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

The slaughterhouse transvestite was never found, and police searching East End slaughterhouses got no verification at all that a potential "Jill the Ripper" had been in their midst. The letter the "woman" wrote the Leman Street Police Station does not appear to have survived. From July 18th (three days after Sickert "resigned" from the New York Herald) through October 30th of 1889, thirty-seven Ripper letters were sent to the Metropolitan Police (based on what is in the Public Record Office and Corporation of London files). Seventeen of these letters were written in September. With the exception of three, all were supposedly written from London, which would have placed the Ripper - or Sickert - in London during the time of the "lodger" and slaughterhouse woman news reports.

From March through mid-July of 1889, Sickert had written twenty-one articles for the London edition of the New York Herald. He was very likely in London on September 8th, because the Sun had just interviewed him days earlier at 54 Broadhurst Gardens and published the article on the 8th. The focus of the article was an important Impressionistic art exhibition scheduled for December 2nd at the Goupil Gallery on Bond Street, and Sickert's work was to be included in it. The reporter also quizzed Sickert about why he was no longer the art critic for the New York Herald.

Sickert's printed reply was evasive and not the whole truth. He claimed he didn't have time to write for the Herald anymore. He said that art criticism should be left to people who are not painters. Yet in March 1890, Sickert was at it again, writing articles for the Scots Observer, Art Weekly, and The Whirlwind - at least sixteen articles for that year. Maybe it is just another one of those Sickert coincidences that the very day his "resignation" from the New York Herald was publicized in the Sun, the mysterious soldier appeared at the New York Herald and announced a

murder and mutilation he could not have known about unless he was an accomplice or the killer.

The torso found in September 1889 was never identified. She may not have been a "filthy whore" of doss-houses and the street. She could have been a prostitute of a higher pecking order, such as a music-hall performer. One of these questionable types of women could have disappeared easily enough. They moved about from town to town or country to country. Sickert liked to draw them. He painted music-hall star Queenie Lawrence's portrait and must have been a bit upset when she refused to accept it as a gift and said she wouldn't even use it as a screen to keep the wind out. Queenie Lawrence seemed to fade from public view in 1889.1 have found no record of what became of her. Sickert's models and art students sometimes just slipped away to who knows where.

"… one of my art students, a darling who drew worse than anyone I have ever seen amp; has vanished into the country. Her name?" Sickert wrote to his wealthy American friends Ethel Sands and Nan Hudson, probably around 1914.

During Sickert's most intense killing times, he could have lived on the rails. He could have mailed letters from all over. Lust murderers tend to move about when they are in the throes of their sexually violent addiction. They go from town to town, from city to city, often killing near rest stops, train stations, some of their predatory places predetermined, some of them random. Bodies and body parts can be scattered for hundreds of miles. Remains are discovered in trash cans and the woods. Some victims are concealed so well that they will always be "missing."

The murderous highs, the risks, the rushes are intoxicating. But these people do not want to be caught, and neither did Sickert. Getting out of London now and then was smart, especially after the double murder of Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddows. But if his motive in mailing so many letters from so many distant places was to drive the police to distraction and create an uproar, Sickert misfired. In D. S. MacColl's words, he "over-calculated himself." Sickert was so clever that neither the press nor the police believed the letters could be from the murderer. The letters were ignored.

Some of them mailed from distant places such as Lille or Lisbon could very well be hoaxes. Or perhaps Sickert got someone else to mail the letters for him. He seemed to have a habit of that. In August 1914, while he was in Dieppe, he wrote Ethel Sands, "I am not always able to nip down to the boat 8c catch some kind stranger to whom to confide my letters."

Early on the frosty morning of October 11, 1888, Sir Charles Warren played the role of bad guy with Burgho and Barnaby the bloodhounds.

The Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police darted behind trees and shrubbery in Hyde Park, making his getaway, while the magnificent pair of tracking dogs lost his scent and successfully hunted down several strangers who happened to be out strolling. Four other trials on the misty, cold morning ended just as badly. This did not bode well for Warren.

If the hounds couldn't track a man in a relatively deserted park early in the morning, then turning them loose in the crowded, filthy streets and alleyways of the East End probably wasn't such a good idea. Warren's decision to volunteer for the tracking demonstration wasn't such a good idea, either. So much for showing Londoners what a great innovation bloodhounds were and how sure Warren was they would sniff out that East End fiend at last. Warren's dashing around in the park with his lost hounds was an embarrassment he would never live down.

"Dear Boss I hear you have bloodhounds for me now," the Ripper wrote October 12th and drew a knife on the envelope.

Warren's bad decision may have been precipitated - or at least could not have been helped - by yet another peculiar letter published in The Times on October 9th, two days before his romp in the park:

Sir - Just now, perhaps, my own personal experiences of what bloodhounds can do in the way of tracking criminals may be of interest. Here, then, is an incident to which I was an eye witness.

In 1861 or 1862 (my memory does not enable me to give a more exact date), I was in Dieppe when a little boy was found doubled up in a horse-bin with his throat cut from ear to ear. A couple of bloodhounds were at once put on to the scent. Away they dashed after, for a moment or two, sniffing the ground, hundreds of people, including the keeper and myself, following in their wake.

Nor did the highly-trained animals slacken their pace in the least till they had arrived at the other end of town, when they made a dead stop at the door of a low lodging house, and throwing up their noble heads, gave a deep bay. On the place being entered, the culprit - an old woman - was discovered hiding under a bed.

Let me add that the instinct of a bloodhound when properly trained, for tracking by scent is so marvelous that no one can say positively what difficulties in following a trail it cannot surmount.

Faithfully yours,

Williams [sic] Buchanan

11, Burton St., W.C., October 8.

As is true with the Elderly Gentleman's letter to the editor, the tone does not fit the subject. Mr. Buchanan has the light, cheerful voice of a raconteur as he relays the horrific account of a boy having his throat cut "from ear to ear," his body stuffed into a "horse-bin."

A search through newspaper records in Dieppe turned up no mention of a child having his throat cut or being murdered by similar means in the early 1860s. This isn't necessarily conclusive, because French records from a century ago were poorly kept or lost, or destroyed during two world wars. But if there had been such a murder, the suggestion that Dieppe had at that time trained bloodhounds available "at once" to put on the scent is extremely hard to accept. The huge metropolis of London didn't have trained bloodhounds available in the 1860s, nor even twenty-eight years later, when Charles Warren had to import the dogs into the city and board them with a veterinary surgeon.