Jack The Ripper - Mark Whitehead [44]
Far from being part of a royalist plot to cover up an illegitimate child, Sickert, insists Cornwell, was a remorseless scopophiliac psychopath who committed the murders alone. He was an amateur thespian, a continual self-reinventor, a lover of disguise (all which helped him slip through the crowds unrecognized). He was a tireless self-promoter and continually wrote freelance articles and letters to the editors of many UK papers. He was also an appalling snob, profligate with money and an inveterate skirt-chaser. His restless intellect and prolific creativity meant that he was easily able to elude the police investigation and continually taunt them with letters in which he effortlessly disguised his handwriting while all the while dropping clues as to his identity and whereabouts. Clues that the police were too occupied to pick up on. Cornwell reckons that out of the many Ripper letters received by the authorities, the majority were penned by Sickert.
Cornwell states that as a child Sickert had suffered several operations on his penis to correct a fistula which had left his penis brutally truncated and sexually useless. Thus disfigured, Sickert as an adult was probably mocked by a prostitute at some point and this proved to be the catalyst for the later murders. Unfortunately, there are no surviving medical records to prove that these operations ever actually took place, or that Sickert’s genitalia were ever disfigured. On the contrary, rumours abound that Sickert was very much a ladies’ man and fathered several illegitimate children.
Portrait of a Killer proposes that Sickert began killing with Martha Tabram (called Tabran throughout) and didn’t stop after Mary Kelly. Instead he varied his methods, killing all of the Ripper’s proposed later victims (see Chapter 7) as well as being responsible for, among others, the murder of an eight-year-old girl in Newcastle (6 August 1889), ‘The Whitehall Mystery’ (3 October 1888) and human remains dumped in Middlesbrough docks (13 December 1889). He also killed prostitute Emily Dimmock in Camden in 1907 and depicted the subject afterwards in such paintings as ‘Persuasion’ and ‘Jack the Ripper’s Bedroom’. Cornwell makes no secret that it was her dislike of Sickert’s paintings that led her to suspect him in the first place.
It is impossible to read Portrait of a Killer without becoming immediately aware of Cornwell’s personality. Her authorial voice continually intrudes on the (admittedly well-beaten) narrative as if she is trying to paper over the cracks in her theory. Sometimes this is to good effect and her sidebars on the actual methods of modern forensics would arguably have made a much better book. Her attempts to humanize the victims can only be applauded in an industry where they have become little more than bloody chess pieces. However, more often Cornwell adopts a hectoring tone that suggests you’re being harangued by a slightly-obsessed fan of CSI.
While there is no doubt that Cornwell has unearthed some interesting links between Sickert and the Ripper, that final, conclusive link that merges the two personalities is a very long way off. Sickert, with his obsession with murder in general and the Ripper in particular, has partially succeeded in weaving himself into Ripper mythology. When painting he would wear a red scarf, telling friends that it had belonged to one of Jack’s victims. Cornwell’s assertion that Sickert ‘identified’ with the Ripper may be cause for concern, but he was not alone in this. False confessors such as John Fitzgerald and Alfred Blanchard readily supplied details of ‘their’ crimes to any enquirers. The day Blanchard confessed, he spent all day in a pub, answering questions on the subject from his fellow drinkers. But identifying is not the same as actually being. Sickert had done some acting earlier in his life and there is no doubt that he never lost his sense of ‘The Great Dramatic Moment’.What could be more dramatic than being inside the mind of the Ripper (except, perhaps, shocking one’s friends a little)?