Overpopulation and the class system, few people seemed to realize, created problems that could not be remedied by tearing down slums or forming “agencies.” The advocacy of birth control was considered blasphemous, and certain types of people were trash and would always be trash. Social problems certainly existed. But London’s class problems were not why prostitutes were dying at the Ripper’s hands. Psychopathic murder is not a social disease. People who lived in the East End knew that, even if they didn’t know the word “psychopath.” The streets of the East End were deserted at night, and scores of plainclothes detectives lurked in the shadows, waiting for the first suspicious male to appear, their disguises and demeanor fooling no one. Some police began wearing rubber-soled boots. So did reporters. It was a wonder people didn’t terrify each other as they quietly crossed paths in the dark, waiting for the Ripper.
No one knew he had committed yet another murder – this one weeks earlier and never really attributed to him. On Tuesday, October 2nd – two days after the murders of Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddows – a decomposing female torso was discovered in the foundations of Scotland Yard’s new headquarters, which was under construction on the Embankment near Whitehall.
A severed arm had turned up first on September 11th. No one had gotten very excited about it except a Mrs. Potter, whose feeble-minded seventeen-year-old daughter had been missing since September 8th, the same morning Annie Chapman was murdered. The police had little power of intervention or interest in the cases of missing teenagers, especially the likes of Emma Potter, who had been in and out of workhouses and infirmaries, and was nothing but a nuisance.
Emma’s mother was accustomed to her disappearances and brushes with the law, and was terrified when her daughter took off yet again, and then a dismembered female arm was found as gruesome murders continued in the metropolis. Mrs. Potter’s pleas to the police were rewarded by a benevolent fate when a constable found Emma wandering about, alive and well. But had it not been for the hue and cry her mother made and the news stories that followed, it is possible that not much would have been made of a body part. Reporters began to pay attention. Was it possible that the Whitechapel fiend was up to other horrors? But the police said no. Dismemberment was an entirely different modus operandi, and neither Scotland Yard nor its surgeons were inclined to accept the view that a killer changed his pattern.
The arm had been severed from the shoulder and was tied with string. It was discovered on the foreshore of the Thames near the Grosvenor Railway Bridge in Pimlico, less than four miles southwest of Whitechapel and on the same side of the river. Pimlico was about five miles south of 54 Broadhurst Gardens – a short walk for Sickert. “I went [on] such a walk yesterday about 11 kilom.’s,” he wrote from Dieppe when he was fifty-four years old. Five miles was no distance at all, not even when he was an old man whose disoriented and bizarre wanderings were a constant worry to his third wife and others who looked after him.
Pimlico was barely a mile east of Whistler’s studio on Tite Street, in Chelsea, an area quite familiar to Sickert. Battersea Bridge, which traverses the Thames from Chelsea on the north bank to Battersea on the south, was a few blocks from Whistler’s studio and approximately a mile from where the arm was found. In 1884, Sickert painted Battersea Park, which was visible from Whistler’s studio window. In 1888, Pimlico was a quaint area of neat homes and small gardens where the sewage system was raised lest it overflow into the Thames.
It was laborer Frederick Moore’s sorry luck to be working outside the gates of Deal Wharf, near the railway bridge, when he heard excited voices on the shore of the Thames. The tide was low, and several men were talking loudly as they stared at an object in the mud. Since no one seemed inclined to pick up whatever it was, Moore did. The police carried the arm to Sloane Street, where a Dr. Neville examined it and determined it was the right arm of a female. He suggested that the string tied around it was “in order for it to be carried.” He said the arm had been in the water two or three days and was amputated after death. Had it been cut off while the person was still alive, Dr. Neville wrongly deduced, the muscles would have been more “contracted.”