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

For the Ripper to backtrack from Mitre Square to Goulston Street involved his virtually returning to Elizabeth Stride's crime scene. Quite likely, this route took him from the Church Passage out of Mitre Square, and to Houndsditch, Gravel Lane, Stoney Lane - and across Petticoat Lane, where Sickert went on his unnerving sojourn in the fog many years later when he carried his Gladstone bag and took Marjorie Lilly and her friend with him. The police were baffled that the murderer would be this bold. There were constables and detectives all over the place. The law enforcement community would have been better served had it spent more energy analyzing the killer's outrageous backtrack and his piece of chalk instead of getting stuck in the muck of the meaning of "Juwes."

"Togs 8 suits, many hats I wear," the Ripper wrote in an eighty-one-line poem he sent the "Superintendent of Great Scotland Yard" November 8th a year later. "The man is keen: quick, and leaves no trace - " His objective is to "destroy the filthy hideous whores of the night; Dejected, lost, cast down, ragged, and thin, Frequenters of Theatres, Music-halls and drinkers of Hellish gin."

For Walter Sickert, it would have been another big "ha ha" to head back to the scene of Elizabeth Stride's murder and ask a constable what was going on. In the same poem of 1889, the Ripper boasts, "I spoke to a policeman who saw the sight, And informed me it was done by a Knacker in the night… I told the man you should try and catch him; Say another word old Chap I'll run you in.

"One night hard gone I did a policeman meet - Treated and walked with him down High St."

The 1889 poem was "filed with the others." No significant attention was paid to the distinctive form of printing or the relatively clever rhymes, which were not those of an illiterate or deranged person. The reference to theaters and music halls as places where the Ripper spots "whores" should have been a clue. Perhaps an undercover man or two should have begun frequenting such places. Sickert spent many of his nights at theaters and music halls. Lunatics and impoverished butchers and East End ruffians probably did not.

In the 1889 poem, the Ripper admits he reads the "papers" and takes great exception to being called "insane." He says, "I always do my work alone," contradicting the much-publicized theory that the Ripper might have an accomplice. He claims he doesn't "smoke, swill, or touch gin." "Swill" was street slang for excessive drinking, which Sickert certainly did not do at this stage in his life. If he drank at all, he wasn't likely to touch rot-gut gin. He did not smoke cigarettes, although he was fond of cigars and became rather much addicted to them in later years.

"Altho, self taught," the Ripper says, "I can write and spell."

The poem is difficult to decipher in places, and "Knacker" might be used twice or might be "Knocker" in one of the lines. "Knacker" was street slang for a horse slaughterer. "Knocker" was street slang for finely or showily dressed. Sickert was no horse slaughterer, but the police publicly theorized that the Ripper might be one.

Sickert's greatest gift was not poetry, but this did not deter him from jotting a rhyme or two in letters or singing silly, original lyrics he set to music-hall tunes. "I have composed a poem to Ethel," he wrote in later years when his friend Ethel Sands was volunteering for the Red Cross:

With your syringe on your shoulder And your thermometer by your side You'll be curing some young officer And making him your pride

In another letter, he jots a verse about the "incessant sopping drizzle" in Normandy:

It can't go on for ever It would if it could But there is no use talking For it couldn't if it would

In a Ripper letter sent in October 1896 to the Commercial Street Police Station in Whitechapel, he mocks the police by quoting, " 'The Jewes are people that are blamed for nothing' Ha Ha have you heard this before." The spelling of "Jews" was hotly debated during Catherine Eddows's inquest, and the coroner repeatedly questioned police whether the word on the wall was "Juwes" or "Jewes." Even though the Ripper was supposed to be dead by 1896 - according to Chief Constable Melville Macnaghten - the letter of 1896 concerned the police enough to result in a flurry of memorandums:

"I beg to submit attached letter received per post 14th inst. Signed Jack the Ripper stating that writer has just returned from abroad and means to go on again when he gets the chance," Supervisor George Payne wrote in his special report from the Commercial Street Station. "The letter appears similar to those received by police during the series of murders in the district in 1888 and 1889. Police have been instructed to keep a sharp lookout."

A telegram was sent to all divisions, asking police to keep this "sharp look out, but at the same time to keep the information quiet. Writer in sending the letter no doubt considers it a great joke at the expense of the police." On October 18, 1896, a chief inspector wrote in a Central Officer's Special Report that he had compared the recent letter with old Jack the Ripper letters and "failed to find any similarity of handwriting in any of them, with the exception of the two well remembered communications which were sent to the 'Central News' Office; one a letter, dated 25th Sept./88 and the other a post-card, bearing the postmark 1st Oct./88."

What is so blatantly inconsistent in the chief inspector's report is that he first says there are no similarities between the recent letter and the earlier Ripper letters, but then he goes on to cite similarities: "I find many similarities in the formation of letters. For instance the y's, t's and w's are very much the same. Then there are several words which appear in both documents." But in conclusion, the chief inspector decides, "I beg to observe that I do not attach any importance to this communication." CID Superintendent Donald Swanson agreed. "In my opinion," he jotted at the end of the inspector's report, "the handwritings are not the same… I beg that the letter may be put with other similar letters. Its circulation is to be regretted."

The letter of 1896 was given no credibility by police and was not published in the newspapers. The Ripper was banished, exorcised. He no longer existed. Maybe he never had existed, but was just some fiend who killed a few prostitutes, and all of those letters were from crackpots. Ironically, Jack the Ripper became a "Mr. Nobody" again, at least to the police, for whom it was most convenient to live in denial.

It has often been asked - and I expect the question will always be asked - if Sickert committed other murders in addition to the ones believed to have been committed by Jack the Ripper. Serial killers don't suddenly start and stop. The Ripper was no exception, and as is true of other serial killers, he did not restrict his murders to one location, especially a heavily patrolled area where there were thousands of anxious citizens looking for him. It would have been incredibly risky to write letters laying claim to every murder he committed, and I don't think the Ripper did. Sickert thrived on the publicity, on the game. But first and foremost was his need to kill and not be caught.

Eleven months after the Ripper letter of 1896, twenty-year-old Emma Johnson disappeared on the early evening of Wednesday, September 15th, while walking home near Windsor, about twenty miles west of London. The next day, two women picking blackberries close to Maidenhead Road discovered two muddy petticoats, a bloody chemise, and a black coat in a ditch under shrubbery.

On Friday, September 17th, the Berkshire police were notified of Emma's disappearance and organized a search. The clothing was identified as Emma's, and Sunday, in the same field where the women had been picking berries, a laborer found a skirt, a bodice, a collar, and a pair of cuffs in a ditch. On the banks of a stagnant inlet of the Thames, Emma's mother discovered a pair of her daughter's stays. Near these were the imprint of a woman's boot and scrape marks in the dirt apparently made by someone dragging a heavy object toward the murky inlet.