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

Entering France from England was an easy and friendly transition and remained so during the years Sickert traveled to and fro. Crossing the English Channel in the late 1800s could take as little as four hours in good weather. One could travel by express train and "fast" steamer seven days a week, twice daily, with the trains leaving Victoria Station at 10:30 in the morning or London Bridge at 10:45. The steamer sailed out of Newhaven at 12:45 P.M. and arrived in Dieppe around dinnertime. A single, one-way first-class ticket to Dieppe was twenty-four shillings, second class was seventeen shillings, and part of this Express Tidal Service included trains from Dieppe straight through to Rouen and Paris.

Sickert's mother claimed she never knew when her son would suddenly go to France or suddenly come back. Maybe he hopped back and forth from England to Dieppe while the Ripper crimes were going on in 1888, but if he did, it was probably to cool off. He had been going to Dieppe since childhood and kept several places there. French death and crime statistics for the Victorian era do not seem to have survived, and it was not possible to find records of homicides then that might even remotely resemble the Ripper's crimes. But Dieppe was simply too small a town to commit lust-murders and get away with it.

During the days I spent in Dieppe, with its narrow old streets and passageways, its rocky shore and soaring cliffs that sheer off into the Channel, I tried to see that small seaside village as a killing ground for Sickert, but I could not. His work while he was in Dieppe reflects a different spirit. Most of the pictures he painted there are in lovely colors, his depictions of buildings inspiring. There is nothing morbid or violent in most of his Normandy art. It is as if Dieppe brought out the side of Sickert's face that is turned to the light in his Jekyll and Hyde self-portraits.

The sun did not show itself on Saturday, September 29th, and a persistent, cold rain chilled the night as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde ended its long run at the Lyceum. The newspapers reported that the "great excesses of sunshine were at an end."

Elizabeth Stride only recently had moved out of a lodging house on Dorset Street in Spitalfields, where she had been living with Michael Kidney, a waterside laborer who was in the Army Reserve. Long Liz, as her friends called her, had left Kidney before. She carried her few belongings with her this time, but there was no reason to assume she was gone for good. Kidney would later testify at her inquest that now and then she wanted her freedom and an opportunity to indulge her "drinking habits," but after a spell of wandering off, she always came back.

Elizabeth's maiden name was Gustafsdotter and she would have turned 45 on November 27th, although she had led most people to believe she was about ten years younger than she really was. Elizabeth had led a life of lies, most of them pitiful attempts to weave a brighter, more dramatic tale than the truth of her depressing, desperate life. She was born in Torslanda, near Goteborg, Sweden, the daughter of a farmer. Some said she spoke fluent English without a trace of an accent. Others claimed she did not properly form her words and sounded like a foreigner. Swedish, her native tongue, is a Germanic language closely related to Danish, which is what Sickert's father spoke.

Elizabeth used to tell people she came to London as a young lady to "see the country," but this was just one more fabrication. The earliest record found of her living in London was in the Swedish Church register that listed her name in 1879, with the notation that she had been given a shilling. She was five foot two or four, according to people who went to the mortuary to figure out who she was. Her complexion was "pale." Others described it as "dark." Her hair was "dark brown and curly," or "black," according to someone else. A policeman lifted one of Elizabeth's eyelids in the poorly lit mortuary and decided that her eyes were "gray."

In her black-and-white postmortem photograph, Elizabeth's hair looks darker because it was wet and stringy from having been rinsed. Her face was pale because she was dead and had lost virtually all of the blood in her body. Her eyes may once have been bright blue, but not by the time the policeman lifted a lid to check. After death, the conjunctiva of the eye begins to dry and cloud. Most people who have been dead awhile appear to have gray or grayish-blue eyes unless their eyes were very dark.

After her autopsy, Elizabeth was dressed in the dark clothing she was wearing when she was murdered. She was placed in a shell that was stood up against a wall to be photographed. Barely visible in the shadow of her tucked-in chin is the cut made by her killer's knife as it jaggedly trails off inches below the right side of her neck. Her photograph after death may have been the only one taken in her life. She appears to have been thin, with a nicely shaped face and good features, and a mouth that might have been sensuous had she not lost her upper front teeth.

Elizabeth may have been a blonde beauty in her youth. During her inquest, truths about her began to emerge. She had left Sweden to take a "situation" with a gentleman who lived near Hyde Park. It is not known how long that "situation" lasted, but at some point after it ended she lived with a policeman. In 1869, she married a carpenter named John Thomas Stride. Everyone who knew her in the local lodging houses she frequented had heard the tragic tale that her husband had drowned when the Princess Alice sank after a steam collier ran it down.

Elizabeth had different versions of this tale. Her husband and two of her nine children had drowned when the Princess Alice went down. Or her husband and all of her children drowned. Elizabeth, who would have been quite young when she began bearing children to have produced nine of them by 1878, somehow survived the shipwreck that killed 640 people. While struggling for her life, another panicking passenger kicked her in the mouth, explaining the "deformity" to it.

Elizabeth told everyone that the entire roof of her mouth was gone, but a postmortem examination revealed nothing wrong with her hard or soft palates. The only deformity was her missing front teeth, which must have been a source of shame to her. Records at the Poplar and Stepney Sick Asylum showed that her husband, John Stride, died there on October 24, 1884. He did not drown in a shipwreck, nor did any of their children - if they had children. Perhaps falsehoods about Elizabeth's past made her life more interesting to her, for the truth was painful and humiliating and did nothing but cause trouble.

When the clergy of the Swedish Church she attended discovered that her husband did not die in the shipwreck, they ceased any financial assistance. Perhaps she lied about the death of her husband and their alleged children because a fund had been set aside for the survivors of the Princess Alice shipwreck. When it was suspected that no one related to Elizabeth had died in that disaster, the money stopped. One way or another, Elizabeth had to be supported by a man, and when she wasn't, she made what she could from sewing, cleaning, and prostitution.

Of late, she had been spending her nights at a lodging house at 32 Flower and Dean Street, where the deputy, a widow named Elizabeth Tanner, knew her fairly well. During the inquest, Mrs. Tanner testified that she had seen Elizabeth on and off for six years and that until Thursday, September 27th, Elizabeth had been living in another lodging house with a man named Michael Kidney. She had walked out on him with nothing but a few ragged clothes and a hymn book. On that Thursday night and the following Friday night she stayed in Mrs. Tanner's lodging house. On the early evening of Saturday, September 29th, Elizabeth and Mrs. Tanner had a drink at Queen's Head public house on Commercial Street, and afterward Elizabeth earned sixpence by cleaning two of the lodging-house rooms.