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

Dr. Robins noticed many details in the guest book that eluded me, including a message in poor German and Italian written over one of the male cartoon figures. Roughly translated, the vandal is saying he is "The Ripper Doctor" and has "cooked up a good meat [or flesh] dish in Italy. News! News!" The play on words and the innuendos, which are difficult to convey in translation, says Dr. Robins, is that the Ripper killed a woman in Italy and cooked her flesh into a tasty meal. Several Ripper letters refer to cooking his victims' organs. Some serial killers do engage in cannibalism. It is possible that Sickert did. It is also possible he cooked up parts of his victims and served them to his guests. Of course, the suggestions of cooking human flesh could be nothing more than taunts meant to disgust and shock.

Dr. Robins believes, as do I, that Sickert's hand is behind the insults, annotations, and most of the drawings in The Lizard guest book. Such names as Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh are penciled in and are people Sickert knew or painted. Dr. Robins suspects that male cartoon figures with different hats and beards may be self-portraits of Sickert in Ripper disguises. A drawing of "a local rustic damsel" in the book may suggest that Sickert murdered a woman while he was in Cornwall.

I bought the guest book from Mrs. Hill. It has been studied by many experts, including forensic paper analyst Peter Bower, who says that nothing about the paper and binding is "out of period." The Lizard guest book is considered so extraordinary by those who have examined it that it is now at the Tate Archive for further study and much-needed conservation.

The Jack the Ripper name did not appear in public until September 17, 1888 - two months after The Lizard guest book was filled, on July 15, 1888. My explanation for how the signatures of "Jack the Ripper" could appear in the guest book is fairly simple. Sickert visited The Lizard at some point after the Ripper crimes were committed, and he vandalized the guest book. This may have occurred in October 1889, because in very small writing in pencil, almost in the gutter of the book, there appears to be the monogram "W" on top of an "R," followed by an "S," and the date "October 1889."

While the date is very clear, the monogram is not. It could be a cipher or tease, and I would expect nothing less than that from Sickert. October 1889 would have been a good time for him to flee to the southernmost tip of England. About a month earlier, on September 10th, another female torso was found in the East End, this time under a railway arch off Pinchin Street.

The modus operandi was all too familiar. A constable's routine beat had taken him past the very spot, and he hadn't noticed anything unusual. Less than thirty minutes later, he passed by again and discovered a bundle just off the pavement. The torso was missing its head and legs, but for some reason the killer had left the arms. The hands were smooth and the nails were certainly not those of someone who led a terribly hard life. The fabric of what was left of her dress was silk, which the police traced to a manufacturer in Bradford. It was a physician's opinion that the victim had been dead several days. Oddly enough, her torso had been found in the place that the London office of the New York Herald had been alerted to some days before its discovery.

At midnight on September 8th, a man dressed as a soldier approached a newspaper carrier outside the offices of the Herald, and the "soldier" exclaimed that there had been another terrible murder and mutilation. He gave the location as the area off Pinchin Street where the torso was eventually found. The newspaper carrier rushed inside the newspaper building and informed the night editors, who rode off in a hansom to find the body. There wasn't one. The "soldier" vanished, and the torso turned up on September 10th. The victim was probably already dead at midnight on September 8th, based on the drying of her tissue. Draped over a paling near her dismembered body was a stained cloth that was the sort women wore during their menstrual periods.

"You had better be carefull How you send those Bloodhounds about the streets because of the single females wearing stained napkins - women smell very strong when they are unwell," the Ripper wrote October 10, 1888.

Once again, the killer had managed to conceal bodies and body parts and carry them in what must have been heavy bundles, which he then dropped virtually at a policeman's feet.

"I had to over come great difficulties in bringing the bodies where I hid them," the Ripper wrote on October 22, 1888.

Twelve days after the woman's torso was found, the Weekly Dispatch reprinted a story from the London edition of the New York Herald, reporting that a landlord claimed to know the "identification" of Jack the Ripper. The landlord, who is not named in the story, said he was convinced that the Ripper had rented rooms in his house, and that this "lodger" would come in "about four o'clock in the morning," when everybody was asleep. One early morning, the landlord happened to be up when the lodger came in. He was "excited and incoherent in his talk." He claimed he had been assaulted, his watch stolen, and "he gave the name of a police station," where he had reported the incident.

The landlord checked out the information and was told by police that no such report had been filed. The landlord got increasingly suspicious when he found the man's freshly washed shirt and underclothing draped over chairs. The lodger "had the habit of talking about the women of the street, and wrote 'long rigmaroles' " about them in handwriting resembling "that of letters sent to the police purporting to come from Jack the Ripper," according to the news story. The lodger had "eight suits of clothes, eight pairs of boots, and eight hats." He could speak several languages and "when he went out he always carried a black bag." He never wore the same hat two nights in a row.

Shortly after the torso was discovered near Pinchin Street, the lodger told the landlord he was going abroad and left abruptly. When the landlord went inside the rooms, he discovered the lodger had left "bows, feathers and flowers, and other articles which had belonged to the lower class of women," and three pairs of leather lace-up boots and three pairs of "galoshes" with India rubber soles and American cloth uppers that were "bespattered with blood."

The Ripper obviously kept up with the news and was aware of this story as it appeared in the London edition of the New York Herald, or perhaps in some other paper such as the Weekly Dispatch. In the Ripper's poem of November 8, 1889, he makes clear references to the tale told by the landlord:

"Togs 8 suits, many hats I wear."

He denies he was the peculiar lodger who wrote "rigmaroles" about immoral women:

Some months hard gone near Finsbury Sqre: An eccentric man lived with an unmarried pair - The tale is false there never was a lad, Who wrote essays on women bad.

It is hard to believe that Walter Sickert would leave boots or any incriminating belongings in rooms he had rented unless he wanted these items to be found. Maybe Sickert had stayed in that lodging house, maybe he never did. But wittingly or not, the Ripper left a wake of suspicion and created more drama. He may even have lurked somewhere behind the curtain of the next act, an account of which was printed right under the story about the "lodger" in the Weekly Dispatch.

A "woman" wrote a letter to the Leman Street Police Station "stating it has been ascertained that a tall, strong woman has for some time" been working in various slaughterhouses "attired as a man." This story gave rise "to the theory that the East End victims may have been murdered by a woman. It is remarked that in each case there is no evidence of a man being seen in the vicinity at the time of the murder."