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

On September 21st, Ellen Sickert wrote a letter to her brother-in-law, Dick Fisher, and said that Sickert had left England for Normandy to visit "his people," and would be gone for weeks. Sickert may have left, but not necessarily for France. The next night, Saturday, a woman was murdered in Birtley, Durham, which is in the coal-mining country of northeast Eng- (land, near Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Jane Boatmoor, a twenty-six-year-old mother who was rumored to lead a somewhat less than respectable life, was last seen alive by friends the night before, on Saturday, at eight o'clock. Her body was found the following morning, Sunday, September 23rd, in a gutter near Guston Colliery Railway.

The left side of her neck had been cut through to her vertebrae. A gash i on the right side of her face had laid open her lower jaw to the bone, and? her bowels protruded from her mutilated abdomen. The similarities between her murder and those in London's East End prompted Scotland Yard to send Dr. George Phillips and an inspector to meet with Durham police officials. No helpful evidence was found, and for some reason, it was decided that the killer probably had committed suicide. Local people made extensive searches of mine shafts, but no body was recovered and the crime went unsolved. However, in an anonymous letter to the City of London Police, dated November 20, 1888, the writer offers this suggestion: "Look at the case in County Durham… twas made to appear as if it was Jack the Ripper."

The police did not link the murder of Jane Boatmoor to Jack the Ripper. Investigators had no clue that the Ripper liked to manipulate the machinery behind the scenes. His violent appetite had been whetted and he craved "blood, blood, blood," as the Ripper wrote. He craved drama. He had an insatiable appetite for enthralling his audience. As Henry Irving once said to an unresponsive house, "Ladies and gentlemen, if you don't applaud, I can't act!" Perhaps the applause was too faint. Several more events happened in quick succession.

On September 24th, the police received the taunting letter with the killer's "name" and "address" blacked out with heavily inked rectangles and coffins. The next day, Jack the Ripper wrote another letter, but this time he made sure someone paid attention. He mailed his missive to the Central News Agency. "Dear Boss, I keep on hearing the police have caught me but they won't fix me just yet," the Ripper wrote in red ink. His spelling and grammar were correct, his writing as neat as a clerk's. The postmark was London's East End. The defense would say that the letter couldn't have been from Sickert. He was in France. The prosecutor would reply, "Based on what evidence?" In his biography of Degas, Daniel Halevy mentions that Sickert was in Dieppe at some point during the summer, but there is no evidence I could find that Sickert was in France at the end of September.

Sickert's "people," as Ellen ruefully called them, were his cliquish artist friends in Dieppe. To them, Ellen would always be an outsider. She was not the least bit bohemian or stimulating. It is likely that when she was in Dieppe with her husband, he ignored her. If he wasn't hobnobbing at cafes or in the summer homes of artists such as Jacques-Emile Blanche or George Moore, he was off the radar screen, as usual, wandering about, mingling with fishermen and sailors, or locked away in one of his secret rooms.

What is suspicious about Sickert's alleged plans to visit Normandy at the end of September and part of October is that there is no mention of him in letters exchanged among his friends. One would think if Sickert had been in Dieppe, then Moore or Blanche might have mentioned seeing him - or not seeing him. One might suppose that when Sickert wrote Blanche in August, he might have mentioned that he would be in France next month and hoped to see him - or would be sorry to miss him.

There is no mention in the letters of Degas or Whistler that they saw Sickert in September or October 1888, and no hint that they had a clue he was in France. Letters Sickert wrote to Blanche in the autumn of 1888 appear to have been written in London, because they are written on Sickert's 54 Broadhurst Gardens stationery, which apparently he did not use except when he was actually there. The only indication I could find that he was in France at all during the autumn of 1888 is an undated note to Blanche that Sickert supposedly wrote from the small fishing village Saint-Valery-en-Caux, twenty miles from Dieppe:

"This is a nice little place to sleep amp; eat in," Sickert writes, "which is what I am most anxious to do now."

The envelope is missing and there is no postmark to prove that Sickert was in Normandy. Nor is there any way to determine where Blanche was. But Sickert very well may have been in Saint-Valery-en-Caux when he wrote the letter. He probably did need rest and nourishment after his frenzied violent activities, and crossing the Channel was not an ordeal. I find it curious if not suspicious that he chose St. Valery when he could have stayed in Dieppe.

In fact, it is curious that he wrote Blanche at all, because most of the note is about Sickert's "looking for a colorman" so he could send his brother Bernhard "pastel glass paper or sand paper canvass." Sickert said he wanted a "packet of samples" and that he did not know "French measurements." I fail to understand how Sickert, who was fluent in French and had spent so much time in France, did not know where to find samples of papers. "I am a French painter," he declared in a letter to Blanche, yet the scientifically and mathematically inclined Sickert says he didn't know French measurements.

Perhaps Sickert's letter from St. Valery was sincere. Perhaps he did want Blanche's advice. Or perhaps the truth is that Sickert was exhausted and paranoid and on the run, and thought it wise to supply himself with an alibi. Apart from this note to Blanche, I could find nothing to suggest that Sickert spent any time at all in France during the late summer, early fall, or winter of 1888. The bathing - or swimming - season for Normandy was over as well. It began in early July and by the end of September, Sickert's friends closed down their Dieppe homes and studios.

Sickert's salon of artists and prominent friends would have scattered until the following summer. I wonder if it seemed a little strange to Ellen that her husband planned to join "his people" in Normandy for several weeks when nobody was likely to be there. I wonder if she saw her husband much at all, and if she did, did she think he was behaving a bit oddly? In August, Sickert the compulsive letter writer sent a note to Blanche, apologizing for not "writing for so long. I have been very hard at work, and I find it very difficult to find 5 minutes to write a letter."

There is no reason to believe Sickert's "work" was related to the toils of his trade - beyond his going to music halls and seeking inspiration from the streets all hours of the night. His artistic productivity wasn't at its usual high from August through the rest of the year. Paintings "circa 1888" are few, and there is no guarantee that "circa" didn't mean a year or two earlier or later. I found only one published article from 1888, and that was in the spring. It seems that Sickert avoided his friends for much of that year. There is no indication he summered in Dieppe - which was very unusual. No matter where he went or when, it is clear that Sickert wasn't following his usual routines, if one could call anything Sickert did "routine."

In the late nineteenth century, passports, visas, and other forms of identification were not required to travel on the Continent. (However, by late summer of 1888, passports were required to enter Germany from France.) There is no mention of Sickert having any form of "picture identification" until World War I, when he and his second wife, Christine, were issued laissez-passers to show guards at tunnels, railway crossings, and other strategic places as they traveled about France.