Patricia Cornwell – Portrait Of A Killer Jack The Ripper

Eleven months after the Ripper letter of 1896, twenty-year-old Emma Johnson disappeared on the early evening of Wednesday, September 15th, while walking home near Windsor, about twenty miles west of London. The next day, two women picking blackberries close to Maidenhead Road discovered two muddy petticoats, a bloody chemise, and a black coat in a ditch under shrubbery.

On Friday, September 17th, the Berkshire police were notified of Emma’s disappearance and organized a search. The clothing was identi­fied as Emma’s, and Sunday, in the same field where the women had been picking berries, a laborer found a skirt, a bodice, a collar, and a pair of cuffs in a ditch. On the banks of a stagnant inlet of the Thames, Emma’s mother discovered a pair of her daughter’s stays. Near these were the im­print of a woman’s boot and scrape marks in the dirt apparently made by someone dragging a heavy object toward the murky inlet.

Police dragged the stagnant water, and fifteen feet offshore a muddy, slimy, naked body emerged. It was identified by the Johnsons as their daughter. A doctor examined Emma’s body at the family home, and it was his conclusion that she was grabbed by the right arm and received a blow to the head to render her insensible before the killer cut her throat. At some point, her clothing was removed. Then the killer dragged her body to the inlet and shoved or threw it into the water. Maidenhead Road was a well-known spot for romantic couples to frequent at night.

There was no suspect and the murder was never solved. There is no evidence it was committed by Walter Sickert. I do not know where he was in September of 1897, although he was not with Ellen. The couple had separated the year before and were still friendly and occasionally trav­eled together, but Ellen was in France when Emma Johnson was mur­dered and had not been in Sickert’s company for months. Eighteen ninety-seven was a particularly stressful year for Sickert. An article he had written for the Saturday Review the previous year had precipitated artist Joseph Pennell’s suing him for libel.

Sickert had publicly and foolishly claimed that Pennell’s prints made by transfer lithography were not true lithography. Whistler used the same lithographic process – as did Sickert – and the Master appeared as a wit­ness in Pennell’s case. In an October 1896 letter to Ellen from her sister Janie, Whistler was quoted as saying that he believed Sickert’s arrow was really aimed at him, not Pennell. Sickert had a “treacherous side to his character,” Whistler told Janie. “Walter will do anything, throw any­one over for the object of the moment.” Sickert lost the lawsuit, but per­haps the greater sting had already come – when Whistler testified from the witness stand that his former pupil was an unimportant and irre­sponsible man.

In 1897, Sickert’s relationship with Whistler finally came to an end. Sickert was poor. He was publicly humiliated. His marriage was ending. He had resigned from the New English Art Club. The fall seemed to be a prime time for the Ripper’s crimes. It was the time of year when five-year-old Sickert endured his terrible surgery in London. Mid-September was when Ellen decided she wanted a divorce, and it was also the time of year when Sickert usually returned to London from his beloved Dieppe.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

BARREN FIELDS AND SLAG-HEAPS

At the mortuary on Golden Lane, Catherine Eddows’s naked body-was hung up by a nail on the wall, rather much like a painting.

One by one the male jurors and the coroner, Samuel Frederick Lang-ham, Esquire, filed in to look at her. John Kelly and Catherine’s sister had to look at her, too. On October 4, 1888, the jurors returned what was becoming a familiar verdict to the press and the public: “Wilful murder by some person unknown.” The public outcry was broaching hysteria. Two women had been slaughtered within an hour of each other, and the police still had no clue.

Letters from the public warned that “the condition of the lowest classes is most fraught with danger to all other classes.” Londoners in better neighborhoods were beginning to fear for their lives. Perhaps they ought to raise a fund for the poor to “offer them a chance to forsake their evil lives.” An “agency” should be formed. Letters to The Times suggested that if the upper class could clean up the lower class, there would be no more of this violence.

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