After 1896, it seems the Ripper letters stopped. His name wasn’t connected to current crimes anymore, and his case files were sealed for a century. In 1903, James McNeill Whistler died and Walter Sickert gracefully assumed center stage. Their styles and themes were quite different – Whistler didn’t paint murdered prostitutes and his work was beginning to be worth a fortune – but Sickert was coming into his own. He was evolving into a cult figure as an artist and a “character.” By the time he was an old man, he was the greatest living artist in England. Had he ever confessed to being Jack the Ripper, I don’t think anybody would have believed him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
FURTHER FROM THE GRAVE
Sickert’s fractured pieces and personas seemed to go AWOL in 1899, and he withdrew across the English Channel to live very much like the paupers he terrorized.
“I arise from dreams & go in my nightshirt 8c wipe up the floor for fear of the ceilings & shift a mattress I have put there ‘to catch the drips,’ ” he wrote to Blanche.
In between killings and spurts of work, he had drifted about, mostly in Dieppe and Venice, his living conditions described by friends as shockingly appalling. He subsisted in filth and chaos. He was a slob and he stank. He was paranoid and told Blanche he believed Ellen and Whistler had conspired to ruin his life. He feared someone might poison him. He became increasingly reclusive, depressed, and morbid.
“Do you suppose we only find anything that is past so touching and interesting because it was further from the grave?” he ponders in a letter.
Psychopathic killers can sink into morbid depression after murderous sprees, and for one who had exercised seemingly perfect control, Sickert may have found himself completely out of control and with nothing left of his life. During his most virile, productive years, he had been on a slaughter binge. He had ignored and avoided his friends. He would disappear from society without warning or reason. He had no caretaker, no home, and was financially destitute. His psychopathic obsession had completely dominated his life. “I am not well – don’t know what is the matter with me,” he wrote Nan Hudson in 1910. “My nerves are shaken.” By the time Sickert was fifty, he had begun to self-destruct like an overloaded circuit without a breaker.
When Ted Bundy decompensated, his crimes had escalated from spree killings to the orgy of the crazed multiple butcheries he committed in a Florida sorority house. He was completely haywire and he did not live in a world that would let him get away with it. Sickert lived in a world that would. He was not pitted against sophisticated law enforcement and forensic science. He traversed the surface of life as a respectable, intellectual gentleman. He was an artist on his way to becoming a Master, and artists are forgiven for not having a structured or “normal” way of going about their affairs. They are forgiven for being a little odd or eccentric, or a bit deranged.
Sickert’s fractured psyche threw him into constant battles with his many selves. He was suffering. He understood pain as long as it was his own. He felt nothing for anyone, including Ellen, who was hurt far more than Sickert because she loved him and always would. The stigma of divorce was worse for her than it was for him, her shame and sense of failure greater. She would punish herself the rest of her life for tarnishing the Cobden name, betraying her late father, and proving a burden to those she loved. She had no peace, but Sickert did because he saw nothing wrong with anything he had done. Psychopaths don’t accept consequences. They don’t feel sorry – except for the misfortune they bring upon themselves and blame on others.
Sickert’s letters to Blanche are masterly works of machination and give us a peek into the dark recesses of a psychopathic mind. Sickert first wrote, “Divorce granted yesterday, thank God!” To this he added, “[T]he first emotion when a thumb screw is removed is a sense of relief that makes one light-headed.” He did not feel grief over the loss of Ellen. He was relieved to have one set of complications out of his life, and he felt more fragmented than before.