Patricia Cornwell - Portrait Of A Killer - Jack The Ripper - Case Closed

It is not known whether the baseless rumors that he was the Whitechapel killer ever reached his safe little rooms crammed with signed photographs of celebrities and royalty, some of whom had come to see him. What a great act of benevolence and tolerance to visit the likes of him and not outwardly register horror. What a story to relate to one's friends, to dukes and duchesses, to lords and ladies, or to Queen Victoria herself. Her Majesty was fascinated by life's mysteries and curiosities and had been quite fond of Tom Thumb, an American midget named Charles Sherwood Stratton who was only forty inches tall. It was easier to enter the cloistered world of harmless and amusing mutants than to wade through the "bottomless pit of decaying life," as Beatrice Webb described the East End, where rents were steep because overcrowding gave slumlords the upper hand.

The equivalent of a dollar to a dollar-fifty a week in rent was sometimes a fifth of a worker's salary, and when one of these Ebenezer Scrooge slumlords decided to raise the rent, sometimes a large family found itself homeless with nothing but a handbarrow to tote away all its worldly goods. A decade later Jack London went undercover in the East End to see for himself what it was like, and he related terrible stories of poverty and filth. He described an elderly woman found dead inside a room so infested with vermin that her clothing was "gray with insects." She was skin and bones, covered with sores, her hair matted with "filth" and a "nest of vermin," London wrote. In the East End, he reported, an attempt at cleanliness was a "howling farce," and when rain fell it was "more like grease than water."

This greasy rain fell in drips and drizzles in the East End most of Thursday, August 30th. Horse-drawn wagons and barrows splashed through the garbage-strewn muddy water of narrow, crowded streets, where flies droned in clouds and people scratched for the next penny. Most inhabitants of this wretched part of the Great Metropolis had never tasted real coffee, tea, or chocolate. Fruit or meat never touched their lips unless it was overripe or rotten. There was no such thing as a bookstore or a decent cafe. There were no hotels, at least not the sort that civilized people might visit. An Unfortunate could not get out of the weather and find a bit of food unless she could convince a man to take her in or give her small change so she could rent a bed for the night in a common lodging house called a doss-house.

"Doss" was slang for bed, and a typical doss-house was a hellish, decaying dwelling where men and women paid four or five pence to sleep in communal rooms filled with small iron bedsteads covered with gray blankets. Supposedly, linens were washed once a week. The casual poor, as the guests were called, sat around in crowded dormitories, smoking, mending, sometimes talking, joking if the lodger was still an optimist who believed life might get better, or telling a morose tale if the threadbare soul had been worn into a numb hopelessness. In the kitchen, men and women gathered to cook whatever they had been able to find or steal during the day. Drunks wandered in and held out palsied hands, grateful for a bone or scrap that might sail their way on the cruel winds of laughter as lodgers watched them grab and gnaw like animals. Children begged, and were beaten for getting too close to the fire.

Inside these inhuman establishments, one abided by strict, degrading rules posted on walls and enforced by the doorkeeper or warden. Misbehavior was rewarded by banishment to the mean streets, and early in the morning lodgers were herded out the door unless they paid in advance for another night. Doss-houses were usually owned by a better class of people who lived elsewhere and did not oversee their properties and may never even have seen them. For a little capital, one could own a piece of a poorhouse and have no idea - perhaps by choice - that his "Model Lodgings" investment was an abomination overseen by "keepers" who often used dishonest and abusive means to maintain control over the desperate residents.

Many of these doss-houses catered to the criminal element, including the Unfortunates who might, on a good night, have pennies for lodging. Perhaps the Unfortunate might persuade a client to take her to bed, which was certainly preferable to sex on the street when one was exhausted, drunk, and hungry. Another breed of lodger was the "gentleman slummer," who, like thrill-seeking men of every era, would leave his respectable home and family to enter a forbidden world of low-life pub-hopping and music halls and cheap, anonymous sex. Some men from the better parts of the city became addicted to this secret entertainment, and Walter Sickert was one of them.

His best-known artistic leitmotif is an iron bedstead, and on it is a nude prostitute with a man aggressively leaning over her. Sometimes both the man and the nude woman are sitting, but the man is always clothed. It was Sickert's habit to keep an iron bedstead in any studio he was using at the time, and on it he arranged many a model. Occasionally he posed himself on the bed with a wooden lay figure - mannikin - that supposedly had belonged to one of Sickert's artistic idols, William Hogarth.

Sickert enjoyed shocking guests he had invited over for tea and cake, and on one occasion, not long after the 1907 slaying of a prostitute in Camden Town, Sickert's guests arrived at his dimly lit Camden Town studio to discover the lewdly positioned lay figure in bed with Sickert, who was making jests about the recent murder. No one seemed to think much about that display or anything else bizarre Walter Sickert did. After all, he was Sickert. None of his contemporaries - nor many of the critics and academics who study him today - wondered why he acted out violence and was obsessed with notorious crimes, including those of Jack the Ripper.

Sickert was in a superior and untouchable position if he wanted to get away with murdering Unfortunates. He was of a class that was above suspicion, and he was a genius at becoming any number of different characters in every sense of the word. It would have been easy and exciting for him to disguise himself as either an East End man or a gentleman slummer and voyeuristically prowl the pubs and doss-houses of Whitechapel and its nearby hellholes. He was an artist capable of changing his handwriting and designing taunting letters that are the mark of a brilliant draftsman. But nobody noticed the remarkable nature of these documents until art historian Dr. Anna Gruetzner Robins and paper conservator Anne Kennett examined the originals at the Public Record Office (PRO) in June 2002.

What had always been assumed to be human or animal blood on the Ripper letters turns out to be sticky brown etching ground - or perhaps a mixture of inks that remarkably resembles old blood. These bloody-looking smears, drips, and splotches were applied with an artist's brush, or are imprints left by fabrics or fingers. Some of the Ripper's stationery is "vellum" or other paper with watermarks. Apparently the police never noticed feathering brush strokes or types of paper when investigating the Ripper murders. Apparently no one has ever paid any attention to the some thirty different watermarks found on letters thought to be hoaxes written by some illiterate or deranged prankster. Apparently no one has asked whether such a prankster was likely to have possessed drawing pens, colorful inks, lithographic or Chinagraph crayons, etching ground, and artist's paints and paper.

If any part of Sickert's anatomy symbolized his entire being, it wasn't his disfigured penis. It was his eyes. He watched. Watching - spying, stalking with the eyes and the feet - is a dominant trait of psychopathic killers, unlike the disorganized offenders who are given to impulse or messages from outer space or God. Psychopaths watch people. They watch pornography, especially violent pornography. They are very scary voyeurs.