During his late-night journeys home, it is very possible he could have seen Emily Dimmock out on the streets, perhaps heading to her rooming house with a client. Had Sickert gathered intelligence on her, he could easily have known her patterns, and that she was a notorious prostitute and a walking plague. Periodically she was an outpatient at Lock Hospital on Harrow Road, and most recently had been treated at University College Hospital. When her venereal disease was fulminating, she had eruptions on her face, and she had a few of these at the time of her death. This should have indicated to a street-smart man that she was dangerous to his health.
Sickert would have been foolish to have exposed himself to her body fluids, because by 1907 more was known about contagious diseases. Exposure to blood could be just as dangerous as intercourse, and it would not have been possible for Sickert to disembowel or take organs without subjecting himself to great risk. I believe he would have been shrewd enough to avoid re-creating the twenty-year-old Ripper scare, especially when he was about to begin his most intense period of violent art and produce works that he would not have dared to etch or paint or display in 1888 or 1889. Emily Dimmock’s murder was staged to appear to have been motivated by robbery.
Bertram Shaw arrived home from the train station on the morning of September 12th, and discovered that his mother was already there. She was waiting in the hallway because Emily did not answer the door and she could not get into her son’s rooms. Shaw tried the outer door and was baffled to find it locked. He wondered if Emily might have gone out to meet his mother at the train station and the two women had missed each other. He was getting increasingly uneasy, and asked the landlady, Mrs. Stocks, for a key. Shaw unlocked the outer door and found the double doors locked as well. He broke in and flung back the covers from Emily’s naked body on the blood-soaked bed.
Drawers had been pulled out of the dresser, the contents rummaged through and scattered on the floor. Emily’s scrapbook was open on a chair, and some postcards had been removed from it. The windows and shutters in the bedroom were closed, the windows in the sitting room closed, the shutters slightly open. Shaw ran for the police. Some twenty-five minutes later, Constable Thomas Killion arrived and determined by touching Emily’s cold shoulder that she had been dead for hours. He immediately sent for police divisional surgeon Dr. John Thompson, who arrived at the scene around 1:00 P.M. and concluded – based on the coldness of the body and the advanced stage of rigor mortis – that Emily had been dead seven or eight hours.
This would have placed her time of death at 6:00 or 7:00 A.M., which is not likely. The morning was thick with fog, but the sun rose at 5:30. The killer would have been brazen to the point of stupidity had he left Emily’s house after the sun was up, no matter how gray and muggy the weather, and by six or seven o’clock, people were stirring, many on their way to work.
Under ordinary conditions, it requires six to twelve hours for a body to be fully rigorous, and cold temperatures can retard this process. Emily’s body was under bedclothes that the killer had flung over her, and the windows and doors were shut. Her bedroom would not have been frigid, but on the early morning she died, the low was 47 degrees Fahrenheit. What is not known is how stiff she was, or how advanced her rigor mortis might have been by the time Dr. Thompson began to examine her at some point after 1:00 P.M. She could have been in full rigor mortis – dead a good ten or twelve hours. This would suggest she could have been murdered between midnight and 4:00 A.M.
Dr. Thompson said at the scene that Emily’s throat had been cut cleanly with a very sharp instrument. The police found nothing except one of Shaw’s straight razors in plain view on top of a dresser, and it would be difficult to use a straight razor to cut forcefully through muscle and cartilage without the blade folding backward and perhaps severely wounding the perpetrator. A bloody petticoat in the handwash basin had soaked up all of the water, indicating the killer had cleaned himself off before he left. He was careful not to touch anything with bloody hands, the police remarked at the inquest.