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

The problem is, psychopaths don't tell the truth. Every word they say is motivated by the desire to manipulate and by their insatiable egocentric need for attention and admiration. The Ripper wanted to impress his opponents. In his own warped way, he even wanted to be liked. He was brilliant and cunning. Even the police said so. He was amusing. He probably believed the police enjoyed a few laughs at his funny little games. "Catch me if you can," he repeatedly wrote. "I can write 5 hand writings," he boasted in a letter on October 18th. "You can't trace me by this writing," he bragged in another letter on November 10th. He often signed letters "your friend."

If the Ripper was offstage too long, it bothered him. If the police seemed to forget about him, he wrote the press. On September 11, 1889, the Ripper wrote, "Dear Sir Please will you oblige me by putting this into your paper to let the people of England now [know] that I hum [am] still living and running at larg as yet." He also made numerous references to going "abroad." "I intend finishing my work late in August when I shall sail for abroad," the Ripper wrote in a letter police received July 20, 1889. Later - just how much later we don't know - a bottle washed ashore between Deal and Sandwich, which are across the Straits of Dover from France.

There appears to be no record of who found the bottle and when, or what kind of bottle it was, but inside it was a scrap of lined paper dated September 2,1889, and written on it was "S.S. Northumbria Castle Left ship. Am on trail again Jack the Ripper." The area of the southeast coast of England where the bottle was found is very close to Ramsgate, Broad-stairs, and Folkestone.

At least one Ripper letter was mailed from Folkestone. Sickert painted in Ramsgate and may have visited there during 1888 and 1889, as it was a very popular resort and he loved sea air and swimming. There was a steamer from Folkestone to France that Sickert would take on numerous occasions in his life, and there was a direct line from nearby Dover to Calais. None of this proves Sickert wrote a Ripper note, tucked it inside a bottle, and tossed it overboard or offshore from a beach. But he was familiar with the Kent coast of England. He liked it enough to live in Broadstairs in the 1930s.

The frustration comes when one tries to trace the Ripper's locations on a map in hopes of following him along his tortuous, murderous path. As usual, he was a master of creating illusions. On November 8, 1888, a Ripper letter mailed from the East End boasted, "I am going to France and start my work there." Three days later, on the 11th, the letter from Folkestone arrived, which might hint that the Ripper really was making his way to France. But the problem is, on that same day, November 11th, the Ripper also wrote a letter from Kingston-on-Hull, some two hundred miles north of Folkestone. How could the same person have written both letters during the same twenty-four hours?

A possibility is that the Ripper wrote letters in batches, not only to compare his own handwriting styles and make certain they were different, but also to give them all the same date and mail them from different locations or make it appear they were mailed from different locations. A letter the Ripper dated November 22, 1888, was written on paper with the A Pirie 8t Sons watermark. Supposedly, the Ripper mailed it from East London. Another letter on A Pirie amp; Sons paper, also dated November 22,1888, claims the Ripper is in Manchester. In two other letters that do not appear to have watermarks (one may have but is too torn to tell) and are also dated November 22nd, he claims to be in North London and in Liverpool.

If one assumes that all of these November 22nd letters were written by the same person - and they bear similarities that make this plausible - then how could the Ripper have mailed them from London and Liverpool on the same day? The absence of postmarks precludes knowing with certainty when and where a letter was actually posted, and I do not accept as fact any dates or locations on letters that do not include postmarks. Inside a Ripper envelope with the postmark 1896, for example, was a letter the Ripper dated "1886." This was either a mistake or an attempt to be misleading.

It is within the realm of possibility that the postmarks may have been different from the dates or locations - or both - that the Ripper wrote on some of his letters. Once the police opened the letters, they wrote down the dates and locations in their case books and the envelope was discarded or lost. The actual dates the Ripper wrote on the letters could be inconsistent by a day or maybe two, and who was going to notice or care? But a day or two could make quite a difference to a man on the run who wants to throw off the police by appearing to be in London, Lille, Dublin, Innerleithen, and Birmingham on October 8th.

It would have been possible for a person to be in more than one distant location in a twenty-four-hour period. One could get about fairly rapidly by train. Based on the schedules in an 1887 Bradshaw's Railway Guide, Sickert could have left Euston Station in London at 6:00 A.M., arrived in Manchester at 11:20 A.M., changed to another train, and left at noon to arrive in Liverpool forty-five minutes later. From Liverpool he could have gone on to Southport on the coast and arrived in an hour and seven minutes.

In mid-September 1888, the decomposing body of a boy was found in an abandoned house in Southport. At his inquest on the 18th, the jury returned an open verdict. It does not appear that the boy's identity or cause of death were ever known, but the police strongly suspected that he was murdered.

"Any youth I see I will kill," the Ripper wrote on November 26,1888.

"I will do the murder in an empty house," the Ripper wrote in an undated letter.

Train travel in England was excellent at that time. Sleeper trains were also available. One could leave London at 6:35 in the evening, have a pleasant dinner and a good night's sleep, and wake up in Aberdeen, Scotland, at five minutes before ten the next morning. One could leave Paddington Station in London at 9:00 P.M. and wake up in Plymouth at 4:15 A.M., take another train to St. Austell in Cornwall and end up near Lizard Point, the southernmost tip of England. A number of Ripper letters were written from Plymouth or near it. Plymouth was the most convenient destination were one headed to Cornwall by train.

Sickert knew Cornwall. In early 1884, he and Whistler spent quite a lot of time there painting at St. Ives, one of Cornwall's most popular seaside spots for artists. In a late-1887 letter to Whistler, Sickert indicated he was planning on going to Cornwall. He may have visited Cornwall frequently. That southwest part of England has always been attractive r artists because of its majestic cliffs and views of the sea, and its picturesque harbors.

Cornwall would have been a good place for Sickert to tuck himself away when he wanted to rest and "hide." During the Victorian era there was a popular private house called Hill's Hotel - affectionately know: as "The Lizard" - at Lizard Point, a narrow peninsula of farmland and steep, rocky cliffs about twenty miles from St. Ives. The sea crashes a- around the peninsula. A visit today requires parking into the wind les~ it rip off your car door.

In the spring of 2001, award-winning food writer Michael Raffael was working on a Food amp; Travel feature and happened to stay at the Rockland Bed Sc Breakfast at Lizard Point. The B amp;B is a modest 1950s farmhouse that can sleep seven, and the woman who owns it is the only living remnant of The Lizard Hotel's distant and illustrious past.

It had been a hard year for Joan Hill, who inherited Lizard guest books and other records that had been in her husband's family for 125 years. Cornwall had been in the throes of foot-and-mouth disease, and her son is a farmer. Government restrictions reduced his income, and Mrs. Hill, recently widowed, found her business all but gone when quarantines kept tourists far away from anything with hooves.