Those who knew him as well as those he brushed past only now and then accepted that being Sickert meant being the “chameleon,” the “poseur.” He was Sickert in the loud checked coat walking all hours through London’s foreboding alleyways and streets. He was Sickert the farmer or country squire or tramp or bespectacled masher in the bowler hat or dandy in black tie or the eccentric wearing bedroom slippers to meet the train. He was Jack the Ripper with a cap pulled low over his eyes and a red scarf around his neck, working in the gloom of a studio illuminated by the feeble glow from a bull’s-eye lantern.
Victorian writer and critic Clive Bell’s relationship with Sickert was one of mutual love-hate, and Bell quipped that on any given day Sickert might be John Bull, Voltaire, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Pope, a cook, a dandy, a swell, a bookmaker, a solicitor. Bell believed Sickert wasn’t the scholar he was reputed to be and appeared to “know a great deal more than he did,” even if he was the greatest British painter since Constable, Bell observed. But one “could never feel sure that their Sickert was Sickert’s Sickert, or that Sickert’s Sickert corresponded with any ultimate reality.” He was a man of “no standards,” and in Bell’s words, Sickert did not feel “possessively and affectionately about anything which was not part of himself.”
Ellen was part of Sickert’s self. He had use for her. He could not see her as a separate human being because all people and all things were extensions of Sickert. She was still in Ireland with Janie when Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddows were murdered and when George Lusk, the head of the East End Vigilance Committee, received half of a human kidney by post on October 16th. Almost two weeks later, the curator of the pathology museum of the London Hospital, Dr. Thomas Openshaw, received the letter written on A Pirie & Sons watermarked paper and signed “Jack the Ripper.”
“Old boss you was rite it was the left kidny… I wil be on the job soon and will send you another bit of innerds.”
The kidney was suspected of being Catherine Eddows’s, and probably was unless the Ripper managed to get half of a human kidney from somewhere else. The organ was anatomically preserved at the Royal London Hospital until it became so disintegrated the hospital disposed of it in the 1950s – about the time Watson and Crick discovered the double helix structure of DNA.
In centuries past, bodies and body parts were preserved in “spirits” or alcoholic beverages such as wine. Some hospitals during the Ripper’s time used glycerine. When a person of high status died aboard ship and required a proper burial, the only way to preserve the body was in mead or whatever spirits were handy. If John Smith, the founding father of Virginia, had died during his voyage to the New World, most likely he would have been returned to London pickled in a keg.
Police reports indicate that the kidney sent to George Lusk was almost two weeks old if it came from Eddows’s body, and had been preserved in “spirits,” probably wine. Mr. Lusk did not seem horrified or in a frantic hurry to get the kidney to the police. When he received the ghastly gift with a letter that has not survived, he didn’t “think much about it.” The Victorians were not accustomed to psychopathic killers who took body parts and enclosed them in taunting letters to the authorities.
At first, it was suggested that the kidney was from a dog, but Lusk and the police wisely sought other opinions. The kidney was a hoax, the police agreed as the marinated organ in its box made the rounds. Medical experts, such as pathologist Dr. Openshaw, believed the kidney was human – although it was a stretch to conclude it was from a “female” who had “Bright’s disease.” The kidney was turned over to Dr. Openshaw’s care at the London Hospital. Had the kidney survived another few decades to be tested, and were Catherine Eddows exhumed for her DNA, there could have been a match. In court that would have hurt Walter Sickert quite a lot – were he still alive to be prosecuted – since the A Pirie & Sons watermark is on his stationery and also on the letter Jack the Ripper wrote to Dr. Openshaw, the stamps on the envelopes of the two letters have a DNA sequence in common, and the Ripper letter is confessional.