Perhaps Sickert’s fantasies about having power over life and death were different in his sunset years. He was getting old. He felt bad much of the time. If only he had the power to give life. He already knew he had the power to take it. Testimony at John Gill’s inquest verified that the seven-year-old boy’s heart was “plucked,” not cut out. The killer reached inside the slashed-open chest and ribs and took the boy’s heart in his hand and tore it from the body.
Do unto others as was done unto you. If Walter Sickert murdered John Gill, it was because he could. Sickert had sexual power only when he could dominate and cause death. He may not have felt remorse, but he must have hated what he could not have and could not be. He could not have a woman. He was never a normal boy and could never be a normal man. I don’t know of a single instance when Sickert showed physical courage. He victimized people only when he had the advantage.
When he betrayed Whistler in 1896, he did so the same year Whistler’s wife, Beatrice, died. Her death devastated Whistler. He would never recover from it. In the last life-size self-portrait Whistler painted, his black figure recedes into blackness until the man is hard to find. He was still in the midst of a financially ruinous lawsuit and was perhaps at the lowest point of his life when Sickert covertly went after him in the Saturday Review. The same year Sickert lost the lawsuit, 1897, Oscar Wilde emerged from prison, his once-glorious career in shambles, his body a wreck. Sickert shunned him.
Wilde had been kind to Helena Sickert when she was a girl. From him she received her first book of poetry and encouragement to be whatever she wanted to be in life. When Walter Sickert went to Paris in 1883 to deliver Whistler’s portrait of his mother to the annual Salon exhibition, the dashing, famous Wilde hosted the young, wide-eyed artist at the Hotel Voltaire for a week.
When Sickert’s father died in 1885, her mother, Helena wrote, was “nearly mad with grief.” Oscar Wilde came to see Mrs. Sickert. She was receiving no company. But of course she will, Wilde said as he bounded up the stairs. It wasn’t very long before Mrs. Sickert was laughing – a sound her daughter thought she would never hear again.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
THREE KEYS
Ellen Cobden Sickert was almost obsessive in her zeal to see that the Cobden role in history would be remembered and cherished. In December 1907, she sent a sealed document to her sister Janie and insisted it was to be locked in a safe. It doesn’t appear we’ll ever know what was in Ellen’s sealed letter, but I doubt it was a will or similar instructions. She wrote all that out later and apparently didn’t care who saw it. Those instructions, along with the rest of Ellen’s letters and diaries, were donated by the Cobden family to the West Sussex Public Record office.
Ellen sent her sealed letter to Janie three months after the Camden Town murder, which was committed blocks from Sickert’s studios in Camden Town and about a mile from where he had recently settled after returning to London from France. Emily Dimmock was twenty-two years old, of medium height, pale and had dark brown hair. She had been with many men, most of them sailors. According to the Metropolitan Police,
PORTRAITOFAKILLER
she led “an utterly immoral life,” and was “known to every prostitute in Euston Rd.” When she was found nude in bed with her throat cut on the morning of September 12,1907, the police, according to their report, first thought she had taken her own life as “she was a respectable married woman.” Respectable women were far more likely to commit suicide than to be murdered, the police apparently believed.
The man Emily lived with was not her husband, but they talked about getting married one day. Bertram John Eugene Shaw was a cook for the Midland Railway. He was paid twenty-seven shillings per six-day week, leaving daily on a 5:42 train for Sheffield, where he would spend the night, then leave the next morning and arrive back at the St. Pancras Station at 10:40. He was almost always home at 11:30 A.M. He later told police he had no idea that Emily was going out at night and seeing other men.