Patricia Cornwell – Portrait Of A Killer Jack The Ripper

“Altho, self taught,” the Ripper says, “I can write and spell.”

The poem is difficult to decipher in places, and “Knacker” might be used twice or might be “Knocker” in one of the lines. “Knacker” was street slang for a horse slaughterer. “Knocker” was street slang for finely or showily dressed. Sickert was no horse slaughterer, but the police pub­licly theorized that the Ripper might be one.

Sickert’s greatest gift was not poetry, but this did not deter him from jotting a rhyme or two in letters or singing silly, original lyrics he set to music-hall tunes. “I have composed a poem to Ethel,” he wrote in later years when his friend Ethel Sands was volunteering for the Red Cross:

With your syringe on your shoulder And your thermometer by your side You’ll be curing some young officer And making him your pride

In another letter, he jots a verse about the “incessant sopping drizzle” in Normandy:

It can’t go on for ever It would if it could But there is no use talking For it couldn’t if it would

In a Ripper letter sent in October 1896 to the Commercial Street Po­lice Station in Whitechapel, he mocks the police by quoting, ” ‘The Jewes are people that are blamed for nothing’ Ha Ha have you heard this be­fore.” The spelling of “Jews” was hotly debated during Catherine Eddows’s inquest, and the coroner repeatedly questioned police whether the word on the wall was “Juwes” or “Jewes.” Even though the Ripper was supposed to be dead by 1896 – according to Chief Constable Melville Macnaghten – the letter of 1896 concerned the police enough to result in a flurry of memorandums:

“I beg to submit attached letter received per post 14th inst. Signed Jack the Ripper stating that writer has just returned from abroad and means to go on again when he gets the chance,” Supervisor George Payne wrote in his special report from the Commercial Street Station. “The letter ap­pears similar to those received by police during the series of murders in the district in 1888 and 1889. Police have been instructed to keep a sharp lookout.”

A telegram was sent to all divisions, asking police to keep this “sharp look out, but at the same time to keep the information quiet. Writer in sending the letter no doubt considers it a great joke at the expense of the police.” On October 18, 1896, a chief inspector wrote in a Central Of­ficer’s Special Report that he had compared the recent letter with old Jack the Ripper letters and “failed to find any similarity of handwriting in any of them, with the exception of the two well remembered communications which were sent to the ‘Central News’ Office; one a letter, dated 25th Sept./88 and the other a post-card, bearing the postmark 1st Oct./88.”

What is so blatantly inconsistent in the chief inspector’s report is that he first says there are no similarities between the recent letter and the ear­lier Ripper letters, but then he goes on to cite similarities: “I find many similarities in the formation of letters. For instance the y’s, t’s and w’s are very much the same. Then there are several words which appear in both documents.” But in conclusion, the chief inspector decides, “I beg to ob­serve that I do not attach any importance to this communication.” CID Superintendent Donald Swanson agreed. “In my opinion,” he jotted at the end of the inspector’s report, “the handwritings are not the same…. I beg that the letter may be put with other similar letters. Its circulation is to be regretted.”

The letter of 1896 was given no credibility by police and was not pub­lished in the newspapers. The Ripper was banished, exorcised. He no longer existed. Maybe he never had existed, but was just some fiend who killed a few prostitutes, and all of those letters were from crackpots. Ironically, Jack the Ripper became a “Mr. Nobody” again, at least to the police, for whom it was most convenient to live in denial.

It has often been asked – and I expect the question will always be asked – if Sickert committed other murders in addition to the ones be­lieved to have been committed by Jack the Ripper. Serial killers don’t sud­denly start and stop. The Ripper was no exception, and as is true of other serial killers, he did not restrict his murders to one location, especially a heavily patrolled area where there were thousands of anxious citizens looking for him. It would have been incredibly risky to write letters lay­ing claim to every murder he committed, and I don’t think the Ripper did. Sickert thrived on the publicity, on the game. But first and foremost was his need to kill and not be caught.

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