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

The records of A Pirie 8c Sons are preserved in a strong room at the Stoneywood Mills in Aberdeen. Keenly aware of my limitations as a paper-manufacturing or stationery expert, I asked antiquarian books and documents researcher Joe Jameson if he would go to Aberdeen and look through thousands of A Pirie records. For two cold, rainy days, he dug through boxes and was able to ascertain migraine-producing details about lime waste, rag boiling, paper machines, how many tons of soda were ordered, sediment removed from river water, shareholders, sketches of trademarks, types of paper manufactured - just about anything one might want to know about how paper was made from the late 1700s until the 1950s.

Over the better part of a century, tons of Alexander Pirie amp; Sons paper were shipped to London and other parts of the world. This prestigious company was proprietary and did not hesitate to sue if another manufacturer tried to delude the public into thinking its paper was made by A Pirie amp; Sons. The obvious question in this case is exactly what I asked Peter Bower: How common was the A Pirie watermark found on the three Ripper and eight Sickert letters?

After a thorough search of the company records, I can only say with certainty that while the paper may not be uncommon, as Bower said, it might be somewhat uncommon as personal stationery. It seems that A Pirie paper was used primarily for the printing of bankers' and other business ledgers, business stationery, and nonwatermarked printing and lithographic printing paper. I have no idea which stationery shop the Sickerts used when Walter or Ellen ordered the blue-bordered stationery printed on A Pirie amp; Sons paper. The shop may not have been in London, and its records may no longer exist. I also can't say how unique their particular watermark was, but it isn't to be found in an A Pirie amp; Sons list of fifty-six trademark designs that were in the Aberdeen records.

But there is a very good chance I didn't see their watermark in the examples I found because the Aberdeen records might be incomplete. I do know that in the only A Pirie amp; Sons catalogue I managed to get hold of, the list of their products for 1900 shows twenty-three designs, and the watermark of interest is not among them.

Walter Sickert knew about watermarks. He knew about paper. It is hard to imagine him writing Ripper letters and not being aware of the watermark. It is hard to imagine that Sickert wouldn't have been aware of the type of paper he was using, including good paper such as Monckton's Superfine and art paper. He may have used his A Pirie amp; Sons and Joynson Superfine personal stationery because he assumed that even if the police did notice the partial watermarks on the torn paper, they probably would not have linked a Ripper letter to the charming gentleman-artist Walter Sickert, who was not a suspect at the time. One does have to wonder, however, what might have happened had the police published the partial watermarks and printed them on posters.

Probably nothing. If Sickert's friends - or Ellen - recognized a partial watermark, they weren't likely to link Walter Sickert with Jack the Ripper. What surprises me most is that I cannot find any evidence that the police noticed the watermarks, and they should have. More than ten percent of the 211 Ripper letters at the Public Record Office (PRO) have watermarks or partial ones. Not all watermarked paper is expensive, but it also isn't associated with the street-slang-talking paupers who police and the press believed were writing most of the Ripper letters.

Sickert was a magpie with paper. He did not waste it. If he was out of paper, he would paste together remnants of whatever he could find and send a note scrawled on a paper patchwork quilt. In several letters to Whistler, Sickert jotted, "No paper in the house," especially if he was approaching the Master about needing money.

"Excuse paper cannot afford to Buy any dear Boss," the Ripper wrote on November 15, 1888.

Sickert made sketches on a variety of papers, from coarse brown toilet paper to vellum. Paying attention to types of paper and watermarks in criminal and civil investigations certainly was not new technology in 1888. Why no policeman or detective observed what many of the Jack the Ripper letters were written on or with is baffling and inexcusable. Someone should have noticed that the "ink" was actually paint, and "pens" were really paintbrushes or drawing pens with large nibs. Microscopy, infrared spectrophotometry, pyrolysis-gas chromatography, mass spectrometry, x-ray fluorescence, and neutron activation analysis were not required to figure out that much.

One explanation for these oversights is that until now police and others dismissed the letters as hoaxes. Photocopies and photographs aren't the best means of seeing the delicate feathering of brushes, or the beautiful purple, blue, red, burgundy, orange, sienna, and sepia colors used to write words and make splashes and strokes on these letters from so-called illiterates and lunatics. It takes an art expert's eye to detect that smears thought to be blood are really etching ground, and if Dr. Ferrara had not used an Omnichrome alternate light source and a variety of different filters, we would not have been able to coax eradicated writing out from under its cover of heavy black ink.

In one letter, the Ripper gives the police fill-in-the-blanks for his "name" and "address," but as a "Ha Ha" he blots out the "information" with dark black rectangles and coffin shapes. Under the black ink the Omnichrome revealed ha and the barely legible and partial signature Ripper, This sort of diabolical teasing is typical of someone who believes that anything "hidden" will puzzle the hell out of the police. Another bit of Ripper fun was to take an envelope and glue a strip of paper on the front of it, implying that the envelope was recycled and the original recipient's name is under the strip.

Dr. Ferrara performed long, delicate surgery to lift that strip. There was nothing under it. But the Ripper's mean-spirited, mocking teases failed to bring him the satisfaction he craved. There is no sign, for example, that anyone cared what was under that strip before Dr. Ferrara removed it 114 years after the Ripper sent the "joke" in the mail. There is no hint that the police tried to figure out what was hidden under the shapes in heavy black ink.

It is easy to forget that in 1888 Walter Sickert wasn't on investigators' minds and that Scotland Yard did not have access to the likes of Peter and Sally Bower, art historian and Sickert expert Dr. Anna Gruetzner Robins, paper conservator Anne Kennett, and curator of the Sickert archives Vada Hart. It has required intellectual sleuths such as these to discover that many of the Ripper letters contain telltale signs of Sickert's handwriting, and that in some cases, a single letter was written and drawn in several colors or mediums and with at least two different writing instruments, including colored pencils, lithographic crayons, and paintbrushes.

One Ripper communication received by the police on October 18, 1889, is on an eleven-by-fourteen-inch sheet of azure laid foolscap writing paper, the lettering first drawn in pencil, then beautifully painted over in brilliant red. Apparently no one thought it unusual that a lunatic or an illiterate or even a prankster would elaborately paint a letter that reads:

Dear Sir

I shall be in Whitechapel on the 20th of this month - And will begin some very delicate work about midnight, in the street where I executed my third examination of the human body.

Yours till death Jack the Ripper

Catch Me if you can

PS, [postscript at the top of the page] I hope you can read what I have written, and will put it all in the paper, not leave half out. If you can not see the letters let me know and I will write them biger.