murder and mutilation he could not have known about unless he was an accomplice or the killer.
The torso found in September 1889 was never identified. She may not have been a “filthy whore” of doss-houses and the street. She could have been a prostitute of a higher pecking order, such as a music-hall performer. One of these questionable types of women could have disappeared easily enough. They moved about from town to town or country to country. Sickert liked to draw them. He painted music-hall star Queenie Lawrence’s portrait and must have been a bit upset when she refused to accept it as a gift and said she wouldn’t even use it as a screen to keep the wind out. Queenie Lawrence seemed to fade from public view in 1889.1 have found no record of what became of her. Sickert’s models and art students sometimes just slipped away to who knows where.
“… one of my art students, a darling who drew worse than anyone I have ever seen & has vanished into the country. Her name?” Sickert wrote to his wealthy American friends Ethel Sands and Nan Hudson, probably around 1914.
During Sickert’s most intense killing times, he could have lived on the rails. He could have mailed letters from all over. Lust murderers tend to move about when they are in the throes of their sexually violent addiction. They go from town to town, from city to city, often killing near rest stops, train stations, some of their predatory places predetermined, some of them random. Bodies and body parts can be scattered for hundreds of miles. Remains are discovered in trash cans and the woods. Some victims are concealed so well that they will always be “missing.”
The murderous highs, the risks, the rushes are intoxicating. But these people do not want to be caught, and neither did Sickert. Getting out of London now and then was smart, especially after the double murder of Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddows. But if his motive in mailing so many letters from so many distant places was to drive the police to distraction and create an uproar, Sickert misfired. In D. S. MacColl’s words, he “over-calculated himself.” Sickert was so clever that neither the press nor the police believed the letters could be from the murderer. The letters were ignored.
Some of them mailed from distant places such as Lille or Lisbon could very well be hoaxes. Or perhaps Sickert got someone else to mail the letters for him. He seemed to have a habit of that. In August 1914, while he was in Dieppe, he wrote Ethel Sands, “I am not always able to nip down to the boat 8c catch some kind stranger to whom to confide my letters.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
IN A HORSE-BIN
Early on the frosty morning of October 11, 1888, Sir Charles Warren played the role of bad guy with Burgho and Barnaby the bloodhounds.
The Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police darted behind trees and shrubbery in Hyde Park, making his getaway, while the magnificent pair of tracking dogs lost his scent and successfully hunted down several strangers who happened to be out strolling. Four other trials on the misty, cold morning ended just as badly. This did not bode well for Warren.
If the hounds couldn’t track a man in a relatively deserted park early in the morning, then turning them loose in the crowded, filthy streets and alleyways of the East End probably wasn’t such a good idea. Warren’s decision to volunteer for the tracking demonstration wasn’t such a good idea, either. So much for showing Londoners what a great innovation bloodhounds were and how sure Warren was they would sniff out that East End fiend at last. Warren’s dashing around in the park with his lost hounds was an embarrassment he would never live down.
“Dear Boss I hear you have bloodhounds for me now,” the Ripper wrote October 12th and drew a knife on the envelope.
Warren’s bad decision may have been precipitated – or at least could not have been helped – by yet another peculiar letter published in The Times on October 9th, two days before his romp in the park: