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

John Gill's coat was tied around him with his braces. Several men unwrapped him and found what was left of the boy's body leaning to the right, his severed legs propped on either side of his body and secured with cord. Both ears had been sliced off. A piece of shirting was tied around his neck, and another piece tied around the stumps left of his legs. He had been stabbed multiple times in his chest, his abdomen slashed open, the organs removed and placed on the ground. His heart had been "torn" out of his chest and wedged under his chin.

"I shall do another murder on some young youth such as printing lads who work in the City. I did write you once before but I don't think you had it. I shall do them worse than the women I shall take their hearts," the Ripper had written on November 26th, "and rip them up the same way… I will attack on them when are going home… any Youth I see I will kill but you will never kitch me put that in your pipe and smoke it…"

John Gill's boots had been removed and stuffed inside his abdominal cavity, according to one news report. There were other mutilations "too sickening to be described." One might infer these were to the genitals. One of the wrappings found with the body, The Times reported, "bears the name of W. Mason, Derby Road, Liverpool." What should have been an incredible lead apparently went nowhere. Liverpool was less than four hours away from London by train, and five weeks earlier the Ripper had written a letter claiming to be in Liverpool, and again on December 19th, or a little more than a week before John Gill's murder, the Ripper sent a letter to The Times - allegedly from Liverpool.

"I have come to Liverpool amp;c you will soon hear of me."

Police immediately went after William Barrett, the dairyman who had given John a ride in the milk wagon two days earlier, but there was no evidence against him beyond Barrett's keeping his horse and cart at the stables and coach house where John's body was found. Barrett had given John a ride many times in the past and was highly thought of by his neighbors. Police found no bloodstains on John Gill's body or the coat wrapped around it. There was no blood inside the coach house or the stable. The murder had occurred elsewhere. A constable patrolling the area claimed that at 4:30 Saturday morning he had tried the coach house doors to make sure they were secure and had stood on the "very spot" where John Gill's remains were displayed by the killer not three hours later.

Afterward, in an undated, partial letter, the Ripper wrote to the Metropolitan Police, "I riped up little boy in Bradford." A Ripper letter of January 16, 1889, refers to "my trip to Bradford."

There are no known Ripper letters from December 23rd until January 8th. I don't know where Sickert spent his holidays, but I suspect he would have wanted to be in London on the last Saturday of the year, December 29th, when Hamlet opened at the Lyceum, starring Henry Irving and Ellen Terry. Sickert's wife may have been with her family in West Sussex, but there are no letters I have found from this period that tell me where either Sickert or Ellen was.

But the month of December could not have been a happy one for Ellen. It is unlikely she saw Sickert much at all, and one has to wonder where she thought he was and what he was doing. She would have been deeply worried and saddened by the critical illness of a dear family friend, reform politician and orator John Bright. Daily, The Times gave reports on his condition, reports that could have evoked bittersweet memories of Ellen's late father, who had been one of Bright's closest friends.

The dairyman arrested in the John Gill case was eventually cleared and the murder would remain unsolved. The murder of Rose Mylett was never solved. The notion that Jack the Ripper might have committed either crime didn't seem plausible and was soon forgotten by the people who mattered. The Ripper didn't mutilate Rose. He didn't cut her throat, and it wasn't his MO to savage a little boy, no matter what was threatened in letters that the police would have considered hoaxes, anyway.

Because of the scarcity of medico-legal facts revealed in the newspapers and the inquest, it is difficult to reconstruct John Gill's case. One of the most important unanswered questions is the identity of the man John was last seen talking to, assuming this reported detail is true. If the man was a stranger, it would seem that quite an effort should have been made to discover who he was and what he was doing in Bradford. Clearly, the boy went off with someone, and this person murdered and mutilated him.

The piece of "shirting" around John's neck is a curious signature on the part of the killer. Every Jack the Ripper victim, as far as I know, was wearing a scarf, a handkerchief, or some other piece of fabric around the neck. When the Ripper cut a victim's throat, he did not cut off the neckerchief, and in Rose Mylett's murder, a folded handkerchief was draped over her neck. Clearly, neckerchiefs or scarves symbolized something to the killer.

Sickert friend and artist Marjorie Lilly recalled that he had a favorite red neckerchief. While he was working on his Camden Town murder paintings, and "was reliving the scene he would assume the part of a ruffian, knotting the handkerchief loosely around his neck, pulling a cap over his eyes and lighting his lantern." It was commonly known that if a criminal wore a red neckerchief to his execution, it signaled that he had divulged no truths to anyone, and carried his darkest secrets to the grave. Sickert's red handkerchief was a talisman and not to be touched by anyone, including the housekeeper, who knew to steer clear of it when she saw it "dangling" from the bedpost inside his studio or tied to a doorknob or peg.

The red handkerchief, Lilly wrote, "played a necessary part in the performance of the drawings, spurring him on at crucial moments, becoming so interwoven with the actual working out of his idea that he kept it constantly before his eyes," Sickert began what I call his "Camden Town Murder Period" not long after the actual Camden Town murder of a prostitute in 1907. Lilly said that during this era of his life, "he had two fervent crazes… crime and the princes of the Church." Crime was "personified by Jack the Ripper, the Church by Anthony Trollope."

"I hate Christianity!" Sickert once yelled at a Salvation Army band.

He was not a religious man unless he was playing an important Biblical role. Lazarus Breaks His Fast: Self Portrait and The Servant of Abraham: Self Portrait are two of his later works. When he was almost seventy, he painted his famous The Raising of Lazarus by getting a local undertaker to wrap the life-size lay figure once owned by the eighteenth-century artist William Hogarth in a shroud. The heavily bearded Sickert climbed up a stepladder and assumed the role of Christ raising Lazarus from the dead while Ciceley Hey posed as Lazarus's sister. Sickert painted the huge canvas from a photograph, and in it, Christ is another self-portrait.

Perhaps Sickert's fantasies about having power over life and death were different in his sunset years. He was getting old. He felt bad much of the time. If only he had the power to give life. He already knew he had the power to take it. Testimony at John Gill's inquest verified that the seven-year-old boy's heart was "plucked," not cut out. The killer reached inside the slashed-open chest and ribs and took the boy's heart in his hand and tore it from the body.

Do unto others as was done unto you. If Walter Sickert murdered John Gill, it was because he could. Sickert had sexual power only when he could dominate and cause death. He may not have felt remorse, but he must have hated what he could not have and could not be. He could not have a woman. He was never a normal boy and could never be a normal man. I don't know of a single instance when Sickert showed physical courage. He victimized people only when he had the advantage.