He was a well-known local artist. He was painting nudes during this time. He had to get his models from somewhere, and he had a penchant for prostitutes. He may have been stalking and watching Emily and her sexual transactions. She was the lowest of the lowest, a filthy diseased whore. Marjorie Lilly writes that once she heard a person defend thieves by telling Sickert, “After all, everyone has a right to exist.” He retorted, “Not at all. There are people who have no right to exist!”
“As you can see I have done another good thing for Whitechapel,” the Ripper wrote November 12, 1888.
The position of Emily Dimmock’s dead body was described as “natural.” The doctor who arrived at the scene said he believed that she was asleep when she was killed. She was face-down, her left arm bent at an angle and across her back, the hand bloody. Her right arm was extended in front of her and on the pillow. In fact, her position was not natural or comfortable. Most people do not sleep or even lie down with one of their arms bent at a right angle behind their backs. There was not sufficient space between the headboard and the wall for the killer to attack her from behind. She needed to be face-down, and her unnatural position on the bed can be explained if the killer straddled her as he pulled back her head with his left hand and cut her throat with his right.
Blood on her left hand suggests she grabbed the hemorrhaging left side of her neck, and her assailant may have wrenched her left arm behind her, perhaps pinning it with a knee to keep her from struggling. He had cut her throat to the spine and she could make no sound. He had slashed her neck from left to right, as a right-handed assailant would. He had so little room to work that his violent sweep of the knife cut the bed ticking and nicked Emily’s right elbow. She was on her face, her left carotid squirting her syphilitic blood into the bed and not all over him.
The police did not discover a bloody nightgown at the scene. Absent that garment, it might be presumed that Emily was nude when she was murdered – or that her killer took a bloody gown as a trophy. A former client who had slept with Emily three times claimed that on those occasions she wore a nightdress and did not have “curlers” in her hair. If she had sex the night of September 11th, especially if she was intoxicated, it is possible that she fell asleep in the nude. Or she may have been with another “client” – her killer – who had her undress and turn over, as if he wanted anal sex or intercourse from the rear. After he cut a six-inch gash in her throat, her killer threw the bedcovers over her. All of this seems to deviate from Sickert’s violent modus operandi, with the exception that apparently there was no sign of “connection.”
After twenty years, Sickert’s patterns, fantasies, needs, and energy would have evolved. Very little is known about his activities after he began spending most of his time in France and Italy during the 1890s. So far, documentation that might reveal unsolved murders with striking similarities to Sickert’s crimes doesn’t exist or has yet to surface in other countries. I found references to only two cases in France, not in police records but in newspapers. The murders are so unspecific and unverified. I hesitate to mention them: It was reported that in early 1889, at Pont-a-Mousson, a widow named Madame Francois was found slain, her head nearly severed from her body. About the same time and in the same area, another woman was found with her head nearly severed from he-body. The doctor who conducted both postmortem examinations concluded that the murderer was very skillful with a knife.
Around 1906, Sickert returned to England and settled in Camden Town. He resumed painting music halls – such as the Mogul Tavern (by now called the Old Middlesex Music Hall, on Drury Lane, less than two miles from where he lived in Camden Town). Sickert went out almost every night and was always in his stall at 8:00 P.M. sharp, he wrote in a letter to Jacques-Emile Blanche. Presumably, Sickert stayed until the performances ended at half past midnight.