The landlord checked out the information and was told by police that no such report had been filed. The landlord got increasingly suspicious when he found the man’s freshly washed shirt and underclothing draped over chairs. The lodger “had the habit of talking about the women of the street, and wrote ‘long rigmaroles’ ” about them in handwriting resembling “that of letters sent to the police purporting to come from Jack the Ripper,” according to the news story. The lodger had “eight suits of clothes, eight pairs of boots, and eight hats.” He could speak several languages and “when he went out he always carried a black bag.” He never wore the same hat two nights in a row.
Shortly after the torso was discovered near Pinchin Street, the lodger told the landlord he was going abroad and left abruptly. When the landlord went inside the rooms, he discovered the lodger had left “bows, feathers and flowers, and other articles which had belonged to the lower class of women,” and three pairs of leather lace-up boots and three pairs of “galoshes” with India rubber soles and American cloth uppers that were “bespattered with blood.”
The Ripper obviously kept up with the news and was aware of this story as it appeared in the London edition of the New York Herald, or perhaps in some other paper such as the Weekly Dispatch. In the Ripper’s poem of November 8, 1889, he makes clear references to the tale told by the landlord:
“Togs 8 suits, many hats I wear.”
He denies he was the peculiar lodger who wrote “rigmaroles” about immoral women:
Some months hard gone near Finsbury Sqre: An eccentric man lived with an unmarried pair – The tale is false there never was a lad, Who wrote essays on women bad.
It is hard to believe that Walter Sickert would leave boots or any incriminating belongings in rooms he had rented unless he wanted these items to be found. Maybe Sickert had stayed in that lodging house, maybe he never did. But wittingly or not, the Ripper left a wake of suspicion and created more drama. He may even have lurked somewhere behind the curtain of the next act, an account of which was printed right under the story about the “lodger” in the Weekly Dispatch.
A “woman” wrote a letter to the Leman Street Police Station “stating it has been ascertained that a tall, strong woman has for some time” been working in various slaughterhouses “attired as a man.” This story gave rise “to the theory that the East End victims may have been murdered by a woman. It is remarked that in each case there is no evidence of a man being seen in the vicinity at the time of the murder.”
The slaughterhouse transvestite was never found, and police searching East End slaughterhouses got no verification at all that a potential “Jill the Ripper” had been in their midst. The letter the “woman” wrote the Leman Street Police Station does not appear to have survived. From July 18th (three days after Sickert “resigned” from the New York Herald) through October 30th of 1889, thirty-seven Ripper letters were sent to the Metropolitan Police (based on what is in the Public Record Office and Corporation of London files). Seventeen of these letters were written in September. With the exception of three, all were supposedly written from London, which would have placed the Ripper – or Sickert – in London during the time of the “lodger” and slaughterhouse woman news reports.
From March through mid-July of 1889, Sickert had written twenty-one articles for the London edition of the New York Herald. He was very likely in London on September 8th, because the Sun had just interviewed him days earlier at 54 Broadhurst Gardens and published the article on the 8th. The focus of the article was an important Impressionistic art exhibition scheduled for December 2nd at the Goupil Gallery on Bond Street, and Sickert’s work was to be included in it. The reporter also quizzed Sickert about why he was no longer the art critic for the New York Herald.
Sickert’s printed reply was evasive and not the whole truth. He claimed he didn’t have time to write for the Herald anymore. He said that art criticism should be left to people who are not painters. Yet in March 1890, Sickert was at it again, writing articles for the Scots Observer, Art Weekly, and The Whirlwind – at least sixteen articles for that year. Maybe it is just another one of those Sickert coincidences that the very day his “resignation” from the New York Herald was publicized in the Sun, the mysterious soldier appeared at the New York Herald and announced a