Handwriting quirks and the position of the Ripper's hand when he wrote his taunting, violent letters lurk in other Ripper writings that are disguised. These same quirks and hand positions lurk in Sickert's erratic handwriting as well.
Paper of letters the Ripper sent to the Metropolitan Police precisely matches paper of a letter the Ripper sent to the City of London Police - even though the handwriting is different. It is evident that Sickert was right-handed, but video footage taken of him when he was in his 70s shows he was quite adept at using his left hand. Lettering expert Sally Bower believes that in some Ripper letters the writing was disguised by a right-handed person writing with his left hand. It is obvious that the actual Ripper wrote far more of the Ripper letters than he has ever been credited with. In fact, I believe he wrote most of them. In fact, Walter Sickert wrote most of them. Even when his skilled artistic hands altered his writing, his arrogance and characteristic language cannot help but assert themselves.
No doubt there will always be skeptics and critics tainted by self-interest who will refuse to accept that Sickert was a serial killer, a damaged, diabolical man driven by megalomania and hate. There will be those who will argue that it's all coincidence.
As FBI profiler Ed Sulzbach says, "There really aren't many coincidences in life. And to call coincidence after coincidence after coincidence a coincidence is just plain stupid."
Fifteen months after my first meeting with Scotland Yard's John Grieve, I returned to him and presented the case.
"What would you do had you known all this and been the detective back then?" I asked him.
"I would immediately put Sickert under surveillance to try to find where his bolt holes [secret rooms] were, and if we found any, we would get search warrants," he replied as we drank coffee in an East End Indian restaurant.
"If we didn't get any more evidence than what we've now got," he went on, "we'd be happy to put the case before the crown prosecutor."
Chapter Three. The Unfortunates
It is hard to imagine that Walter Sickert did not engage in London's festive activities on the much-anticipated bank holiday of August 6th. For the art lover on a budget, a penny would buy admission into all sorts of exhibits in the squalid East End; for the better off, a shilling would pay for a peek at the masterpieces of Corot, Diaz, and Rousseau in the high-priced galleries on New Bond Street.
Tramcars were free - at least those running to Whitechapel, the city's crowded clothing district where costermongers, merchants, and money changers loudly hawked their goods and services seven days a week while ragged children prowled the fetid streets for food and a chance to trick a stranger out of a coin. Whitechapel was home to "the people of the dustbin," as many good Victorians called the desperate wretches who lived there. For a few farthings, a visitor could watch street acrobatics, performing dogs, and freak shows, or get drunk. Or he could solicit sex from a prostitute - or "unfortunate" - of whom there were thousands.
One of them was Martha Tabran. She was about forty and separated from a furniture warehouse packer named Henry Samuel Tabran, who had walked out of her life because of her heavy drinking. He was decent enough to give her a weekly allowance of twelve shillings until he heard she was living with another man, a carpenter named Henry Turner. But Turner eventually lost patience with Martha's drinking habits and had left her two or three weeks ago. The last time he saw her alive was two nights earlier, on Saturday, August 4th - the same night Sickert was making sketches at Gatti's music hall near the Strand. Turner handed Martha a few coins, which she wasted on drink.
For centuries, many people believed women turned to prostitution because they suffered from a genetic defect that caused them to enjoy sex for the sake of sex. There were several types of immoral or wanton women, some worse than others. Although concubines, mistresses, and good wenches were not to be praised, the greatest sinner was the whore. A whore was a whore by choice and was not about to retire from her "wicked and abominable course of life," Thomas Heywoode lamented in his 1624 history of women. "I am altogether discouraged when I remember the position of one of the most notorious in the trade," who said, " 'For once a whore and ever a whore, I know it by my self.' "
Sexual activity was to be confined to the institution of marriage and had been ordained by God for the sole purpose of the continuation of the species. The solar center of a woman's universe was her uterus, and monthly menstrual cycles precipitated great storms of disorders - throbbing lust, hysteria, and insanity. Women were a lower order and incapable of rational, abstract thinking, a view with which Walter Sickert concurred. He was quite eager to assert that women were incapable of understanding art, that they were interested in it only when it "ministers to their vanity" or elevates them "in those social classifications they study so anxiously." Women of genius, the rare few there were, Sickert said, "count as men."
His beliefs were not unusual for the era. Women were a different "race." Contraception was a blasphemy against God and society, and poverty flourished as women gave birth at an alarming rate. Sex was to be enjoyed by women for the sole reason that physiologically, an orgasm was thought to be essential for the secretion of the fluids necessary for conception. To experience the "thrill" while unmarried or by oneself was perverse and a serious threat to sanity, salvation, and health. Some nineteenth-century English physicians cured masturbation with clitorectomies. The "thrill" for the sake of the "thrill," especially among females, was socially abhorrent. It was wicked. It was barbaric.
Christian men and women had heard the stories. Way back in the days of Herodotus, Egyptian females were so aberrant and blasphemous, they dared to mock God by giving themselves up to raging lust and flaunting the pleasures of the flesh. In those primitive days, satisfying lust for money was desirable, not shameful. A voracious sexual appetite was good, not evil. When a beautiful young woman died, there was nothing wrong with hot-blooded males enjoying her body until it was getting a bit ripe and ready for the embalmer. Such stories were not repeated in polite company, but the decent nineteenth-century families of Sickert's day knew that the Bible had not a single nice thing to say about strumpets.
The notion that only guiltless people cast the first stone was forgotten. That was plain enough when crowds swelled to watch a public beheading or hanging. Somewhere along the way the belief that the sins of the father will be visited on the children got translated into the belief that the sins of the mother will be revisited among the children. Thomas Heywoode wrote that a woman's "vertue once violated brings infamy and dishonour." The poisons of the offending woman's sin, Heywoode promised, will extend to the "posteritie which shall arise from so corrupt a seed, generated from unlawful and adulterate copulation."
Two hundred and fifty years later, the English language was a bit easier to understand, but Victorian beliefs about women and immorality were the same: Sexual intercourse was for the purposes of procreation, and the "thrill" was the catalyst to conception. Quackery perpetuated by physicians stated as medical fact that the "thrill" was essential to a woman's becoming pregnant. If a raped woman got pregnant, then she had experienced an orgasm during the sexual encounter, and intercourse could not have been against her will. If a raped woman did not become pregnant, she could not have had an orgasm, indicating her claims of violation might be the truth.
Men of the nineteenth century were very much preoccupied with the female orgasm. The "thrill" was so important, one has to wonder how often it was faked. That would be a good trick to learn - then barrenness could be blamed on the male. If a woman could not have an orgasm and was honest about it, her condition might be diagnosed as female impotence. A thorough examination by a doctor was needed, and the simple treatment of digital manipulation of the clitoris and breasts was often sufficient in determining whether the patient was impotent. If the nipples hardened during the examination, the prognosis was promising. If the patient experienced the "thrill," the husband would be most pleased to know that his wife was healthy.