Patricia Cornwell – Portrait Of A Killer Jack The Ripper

Afterward, in an undated, partial letter, the Ripper wrote to the Met­ropolitan Police, “I riped up little boy in Bradford.” A Ripper letter of January 16, 1889, refers to “my trip to Bradford.”

There are no known Ripper letters from December 23rd until Janu­ary 8th. I don’t know where Sickert spent his holidays, but I suspect he would have wanted to be in London on the last Saturday of the year, De­cember 29th, when Hamlet opened at the Lyceum, starring Henry Irv­ing and Ellen Terry. Sickert’s wife may have been with her family in West Sussex, but there are no letters I have found from this period that tell me where either Sickert or Ellen was.

But the month of December could not have been a happy one for Ellen. It is unlikely she saw Sickert much at all, and one has to wonder where she thought he was and what he was doing. She would have been deeply worried and saddened by the critical illness of a dear family friend, reform politician and orator John Bright. Daily, The Times gave reports on his condition, reports that could have evoked bittersweet memories of Ellen’s late father, who had been one of Bright’s closest friends.

The dairyman arrested in the John Gill case was eventually cleared and the murder would remain unsolved. The murder of Rose Mylett was never solved. The notion that Jack the Ripper might have committed either crime didn’t seem plausible and was soon forgotten by the people who mattered. The Ripper didn’t mutilate Rose. He didn’t cut her throat, and it wasn’t his MO to savage a little boy, no matter what was threat­ened in letters that the police would have considered hoaxes, anyway.

Because of the scarcity of medico-legal facts revealed in the newspa­pers and the inquest, it is difficult to reconstruct John Gill’s case. One of the most important unanswered questions is the identity of the man John was last seen talking to, assuming this reported detail is true. If the man was a stranger, it would seem that quite an effort should have been made to discover who he was and what he was doing in Bradford. Clearly, the boy went off with someone, and this person murdered and mutilated him.

The piece of “shirting” around John’s neck is a curious signature on the part of the killer. Every Jack the Ripper victim, as far as I know, was wearing a scarf, a handkerchief, or some other piece of fabric around the neck. When the Ripper cut a victim’s throat, he did not cut off the neck­erchief, and in Rose Mylett’s murder, a folded handkerchief was draped over her neck. Clearly, neckerchiefs or scarves symbolized something to the killer.

Sickert friend and artist Marjorie Lilly recalled that he had a favorite red neckerchief. While he was working on his Camden Town murder paintings, and “was reliving the scene he would assume the part of a ruf­fian, knotting the handkerchief loosely around his neck, pulling a cap over his eyes and lighting his lantern.” It was commonly known that if a criminal wore a red neckerchief to his execution, it signaled that he had divulged no truths to anyone, and carried his darkest secrets to the grave. Sickert’s red handkerchief was a talisman and not to be touched by any­one, including the housekeeper, who knew to steer clear of it when she saw it “dangling” from the bedpost inside his studio or tied to a door­knob or peg.

The red handkerchief, Lilly wrote, “played a necessary part in the per­formance of the drawings, spurring him on at crucial moments, becom­ing so interwoven with the actual working out of his idea that he kept it constantly before his eyes,” Sickert began what I call his “Camden Town Murder Period” not long after the actual Camden Town murder of a prostitute in 1907. Lilly said that during this era of his life, “he had two fervent crazes… crime and the princes of the Church.” Crime was “personified by Jack the Ripper, the Church by Anthony Trollope.”

“I hate Christianity!” Sickert once yelled at a Salvation Army band.

He was not a religious man unless he was playing an important Bib­lical role. Lazarus Breaks His Fast: Self Portrait and The Servant of Abraham: Self Portrait are two of his later works. When he was almost seventy, he painted his famous The Raising of Lazarus by getting a local undertaker to wrap the life-size lay figure once owned by the eighteenth-century artist William Hogarth in a shroud. The heavily bearded Sickert climbed up a stepladder and assumed the role of Christ raising Lazarus from the dead while Ciceley Hey posed as Lazarus’s sister. Sickert painted the huge canvas from a photograph, and in it, Christ is another self-portrait.

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