as she had promised her father she would. She handled the family finances while her mother moved numbly through the last few years of her unhappy life. Had it not been for Ellen’s dogged cajoling and firm supervision of the family affairs, it is questionable whether bills would have been paid, young Annie would have gone to school, or the daughters could have left their mother’s house to move into a flat at 14 York Place, on Baker Street, London. Ellen’s yearly stipend was £250, or at least this was what she told her mother she would need. It can be conjectured that each daughter received the same amount, ensuring them a comfortable existence, as well as a vulnerability to men whose intentions may not have been sterling.

  Richard Fisher was engaged to daughter Katie when Cobden died, and he rushed her into marriage before the family had stopped writing letters on mou
rning stationery. Over the years Fisher’s greedy demands would prove a constant source of irritation to the Cobdens. In 1880, when Walter Sickert entered the lives of the Cobden daughters, Katie was married, Maggie was too spirited and frivolous to serve an ambitious, manipulative man any useful purpose, and Janie was far too savvy for Sickert to go near. He picked Ellen.

  Both her parents were dead. She had no one to advise her or raise objections. I doubt that Sickert would have gained Richard Cobden’s approval. Cobden was a wise and insightful man and would not have been fooled by Sickert’s acts or enchanted by his charm. Cobden would have detested the absence of compassion in the handsome young man.

  “Mrs. Sickert and all her sons were such pagans,” Janie would write Ellen some twenty years later. “How sad that fate has ever brought you into their midst.”

  The differences between the character of Ellen’s father and that of the man she would marry should have been blatantly obvious, but in Ellen’s eyes the two men might have appeared to have much in common. Richard Cobden did not have an Oxford or Cambridge education and was in many ways self-taught. He loved Shakespeare, Byron, Irving, and Cooper. He was fluent in French, and as a young man he had fantasized about being a playwright. His love of the visual arts would be a lifelong affair, even if his attempts at writing for the stage were a failure. Cobden too was not adept at handling finances. He might have been savvy in business, but he had no interest in money unless he had none.