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

He had studios at 18 and 27 Fitzroy Street, which is parallel to Tottenham Court Road and becomes Charlotte Street before passing Windmill Street. He could have walked from either of his studios to the Rising Sun public house in minutes. Mornington Crescent was a mile north of the pub, and Sickert rented the two top floors of the house at number 6. He painted there, usually nudes on a bed in the same setting he used in Jack the Ripper's Bedroom, painted from the point of view of someone outside open double doors that lead into a small murky space, where a dark mirror behind an iron bedstead vaguely reflects a man's shape.

Six Mornington Crescent was a twenty-minute walk from the rooming house where Emily Dimmock lived at 29 St. Paul's Road (now Agar Grove). She and Shaw had two rooms on the first floor. One was a sitting room, the second a cramped bedroom behind double doors at the back of the house. After Shaw would leave for St. Pancras Station, Emily might clean and sew or go out. Sometimes she met customers at the Rising Sun, or she might rendezvous with a man at another pub, Euston Station, or perhaps the Middlesex Music-hall (which Sickert painted around 1895), the Holborn Empire (home of music-hall star Bessie Bellwood, whom Sickert sketched many times around 1888), or the Euston Theater of Varieties.

One of Sickert's favorite spots for rendezvous was the statue of his former father-in-law, Richard Cobden, on the square off Mornington Crescent in Camden Town. The statue was presented to the vestry of St. Pancras in 1868 in honor of Cobden's repealing the Corn Laws, and was across from the Mornington Crescent underground station. Even when Sickert was married to Ellen, he had a habit of making sarcastic remarks about the statue as he rode past in a hansom. To use the statue for a rendezvous years after his divorce was perhaps another example of his mockery and contempt for people, especially important ones, especially a man he could never measure up to and had probably heard about all too often from the time he first met Ellen.

Emily Dimmock usually left her rooming house by 8:00 P.M. and did not return while the couple who owned the house, Mr. and Mrs. Stocks, were still awake. They claimed to know nothing about Emily's "irregular" life, and quite a life it was - two, three, four men a night, sometimes standing up in a dark corner of a train station before she might finally bring the last fellow home and sleep with him. Emily was not an Unfortunate like Annie Chapman or Elizabeth Stride. I wouldn't call Emily an Unfortunate at all. She did not live in the slums. She had food, a place to call home, and a man who wanted to marry her.

But she had an insatiable craving for excitement and the attention of men. The police described her as a woman "of lustful habits." I don't know if lust had anything to do with her sexual encounters. More likely her lust was for money. She wanted clothes and pretty little things. She was "greatly charmed" by artwork and collected penny picture postcards to paste in a scrapbook that was precious to her. The last postcard she had added to her collection, as far as anyone knows, was the one artist Robert Wood, employed by London Sand Blast Decorative Glass Works, Gray's Inn Road, had given to her on September 6, inside the Rising Sun. He wrote a note on the back of it, and the postcard became the key piece of evidence when Wood was indicted and tried for murdering her. His indictment was based mostly on handwriting comparisons, and after a long, highly publicized trial, he was acquitted.

Emily Dimmock had given venereal disease to so many men that the police had a long list of former clients who had good cause to do her in. She had been threatened numerous times in the past. Enraged men who had contracted the "disorder" harassed her and threatened to "out" or kill her. But nothing stopped her from continuing her trade, no matter how many men she infected. And besides, she remarked to her women friends, it was a man who gave her the disorder in the first place.

Emily was seen with two strangers the week before her murder. One was a man "who had a short leg, or hip trouble of some sort," according to Robert Wood's statement to the police. The other was a Frenchman described by a witness as approximately five foot nine, very dark, with a short cut beard, and dressed in a dark coat and striped trousers. He briefly came into the Rising Sun on the night of September 9th, leaned over and spoke to Emily, then left. In police reports and at the inquest, there is no reference to this man again, nor did there seem to be any interest in him.

Emily Dimmock was last seen alive at a Camden Town public house called the Eagle on the night of September 11th. Earlier in the evening she had been talking to Mrs. Stocks in the kitchen and said she had plans for the evening. Emily had received a postcard from a man who wanted to meet her at the Eagle, near the Camden Road Station. The postcard read, "Meet me at 8 o'clock at the Eagle tonight [Wednesday, September 11th]" and was signed "Bertie," which was Robert Wood's nickname. When she left the house that night in her long dustcoat, her hair in curling pins, she was "not dressed to go out." She mentioned to acquaintances that she didn't plan to stay at the Eagle long, wasn't eager to go, and that was why she wasn't properly dressed.

She still had the curling pins in her hair when she was murdered. Perhaps she was taking extra care to make sure she looked her best the next morning. Shaw's mother was coming to visit from Northampton, and Emily had been cleaning, doing laundry, and getting the house in order. None of her former clients ever mentioned that Emily wore curling pins while giving them pleasure. It would seem a poor business tactic if one was hoping for a generous payment from a client. The curling pins could suggest that Emily wasn't expecting the violent visitor who took her life. They might suggest she took her killer home with her and never removed the curling pins from her hair.

Her back bedroom on the ground floor was accessible by windows and sturdy cast-iron drainpipes a person could climb up. There is no mention in police reports that the windows were locked. Only the bedroom double door, the sitting room door, and the front door of the house were locked the next morning when Emily's body was found. Her three keys to those doors were missing when police and Shaw searched the rooms. It is possible someone climbed into her bedroom while she was asleep, but I don't think it's likely.

When she set out from 29 St. Paul's Road that Wednesday evening, she may not have intended to sell pleasure to anyone, but it could be that while she was on her way home with curling pins in her hair, she ran into a man. He said something to her.

"Where are you a goin my pretty little maid?" someone wrote in The Lizard guest book.

If Emily did have an encounter with her killer on her way home or if he was the man she met at the Eagle, he might have told her he didn't mind her curling pins in the least. Will you let me come see you in your room? It is possible Sickert had noticed Emily Dimmock many times in the past, at train stations, or just walking about. The Rising Sun was right around the corner from his studios, not far from Maple Street, which he would later sketch as an empty back road late at night with two distant shadowy women lingering on the corner. Emily Dimmock may have noticed Walter Sickert, too. He was a familiar sight along Fitzroy Street, carrying his canvases back and forth from one studio to another.

He was a well-known local artist. He was painting nudes during this time. He had to get his models from somewhere, and he had a penchant for prostitutes. He may have been stalking and watching Emily and her sexual transactions. She was the lowest of the lowest, a filthy diseased whore. Marjorie Lilly writes that once she heard a person defend thieves by telling Sickert, "After all, everyone has a right to exist." He retorted, "Not at all. There are people who have no right to exist!"